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Advent C December 2, 2012
Jeremiah 33: 14-16 Psalm 25: 1-9
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13 Luke
21:25-31
Did you
ever ponder the diversity of areas of interest that a person of modest income
and education can have in our time and place?
We can be substantial cluttered multi-taskers. About four PIP…picture in picture venues on
the screen. Ballgame, googling, reading
a book, updating two blogs, three facebook pages, writing a sermon, and
listening to music, and a news commentator on the TV in the next room, checking
text message on a smart phone, doing research in multiple areas of interest at
one time and writing stuff for children, teenagers, for spiritual direction,
for counseling sessions, lyrics for songs, involved in political discussions,
and following Curiosity on Mars and much, much more. And as a news and information junkie who is
disillusioned with anyone who thinks that they have found a final answer, I
think this is a pretty exciting time to live in. And you might think this is a cluttered
shame.
But ponder the amount of world knowledge
accessible to the ordinary person in biblical times with the amount of world knowledge and variety
of experience available to us today. You
see where it might be difficult for us to be impressed with the details of the
Bible because it has to compete with so many more kinds of text and cyber
textual experiences. We as the
church have forced ourselves to read this book in public even while for the
stuff of our modern life we resort to the entire panoply of “self-help” gurus to
fine-tune our life performance. And what
do the Bible and Jesus have to do with us?
The people in biblical times had a
comparatively minute body of world knowledge compared to what we have today. With so little world information their lives
could be more easily unified and entertained.
And their religious life was also their political life and their
entertainment. They could network by
sitting with their wise people who could spin tales from their reading, travels,
and knowledge acquired beyond the border of the village or neighborhood. They could in hushed tones speculate about
their political affairs, that is, their state of oppression by the Empire, the
one that struck back again and again and took out the Temple and Jerusalem.
There was a political figure in their time
known as the Son of Man. In the prophet
Daniel such a Son of Man was to be one who was to come in the clouds. That expression was vague enough to be able to
bear the projections of many who speculated about the fate of God’s people
since their actual conditions did not always seem to be what could be called
providential favor and blessing. So, writers
in apocalyptic books such as the book of Enoch speculated about such a Son of
Man. This writing did not make it into official
Bibles but it was influential enough to show up in the street conversations
with populist rabbis in Palestine.
Biblical Scholars are not really sure about
this figure in the Gospel called the Son of the Man. They are not sure as whether Jesus at times
is referring to this Son of Man as someone who is not himself or to a future
role that he himself would assume. The
Gospels are first of all, literature; they are written and as writing their teaching
function prevails over their being mirrors of historical events. This is most evident when Jesus often speaks
of the Son of Man or Messiah in the third person and that kind of speech
betrays the fact that the Gospels are in fact teaching literature and liturgy. The Gospels also integrated the actual street
language, the political speech that Jesus and his counter-culture gang used as they traveled.
The Son of Man was important just as the
resurrection was important because the world of God’s people woefully lacked
justice. The Empire and Empires had
stuck again and again and God’s people were often those who bore the brunt of
those strikes by the Empires: Persian, Assyrian, Greek and Roman.
Religious talk in the alley on the hush hush
was also political but it was also partly their entertainment since politics
has a largely theatrical aspect about it in how it comes to the people. Religious talk was also entertainment; Son of
Man and resurrection talk was very entertaining. Such talk was imaginative and engaged the
imaginations. We today have so many
compartments that derive from genres and specializations as compared to the
time of Jesus when world knowledge was so minimal that the religion, politics and
entertainment all came together. And I
am not trivializing or diminishing it by making such a suggestion. They in their time, like we are in ours, need
to deal with the issue of justice. Theodicy? How can God be believed to be just in the
face of innocent suffering in this world?
In their day and in ours when we sense the
severe impoverishment of justice, our stomachs are sickened. We need catharsis. In our day of Hollywood, we have the
visualizations of vigilante saviors who in the duration of a two hour movie
bring the “bad guys” to justice and rescue the good guys and the weak and the
poor. But vigilantism is not justice
because once vigilantism becomes codified into the law of the land, it becomes the law of those who “have” oppressing those who “do not have.”
And so in the time of Jesus, the Son of Man
was an ultimate figure of the future representing the projection from the hearts
crying the eternal need for justice. The
Son of Man was a future judge and the severity of the oppression intensified expectancy for the imminent arrival of
that judge.
Why do you need resurrection and a judge as a
narrative for future life? What if the
oppressors die and leave this world in the lap of luxury? What if the oppressed who believed that the
Lord loves the poor, the widow and the orphans, die and leave this world in the
state of oppression? How can a just God
be proclaimed to anyone now?
Resurrection is an imagination on how retroactive justice can be
exacted. If everyone has to face a
future judge then accounts and scores can be settled and in the end we can hold
out that our faith and hope in a just God has been validated.
So do not disparage the Son of Man language
or the eternal return of the desire for the realization of justice. Let us be thankful if our laws in some
significant way approximate justice and dignity and spread this fairness to as
many as we can in our life time.
We will seek catharsis from our anger at
injustice in “quick fix” wars and vigilantism and perhaps achieve temporary
fixes in ridding the world of the violence and terror.
And some of our anger for justice will be merely the catharsis of an Action film but even that cinematic vigilante justice is a faint artistic liturgy of repugnance in the face of injustice.
The resurrection, the Son of Man, the judge
and Jesus as a future judge are very profound and inspired narrative bearing
our quest for justice and more importantly, expressing our own need to be just.
The season of Advent is about what is
coming. The future is what is
coming. And what is coming? A judge and justice and if we are living in
fear about it we should simply switch our focus and see the Son of Man as the
judge who invites us to be Just now and to practice mercy and kindness. Advent is about being invited to Justice. And justice is a lifelong quest and Jesus
invites us to the Son of Man who is our judge and who offers us the Gospel of
justice. Amen.
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