A New Year - Under God’s Rule!

Epiphany - The Magi come seeking the new king. Herod urges them to seek that king so that he may ‘worship’ (kill) him. Mt wants us to think intently about Jesus as God’s Messiah, King. "God’s kingdom is arriving" - breaking in. This is God’s work. Can we participate?

New Year - We stand in the crowd listening to Jesus: "Seek first God’s kingdom, God’s rule and God’s righteousness!" Good! I want God to rule in my life. But it sounds strange.

I don’t have to seek Herod’s rule or Rome’s. They impose it. God’s kingdom comes, but it relates to me as no other kingdom. Jesus says, "Seek it." I say, "Just tell me the rules - sacrifices, rituals, purities, things forbidden, boundaries, who’s in/out, rules of worship, rewards, punishments." Jesus looks at the rag-tag, expectant crowd: "Sure, that’s what I’ve been doing. Love God, neighbors, enemies. No anger. No sexual dominance, Speak truth. Don’t resist evil people, but turn your cheek. Don’t show off piety. Pray simply. Give generously. Don’t judge. Give to others what you’ve been given. Don’t worry about your life!

I say, "But those aren’t good rules, good boundaries. They exclude me! They’re impossible." Jesus says, "That’s why I said, Seek!" Our life’s a quest to find the kingdom that already surrounds us but is always beyond us. That gives the only lasting meaning to our life.

Treasure, Vision, Service

Jesus talks us/the crowd through it in very down to earth images that take people seriously. You (impoverished people) are treasure keepers. Where’s what you worry about, what matters to you? You live in this world and also in God’s realm. Put treasure there. SoM!

You have eyes to see, seek, perceive! If perception is clear, generous. Your life is bright. But if

you become envious, coveting, comparing (evil eye), then darkness falls. "Greed clarifies"!?

Jesus identifies the two gods. God, whose kingdom you have to seek. Mammon, money, stuff, all the gods we create, power, sex, celebrity, ethnic dominance, control, family, etc. The god of the real, practical. He’s out there, selling us all the time. I’ll fulfill your dreams, secure you from your worries. You just need a little more of me, and more. We make our little god.

Anxiety and Vulnerability with Extras

Our anxiety makes Mammon very attractive. But Mammon is not a god, just stuff we make, like all idols. We serve/worship stuff and become stuff. Jesus: You’re "something more"!

Jesus tells the truth: Every day has trouble. You’re going to die like flowers and birds. That’s our world. But God cares for and delights in even passing creatures. You’re more. You can seek! Seek God’s very heart: kingdom, faithfulness. You have little faith! But you have faith!

Fight mammon’s sales pitch. Refuse anxiety! Stop the darkness. Open eyes can see God! Seek boldly! Ask! Knock! God knows your needs. The stuff of mammon is generously added.

John the Baptizer and Elijah

Matthew introduces John as a known person: "Baptizer" (also Josephus). Famous as prophet and martyr killed by Herod Antipas. He is the renewal of prophecy cut short by corrupt power.

Mt illuminates his role by two scripture references. Isaiah 40: Wilderness, Exodus, hope for end of exile, renewal. Preparation for God. This is what the Gospel is about. Nothing less.

Also the sign of Elijah that ends Malachi. The call for renewal before God’s Judgment.

The surprising way that God comes. "God with us" as the exiled son. God as human Messiah.

God’s Kingdom Breaks In - Learning to Think in New Ways

John proclaims a call for repentance (metanoein) and the arrival of God’s Kingdom: the heavens are the realm of God everywhere. Repentance is more than personal sorrow for individual sins. It is realization that God’s people have fundamentally turned away from God as God. The people are plunged, confessing that rebellion and brokenness, like Daniel.

John, like Jesus, doesn’t try to convince them that God’s kingdom is coming. It is here, beginning to break in. He is telling them/helping them see what to do to get to participate in it. Matthew’s Gospel - the Gospel - is announcement not defense or argument.

Pharisees and Sadducees - What is a Brood of Vipers?

John’s reaction to these leaders is startling! Pharisees are the great expounders of the Law. Sadducees are the leading priests and keepers of the Temple. John (like the Essenes of the Dead Sea Scrolls) sees them not as forces for renewal but expressions of Israel’s problem.

John anticipates Jesus’ critique: Abraham as father (Mt 1:1). Confidence in ethnic identity and careful legal purity boundaries, blocks them from real change of thinking that can make them open to the in-breaking of God’s kingdom in unexpected ways, among sinners, Gentiles. Purity and Temple are not the fruit of a new way of thinking. The axe of judgment is ready.

The Beginning of a Time of Spirit and Fire

Matthew describes John anticipating Jesus. John is a recognizable prophet of the long story. Jesus will connect with John’s baptism in water, but the power of Jesus’ work will be plunging people into Spirit and Fire. This will open to them God’s rule and reveal who they are not by external signs but deep transformation that creates a new way of life (SoM).

God is with us in ways that challenge all expectations. In the very things that seem to deny Jesus as Messiah - reinterpretation of Law, rejection of Temple, welcome to sinners / outsiders, death - God is judging old ways and plunging people into Spirit and Fire. The Kingdom!

Jesus’ Birth - How God Fills up His Story

Matthew tells of Jesus’ birth to help us learn how to hear and understand Jesus’ whole story. There’s no sweetness in Mt’s narrative, except the Magi’s joyful gifts. It’s more like the crucifixion: ambiguity and doubt, signs, deception and betrayal, flight and unjust murder. Like Paul’s story of Jesus’ birth in Phi 2:6-8: emptying, form of a slave, obedient to death.

Mt punctuates the narrative with references to prophets in scripture. These are sometimes taken as proofs for unbelievers: ancient predictions fulfilled in Jesus’ birth. But none of them works that way. We’ve seen overview in royal genealogy with women; virgin conception by Holy Spirit; Messiah’s birth in Bethlehem manipulated by Herod, not needed by Magi.

Now Joseph, the dreamer, takes "the child and his mother" into Egypt in flight from danger.

Mt cites Hos 11:1. No prediction. Rather a reference to a basic pattern: Exile (Eden, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Sin), enslavement, threat of death by king; Exodus, God delivers the slaves. But even with the faithlessness and failure of those delivered, God’s love persists.

Again Mt cites Jer 31:15. No prediction. Image of Rachel weeping over lost tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh (dead and gone) and later Benjamin with Judah in exile. But basic pattern: even death and exile for real rebellion can’t stop the hope in God’s creative and restorative love.

Third Mt cites "the prophets" in the wordplay between "Nazareth" and "Nazorean." He shows extensive reflection about many uses of the image of the "Branch" (Nazer, Isa 11:1) for Israel and the Messiah showing how God can restore life and growth to a cut off stump. The Heb verb nazar means to preserve/guard. Through his Servant God preserves/saves others.

The Empire Strikes!

All of this interpretation surrounds the awful story of Herod, who embodies the enslavement and exile of humanity in the world of empire, power, ego-centrism, violence, fear, deceit, manipulation. Herod recognizes the sign the Magi have seen - a true king anointed by God. He tries to get them to do his searching, using data from religious leaders. He wants to protect his own power, assassinate rivals (standard), while himself slave of a larger empire. His search is frustrated. He uses Magi data and strikes with unfettered fury, revealing the iron fist behind the Pax Romana. Rational terror. Horror! Maybe 20 babies! Mothers wailing!

2000 yrs later we can recognize every element. But for our enlightened world, Herod’s a piker. We can see worse almost any day in Yemen or Syria, or the 8,500 kids that silently die of malnutrition every day in our world (UNICEF). We see children victimized all the time.

We know that Herod’s power is the real power, and we’ve settled down in Herod’s world. We just look at other things! God’s king looks weak: a toddler in a family seeking asylum. Herod can’t get him this time. He dies too soon. But rulers, priests, crowds will crucify him.

God’s King Strikes Back!

Mt’s drama must unfold. The exiled king must strike back! He does! He empties himself to bring his enemies home from their exile in violence and fear into hope and new life. He’s vulnerable in this world but not defeated. He is exiled, crucified, but he conquers death with new life. He strikes back with forgiveness, reconciliation, life, loves his enemies and dies to give them life.

Which kingdom is real? Which will last? Which do I live by? Which do I trust? Which is Christmas?

How Do You Know What is Happening?

Matthew wants us to see beyond the surface: Jesus Messiah, Son of David, Son of Abraham. He led us through royal/mixed genealogy. He showed us Mary’s unusual pregnancy, Joseph’s challenge of faith, new meaning of "God with us." He says hardly a word about Jesus’ birth itself, but brings in other eyes, outside witnesses of events around the birth.

The gifts of the Magi are vulnerable to misuse, adapting the story to our worship of Mammon. But for Matthew this is the clash of two visions of kingship, power, what really matters. The Magi are the world/nations at large, given an opportunity to see what God’s people, who should have been eagerly looking, cannot see because of corrupt, blinding power.

Magi are exotic, then and now, eastern scholars, astronomers, wise men, reading the skies. We meet them arriving in Jerusalem, sometime after Jesus’ birth. With naïve frankness they ask not whether a new king is born but where he is. A star revealed his birth.

Herod is not exotic. Everything about him is the known world of power, violence, fear, control. He accepts but with fear. An anointed king threatens. He musters religion to respond.

Religious leaders provide an answer and a text, Micah adapted. God has long made promises. But knowledge didn’t bring anticipation or understanding. The Roman king has power. He has a plan for violence wrapped in courtesy, false humility, coopting the Magi’s mission.

The Magi listen but don’t trust Herod - overjoyed that the Star gives the guidance they need. They find a village house, a child, and mother and give gifts of obeisance to true royalty. As with the Star, they trust a dream rather than the king Herod. They go home another way.

What did the Magi See? What does it Mean?

As with the genealogy and "Emmanuel," Mt trusts that we will think about the Magi’s story and see through their experience. We bring our life, perception, but must see for ourselves.

T. S. Eliot, the American/English poet, wrote a dramatic monologue poem, "The Journey of the Magi" shortly after his conversion and baptism in 1927. Many years after the journey, one of the Magi, now back in his old kingdom, remembers. The hard journey with doubt and leading. The uneasy return to our familiar kingdoms, clutching gods, but never the same.

"We" experienced the beginning of something greater. Birth ... Death? Not Herod’s murders but "our death." Agony of death to old reality, clutching our gods. But more!

When did Christ / God die for us? The cross. Yes! Also Yes, in the emptying of the incarnation, of birth. The eternal Logos opened his eyes in a baby - fleshy, finite, transitory existence - humiliation for our sake. That humility is God’s glory shining like a star in our dark world.

But if this happened, God’s life broke into our world in Bethlehem and broke the grip of death through Jesus’ death and resurrection, then there can be real new birth, new creation.

The Death that grips us can die. That Love from God can move us into a new world of reconciliation. Can we see? Trust God and receive his gift? Creative, reconciling, loving Life!

The Messiah’s Coming and a Crisis of Faith

This is the first of four Sundays of Advent: Our faith in a God who intervenes, comes into human life and experience in a totally remarkable way: incarnation to resurrection. He unites the life of God with the life of God’s creatures, us humans. He changes Human possibility by what he does and how he remains with us. Jesus is that event of intervention, Advent.

Messiah means "Anointed King"- the promise to David. Mt’s tells Jesus’ birth stressing the confrontation between the coming of God’s Messiah and Herod the "King of the Jews" established on his throne not as "son of David" but by normal power, Rome, conquest, control. We’ve reflected on his royal genealogy, but strange. God’s work, like Genesis.

Mt starts by stating the hard-to-believe as fact and problem. Mary and Joseph are betrothed. It’s discovered that she’s pregnant by the Holy Spirit. Pregnant? Yes. Holy Spirit? Really? Joseph is like every human believer. He knows life doesn’t work that way. Can God do it? Do I believe Mary? Joseph is open, trusting, a Son of David. Angelic appearance confirms Mary’s story. But also that this event has profound purpose, God’s promised salvation: Joshua/Jesus.

Filling Up God’s Ancient Challenge to Faith

Mt challenges us to understand by pointing to ancient words from Isa 7:14. For moderns the much-debated prophecy of a virgin birth. Becomes a crux in debate about modern belief. It’s especially challenging when thought of as a prediction of Jesus’ birth now fulfilled.

But in Isaiah it is a prediction in Isaiah’s time for king Ahaz. It’s about assurance of God’s protection for Jerusalem under attack. It gives a timeframe of birth for God’s security.

Mt’s word pleroun should be translated "fill up" not "fulfill." Mt is not working from Isaiah to Jesus but the reverse. Isaiah shows a parallel situation of God intervening in a challenging way that calls for faith. It also concerns the "House of David" and a Maiden who becomes pregnant. But more important it concerns salvation and God’s presence with his people.

Ahaz can’t bring himself to trust God’s strange assurance: Some maiden is going to have a baby and by the time he’s a few year old God’s going to deal with military threats. Really?

Joseph does believe and joins in Advent. This the coming of the Anointed king of the House of David. But in a way that no one would have predicted. But the faith needed to join this story is the same kind of faith that God has challenged his people to have all through history.

A Messiah who Saves

God’s people knew that since the exile they had had kings (Maccabees) that were not Davidic. Now the powerful king was not even a real Israelite, but Rome’s appointee. They were still under the power of pagan empires and longed for deliverance/salvation. Joseph is to call the baby Joshua/Gk, Iesous/Latin, Jesus, meaning Yahweh saves. The Heb word for salvation, Yeshua, is almost exactly the same as Jesus’ name in the Aramaic of Israel.

What is this salvation? Mt wants us to begin to reflect deeply on that question. How do we recognize salvation. Military deliverance? Forgiveness of sin? Deliverance from death?

A God Who is With Us

The baby of Isaiah’s time is name "God-with-us." God would protect his people. Now that description is being filled up on a level that no one could really have imagined. God chooses to use his Image in the Human being, his promise of an Anointed king to intervene in human life to deal with the deepest levels of sin, brokenness, enslavement of human beings.

The Gospel unfolds the astonishing story of God from incarnation to resurrection creating a new way for his own life and Spirit to unite his creatures to himself: "I myself am with you always!"

Behold Your Anointed King - Think of the Pattern

We like to think in patterns. Generations: Lost (1880-1900), GI (1901-24), Silent/Beat (1925-44), Boomers (1945-64), Gen X (1965-84), Millennials (1985-2004), Post Millennials (2005-). Now many are absorbed with personal genealogy, genetic background, forensic genealogy.

Matthew is beginning Jesus’ story. Genealogy says something. This is a king’s list of ancestors. Few ordinary people could show such a list. Few today could without computers, databases. It is by fathers only, thus a single line, not a family tree. Thus through Joseph, not Mary.

Mt is not strict with history, since he omits generations listed in scripture. He wants us to think about meaning, using language of Sabbaths and Sabbath years (7), Pentecost and Jubilees (7x7), Exile (70). He structures the genealogy into 3 groups of 14 - 6 x 7... awaiting a seventh.
He doesn’t tell us what it means, but urges us to think about the open-ended pattern.

Expectant History - Promises kept to Broken People

Within the formal pattern, there is a view of 2000 yrs of history shaped by God’s promises. The more we learn of that history, the more the genealogy stirs interest. Some are substantial stories (underlined), some are just names. But they unfold the human side of God’s story.

Mt alludes to the creation story (Gen 2:4; 5:1 LXX), as John does. But he highlights the promises God made to Abraham’s "seed" / "offspring" and to David’s "son," / "anointed king."

From universal creation, the story narrows to Abraham (one) and moves to Messiah (one). Abraham grows to a Great nation. Messiah expands to all the World, universal authority.

The first group covers a thousand years. Patriarchs - stories of promise and brokenness - till Egypt and Exodus. Mostly names (with the interludes of Rahab and Ruth) till David.

From David, the royal king-list of Judah (with omissions). God’s promise to David. David’s failure in ref. to Uriah. Solomon, temple. Rehoboam, division, little Judah. Kings famous for idolatry and reform, pushed around by empires (Assyria, Babylon), prophets intervening, profound corruption. Imperial violence, God’s judgment - deportation into exile of leaders of Judah.

The Unexpected Women

Mt mentions four women: Tamar, daughter-in-law of Judah, Rahab, a Canaanite women who was a prostitute in Jericho; Ruth, a Moabite woman, and "the wife of Uriah," Bathsheba, married to a Hittite soldier. She committed adultery with David, became mother of Solomon. With Rahab, Mt breaks chronology to purposefully bring these women into the genealogy.

All are notable, distinctive women who strongly inserted themselves into history and shaped the course of Israel’s story. Their stories are told to show God’s desire to challenge the ideas of Israel as a closed, pure people, that he is concerned for all of his many peoples.

They remind us of the decisive faithfulness of a Jericho prostitute who saved Israel’s spies, and a despised Moabite, who embodied faithful love, service, and conversion to the God of Israel.

They show how God overcomes the sinful brokenness of his people, with Tamar’s deception and intercourse with her father-in-law, the patriarch Judah, of the leading tribe. They remind us of the faithful Hittite, Uriah, whom David had killed in order to cover his adultery with his wife Bathsheba. Still, through Solomon, her son, was the line of kings and the promise of the anointed king, Messiah. Jesus’ reality required the inclusion of the women.

An Event that Defines all that Went Before

Mt is unfolding the event of Jesus, the anointed king, unlike those broken kings. The human who is the presence of God, the event of crucifixion/resurrection that changes everything.

The open-ended story comes to this Event that shapes the meaning of the whole story before it.

The 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month.

We arrive this morning at the hour when 100 years ago the guns fell silent at the end of the most destructive war the world had ever known: "the Great War" 1914-18.

Nearly 10 million dead or missing, 21.2 million wounded that 4 years earlier had been the pride and hope of their various nations. Armistice Day / Veterans Day.

We also are in a time of "peace" when there is a "mass shooting" on average about every day. Fires. Hurricanes. Floods. Global warming. We feel the trauma, the fragility of life, frustration at injustice, persistence of evil, the desire to know what really matters.

Jesus on the Mount of Olives looking at Herod’s Temple.

The disciples impressed with magnificence. Jesus knows the impermanence. Beware of deception. It is hard to keep clarity in the welter of "great" events. Wars and rumors of wars. Rise and fall of peoples, kingdoms. Famines, earthquakes. Evil, struggle. Things that seem cataclysmic and final aren’t. "Definitely going to happen..."

There is an end, a goal toward which God is moving, but it’s in the hands of God, not humans.

The Great War to end all Wars.

End of an era. Destruction of empires: German/Prussian (Hohenzollerns, Wilhelm II, 300 yrs.), Russian (300), Austro-Hungarian (Hapsburgs 500), Ottoman (600). British (300) weaker. Self-determination and the rise of the nation-state as new focus of devotion and autonomy. Collapse of 19th cent. optimism about human progress. Trauma of war.

Troops enlisted on all sides in patriotic fervor. High hopes of quick fight, military glory. Instead, miserable trench warfare. Verdun (1916, 163,000 killed), Somme (1 mil. cas.), Passchendaele. Vast casualties for little gain. Human folly. Hell of war. Machine guns, mustard gas, tanks — mechanized carnage. 60% casualties. Americans entered in late 1917. A last German gamble, Spring 1918, fell short. No replacements. Total exhaustion.

Nov. 11 at 5 am, armistice signed. At 11 am the guns stopped. Soldiers died till 10:59. Exhilaration but not wisdom. A vindictive rather than a healing peace, began the slide toward another war. Power of totalitarianism. Control of information. The big lie.

Something else also hit. Spanish flu pandemic. During 1918-19, more than 50 million died world-wide. 33,000 died in New York City! Far more than war. Human and natural death!
It seemed the end of everything. The edge of the abyss. But today we hardly remember it.

"Everything has Changed" "Nothing Changes"

Some things have changed. Our false sense of invulnerability. But the human condition continues. We still see the human events as the great events. We see God’s story as personal belief. Tolerated and maybe useful, but not fundamentally important. We know the self-sacrifice of crisis but are ever ready to revert to selfish individualism.

God’s story and Kingdom are the great event: Good News that the world’s Creator acts to woo us to his love. His long process of claiming his creation. Now by grace calling people to faith. One day by creative power. The challenge is to see now the reality of what God is doing. We experience day by day struggle, trauma, and joy, now as a part of God’s greater drama.

True Grace, Costly Grace

This text concludes Isaiah of the Exile, 40-55, in a playful, powerful way. A water-seller’s cry! But no sale, no cost. Wine, milk, bread provided free! The people have so missed real life that they labor to eat the dust and tree bark of their self-made powers. If they could listen to another story, God’s story, everything would be gourmet! Their broken life could become really alive.

Behind this lies a complex story of brokenness and exile. God’s promise of renewal seen through God’s self-giving love embodied in the Suffering Servant. God is king renewing through a servant.

If people are going to really hear this, they must listen carefully, to grasp a new kind of Grace! We’re sure there must be a catch: God is wanting to snatch life away, fill us with guilt. True, we are guilty, but God’s aim is to share the living water, rich food of his own life with his creatures.

Israel’s Covenant and Story Extended to All People

Isaiah stresses that the God Israel knows is the only God. All other gods are human constructions. But the only God must be the God of all the world, all nations and peoples, even Persians, etc.

God’s promises extend out from Israel/David to all. A strange dance of new knowledge will come. Israel will impact peoples they don’t know and those strangers will run to a God of such grace.

A Greatness so Vast, We Struggle to See It

In a final exhortation Isaiah calls Israel to return to God. God longs to give compassion and pardon. We continue to wallow in our evils and trouble, corrupting our lives, limiting our vision. We can recognize a greatness like our little broken selves, control of each other, our fear and violence. Our religions prefer gods of human achievement, guilt, shame, punishment, human-size kings.

But God’s greatness is so incomprensible we can hardly recognize it as great - "not our ways!"
A God who takes the suffering and sin we and all other humans cause, who bears it and gives life in exchange! We feed ourselves on dust and death while he brings free water and a banquet. Can it be real? Surely not. We’ve got to be our own masters. Such gracious love, can I believe? Jesus shows that God as King - Messiah - Son of Man and as Suffering Servant belong together!

A Work God Alone Does, so We won’t Be Alone

Through Isaiah, God emphasizes that his unfolding work of grace doesn’t depend on our approval or understanding. His Word goes out into his world, like water on earth. It will ultimately accomplish God’s Delight! Humans don’t have a vote in whether God is God. Our choice is for ourselves, whether we share in that Delight of Grace, in our life coming alive, in the banquet.

The Event is played out in small stories, Jews returning to Jerusalem, Jesus living the Suffering Servant, offering Water of life. Jews and people across the world, experiencing God’s amazing Grace. The whole universe joins in. Trees clap their hands! God delights in all his people, an eternal sign!

A Vision Planted in the Heart of God’s Story

This text in Isaiah is one of the most important in history. But it is filled with mysteries. The Ethiopian in Acts 8 shows the challenge. Great scholars like W. Brueggemann point to its difficulty. As Christians with help of Acts we hear it as a direct prediction/description of Jesus.

A text nearly 600 yrs old when Jesus lives. People puzzled. Who are the people in the poem?

God, "Arm of Yahweh," the "many," "nations," "kings." "The Servant" - is that Israel as in

Is 49:3? Or a person turning Israel back to God as in 49:5? Then "we!" Who are "we"? Israel? Those who have seen the Servant but misperceived him and now have realized a greater reality about him? Us today, now reading this text? We recognize ourselves in the "sheep gone astray"!

The Servant is in the midst of this swirl. As we see him, he is with the sinful many, bearing their sorrows and sins. He embodies God’s will and delight; he is the "Arm of Yahweh." He is the one whom people see but do not see, hear but do not hear. Till he astonishes us by transforming us! He is God’s people but also the appalling/exalted sign for all nations. Israel and humanity. The vision uses both future verbs and past tense verbs. Is it describing past or predicting future?

Jesus and the Servant of the Lord

I imagine when Jesus as a boy read this text for the first or 100th time. In the Servant, Yahweh, the "Arm," the suffering, the transforming love, the mystery, Jesus saw the Father he knew, whom he embodied, the one eternal God. This was being known by God. The vision of who God is.

The Servant is God visiting his People, rejected, loving, redeeming. The Servant is an event - God intervening for us. What happens is profoundly unjust, transformed into grace and delight. What happens is God! Deeply mysterious, captured by the "we" who realize how wrong we are.

The Servant takes on himself every kind of human brokenness. He is disfigured, lacks beauty, despised, rejected, treated with contempt. He takes on sickness, pain, sorrow. He is pierced and crushed, oppressed, afflicted, punished, wounded, slaughtered, cut off from life, buried.

But the suffering itself is not the whole point. As God’s Servant he takes these sufferings not as just punishment, but although he has done no wrong. He takes them as our transgressions, our bent character; he bears our sins; his whole life becomes an offering that brings us peace/Shalom.

We see ourselves and our sin more clearly through Him. We minimize our sin. But the suffering of the Servant shows us the seriousness of our brokenness. God’s people are like all people, sinners.

The deep character of our sin is in our self-will - we turn to our own way. Self-will is one of the most highly valued characteristics of our modern society. We want to be the master of our own lives, our own gods. Jesus becomes that Servant/Yahweh. He gives up his life in order that we can regain ours, know Peace, Salvation. "Our God Reigns" - reigns in our lives to give his life!

The Kingdom of God and a Captive People

When Isaiah of the Exile writes in about 545 b.c. nothing has yet really happened to change Israel’s situation. Yes, Cyrus the Persian is advancing, but Babylon’s empire still reigns. Even when Isaiah’s prophecies are fulfilled and Persia allows some of the exiles to return to Jerusalem, it’s not as an independent kingdom but only as a small sub-province within the Persian empire.

God pushed Israel to deal with the paradox of human power. As a kingdom, Israel had failed. Even David was not great on policies, but on knowing God as God. Corruption, injustice, idolatry became so ingrained that God abandoned Jerusalem. Now God awakens Jerusalem to beauty and captivity. Isaiah announces a new Exodus: Knowing God. God reigns as king. God intervenes.

God is king over all nations! Yes, but Israel wanted that to mean Israel is a powerful, independent empire of its own. How can God be king if He and his people don’t rule over surrounding powers.

Isaiah’s words created a continuing longing and expectation: What is God’s Kingdom? When? How? By the time of Jesus, Isaiah’s words and vision had been percolating in Israel for nearly 600 yrs. through Persians, Greeks, Ptolemies, Seleucids, Hasmoneans, Romans, Herod, Antipas/Pilate.

Jesus Announces the Kingdom of God

When Jesus announces the "Kingdom of God," he touches that electric nerve. People were ready for an anointed King backed by God to do what they imagined Isaiah and other prophets meant. Jesus showed great power, but he didn’t use it properly - against Rome (not directly). Modern scholars from Reimarus to Reza Aslan have portrayed Jesus as a failed Zealot. Failed kingdom. It’s hard to imagine real power that’s not our kind of power. Has God’s kingdom come? Look around.

But it is Isaiah’s visions of God returning to Zion and the Servant of the Lord that provide the vision of meaning, the language that Jesus speaks when he announces and unfolds God’s Kingdom. It is power beyond imagining, over all nations, all creation. It is God himself intervening by his mighty arm. But it’s seen in leading a few captive exiles home, in God’s servant turning God’s people back to God. It’s in a despised, unrecognized figure anointed by God’s Spirit not oil of coronation. It’s an announcement of Good News, rejected as weak and foolish, but God’s power and wisdom.

Jesus comes, announcing God’s kingdom, not to win over followers but to urge people to listen, to look, to see the arrival. Only when it’s accomplished in Jesus’ death and resurrection can they begin to comprehend. Jesus and Eleven: "All authority in heaven and on earth..."

An Exodus for All the Ends of the Earth

When early believers told the story, they too went back to Isaiah and other prophets to grasp reality. Both the purity and glory of God’s people and the inclusion of all nations had to come together. One God of all nations. A new temple. New circumcision. New "cleanness." The ancient promise to Abraham is fulfilled. "The ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God."

God’s kingdom is on a scale of power beyond, Israel, Persia, Rome, China. God comes for the life of all of his creatures. He conquers death, unmasks our power by violence, injustice, domination.

Depart! Leave it behind - a new Exodus. God leads all broken people in a new song of deliverance.