In preparing this sermon I have constantly had in mind the Tableau Vivant contrived, by the venerable Alan Goodison and wise Pat Gardner, dressed in tea towels, playing Simeon and Anna with a borrowed baby (now at least a teenager). As we have a baby on hand, I toyed with the idea of a reenactment, but such charming and moving memories are better left alone, and to choose among the many venerable, wise and elderly ladies and gentlemen in the congregation would have been invidious.
So, a different sermon, but one which nods to memory and the timeless values those two actors epitomise for me.
In this Epiphany season we have been hearing stories about how Jesus as a baby and adult was revealed to the world; to the three kings representing the wisdom of the gentile East; to the wedding guests at Cana in Galilee as bringing a new order to Jewish experience; and in baptism by John the last of the prophets. Today we go back to Jesus’ very early childhood and expand on that link between Jesus and the history and expectations of the Jewish and all people, now and then.
Mathew and Luke especially explore Jesus’ role as the messiah whom the Jews were waiting and who would restore Israel’s fortunes as a nation. This was mattered because by the time the Gospels were written it was obvious that Israel’s fortunes in any conventional sense, were very low indeed. The revolt of 66AD had been savagely crushed, Jerusalem sacked and the Temple destroyed. Those who had been thinking Jesus was the political saviour of the Jewish people had their hopes dashed first by their messiah being crucified and then 30 years later their aspirations for liberation from the Romans being annihilated in a way only the Romans knew how. We must accept that however powerfully we as Christians may believe in the resurrection it must have seemed at best elusive and implausible to most and certainly a disappointment to those many expecting political and military leadership.
Gentile converts to Christianity would not have had those expectations; for them the gospel writers’ task was to elucidate Jesus’ role as a messiah of importance to the world beyond Jewry.
So those writers needed to show that Jesus was indeed the messiah foretold- although never very precisely- by the Old Testament prophets but that those prophecies needed to be interpreted as having a far wider and deeper meaning than the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine.
Matthew stresses this by frequent referrals to prophetic predictions realised (not always terribly plausibly) in, for example the circumstances of Jesus’ birth and in portraying him a second Moses, the architect of Israelite religion and law.
Both he and Luke put Jesus’ nativity in the tradition of Old Testament prophets and patriarchs conceived magically by elderly or barren women- in Jesus’ case conceived by a virgin.
Luke way of emphasising the tradition is through what we call the canticles, most notably as Mary in the Magnificat echoes, in part almost word for word, the song of Hannah as she presents her longed-for son Samuel to serve God with Eli the priest at Shiloh. Jesus’ own presentation at Jerusalem is set in a strictly orthodox context as Luke quotes chapter and verse for the timing and sacrifice required. And Simeon’s prayer- the
Nunc Dimittis, also echoes Old Testament prophecy with near quotes from Isaiah and the underlying idea of the messiah bringing light and vision, not just to Israel but the gentiles too. And Anna too, called expressly a prophetess, of great age like Simeon, ends her long wait as we are reminded, of the long wait of the Jews and gentiles for their saviour.
Thus Jesus’s birth and the following formalities place Him firmly in the prophetic tradition but the aspect of that tradition which is emphasised is not the then conventional idea of a military or political leader as messiah but one which is in many ways antithetical to the prevailing contemporary Jewish establishment, both theological and political. Jesus’s ministry angers both the religious leadership and Jewish political leaders both those who found it convenient to accommodate their Roman rulers and those violently opposed to the Romans. The Gospel writers portray Jesus as a radical revolutionary in social terms – albeit a mostly pacifist one- but not a rebel against the prevailing political order. They needed to make their Jewish readers look harder at the prophets and see another sort of messiah whom those prophets foretold, just as their gentile readers needed an explanation of Jesus’ Jewish background
That, I suggest was the challenge for Christians in first century Palestine and particularly for those in the churches springing up the Mediterranean world. We face a similar challenge and so has, and so will, every generation of Christians, because the challenge is an inevitable corollary of the incarnation. The incarnate God as a human being has to be fixed in a particular time and place, with all the baggage that any particularity entails. As God, however, he embodies values which are universal and timeless. It is those values which the Prophets explore and the failure to live up to them that the prophets deplore.
This is a challenge before us all the time, but a baptism focusses our thoughts; what sort of world has Layth entered? What should Christianity mean for him when he comes to think about these things for himself, guided no doubt by his parents and God parents and less directly, all of us? This is surely a time when the need to fill the hungry with good things is urgent as is the need to send the rich empty away and most especially. A scatter the proud in the imagination of their hearts. A time when we desperately need to realise the salvation prepared for all peoples and enlighten and reveal God’s glory among the gentiles and the people of Israel. We have largely failed to do so for the baby in the Tableau Vivant, but there is still time to build the Kingdom of Heaven fit for our children and grandchildren. Amen.