He Wasn't Talking about Jesus (24th Sunday after Pentecost; Isaiah 9:1-7; November 19, 2017)

He Wasn't Talking about Jesus

24th Sunday after Pentecost
Isaiah 9:1-7
November 19, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

The Bible is a difficult book. Many of the books embody multiple traditions that have been stitched together with varying degrees of success. Each of the texts has an agenda through which it views the traditions it has inherited. Each text contains multiple voices, some of them partly suppressed. Reading the Bible well is a complex practice that involves a knowledge of history, cultural anthropology, and literary criticism, not to mention a stubborn persistence in the face of a sometimes very difficult and occasionally an even repulsive text.

Defying this reality Protestants have a traditional insistence that is nearly impossible to pronounce. It’s called the "Perspicuity of Scripture." That teaching simply means that we have held that any ordinary, reasonably intelligent, literate person can read the Bible to their own spiritual health. I wonder sometimes.

Misreadings abound. Most of them fall into the fundamentalist fallacy, that the Bible is a collection of absolute truths in written form that are divinely-given and protected from error. Many Christians believe this and many atheists believe that this is what all Christians believe. I can hardly recognize this as a description of the Bible that I find that is a spirited conversation about important things involving many voices each with its own and sometimes multiple perspectives and ideas, a conversation that is sometimes tranquil, but is more often carried out with raised voices and vehement gestures.

Fundamentalists of whatever stripe aren't interested in conversations, of course. As far as they are concerned there has been far too much conversation already and everyone should recognize the truth--their truth--and just shut up and behave. Fundamentalists aren't interested in uncertainty. Especially they cannot abide the notion that there might be ideas that are mutually contradictory and yet are true at the same time. They cannot handle the universe in shades of gray, let alone one in dazzling color. Oddly the people who say they are ones who value the Bible and who use the phrase "the Bible clearly teaches" and clearly failing to understand what the word "clearly" means, are those who least appreciate its complexity, beauty, and liveliness.

And saying all that, and I've said more than a mouthful, doesn't even begin to address the problem of the filters that we all bring to reading any text, let alone one as important and central as the Bible. We'd like to read the Bible without filters, but I don't think that can be done. To begin with, the Bible is a filtered text. It contains the writings that it contains and not some others. Some books were chosen; others were not. It's a translated text for almost all of us. Translation is never a one-for-one operation. Two languages never line up perfectly. Choices are always made in the act of translating. Knowing the original languages helps but that's not a perfect answer either. I can read Greek fairly well and I can puzzle through Hebrew in a way that I don’t really call reading, but the fact is that my first language is English and I read the world differently for that reason alone. I read Greek like a contemporary, English-speaking American, not even like a contemporary Greek, let alone a Greek-speaking Jew of ancient Roman Palestine.

But we also bring the filters fashioned from our experiences and our biases. No one can free themselves from those, no matter how hard they try. And how could we? The very notion that we should read in a bias-free way is itself one of the biases of our culture that values objectivity. (Or at least it values the rhetorical forms that claim to be bias-free.)

One of the places where we pick up biases is tradition. In fact, I'm wondering if a reasonable definition of tradition wouldn't be a set of biases that is transmitted along with a body of texts, stories, and attitudes from one generation to the next.

I've said all that because I am frustrated. I'm frustrated because every time I try to read today's lesson I hear in my head the chorus from Part I, scene 3 of Handel's The Messiah, "For unto Us a Child Is Born." To some extent every line of the Bible is a text that has already been read, an already-read text. It has already been read. It has already been interpreted. It has already become meaningful. And all before we even open the covers. We are--whether we like it or not--always and already part of a history of reading. And this time I don't like it.

To me one of the worst things that you can do to the Hebrew Bible is to assume that it only means something when it is made to be about Jesus. None of the writers of Old Testament were writing about Jesus. There was no foretelling going on. Later, after we had experienced Jesus and saw the pattern of his life, then early Christian writers saw similarities and parallels between that pattern and parts of the pattern of Israel's covenant life with God. Then, emboldened by this discovery they claimed that Jesus had "fulfilled" the Scriptures, sometimes in ways that strike me as odd and even a little ridiculous. But that wasn't and isn't how the prophetic tradition worked.

The Prophet Isaiah wasn't talking or thinking about Jesus when these words were written. I know that this is true even if later Christians seized on these powerful and lovely words as the text for part of a beautiful and splendid oratorio composed some twenty-four centuries later. And yet I still hear it, "For unto us a child is born..." It's what we call an earworm, that unshakable melody that keeps playing in our heads. As earworms go, it's not so bad, better by far than, say, "Feliz Navidad."

Still, I want to wade into the conversation in and around this text and say to Handel, "George! Be quiet. The music is lovely, but stop. I want to hear Isaiah of Jerusalem speak for himself. George! Uist!"

Isaiah, when he has a chance to speak for himself, is a rare voice among prophets. Most prophets say that while things may be good now, they are about to get really bad. But Isaiah, in second half of the eighth century BCE Jerusalem was just the opposite. There appeared to be great threats, but the reality, Isaiah insisted, was that these threats were empty. That background was that Assyria in the northern part of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley had made the little kingdoms around Judah into vassal states, paying for their very limited freedom with massive amounts of tribute money.

Some of the little kingdoms--Israel, Tyre, and Syria--decided that, if they worked together, and especially if Judah would join them, they could all regain their freedom from Assyria. King Ahaz of Judah was reluctant to join them and eventually refused. So the rest of the alliance laid siege to Jerusalem.

It's at this point that Isaiah came on the scene. He was convinced that, as usual, the king of Judah was afraid of the wrong things. He was afraid of the three kings outside his wall. He was afraid of the Assyrians. He didn't know what to do or which way to turn. Isaiah confronted him with an insistence that he trust Yahweh to deliver them from both sets of threats. He even suggested that Ahaz should ask for a sign that this was Yahweh's promise. Ahaz piously claimed that he couldn't put Yahweh to the test by asking for a sign, so Isaiah told him that he would have a sign anyway: A young woman would give birth to a child whose name would be "God is with us." Before that child was two or three years old, the threat against Jerusalem would vanish. No need either to join the other kings in rebellion or to plead for Assyria's help.

Our reading today holds out the hope that a prince already born would show all the qualities of an ideal king. Therefore, Ahaz should proceed with confidence, neither rebelling against Assyria nor bowing before Assyria's power. If Ahaz wants to fear something, he should fear putting his trust in armies—is own or anyone else’s instead of in Yahweh.

We have some beautiful and powerful poetry in the service of a rather simple message: Ahaz was afraid of the wrong things and should, instead of acting out that fear, trust Yahweh to uphold the covenant.

It's not an unimportant message. It's one that we could hear to our own benefit. What are we afraid of? Too many of us are afraid of others: Muslims, or immigrants from Latin America, or black folks demanding that their right to life and dignity be recognized. Some of us imagine that justice is a zero-sum game, that anyone else's gain is our loss. Some of us imagine that people hate us because of our way of life or our freedoms. Some of us fear those who we imagine are going to take away our guns.

In our fear of these imagined threats we miss the threats that are really there. When the real danger is the loss of a sense of community without which human beings cannot survive, instead of reaching out we are building walls. Instead of being afraid of a system that siphons off the product of our work for the profit of a very few, we let ourselves be bought off with a few temporary tax breaks and a pocket full of mumbles. Instead of being a afraid for those who can't get a good education without incurring staggering loads of debt, or being afraid for those whose access to decent health care is precarious at best, we are afraid of "enemies" around the world and will not rest until we have bankrupted ourselves to protect ourselves from them. Instead of being afraid that changes in the world's climate will make human life on earth more difficult or even impossible, we are afraid that we will be asked to make changes in the way we live our lives.

We are mostly afraid of the wrong things and in the midst of our fear we are easy targets for demagogues and con-artists. Our greatest strength, says Isaiah of Jerusalem, lies in a shared life of covenant justice and anything that stands in the way of that is the real threat. God, and nothing else, is the ground and source of that shared life. If we listen to Isaiah, we can avert the real threats that approach our gates. There will be good governance again and everything will be all right. It will be okay.

"For unto us a child is born..."

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.