For What Are You Hoping?

A Meditation for a New Year

At our Christmas Eve service we said that Jesus came to bring us hope for our lifetimes:

Hope that God exists, that God reigns in holiness and love, that God is worthy of our trust, love, and obedience

Hope that there is a great purpose for human life, that we are meant to be renewed as children and servants of God, living for the praise of God’s glory, showing forth God’s character through our lives.

Hope that we can be restored from the dilemma caused by our sin, that Jesus has paid the cost of our sin and that, when we trust in him, he will cover us with his righteousness and give us the Holy Spirit to renew us by degrees in that righteousness.

Hope that, in our social life, we can get beyond the distractions of striving for the wrong goals and fighting the wrong battles so that we can build a human-scale community of hope in Jesus Christ

Hope that that we will be among those who at last enter the eternal and perfect new heaven and new earth that God has planned from the beginning of creation.

We also said that this hope comes as we allow ourselves to be immersed in Jesus Christ, his life, his ministry, his death, his resurrection, his exaltation, living our lives in him. In so doing, we will learn more and more, day by day, to see life through his eyes, and everything will be transformed. That retraining of our vision is the topic for the rest of today’s sermon.

When we celebrate Christmas, we need to be aware that one of the important things Jesus did in his coming was to give us a new basis for seeing life through God’s eyes. This retraining of our vision was already at work in the circumstances of his birth: conceived by a virgin, which would have been as hard to explain then as now, in a poor family, tossed about by a foreign occupying empire, at the crucial time of the pregnancy traveling to a distant rural village where the only available lodging for birthing was an animal stable, with a feed trough as a baby’s bed, with disreputable shepherds as the first visitors, with warnings from later visiting pagan astrologers that the holy family must flee from an attempt by the evil puppet king on the baby’s life. We have heard it so often that we forget how disorienting this is to our normal worldly assumptions about what qualities make one influential, powerful, effective, able to bring hope to the whole world. If we were left to write the story based on our own daily assumptions, it is probably not how we would write it.

But Jesus came to challenge our assumptions. He came to be the Messiah, but he would not let anyone talk about his being the Messiah, because he had a most surprising style of being the Messiah. His story had to unfold in its own way and on its own timetable, and it had to develop the amazing possibilities of the supernatural working of God and then pass through what appeared to be a colossal defeat before it could be understood exactly how he intended to deliver us from our bondage. He came to proclaim the kingdom of God, but he proclaimed the good news of the kingdom with shocking outreach to the most disreputable people, in defiance of the most respected religious authorities, by steering clear of the hot political issues of the day, with his good news communicated in parables, both spoken and enacted, parables that no one fully understood at the time.

Why? Because Jesus’ message and mission call for us to step outside the ways we normally think, to begin to see things not with human eyes, but with the eyes of God.

So strange was Jesus’ approach that John the Baptist, who of all who had preceded Jesus was in the best position to understand, began to think that he had somehow picked the wrong guy. John had expected to see Jesus calling down fires of destruction on wicked men like Herod Antipas, but instead Antipas had him in prison on what would prove to be his death row.

According to Matthew 11, John sent disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” Jesus answered John’s disciples, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk; lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.”

The point is that Jesus’ approach was not focused on the big social institutions, or on the major events recorded by historians, but on sowing the seeds of God’s reign in the lives of less than ordinary people who nonetheless knew that they needed God.

In Matthew 12, Jesus’ redemptive ministry drew together an odd alliance of opponents, from the most religious to the least religious, who were ready to conspire together to kill him. Jesus withdrew from attempting to explain himself to these opponents, but focused instead on ministering to the crowds that followed him and on instructing his closest disciples. He ordered them not to make known who he was. Matthew reports, “This was to fulfill what was spoken by Isaiah.” He then quotes in free translation, the words of the first Servant Song from Isaiah 42: 18 “Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles. 19 He will not quarrel or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets; 20 a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench, until he brings justice to victory; 21 and in his name the Gentiles will hope.”

In other words, Jesus came not only as the Royal Son of God, but also as the Suffering Servant of God. He came not in the spirit of this world, but as one anointed by the Spirit of God. He came not to fight worldly battles, or to build worldly institutions, but to form a community of hope. He came not to gain influential followers, not to discard the broken and the weak, but to heal the bruised reed and to trim the smoldering wick. He came to repair the lives of the broken and the discouraged. But in the end, the text Matthew quotes from Isaiah says, it is he and his type of ministry that will bring justice to victory and it is in his name and no other that the peoples of the world will at last find hope.

Isaiah had foreseen it, Jesus had embodied it, Matthew had reported it—this strange new way of seeing life and all its possibilities when we look with eyes trained to the reign of God. When Matthew reported Jesus’ words, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness…” he was referring to a way of seeing life, by looking for the mostly hidden signs of God’s redeeming presence and power.

Where do we see and seek the reign of God? Where have we seen the hand of God at work among us this past year?