Living Up to the Hype--December 23, 2019

Living Up to the Hype--December 23, 2019

"Then [John's] father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke this prophecy:

 'Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,

    for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them.

 He has raised up a mighty savior for us

    in the house of his servant David,

 as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,

    that we would be saved from our enemies 

    and from the hand of all who hate us.

 Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors,

    and has remembered his holy covenant,

 the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham,

    to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies,

 might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness

    before him all our days.

 And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;

    for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,

 to give knowledge of salvation to his people

    by the forgiveness of their sins.

By the tender mercy of our God,

    the dawn from on high will break upon us,

 to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,

    to guide our feet into the way of peace'." [Luke 1:67-79]

Wow.  That's a lot of build-up, isn't it?  No pressure or anything, right ol' Zechariah?

There is so much going on in this poetic speech of Zechariah's, which is often borrowed by the church to be used as a song.  It's all about what the coming Messiah will do, and what Zechariah's son John will do to prepare for the Coming One, and, boy oh boy, it sure does raise our expectations, doesn't it?  (You've got to wonder what a song like this does to a boy like John if this is your lullaby as a baby--you're gonna grow up knowing there are a lot of hopes pinned on you!)

And maybe it's the cynic in me, but it has taken me a long time to listen to these words, to really hear them, without shrugging them off as too much hype.  Maybe that seems disrespectful or sacrilegious, but it just seems that for so much of my life--and I'll suspect yours too--there have been too many voices making impossibly big claims that don't come true.  And it is hard for me not to hear Zechariah's song and not think, "That's a tall order here, Zach..."

We have grown accustomed to the unending litany of political voices who make big promises that don't live up to the sales-pitch: the tax cuts that will make everyone richer, but which never seem to show up in your own paycheck; the stock markets that will roar endlessly, but which don't seem to help you be able to provide for your family any better; the latest program, the grandest slogan, the promises to make it all great... we've been living through one round of that carnival barker's spiel after another, and they have never lived up to the promises.  It's hard, after being let down so many times by big talkers, to believe that there is really someone who could live up to the hype.

And, not to rub salt in the cynic's wounds here, but we all know that Zechariah is singing about Jesus, who doesn't exactly fit our expectations. I mean, yes, Luke the narrator wants us to believe Jesus is the promised savior that Zechariah was singing about, but given the way the story goes from here, you almost wonder whether Zechariah himself pictured a cross or a borrowed grave as the way that Jesus saves the world.  You wonder if Zechariah pictured the smallness of Jesus' ministry--there is no violent uprising, no army of liberation, no angelic militia to help Jesus retake the throne.  Jesus' way of saving "those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death" doesn't seem to involve stopping death, so much as it means going through death with us, and breaking it open from the inside.  Jesus' way of bringing God's jubilee isn't through an armed conflict, and he doesn't do a single thing to look "tough" in order to "defend God" or to "fight for the rights of his countrymen."  Instead, we are given a baby laid in a borrowed food trough who becomes an itinerant homeless rabbi whose students are illiterate fishermen and outcast tax collectors, who tells people to love their enemies and give their possessions away before getting lynched by the Respectable Religious crowd and executed by the state for treason. Nobody was expecting quite that, and you don't even get a hint of it in Zechariah's song.

And yet... Zechariah's not wrong.  Jesus really is the one we have been waiting for.  Jesus really is the one through whom our feet could finally be trained to walk in the way of peace.  Jesus really is the one who lifts us beyond the shadow of death.  And Jesus really is the one who leads us beyond living in fear of those who are hostile to us.  It's just that his way of being all those things isn't what any of us were expecting.  To borrow a favorite line of another Luke whose story is popular these days (one with the surname of Skywalker), "This is not going to go the way you think."  

And that's true.  It's gloriously, wondrously, surprisingly true.  Jesus is the one that Zechariah was singing about, but not as one more military general trying to replace one rotten empire with another rotten empire.  Not as another boastful politician making promises he cannot keep, or selling us on lies we would be fools to believe.  Jesus doesn't come to stabilize the markets or to make it more comfortable and convenient for us to practice our religion.  He hasn't come to bolster any empire or endorse any demagogues, and he hasn't come to help us all achieve the American Dream.  He has come to bring about God's dream, in which we no longer live in fear, in which our many kinds of darkness give way to God's light, and in which sin and death and hostility no longer get the last word.  He will do it, of course, through the suffering love that heals lepers, weeps at Lazarus' tomb, washes feet, and gets nailed to a tree.  And in that sense, the Promised One of whom Zechariah sang turned out to be a surprise even Zechariah himself didn't see coming.  But he isn't a letdown.  For once, the one for whom we are waiting lives up to the hype.

So in this last couple of days before "the Day" of Christmas, let Zechariah's words lift your expectations.  Nothing less than light in the darkness, and nothing less than life beyond the shadow of death is what we have been given.

Don't settle for anything, or anyone, less than that.

Lord Jesus, come among us and surprise us as the one who at last lives up to our expectations and yet turns those same expectations upside down.