Glory amid the Messiness
And suddenly there appeared with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace among those with whom He is pleased." Luke 2:13-14
This passage provokes two questions:
1. Where was God’s glory on that night? Other than the angels themselves, what do we have? Shepherds … childbirth in a barn … God as a tiny creature rather than in the throne room of heaven. We have blood, dirt, and peasants. How glorious is that?
2. Where is the peace? Maybe the night was quiet, but Rome’s pagan army still occupied Israel’s holy land. Herod the psychopath was still king of Judea. We have political oppression, poverty, an inn with no room, Joseph unable to provide anything but a barn for his family, a highly suspicious pregnancy, the pain and messiness and terror of childbirth. What kind of peace are the angels talking about, and where is it to be found?
To answer these questions, we have to ask another pair first: Who is this baby, and what is he up to?
Luke 2 tells us who the baby is—this baby is the Messiah, God’s Redeemer, who would save his people. But somehow this baby is also “the Lord,” a word that in the rest of the chapter refers only to God. God rescues mankind by becoming a man.
The rest of Luke’s gospel tells us what the baby is up to. In this child God affirms the goodness of his material creation by entering it, so that now humanity is also an attribute of God. Throughout Luke’s gospel Jesus, the Messiah, the God-man, shows himself to be Lord of heaven and earth—and the character of his rule is grace and mercy and liberation.
When we read through Luke’s gospel looking for the character of this Lord and his rule, what do we find?
We see that our sin and rebellion against God separate us from God, who is our only source of life and goodness. So Jesus forgives people, and they repent and return to God.
Our lives are twisted and torn apart by sickness, spiritual slavery, natural disasters, and material poverty. So Jesus liberates his people by healing their diseases, casting out demons, calming storms, and feeding the hungry.
Our lives and hopes and purposes are overshadowed by the prospect of death. So Jesus takes our death upon himself, dying on a cross as an outcast—and then rising from the dead, alive beyond all power of death.
All this he does on our behalf and as one of us, making our story his. And, because he has entered our story and made it his, he has also opened his story to us, and brought us into it.
Therefore, if we are to understand our own story, we must first look to him.
Jesus is the Lord. Not Caesar and his political oppression; not money and its economic oppression; not Satan, and not death—and also not us. We are not lords even of our own lives. Jesus is Lord. He has not just taken on a life like ours, he has taken us on. And, therefore, to try to live apart from him warps us away from the peace that God has for us. Trying to understand ourselves apart from him only leads to confusion.
So then, what does it mean to live or to understand in the light of Jesus? Three things:
1) Faith is an acknowledgement and a trust. We acknowledge that Jesus is Lord and we are not. And we can trust him because his lordship, as St. Luke shows us, is a lordship of grace and mercy, liberation and love. He cares for us. So faith looks to Jesus for direction, for the ability just to keep putting one foot in front of the other. We listen to his words, we meditate on them, and we trust that even in this mess, this painful, dirty, bloody, confused, frightening mess, full of foolish people like you and me—we trust that even here he will show up. We can trust that our little lives are ultimately about something bigger that we usually can’t see. We can trust that the good Shepherd will bring all his sheep home, especially from dark and scary places.
2) This is our hope, that Jesus will bring us home. Zacharias expresses his hope in the previous chapter,
Salvation FROM OUR ENEMIES, And FROM THE HAND OF ALL WHO HATE US; To show mercy toward our fathers, And to remember His holy covenant, The oath which He swore to Abraham our father, To grant us that we, being rescued from the hand of our enemies, Might serve Him without fear, In holiness and righteousness before Him all our days.
3) And, since his lordship has the character of love, walking with him means that we, also, pursue a life of love. Not to earn marks, not to make God like us, not as another set of obligations piled on the others that we already can’t meet. No, but because love is the source of life. Literally, Love Rules. Love became this baby, this Ruler, this Lord, who rules. And you see his love work everyday. You extend love to other people and it changes them, it energizes and enables them. God does this for us. Frankly, if he didn’t, then we wouldn’t be able to do it. Our meanness, our fear, our pain, our confusion would take over again if God did not uphold us.
The newspapers today were full of mixed news again. Some news was hopeful, but most wasn’t. The world is still full of death, political oppression, disaster, hunger, hate, fear, psychotic rulers, terror, and inns with no room.
This room is full of pain and disappointment and the fear that tomorrow holds nothing but more of the same. Please do not take my remarks to deny or even minimize that. You hurt, I hurt, and it’s real. It’s bigger than we are.
That’s why Jesus came. That’s why angels sang to hurting, dirty, poor, confused, frightened, outcast people.
And that’s the glory—God himself has become our hero, our rescuer. God himself has lived in our hurt—and killed it. It’s still punching us only because it doesn’t know it has been defeated.
And there is our peace. In the middle of real, anguishing pain, God tells us that he feels it even more than we do, and that he will deliver us through it.
Christmas trees are not biblical, but I like them very much because they say something very biblical indeed. The sparkly lights, the plastic tinsel, and the fragrance of evergreens tell of a glory that is coming and will not be hidden by darkness and doubt, of a peace that is coming and will not be hidden by fear and pain. So tonight we can sing with the angels,
Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth Peace among those with whom he is pleased.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment