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"Israel's Strength and Consolation; Dear Desire of Every Nation"
November 30, 2003 The Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower
One of the interesting things that I discovered early-on in being an Interim Pastor is that if I were to limit myself to going to churches that were exactly like I was theologically, there wouldn't be very many jobs available out there! So I've had a very, very interesting time. Of course, here I feel very much a kinship, very much right at home. That has been more true and less true in some of the other churches that I've served. The church two churches ago was a congregation that had had a Senior Pastor for 30 years, I think, and then he retired from the ministry from that church. I would say he was quite a bit to the left of where I would feel comfortable being.
An interesting thing was after a while the members of that church said, "Um, your sermons are not like the sermons that we're used to." I'd say, "Oh, really? Really? What's the difference?" "Well, you give us a lot more Jesus than we're used to." I said, "Is that OK?" "Yeah, yeah, that's OK."
Well, it's Advent season and I would say if ever there's a time to "give a church Jesus," this would be the time. And I want us this morning to look at the early parts of the Christmas story. You know, the Christmas story concerns the birth of Jesus. But in Luke's gospel we learn some things about even before Jesus was born, the forerunner, John the Baptist, was born. Luke gives us some background to the Christmas story. We're going to look at a little bit of the story of the birth of John the Baptist, Jesus' cousin, who was born roughly the same time (a little bit before Jesus was). And you may want to turn in your Bibles and turn to Luke chapter 1.
We're going to look at a prophetic word that was given to the father of John the Baptist. After John was born, it says they were told that the Holy Spirit anointed John's father and he delivered a prophecy. We're going to look that and then we're going to ask ourselves this morning, "Is Jesus for everyone?" That's what we're going to ask: Is Jesus for everybody, or is Jesus really just so connected with the values and the priorities of Western Christians (European and American Christianity) that, really, that's who Jesus is for. You know: "Jesus is just for a certain group in one culture and not for anyone outside of that culture." That's the question we're going to ask this morning.
But let's look at Luke chapter 1, beginning at verse 67. This is Zechariah's prophecy:
Then his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke this prophecy: "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favorably on the people and redeemed them. He has raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us. Thus he has shown mercy promised to our ancestors, and remembered his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, child [now this was John, the little baby John] And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways. to give knowledge of salvation to his people by forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace." The child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness until the day he appeared publicly to Israel.
Now, we're told that this is a prophecy of . . . just like the prophetic words that we have in the Old Testament that some of us might be surprised to realize actually prophecy is not something that we only find in the Hebrew scriptures, in the Old Testament. You know, there are New Testament prophecies and here's a perfect example. The Holy Spirit inspired Zechariah, at a particular moment in time, to speak God's words and they were remembered. They were recorded, they were written down, they were saved. And Luke was able to incorporate them here.
Now, who is this? This is obviously, let's say, not the Old Testament prophet named Zechariah. There is one of those. If you're looking in the first part of the Bible, the Old Testament, there is a Zechariah the prophet, and that is not this. That was 500 years earlier. This is now in New Testament times. Although the Jews of this day would have associated, you know, the name Zechariah with that previous famous Zechariah the prophet. And what was famous about that prophet is he predicted a Messiah. He was not the only one. That was a common feature of Old Testament prophecy. But if we look now at Zechariah, the earlier one, the Old Testament prophet, we'd see a Messiah-to-come being prophesied, being predicted. So the Jews would have understood this prophetic word as somehow connected by the Spirit of God with that earlier prophetic word. And, indeed, we're being told about a Savior who is to come. He is going to save us from the hands of our enemies. He is going to be the one who is going to release us from fear and release us into holiness and righteousness. This is to be the Messiah who is to come.
But then mid-prophecy, Zechariah turns to John and says, "And you, child, will be called prophet of the Most High. You will go before the Lord to prepare his way." And so this is a prophecy about the coming Messiah and it is a prophecy about John the Baptist, who is (as we know) going to prepare the way for the Lord.
Now, with all of that as background, what I want to notice together, is how Jewish this all sounds. This all sounds wonderfully Jewish because the Messiah is certainly going to be relevant to all of the Old Testament aspirations, all of the Old Testament longings. The Messiah is going to be "Israel's hope and consolation," as one of our Christmas carols says. And those aspirations, those connections, are sort of stressed for us in terms of the fact that this is going to be a Messiah sent from God, the Lord God of Israel. This is going to be someone who is going to come from the house of David. As the Messiah, we know that the Messiah is going to be the son of David. So that is reiterated here. The relevance of our ancestor Abraham, the relevance of the covenant with Israel--all of those Old Testament markers are referred to. And that's all very, very good, because the Messiah is wonderfully relevant to the people of Israel living at this particular day.
The question is, "Does the Messiah being relevant to Israel mean also that the Messiah has to be relative to Israel alone?" Do you see that? Does the relevance mean that the Messiah is going to be relative to Israel alone, and for no one else? And if you read this passage that way, what you realize is that what Zechariah is saying is, "Us--us Jews, us Hebrews, us people of God--that's who the Messiah is going to be coming along for. He's not going to come for our enemies. No, he's going to be coming to save us from our enemies." And so there was an openness in Judaism at this time to God fulfilling His promise in sending a Savior. But with that openness, there is a temptation to say, "He's going to save people like me . . . Me, of course, people like me, and that's it." The idea here is that the Messiah is going to come and save good Jews and no one else.
Well, that's all the more interesting when we remember the history of the spread of the gospel in the first century as Paul and Silas went out on their missionary journey and would preach the gospel throughout the Mediterranean world. A fascinating thing is if there was a Jewish synagogue in the new city, they would go and they would preach at the Jewish synagogue first. And if there was hostility, and resentment, and anger, if there was a rejection of this gospel that was preached in the Jewish outposts around the known world, we would sort of think that it was because Jesus was a scandalous kind of Messiah. Jesus did not live up to the Jewish ideas of a Messiah of the day. That's what we would sort of think.
But read through the book of Acts and see if you don't see something else entirely. Which is, as Paul and Silas went around and preached, they said "and the Gentiles are going to be in the Kingdom, too." And that made the Jews in the first century . . . Many Jews opened their hearts to the gospel, but if there was opposition, if there was hostility, if there was a rejection, in the book of Acts what we see is it wasn't a rejection of the idea that the Messiah was Jesus. It was a rejection of the idea that the Messiah is for more than "just me and people like me."
Now, let's apply this to ourselves. We live in a day that is, in some ways, unprecedented (at least for a heck of a long time in the history of Western civilization). And because there are so many things new and unprecedented today, there are voices at the present time who are saying, "Oh, Jesus is not for the people far away in Asia, India, Africa, Latin America. No, no, no. Jesus is just for us. See, they need to have their own religion because of how different they are from us. Jesus is for us, but He's not for them."
Now, why would that be? Well, this is interesting. For a long time in Western civilization, as we know, if you were a Christian living in a village in Italy or Germany, Christians were the only people that you ever rubbed elbows with (with the notable exception of there was probably a Jewish synagogue in your little village, so there were Jews that you knew). But the Jews were a very, very familiar sight. The Jews aside, Christians never met, never encountered, never heard of, did not know anything about people of other religious faiths and people of no faith. The society and the church were almost (99.9%) one and the same. And that's not true any more. We do know people of other faiths. We do rub elbows with people who believe differently than us and people who do not believe at all, people with no faith. So this is an unprecedented time and we're asked to ask the question, "Well, do I need to say that Jesus is for other people just like He is for me? Is Jesus for me or everybody?" We ask that question in a different way.
One suggestion is that, "No, no, no, no. Let's not try to push Jesus on anyone else. Let's just let Jesus be for us--you know, people in the Christian West." Now, the fascinating thing is, at the present time in parts of Asia, many parts of Africa, and throughout Latin America, people are responding positively to Jesus, people are responding positively to the preaching of the gospel. There is an immense interest in the Christian faith throughout the world at the present time. Wherever Christian missionaries go, in many parts of the world, people are very attracted to Jesus, people are responding very positively. And so one thing with "Is Jesus for us only?" well, let's see. And as we take the gospel into other parts of the world, we find that there are people who are going to respond positively to Jesus.
And, as a matter of fact, to be perfectly honest, if you want to know where the most cold indifference to Jesus Christ is at the present time, well, it's first of all in Western Europe and, to a lesser extent, in North America. There is a warm faith-response to Jesus taking place in many parts of the world. And the fact that we don't see it doesn't mean that it's not happening. And, as a matter of fact, the real problem is not, "Is Jesus for people in Asia, Africa, Latin America, parts of the world other than our part of the world?" That's really not where the problem is today. People in other parts of the world are being given chances to respond to the gospel and many of them are saying "yes" to it. Many of them are accepting the offer of salvation in Jesus Christ. And I'd say it's certainly not our place to say, "Oh, no, no. Jesus is not for you." Because you know what? That makes us just like the way I'm reading Zechariah here saying "the Messiah, just for us, just for people with our history, just for people with our culture, just for people just like me. Those are the only ones."
And I'm saying, you know what? The Jews of the first century had to discover how attractive the Messiah was to people who were not like them. Isn't it interesting that many Americans today are really pretty much in that same boat. We want to say, "Oh, no, no, no. Jesus is just the Savior for us. He's not the Savior for anybody else." When actually, when the gospel is taken out into cultures very different than ours, there's a wonderful warm-hearted response of faith to it.
So I'm going to say the question for you and me, the question for people like you and me, is not, "Is Jesus for everybody else?" Because, you know what? The question for you and me is: "Is Jesus for you?" "Is Jesus for me?"
Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, I ask that we would not be distracted from the one-and-only truly important question. The question for each of us is: "Is Jesus for me?" Lord, we thank you for reports that we get of how faith in your Son Jesus Christ is spreading, how your Kingdom is advancing in other parts of the world. Lord, we delight in that. Lord, we ask that you would give us grace to allow your Kingdom to advance here as well. And it's in the strong name of Jesus that we pray. Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower Interim Pastor Faith Presbyterian Church Minnetonka, Minnesota
[Transcribed from an audiotape of the worship service on November 30, 2003.] |
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