Hilton Head Island, SC – December 24, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 2:8-20; Luke 2:41-52
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And he said to them, “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” – Luke 2:49 (RSV)
Jesus and the Extraordinary
Jesus was not sent into this world for the sake of Jesus. Jesus came on behalf of God and the kingdom of God. From the Christian perspective, Jesus of Nazareth was the supreme proclaimer of God and His kingdom.
Prior to Jesus, no one in human history had ever used the unique phrase, “the kingdom of God.” If that had been the case, the term would be found in the Hebrew Bible, which Christians strangely call the Old Testament. After all, the Jews were the only monotheists up to the time of Jesus anywhere in the world. And since no writer of any book in the Old Testament ever spoke of the kingdom of God, we may appropriately assume no one else ever used those particular four words before Jesus used them during the brief three-year ministry that forever altered the world.
As Jesus went about the Galilee, he talked about many things, and he elucidated many different ideas. But the one theme that stood far above all the others was that pivotal, transformational concept: the kingdom of God. Jesus insisted we are all daughters and sons of God. If that is so, we must act like it. We must seek good, and do good, and love good. And we must love. Love is the essential element that constitutes God’s kingdom. Love came down at Christmas, love all lovely, love divine.
There are two Christmas stories in the four Gospels, one in Matthew and one in Luke. Neither Mark nor John says a single word about Jesus’ birth. In both stories, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, because it was believed, at least by Christians in the first century AD, although not necessarily by Jews in the first or fifth century or tenth centuries BC, that the Messiah had to be born in Bethlehem. King David was born there, and thus Matthew and Luke declare that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
In Matthew there were wise men from the east, but no shepherds. In Luke there were shepherds, but no wise men. The account in Luke is the better remembered of the two stories, if only because of Handel’s famous oratorio Messiah. No one who ever heard it in performance can forget the soaring soprano recitative: “There were shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, “Fear not, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.”
Then the tempo of the music instantaneously picks up, with the soprano announcing, “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying,” --- and with that the chorus comes in. The sopranos, altos, and tenors are singing mezzo-piano, moderately quietly, “Glory to God, glory to God, glory to God in the highest.” They are relatively far away, this heavenly host of angels, and their music is ethereal, mystical. Then the tenors and basses quietly intone, “And peace on earth.” Once again, and this time forte, loud, “Glory to God, glory to God, glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth, good will toward men!” Finally, at the very end of the chorus, fortissimo, very loud, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth, good will toward men!”
Jesus came to proclaim peace, the peace of God! It was peace for all people, not just good people or religious people or respectable people, but for all people! God’s peace is intended to change everyone into good, respectable people. In the kingdom of God, everyone is capable of being redeemed. None is ever outside the redeeming love of God. All of us can be transformed into what God meant us to be, if we allow ourselves to enter His kingdom and to walk in His paths. None is excluded; everyone is welcomed in. Glory to God in the highest! “To God be the glory/ great things He hath done/ So loved he the world/ that He gave us His Son/ Who yielded His life/ Our redemption to win/ And opened the life-gate/ That all may go in.”
Glory to God in the highest! To God be the glory, great things He hath done! Jesus knew that about God. Somehow, in an inexplicable but un-ignorable manner, Jesus knew he was born to give God glory. Jesus came not to proclaim Jesus; he came to proclaim God. Before Luke even finishes the second chapter of his Gospel, he reiterates that truth in a story which only he, of all four Gospels writers, tells us.
You heard it in the second Gospel lesson today. When Jesus was twelve years old, Mary and Joseph went with him, along with many other relatives and friends from Nazareth, to Jerusalem for the spring festival of Passover. Twenty years later, under very different circumstances, Jesus was to be in Jerusalem for another Passover, which would be his last, and the end of his life.
This time, after the festival was over, Mary and Joseph headed back to Nazareth. In those days of very large extended families, they no doubt figured Jesus was with his cousins or aunts or uncles on the way back to Nazareth. When they discovered that was not the case, they returned to Jerusalem. Finally they found Jesus in the temple, talking to the elders and teachers. Listen to the text again. “And when they saw him, they were astonished; and his mother said to him, ‘Son, why have you treated us so? Your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.” (You can make of the two words I highlighted whatever you choose, but I hope you will think about it.)
Jesus said something to his mother which sounds almost smarmy. “How is it that you sought me?” How is it? How is it? Jesus didn’t return to Nazareth with anybody! He stayed back in Jerusalem! Mary and Joseph were frantic. But Jesus explained why he did that to his astonished parents: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” And in order for the reader to understand the nuance of what Jesus was saying, the word Father is capitalized. In other words, Jesus was telling Mary and Joseph that at that moment he felt obligated to be in God’s temple.
I prefer the much more quaint KJV translation to the RSV --- “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” Don’t you know, Mom and Dad, that I am called to be about my heavenly Father’s business? Those words are the first direct quotation of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, and they come out of the mouth of a mere twelve-year-old!
Jesus saw himself as God’s unique agent to a world in great need of redemption. Whether that realization came to him when he was twelve, or earlier, or later, no one can know. Nevertheless, Jesus always saw himself to be The Messenger of God; he was not The Message. Christianity, from its earliest beginnings, transformed Jesus into The Message. In the mind of Jesus, however, Jesus was The Messenger, and not The Message. God was always the essential thrust of Christ’s Message. The God-appointed business of Jesus was to announce the kingdom of God.
Only Luke, of all four Gospel writers, was a Gentile. Only Luke tells the story of Jesus as a boy in the temple. Furthermore, only Luke tells the story of Jesus raising the son of the widow of Nain from the dead (7:11-17). It is a particularly interesting story on the basis of the focus of this sermon. Jesus was in a village called Nain, which was at the eastern foot of Mount Tabor in the Galilee. When he arrived there with the disciples, some men were carrying the casket of a young man who had just died. He was the only child of his mother, Luke tells us, and she was a widow. So now she was entirely alone in the world. “And when the Lord saw her he had compassion on her,” Luke notes. Jesus quietly said to the mother, “Do not weep.” Then Jesus touched the body of the dead man, and Jesus said to him, “Young man, I say to you, arise.”
On other occasions, but never in exactly the same circumstances, Jesus had said those words to other people who were sick or disabled. But this time he said it to a man who had died, and the young man was revivified from death. Only this man and Lazarus in the Fourth Gospel were resurrected by Jesus in any Gospel narratives. But please note how Luke describes what the people of Nain, all of whom were Jews, said in response to this resurrection: “They glorified God, saying, ‘A great prophet has arisen among us!’ and ‘God has visited his people!’” (Luke 7:16)
Historical Jewish theology and tradition unambiguously declared that God could never been seen in the world. Faith could reveal God’s actions or activities by means of human actions and activities, but God Himself deliberately chose to remain invisible to the world. The only way God becomes incarnate in the world is through ordinary human beings. We see God through others; we cannot literally see God in others, because God cannot be physically observed in anyone. Therefore the Galilean Jews who saw Jesus resurrect the son of the widow of Nain glorified God, and exclaimed, “God has visited His people!” They did not glorify Jesus, nor did they perceive him to be God’s physical human manifestation. They believed Jesus was an agent of God, an emissary, and ambassador; they were grateful for what Jesus had done, but they glorified God.
Luke, like Matthew and Mark, has an account of the healing of what is called “the Gerasene demoniac.” There was a mentally ill Gentile who lived on the east side of the Sea of Galilee. His neighbors believed was possessed by demons. After Jesus sent “the demons” into a herd of pigs, the man miraculously regained his right mind. Jesus told the people who came to witness this miracle, and the man for whom the miracle was performed, “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you” (Luke 8:39). Jesus did not tell him to declare what he (Jesus) had done for him. He said he should proclaim what God had done for the man through Jesus. God has many agents, and Jesus is His supreme agent. Nevertheless, everything God’s emissaries accomplish they do by means of God enabling them to enact the divine will.
Later, Luke relates how Jesus cured a boy of epilepsy. The episode ends with these words: “And all were astonished at the majesty of God” (Luke 9:43). Jesus saw himself to be a conduit of divine power. He did not conceive himself to be God, for God alone is God. But he did believe himself to be the initiator of the proclamation of the kingdom of God.
Of all the great religious figures throughout human history, Jesus of Nazareth had the clearest and most compelling concept of who God is and what His purposes are for the world. The Lord God is One, as Moses said. God is the Compassionate, the All-Merciful, as Muhammad said. God is the summum bonum, as Thomas Aquinas said: the Highest Good. God is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, as Rudolf Otto said: the Tremendous Mystery and Fascination. All these ideas Jesus indirectly incorporated into the essential message and meaning of his life, which was the announcement of the arrival of the kingdom of God.
Those who actually saw and heard Jesus perceived him to be the most compelling messenger of God any of them had ever seen. By two or three generations later, however, and by looking back on the life of Jesus, many people began to see Jesus himself as God, as the personification in human form of the Almighty One of Israel. Eventually the early Church officially deified Jesus.
“And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.” It all began so quietly, almost with extraordinary indignity. Who would ever have guessed that very shortly angels would appear to some startled shepherds, and then kings would come from the East, and that in time the world’s most widespread religion would circle the globe, singing of the kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ? Christmas changes everything. Chronology became the kingdom of God, and the new-world-clock began ticking in Bethlehem.
Several years ago Mark Lowry wrote the lyrics and Buddy Greene the score for a new popular song called Mary, did you know. It is neither theologically not Christologically profound, but it captures a certain kind of ethereal inner wonder which only Christmas can produce.
Mary, did you know that your baby boy would one day walk on water?
Mary, did you know that your baby boy would save our sons and daughters?
Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new?
This child you’ve delivered will soon deliver you….
Mary, did you know? Mary, did you know? Mary, did you know?
Mary, did you know that your baby is Lord of all creation?
Mary, did you know that your baby boy would one day rule the nations?
Did you know that your baby boy is heaven’s Lamb?
That sleeping child you’re holding is the great I Am.
Mary, did you know? Mary, did you know? Mary, did you know? Mary, did you know?
To Jesus, nothing was more extraordinary than God, and Jesus had the most extraordinary concept of God of all the spiritual visionaries of all time. To Jesus, God was everything. That doesn’t mean that everything is God; far from it. It means that all of us, with Jesus, need to put God first and foremost in our lives. We live too much for ourselves and for one another. If we strive for a lifetime to understand who God is, then we can begin to live productively and completely for others and for ourselves. In order to accomplish that, however, we must first comprehend who God is and what the kingdom of God is. When that happens, the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of our God, and of His Christ.
Christmas appears to be about Jesus, but it is really about God. It sings, “Glory to God in the highest!” With the Magi coming from the East, it proclaims that God and His kingdom are for everyone, not just for Jews, not just for Christians, but for all people everywhere who do not know God. Christmas is the astonishing announcement of the kingdom of God.
Therefore, to God be the glory; great things He hath done!