Notes to the Lessons
Zephaniah
After warnings of God’s judgment, God’s displeasure with God’s people, Zephaniah finally at the end of the book gets around to, starts to present that God is actually merciful and will save them.
Judgment as Good News is a theme this week, a most challenging one.
The first section is in the 3rd voice; the prophet addresses the people. The second section is in the first person; God addresses the people; the prophetic voice of the prophet claiming to speak for God.
The first words are simple, “Sing aloud…” which may not be so powerful until one remembers that in captivity, it is not safe to sing aloud. For to sing praise to God who is seen as a threat to one’s captors is to invite personal destruction.
So here it starts: hear this: Sing, and sing aloud, for there is no captor, no foreign power, no occupier to hear. There is only those who fear and love the Lord, and the Lord God, who can hear. All is well.
All that Zephaniah has prophesized has come to be: God has judged Israel. But now that God takes away those judgements.
Everything is changed. Israel’s enemies are turned away, and Israel need not fear disaster anymore!
There’s a wonderful freedom in that. Anyone who has lived under the threat of a disaster can recount the horror, and the relief when it is done. We watched flood waters rise two meters a night, coming one meter from flooding our house we built with our own labour. The whole neighbourhood already flooded, but ours was by chance built higher up the side of the valley, just enough as it turns out.
If you’ve ever been under threat from another person who seems focused on ruining you with lies, who has already ruined your reputation, finances, family, ability to work, and still will not quit, you know what it is to live under the threat of disaster.
The promise is that God is in our midst whereas before God had deserted Israel. Both seem to be quite frightful. To have God desert us is not unlike Martin Luther, condemned by the Church court. No great sentence except excommunication. Seems like not much until you remember that meant he was not considered a full person. He was not protected by any laws. Anyone could treat him however, and there were no consequences, even if he were killed, it was not murder.
So being without God is to have one’s life under constant threat. And if you’ve ever been somewhere where that is the case, you know it’s a horrible experience. And then to have that threat end… the relief is palpable, visceral, and profound.
The promise that God is in our midst can also be similarly terrifying, for with good reason the traditions are that seeing God face to face is to die. The awesome presence of God in person is too much for a human to survive. And if that does not do you in, then the fact that God knows every single truth about you. You cannot hide, pretend, or fake it. Every thought, intention, excuse and secret are there on the open page of your life, for God to see and respond to. And there is not a single one of us that deserves anything short of condemnation from God.
But that is not the kind of God that we trust in, believe in or that Zephaniah presents to Israel. God is a God who gives victory, who rejoices over us, who renews God’s love for us, who will exult us (it should be the other way around, shouldn’t it; we exult God!) with loud singing. The whole universe hears God singing … with joy … about us!
Now that makes up for anything our enemies can do to us, anything we might suffer at their hands, any disaster that might befall us.
And the voice changes from the prophet talking about God, to the prophet presenting God speaking directly to us.
Disaster is gone, reproach too. Our oppressors are history. And then the lame and the outcast (those who suffer in society through no fault of their own) will receive God’s blessings: their shame is turned to praise and renown in all the earth!
For us the same renown on all the earth, our fortunes are restored before our eyes, and,
The best part,
God brings us home.
Maybe not such a big deal if you’ve always been able to go home. But if you’ve been exiled or made homeless, or cast out by misfortune or ill intent of an enemy, then to be able to come home … to have a home to come to, and to be brought there … this is a miracle of hope realized.
For it is at home, where one can recuperate, recover, rest, live and work, eat and play, and spend time with family.
Isaiah
Isaiah, stands in for the Psalm, as this portion of Isaiah is a song (a psalm) already.
Where does the author put their trust? In God, for in God is salvation, the water of life that can be drawn only from God’s well supplied well of salvation.
The response to God’s act of saving: to give thanks, make known God’s deeds, sing praises to God, shout and sing for joy.
Again, this is all because God is in our midst. A terrifyingly wonderful blessing.
Philippians
Paul is over the top with the Philipians, giving thanks for them and encouraging them to:
Rejoice, and again rejoice.
Put everything in God’s hands with prayer
And instead of worrying, to make our requests known to God.
Here Paul gives the blessing that has grown a tradition of use all it’s own: God’s peace, which surpasses all understanding, will guard our hearts and our minds.
How God works peace we most often simply cannot begin to fathom. But God does.
With this peace God guards our hearts and minds … and that is all we can ask God for ever anyway.
John the Gospel
John proclaims the Good News to those who come out to be baptized. Well actually he exhorts them, and the writer John says that’s good news. We know the writer John is a different John because Herod has John the Baptist beheaded while Jesus is still alive, long before any of the Gospels were written, the Gospel according to John being the last one to be written.
The best dates we have for the Gospels being written are: Mark 66–70, Matthew and Luke 85–90, and John 90–110. Subtract 30-33 years for how many years after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. So today’s Gospel was written roughly 60-80 years after John the Baptist and Jesus were killed.
There are two ways to start looking at this, well let’s call it a paradox. First look at the definition of Exhortation and see how that can be good or Good News. The second is to look at what the Gospel says John did, and ask how that is good or Good News.
The Oxford dictionary defines
exhortation as “n[oun] address or communication emphatically urging
someone to do something.
‘exhortations to consumers to switch off
electrical appliances’
mass noun ‘no amount of exhortation had any effect’
Problem A: works righteousness: repent and earn God’s favour, through baptism.
Problem A explained: there is no one who can repent, change oneself, enough to earn God’s favour. Exhortation is a false good news. It’s actually a trap, a diversion, a call to fully occupy oneself with an impossible task, in order to accomplish a goal. But the task cannot be accomplished, so it keeps one from reaching the goal. When, other tasks are possible, if extremely difficult, but can be accomplished, and the goal can be reached. Actually since the goal is to gain God’s favour it is moot goal. God promises us God’s favour. We cannot earn it, we do not need to earn it. Any attempt to do so is futile, and can consume life, all of life.
Problem B: what John says to the people coming out to be baptized is not really so benign as “emphatically urging someone to do something”. It is rather nasty things that John says about people from the get go: You brood of vipers. Who warned you to flee the wrath that is to come! Repent! Don’t count on being a descendant of Abraham. God can create Abraham’s descendants from stones. But be warned, the axe is at the root, Your root, and any person that does not bear good fruit will be thrown into the fire.
Hot stuff, already the fires of damnation are leaping at our feet, as the axe is swung back to come slamming back down on the root of our existence, us poor sinners all!
And then flow the exhortations, or rather generalized accusations of malfeasance, which may have been earned or not.
What does he tell people?: All good stuff, share that second coat, as well as any food. Notice it is not spare food, it’s all food. Which should put one aware that a lot of people did not have ANY food. It was common. Which by the way is still the case today, if you had not noticed or had forgotten. The problem is not supply. There is enough food to feed everyone. The problem is distribution and hoarding and over consumption, says the guy with a fat belly.
Mailing your unwanted food off to someone hungry in Africa or China, of course, is not the solution. The need is also local and it is world wide.
So good for John in naming the problem; But how is that Good News?
And he goes on: tax collectors collect only what you are prescribed. And soldiers do not extort money with threats. So good: generally live honorably and stop the threats and graft and corruption.
But how is that Good News. Yes of course it’s good for the rest of us, but what about the tax collector and soldier who has been reduced from a well-paying job, to a job that barely puts food on the table?
Then comes the clarity, if it were not already crystal clear: John the Baptist is not the Messiah. Jesus is still coming, and he will baptize, not with water and calls for repentance, but with the Spirit [and assurances that God already favours us, so get on with responding by being and doing appropriately. – It’s not about earning God’s favour. It’s about responding to the blessed reality that is already there: so stop sacrificing other people in order to fake that you are good enough for God’s favour. You are not good enough, you can’t be good enough and you never will be. God’s favour is a free gift, so stop trying to earn it and get on with living it out, or living out of it, since it is a ‘home’ and a way of being.
Again: how is John’s insulting the people, as well deserved as it may have been, and telling them to repent and earn God’s favour … how is all this good or Good News?
Answers come to mind like: the Good News is like a two-edged sword, or word.
Or we really do need to stop sinning, and we do need to start taking care of each other and we do need to stop stealing life’s essentials from other people.
All this is true.
None of this is good. It may be calls to be good. But the act of calling someone to be good, at least the way John the Baptist does it, is not good. It may be a lot of evil fun: naming other’s sins and rubbing it in their faces. But it is not good. It may be necessary, but it is not good.
It is a distraction from the real Good News. And it may be, in the writing and in real life, the foil that sets Jesus up to bring Good News that is unlike any other news the people have heard.
Foil: so lets go with that.
And then, since we already have God’s favour, let’s get around to solving world hunger, and the mal-distribution of the necessities of life: air, water, food, clothing, shelter, meaningful labour and love.
Now if our churches were about that, then we would actually be living out of the Gospel as our home, our way of being.
Welcome home. Life just got a lot more difficult, because the hungry are coming to supper, and breakfast and lunch. And the homeless are moving in with us. And the despised sinners are coming to coffee and tea with us, after they have shared the cup and bread with us.
Welcome home, because this is home to Jesus, with the hungry, the poor and homeless – even the crazies, and with those people we despise and find their sins abhorrent.
And we thought the Good News was anything close to good news for us. Except living at home with the hungry, the homeless, the outcasts … that is home for Jesus, and it is the life that is blessed.
It is not comfortable.
But then the Gospel properly proclaimed and heard never is. It is revolutionary: it makes things revolve, not around what we want, but what God wants for God’s people, which are all people.