Tired. So very tired.
Luke 1:26-38; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:47-55; 2 Samuel 7:1-11,16
We’re only a week away from Christmas. Jesus’ earthly birthday is quite nearly upon us. We’ve been preparing for a good long while for this. I finished my Christmas shopping this week; after church today we’ll decorate it for the Christmas season. Many of us have put up Christmas lights and other decorations around the house — as an aside, the best show in Brigham is over by Discovery Elementary, complete with FM transmitter. With just a week to go, I’d dare venture a guess that many of us are “ready” for Christmas.
And yet, a curious thing about Christmas is Israel should have been ready for Jesus’ birth as well. There are many prophecies that point to Jesus in the Old Testament, and even more which prefigure the things he did. It’s enough to make us look back and wonder how they all missed the boat so bad.
Paul’s doxology in Romans 16 gives us a bit of a hint as to why this may have happened. He gives glory to God, and refers to the proclamation of Jesus, along with a few descriptors: “according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed an made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey him.”
There’s a theme in Paul’s writings, one that is somewhat present in Romans but even more obvious elsewhere, that things about God are hidden except to those who believe. The gist of it is summed up in 1 Corinthians 1:18. “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” God has a habit of doing the unexpected and everything Jesus did, while prophesied about, was definitely unexpected.
I mean, look at what the people were expecting from the Messiah. 2 Samuel 7 recounts God’s promise to David that his kingdom will be eternal, through a descendant who will reign forever. While it’s quite odd that our readings for today skip that bit, here it is: “I will raise up an offspring to succeed you, and I will establish his kingdom… I will be his father, and he will be my son.” So the idea is that the Messiah to come will be a great king, one who will restore the kingdom of David — the “Golden Age” of Israel.
But God didn’t exactly do things that way. Instead, he sent an angel to a 13 year old girl, engaged to a carpenter named Joseph, telling her she’s going to have a son who she’s going to name Jesus who will fulfill the prophecy from 2 Samuel. And Mary said, “Ummm…. what?!” Then the angel said, “No really, your cousin Elizabeth is 6 months along; God can do anything.” Then Mary said, “I’m the Lord’s servant; may it be to me as you have said.”
Already, Jesus’ story is unconventional. I mean, he was born to an unwed teenage mother, just the kind of person society back then reviled even more than society today. Yet that’s who God chose, and it’s definitely not the kind of person who usually bears the son of a king. Even in Jesus’ ministry his “questionable” parentage was a way the Pharisees would bait him. In a scene in John’s gospel they quip, “At least we know who our father is.” It’s all very out of the ordinary.
Yet we read in Isaiah 53, “He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” But people flocked to him anyways, and most importantly, he saved us from sin and death.
Even though Jesus didn’t fit the people’s expectations of him, and even still doesn’t fit people’s expectations today, he is the one who, as it says in the Magnificat, extends mercy to those who fear him, performs mighty acts, and helps his servants.