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The Messiah Who Did Not Come
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis December 7, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 35:3-10 Matthew 11:1-6
What are we to make of this question in the mouth of John’s disciples that the season of Advent places on our lips too? How are we to recognize the God who is coming to us, the Savior who has promised to be with us, the Lord in whom our time has been redeemed from insignificance? “Go and tell John what you hear and see,” Jesus replies. In this season of high expectation, his answer leaves us mostly with words, with a spoken truth counter to the actual reality, with a summons simply to listen and look around: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them,” says Jesus. We have heard this, but do not see the evidence: eyes grow dim, limbs wither, AIDS is legion, ears stop, the dead are buried and the poor…well perhaps the poor would have good news brought to them if there were the political will to do so, but apparently there is not. So we are waiting, we are watching, and we reasonably are wondering, like those who have gone before us: is Jesus the one or are we to look for another? The question itself suggests that the Messiah’s identity was far from settled, even and especially in Matthew’s time and town among those who actually may have seen him with their own eyes when they were children or heard of him as they listened to relatives report what had been heard with their own ears. Writing a decade after the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., many think Matthew’s gospel was written out of and addressed to a community in Syria named Antioch, a community already rife with conflicting claims concerning the identity of Jesus. Among that community, on the one hand, were wandering prophets and teachers who spoke in the Spirit. They went about to the poor, healing, visiting, exorcizing demons, gathering the faithful and “preaching the gospel with little rhetorical skill,” says Eduard Schweizer. Was Jesus like them but better? On the other hand, by 83 A.D. Antioch had a bishop named Ignatius. The local congregation in Syria, it seems, was already Presbyterian, having a council of presbyters assisted by deacons and under the bishop’s authority. No services were to be held or actions taken without the approval of this bishop, who was a resident (rather than itinerant) teacher, priest and prophet. We know all of this through letters Ignatius penned on his way, under guard, to Rome, where he would be fed to the lions. They are perhaps the most intimate and revealing witness we have to the faith of the earliest of Christians who died confessing Christus Kyrios: Christ is Lord. Was he the one or should they have waited for another? Three concerns dominated the letters of Ignatius. First and most obvious is the fact of his impending martyrdom. In these early years, discipleship was martyrdom. “It is not that I was merely to be called a Christian,” he wrote, “but actually want to be one…I shall be a convincing Christian only when the world sees me no more…The greatness of Christianity lies in its being hated by the world, not in its being convincing to it.” Second, Ignatius was deeply concerned for the unity of the church, a unity already threatened by schism. “Make unity your concern,” he wrote to Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, “there is nothing better than that.” Finally and not unrelated, Ignatius hoped to expose the prevailing heresies for what they were before he faced his death. It is this third concern that returns us to our question, wondering with John’s disciples what about Jesus should make us quit our waiting and believe? For Ignatius, the answer to that question was a matter of life and death. The first heresy to concern him was Docetism. Believing matter to be evil and God incapable of having a direct relationship to the sensible world, Docetists denied that Jesus was really human. The docetic hymn sung with gusto every Christmas proclaims: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see! Hail the incarnate deity!” Jesus only seemed human. Writing to the church at Smyrna to counter their claims, Ignatius underlines the true humanity of Jesus, “Regarding our Lord, you are absolutely convinced that on the human side he was actually sprung from David’s line, Son of God according to God’s will and power, actually born of a virgin…” We think the virgin birth to be some strange gynecological mystery having to do with Jesus’ divinity, whereas for the earliest of Christians, it was the way they insisted on Jesus’ true humanity: he was really born from the womb of a woman and sprung from David’s blood line! The second heresy flourished in Philadelphia—a site now marked by an overgrown lot with a chain link fence around it, as I recall, in the middle of modern day Turkey. There, Ignatius addressed those who believed Jesus to be the last of the prophets and so simply a human being. Given wandering prophets reportedly doing the same things Jesus was doing, this understanding of Jesus makes all the sense in the world. Perhaps he was better spoken than most of these ragtag characters walking around Syria, but in kind, he was a messenger of God at most, they said. Known as Judaizers, these Gentiles promoted the observance of Jewish traditions and a return to Sabbath worship. At one point, Ignatius warns Philadelphians to “observe a single Eucharist” because the Judaizers were holding separate suppers on Saturdays. To their way of thinking, why alter the common life and practices of believers if Jesus were merely the end of the prophets, in whose speech the community heard God’s address? But to the mind of Ignatius, Christians were those who had “arrived at a new hope. They ceased to keep the Sabbath and lived by the Lord’s Day, on which our life as well as theirs shone forth.” In other words, how the community worshipped had everything to do with what the community believed about who Jesus was. Though a Jew and of David’s line, the grace of God made known in him literally turned the known religious world upside-down. “If we still go on observing Judaism,” he wrote, “we admit we never received grace.” Theologically Ignatius countered their claims with words that claimed much more: “Be on the alert for him who is above time, the Timeless, the Unseen, the One who became visible for our sake, who was beyond touch and passion, yet who for our sakes became subject to suffering, and endured everything for us.” In one letter he speaks of the “Christ God” and in another he would have the church “confess the union of Jesus with the Father.” In this sense, said Ignatius, because in him we see and hear our true humanity, because in him we see and hear the God who is with us, he is the one. Saying this did not make it so, however. Then as now, only scriptural authority could change minds. So Ignatius reports, “When I heard some people saying, ‘If I don’t find it in the original documents, I don’t believe it in the gospel,’ I answered them, ‘But it is written there.’ They retorted, ‘That’s just the question.’” The original document for the early church was the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. For Ignatius and supremely for the writer of Matthew’s gospel, Israel’s scriptures pointed to Christ. So when John’s disciple’s came to Jesus and asked if he were the one or should they wait for another, Jesus simply quotes the prophet Isaiah, saying in so many words: tell John ‘the eyes of the blind are opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped, the lame leap like a deer and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.’ “See!” says Ignatius pointing to Jesus. “See what?” say his opponents. Unable to entertain the possibility that Jesus could be the one, could be God’s midrash in flesh of the prophet’s message, they heard in Isaiah’s 35th only word of Israel’s hope in exile for a return to Jerusalem and a king from David’s blood line, a king still longed for by the Jews of Jesus’ time, a king they expected God would send to unseat the Herodian king imposed by Roman rule. But to Ignatius’ ear and so to his mind, “Jesus Christ is the original document. The inviolable archives are his cross and death and his resurrection and the faith that came by him.” Contrary to the expectations of Israel, contrary to the arrangements of gentile Judaizers, contrary to the philosophical fancies of Docetists, he heard and saw the power of God in Jesus Christ. He was the one and there was no waiting for another. What in the world has any of this ancient point and counterpoint to do, some two thousand years hence, with Advent 2003 A.D.? Simply this: since the beginning until now, we are those who, with the same hopes and fears, are waiting for one in whom they meet. Whether Israel expects a king from David’s line to be born or post-modern minds wait for a subjective truth to strike their fancy, whether a nation expects a longed-for leader to right its corporate wrongs or a person expects a longed-for love to fill the empty spaces, whether peace is thought to be an achievable goal of global politics or peace of mind is sought through some spiritual technique, all human longing will send us out into the winter night looking for another. That is the point and the counterpoint of faith is this: that in Jesus Christ we hear and see our true humanity and are addressed by the God who has come to us in him. We proclaim this, as Ignatius said, not so much because it is convincing, but because it places an ultimate question over and against any penultimate answer for which we so restlessly settle. Though two thousand years later, we are driven to say more than Ignatius and Matthew had a need to say, given that the end was near for them and we are still waiting in time. We must do business with the reality that still the blind do not see, the deaf do not hear, the lepers are not cleansed, the lame limp away and death would seem to have dominion. We live in the meantime, and in the meantime, I believe what his birth affects is a sharpening of our longing and a deepening of our hope until we see him face to face. That he is the one, that “‘The promise is fulfilled’ [in him] does not mean that the promise has ceased and that which is promised takes its place,” says Karl Barth at the beginning of Hitler’s reign. “It means that the promise is now complete, unambiguous and thus potent.” Tell John what you hear and see: in Him we hear and see the content of our hope, though still it remains hope, and are turned, in this season of expectation, to look for the One whose face we know. “To those who have seen/The Child, however dimly, however incredulously/The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.” Come Lord Jesus. Quickly come. |