Great Expectations--December 22, 2023

Great Expectations--December 22, 2023

"In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, 'Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.' But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, 'Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David.  He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end'." [Luke 1:26-33]

Wow.  This is a lot to put on a kid, isn't it?  These are some pretty big expectations placed on Mary's future baby--and thus on Mary herself--with this angelic introduction.  We probably can't even appreciate just how big a deal this pregnancy is, and just what the angel's words really meant to Mary's ears.  In particular, I think we miss the heft of all this angelic stuff about sitting on "the throne of his ancestor David" and a reign that will have no end.  That's not just pie-in-the-sky talk: in the context of first century Palestine, it's a promise that the empires of history won't get the last word.

When the angel came to Mary, the power of the day is Rome (Luke, the narrator, is careful to remind us that the birth of Jesus happens during the reign of Caesar Augustus, all the way down to who was the regional governor in the province of Syria).  But Rome was only the most recent player on the world stage, coming after the Greeks (Alexander the Great and his successors), the Medes and Persians before them, and the Babylonians and Assyrians before them.  And of course, in the back of Mary's awareness was the distant ancestral recollection of life under the harsh rule of Pharaoh's Egypt.  So by the time Gabriel appears in Mary's kitchen, all she and her neighbors, parents, and grandparents have ever known is being dominated by a foreign empire.  In fact, except for a brief blip on the radar during the time of the Maccabees, the place where Mary lived had been under the rule of one empire or another, all playing a terrible version of King of the Hill for more than five centuries. All anybody knew or remembered was the shadow of some faraway bully of a conquering king cast over their lives and their land.

So when the angel announces that Mary's boy will sit on the old ancestral throne of King David, it's a promise that God won't let the way of empire last forever.  The bullies will not win the day.  The conquerors will eventually end up in the dustbin of history, and the people who have been taken advantage of, exploited, and intimidated by one tyrant after another will finally be free of that machine.  All of that is the hope of the coming Christ.

Now, to be sure, you and I know that the way the story goes from there sure doesn't look like what many people expected for a defeat of empire.  Jesus ends up being crucified by the Roman Empire, and for many folks that became the clear proof that Jesus couldn't be the Messiah (because Messiahs don't get killed by their enemies, of course!).  For the Christian community, on the other hand, the cross of Jesus is actually an even deeper subversion and more revolutionary victory--not just over the Romans, but over the powers of death and evil themselves.  Christians came to see the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not as Christ's defeat by the Romans who put him to death, but as God's victory over the whole game of King of the Hill altogether.   Jesus wasn't going to get rid of the Roman Empire with another new empire, playing the same brutal game of domination that they'd all been playing for the last five hundred years.  Jesus was going to undo the whole logic of empire and conquest with a victory that broke the power of death itself (which is ultimately what empires threaten people with).

All of this is to say that when Gabriel tells Mary that her boy will receive (note: not take by force, but be given it by God) the throne of David, it means more than just "Jesus will get to wear a crown, so you'll get to live the good life in his palace one day." It means an end to the vicious cycle of domination, and the beginning of something new, even if it has the thread of continuity with ol' King Dave.  That's the hope we have placed in Jesus, even if his way of subverting the power of empire doesn't match our expectations.  Jesus was never going to rile up a violent insurrection against Rome--that's just another way of getting suckered into the imperial game of King of the Hill.  Jesus' way of breaking the power of empires altogether is to embody a different order altogether, what Jesus calls "the Reign of God." And on that promise, Jesus has delivered already--we are invited into his new way of being human, into his beloved community, even now, regardless of whose name is on the imperial letterhead. We participate in the Reign of God even now... and there's nothing that a Caesar, a Nebuchadnezzar, or a Pharaoh can do to stop it.

There's a lot more riding on the baby Mary carries than we might have realized, and it's all right there, at least in seed form, in the word the angel brings.

May we be ready, at last, to encounter this Child of Mary, who is also God's own.

Lord Jesus, come among us and free us from the powers of empire and bullying in which we are still entangled.