Sermon by Frederick G. Lawrence
Department of Theology, Boston College
The First Sunday of Advent
November 27, 2011
Audio - Download mp3 (length: 14:07) |
Homily for the First Sunday of Advent - by Frederick Lawrence, Professor, Department of Theology, Boston College, First Sunday of Advent, November 27, 2011 |
All Saints Parish
Brookline, Massachusetts
Isaiah 64: 1-9, Ps 80: 1-7, 16-18, 1 Cor 1: 3-9, Mk 13: 24-37
When I was younger, I often wondered why the readings for the transition from Ordinary Time after Pentecost to the beginning of the Advent season always featured readings from apocalyptic biblical texts. I did know that the Greek word apocalypsis means revelation in English.
Today's Old Testament reading appears in the final section of the Book of Isaiah, whose first 39 chapters are by the 8th century prophet, Isaiah of Jerusalem, who preached to the Jews of the Kingdom of Judah, who were devastated by the powerful Assyrian Kingdom in 721 BCE. Chapters 40-55, attributed to Second Isaiah, were written towards the close of the Babylonian exile that began with the destruction of Jerusalem and of the first Temple in 568. After emphasizing the providential advent of the Persian king Cyrus, who allowed the Israelites to return from exile to their home in Jerusalem, this prophet set down the beautiful hymns of the suffering Servant of YHWH that would play such a central role in the Christian interpretation of the Messiah. Then, according to the late biblical scholar, Raymond Brown, the final section of Isaiah (55-66)[1] seems to envisage the Israelites just after they'd returned to their own land, and were observing the customary ceremonies and feasts, even though the Temple appears not yet to have been rebuilt. In the first part, God is grieved about the Israelites because of the selfishness and greed of the religious leaders, the gradual creep of idolatry, and people much more concerned for making money than with helping others. With its strikingly apocalyptic scenario of God's judgment both on a remnant that "joyfully works righteousness" and "remembers [God's] ways" and on a sinful people, today's reading is located amidst speeches about how people might be, so that God would be glorified, and about YHWH's loving-kindness and grace. It ends with an anticipation of a time when the people of all nations shall come to a purified Jerusalem to worship the Lord.
In order to convey my understanding of our readings, let's go back to the days of the 1960s and my theological studies as a seminarian at the Gregorian University and as a layman at the University of Basel. The dominant school of NT interpretation at the time was that of Rudolph Bultmann (1884-1976), who taught at the University of Marburg in Germany. The "first quest" for the historical Jesus began under the auspices of the Historical School, and featured scholars such as David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1974), Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), Wilhelm Wrede (1859-1906), and Adolf Harnack (1851-1930) and culminated with The Quest of the Historical Jesus, whose author, Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), heavily influenced by the History of Religions School, based his interpretation of Jesus on a "thoroughgoing eschatology." Bultmann's historical skepticism and radical program of demythologizing the NT was followed by a "new quest" for the historical Jesus, which was largely implemented by his own students.
Then Tom Wright's 1988 updating of Stephen Neill's The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861-1961[2] marked a turning point for me. Wright trenchantly observed that both the old and the new quests for the historical Jesus had taken for granted Martin Luther's anachronistic and pejorative parallel between Roman Catholic "works justification" and Jewish legalism, and at the same time they remained stunningly oblivious to the fact that Jesus was a Jew of first century Palestine. In the third quest for the historical Jesus, N.T. Wright, along with scholars such as Ed Sanders, Ben Meyer, James D.G. Dunn, John Dominic Crossan, and Richard Horsley, each in their own way, used the lens of late Jewish apocalyptic to understand the eschatological event of Jesus's proclamation of the presence of the Kingdom or Reign of God in his own words, deeds, passion, death, and resurrection.
I discovered that the password for the successive waves of the historical critical study of the life of Jesus was eschatology. What a sea-change for one who had been taught as a seminarian that 'eschatology' meant only the study of "the last things" – meaning death, individual and final judgment, heaven and the beatific vision, and hell (with its Catholic suburbs, limbo and purgatory)! In the context of more recent New Testament interpretation, eschatology denoted primarily the Christ-event, the intelligibility of which is grasped in the light of Old Testament apocalyptic prophecy. The post-exilic literature made use of the fantastic imagery inscribed in the passage read from Isaiah and echoed in "the little apocalypse" of Mark 13: the terrors and woes linked inexorably with the coming of the Messiah, the convulsions of nature, the frightful battles between the forces of good and evil, and so on. This teaching and doctrine about ultimates is focused on Jesus who as the revelation of God is the whole essence of "the last things."
More than anything else, then, our OT and Gospel readings employ disturbing and interruptive language to indicate that the Advent of Jesus of Nazareth is an eschatological event. This means that it is the absolutely decisive or definitive or culminating event in the history of salvation and hence of world history, whether one speaks of BC and AD or of BCE and CE. For the prophets of the exile and after – especially Second Isaiah, Daniel, and Ezechiel – Jewish Messianism took on the peculiar tone, which formed what J.R.R. Tolkein, in response to a question put to him about the origins of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, called "the leaf-mold of the mind" – in this case, the mind of Second Temple Judaism in Jesus's day. The expectation built into post-exilic apocalyptic prophecy was threefold: first, the true return of YHWH in triumph to Jerusalem; second, the ultimate victory of good over evil; and, third, the restoration and renewal of the Temple in Jerusalem. In the wake of oppressive occupation under Macedonian Rule followed by domination by the Roman Empire, such expectations had a political tenor. This was altogether clear in The Jewish Wars and The Antiquities of the Jews by the Pharisee, Flavius Josephus (ca. 33 - ca. 100); and in the Jewish zealot and revolutionary, Simon bar Kosiba (nicknamed Bar Kochba or 'son of a star'), who led a Jewish rebellion in Palestine later on in 132.
The Gospels present Jesus as the eschatological prophet who not only communicated God's authentic interpretation of these messianic expectations, but also lived out this interpretation in his life, passion, death, and resurrection. It is highly probable that the Jews of first century Palestine did not take the statements about the sun being darkened, the moon no longer giving its light, the stars falling from the heavens, and the powers being shaken any more literally than we do. But, unlike us, Mark believed that they would have connected this imagery with God's judgment of Israel and the hope for renewal. And that's what we have to do, too.
Nevertheless, as James Carroll noted when receiving the All Saints Spirituality and Justice Award last year, we have not been accustomed to seeing in Jesus a first-century Jewish prophet, announcing and inaugurating the Kingdom of God. We are not used to understanding that in implicitly claiming to be Israel's Messiah, Jesus preaches the Joyful News of a God who is all-good and all-merciful; a God who offers to forgive sinful Israel and all others without any pre-conditions. And Jesus calls others to follow him in being "perfect as His Father is perfect" by living lives of self-sacrificial love and forgiveness, relinquishing all the petty judging motivated by envy and jealousy, and rejecting every form of violence. We are not used to realizing that Jesus was not telling the lost sheep of Israel to abandon Judaism, but he was portraying the true image of their God who is Love; he was telling them what was required in order to become the true, returned-from-exile people of the one true God. We have a hard time comprehending Jesus's cryptic Temple action and his speech about 'destroying this Temple' and 'raising it up again in three days.' It's not easy for us to know what to make of his coded statements that joined the symbol of the Son of Man, who Daniel's prophecy depicts as "coming on the clouds of heaven," with Second Isaiah's picture of the suffering Servant of YHWH who undergoes a vicarious death for the redemption of all the nations. Whether we "get it" or not, the growing consensus of scholars is that the apocalyptic language of today's OT and Gospel readings wants to say that Jesus was the means of the renewal of Israel and the means of Israel's God returning to Israel. It wants to suggest to us that by facing on the cross the dire consequences of our ultimate refusal of the call that is inseparable from Jesus's disclosure of God's love for his enemies, and that by God's turning the evil of death into the good of the resurrection, Jesus reveals God's solution to the problem of evil.
No wonder, then, that Paul could utter to the notoriously corrupt community at Corinth – and, yes, to us – the words of today's epistle (1 Cor 4-9):
I give thanks to God always for you because of the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in him with all speech and all knowledge ... so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Messiah; who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Messiah. God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
[1] According to the late biblical scholar Raymond Brown, The Bible Guide (Philadelphia, PA: Running Press), 120.
[2] Stephen Neill and Tom Wright, Interpretation of the New Testament 1861-1986 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).