Hilton Head Island, SC – December 4, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Revelation 11:15-18; Luke 1:26-33
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” – Luke 1:33 (RSV)
The Songs Of The Messiah
1) The Unique Monarchy Of The Messiah
There are four Gospels which were accepted into the New Testament canon by the early Church. There were many other possibilities which were rejected. The word “canon” (c-a-n-o-n; like the spelling of the camera) in this context means the books which were “voted” into the Bible at the Council of Nicea in the year 325 CE.
There are similarities in the accounts of the ministry and teachings of Jesus among all four Gospels, but each is also unique in its own ways. Only two of the Gospels, Matthew and Luke, have a story about the circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus, but there are more differences than similarities between those two Gospels’ Christmas narratives. Luke begins by telling the story of the birth of John the Baptist, who was a cousin of Jesus. Matthew says nothing in his birth narrative about John the Baptist, and concentrates only on the details of Jesus’ birth. Mark and John say nothing at all about Bethlehem or the shepherds or wise men or anything else that reminds us of the original Christmas and about which we sing in the Christmas carols.
In their first chapters, both Matthew and Luke tell of a visitation by the angel Gabriel. But in Matthew Gabriel appears to Joseph, and in Luke he visits Mary. Furthermore, in Matthew there are no songs. However, in Luke Gabriel sings two songs, then there is a song by Mary, and then another song by Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist. Later, in the second chapter, after the birth is announced, Joseph and Mary took the baby Jesus to the temple for the ceremony of purification. There Simeon, an elderly resident of Jerusalem, who had been waiting all his life for the Messiah, sang yet another song about the infant Jesus.
Some New Testament scholars believe these poetic songs were used by the New Testament Church and the Church from the earliest centuries as part of the Christmas liturgy. The three longest songs have been given specific Latin names by Church tradition. The song of Mary (Luke 1:29-35) is called “The Magnificat,” after the opening line, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” The song of Zechariah (Luke 1:67-79) is called “The Benedictus,” after its opening line, “Blessed (in Latin Benedictus) be the Lord God of Israel.” The song of Simeon (Luke 2:29-35) is called the Nunc Dimittis for its opening line, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,” or “Lord, now dismiss thy servant in peace.”
There are no records that corroborate this notion, but it is widely assumed that at some early point in the Church’s history, it began to use the Songs of the Messiah found in Luke 1 and 2 during the Advent season, leading up to Christmas. Thus during Advent we too shall focus on these beautifully-written poems about the coming of Jesus as the promised Messiah of God.
In the Old Testament prophets, and especially in the prophet Isaiah, there are isolated verses which tell us about an Anointed One of God (which is what the Hebrew word Messiah [Mesheach]) means. But who would God’s Anointed One be? And what does “anointed one” mean? In the days of the kings of Judah and Israel, in the coronation ceremony, the king had holy oil poured upon his head. There followed a prayer for God’s blessing upon the monarch. That still happens in Westminster Abbey whenever a new British monarch is crowned.
Thus it would appear that, technically, every monarch is a messiah, because every monarch is anointed with oil in his or her coronation. But over the centuries the Jews began to yearn not for a messiah but for THE Messiah, the king who would be superior to all other kings. He would need to be a descendant of David, reckoned to be the greatest of all the kings in Israelite history. Here and there throughout the prophets are verses which seem to point to God’s Messiah, but no one ever suggested who specifically that person would be.
If you study every messianic verse that can be found in all of the prophetic writings, it seems obvious that the Messiah was to be essentially a spiritual king, not a political or military monarch. His kingdom would not be established by force of arms, but rather by divine persuasion. He would be God’s Messiah much more than the people’s Messiah. That is, He would be sent by God to lead the people back to God; he would not be sent by God to lead the people against their enemies. The mission of the Messiah was fundamentally religious; it was not fundamentally political. The Messianic Kingdom would be founded on divine principles, not human principles.
Nevertheless, there seems to have been a slow shift in messianic thinking from the time Isaiah began to write about God’s Messiah to the time Jesus was born. In that seven-and-a-half-century period, the two Jewish kingdoms were invaded and conquered three times. In 722 BCE, the Assyrians from the northwest corner of the Fertile Crescent came and conquered the northern kingdom of Israel. Never again was it an independent nation. However, they failed to conquer Judah. In 586 BCE the Babylonians from the southeast corner of the Fertile Crescent came and conquered Judah and Jerusalem, burning the holy city to the ground. Judah did regain its independence, but only after four centuries, and that lasted only a little more than a century until the Romans came and turned Judea into a vassal state of the Roman Empire. The Romans had occupied the Jewish homeland for almost three generations by the time Jesus was born.
In that 750-year-span, and with those major military losses, no longer did most Jews conceptualize the Messiah as a spiritual king. In their minds, because of the reverses their homeland had endured, the Messiah of faith had become a military liberator, the leader of a Jewish army who would cast out the Roman occupiers.
The four Gospels were written from sixty to a hundred years after the birth of Jesus, and thirty to seventy years after his crucifixion and resurrection. Those years were the most formative period in the development of the Christian religion. Whatever the original followers of Jesus thought about him while he was living in Judea, it was radically transformed within two generations after Jesus was gone from them.
You may wonder why I am telling you all this. Is this a sermon, or is it a history lesson? To both questions I would answer Yes; yes, it is a sermon, and yes, it is a history lesson. But we need to understand the history before we can understand the sermon.
The Gospels and the other parts of the New Testament are not really history. They are relatively brief glimpses into the most radically transformative century in the western world. A Galilean peasant was born somewhere in the Roman province of Judea. Two New Testament writers, and only two, say he was born in Bethlehem, which is the town where King David had been born a thousand years earlier. According to both of those writers, the angel Gabriel appeared to Joseph (in Matthew) and to Mary (in Luke). Gabriel is mentioned only twice in the Old Testament, and both times in the prophecy of Daniel (8:16 and 9:21). Daniel does not even refer to him as an angel, but in both instances as “the man Gabriel.” However, we may naturally infer that he is a special messenger from God (which is what the word “angel” means: messenger.)
In both Matthew and Luke, Gabriel has a message from God to deliver, but they are really two different messages. In Luke, Gabriel appears before Mary, and his first words to her are these: “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” In Latin, “hail” is “ave’,” from which comes “Ave’, Maria, gratia plena, Dominus te cum”: Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.” Very big things are coming out of this first chapter of the Third Gospel.
Then comes one of the most memorable and profoundly human observations to be found anywhere in scripture: “But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be” (1:29). Mary is a peasant girl of thirteen or fourteen. In her culture she is at the usual age for marriage, and very soon she shall be married. But still, she is only thirteen or fourteen. What girl of that age would not be fearful of an angelic appearance before her, her, of all people?
Gabriel quickly assures her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.” “Jesus” is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua, or the Aramaic name Yeshua, and Aramaic is the language Jesus spoke. Aramaic was latter-day Hebrew, as Italian is like latter-day Latin. The name Joshua means both “God Saves” and “Savior.” The baby to be born shall be a Savior sent from God.
Now for a momentary cheeky aside from the profound importance of this story. Gabriel tells Mary that “you will conceive in your womb and bear a son.” The cheeky aside comes from a congenital ponderer-about-nearly-everything with a particular personality which tries to think through everything think-throughable, and he says, “Where else, other than in her womb, would Mary conceive?” But that is one of the primary points of this singular story! Jesus shall be born like any other child is born! He shall be a normal human being! This shall not be a miraculous, celestial, out-of-this-world birth! And yet this child also shall be THE Messiah!
Then comes Gabriel’s song, the first of the Songs of the Messiah.
He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High,
And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David,
And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever,
And of his kingdom there will be no end.”
Listen carefully, Christian people. “House of Jacob” means “the Jews.” According to the angel Gabriel, Jesus was supposed to be the king of the Jews forever. By the time the Gospel of Luke was written, which was about 80 AD or CE, the nascent Christian religion was getting nowhere with the Jews. In fact, the writer of the Third Gospel himself was not a Jew; Luke was a Gentile, the only Gentile writer in the entire Christian Bible.
If “The Messiah” was to “reign over the house of Jacob forever,” Jesus didn’t. At the beginning, nearly all the first Christians were Jews. Within two generations, however, almost all new Christian converts were pagan Gentiles, and there were very few Jews who became Christians after that. I believe the Roman obliteration of the Jewish kingdom from 68-72 CE (AD) is the primary reason for that trend, but I’m not going to take time to try to explain it; I shall only state it without any explanation.
For the first twenty-five years or so, Christianity was a splinter group within Judaism. From then on, it became an almost exclusively Gentile religion. Thus Gabriel’s song was not historically accurate; Jesus did not and does not reign over the house of Jacob forever.
From the standpoint of late first-century Christianity to the present day, however, the last line in Gabriel’s song holds true: Of the kingdom of The Messiah Jesus there shall be no end. We hear that idea stated slightly differently in the Revelation. The last book in the New Testament was the last New Testament book to be written. Scholars generally agree that “The Revelation to John,” or “The Apocalypse of John,” was written about the year 120 CE.
In the reading from Revelation which you heard earlier in the service, an unnamed angel is quoted as saying, “The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.” And when I chose to read that verse you are meant inside your head to hear The Hallelujah Chorus being sung by a hundred-voice choir with trumpets timpani and strings at fortississimo. Do you hear them --- the choir and trumpets and timpani and strings? The whole world has become the kingdom of our Lord (God) and of His Christ (Jesus)! For almost twenty centuries Christianity has been a world religion, in some respects perhaps The World Religion, theoretically if not actually embracing everyone of every nationality and culture and color!
Several years after Jesus died, he no longer was the king of the Jews, if he ever was perceived to be that to begin with. However, from the Christian viewpoint, Jesus did become the monarch of the world. But his monarchy was unique among all the monarchies or autocracies or democracies of the world; it rested not at all on military force or on political prowess, but solely on spiritual power.
Jesus is an un-regal king. He doesn’t live in a palace. He has no army or court or treasury. His reign takes place in the heart and head, not on the battlefield or at the ballot box.
“He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High,
And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David,
And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever;
And of his kingdom there will be no end.”
The monarchy of the Messiah is a unique monarchy. It operates on God’s laws, not human laws. And it is God who crowned The Messiah as monarch.
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will toward men. That is the essential proclamation of the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.