“Servants of God, arise!”
Christmas Eve Meditation
UCCP Maasin City
by Frank J. Hernando
Scripture texts: Isaiah 53: 1-12: Luke 2: 1-20
Isaiah 53: 1-12
Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? 2For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. 3He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account.
4Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. 5But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. 6All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 7He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. 8By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. 9They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.
10Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the Lord shall prosper. 11Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. 12Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.
Luke 2:1-20
2
In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. 2This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3All went to their own towns to be registered. 4Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. 5He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. 6While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. 7And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
8In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: 11to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. 12This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” 13And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, 14“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” 15When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” 16So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. 17When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; 18and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. 19But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. 20The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
Warmest Christmas greetings to all! I am glad to be with you tonight as we commemorate the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Christmas Eve in the Presbyterian Churches in Korea where I worked with is a grand celebration because the Church School Department, or Kyoyukwon presents the colorful Christmas program after the worship service. Children, youth and young adult parents with their toddlers present their number and all groups would use colorful costumes and joyful music. Attending Christmas Eve service and the Christmas Program was daunting in the sub-zero temperature especially if you are commuting through bus and subway train. The traffic jam was terrible, as all roads lead to churches and residential areas where people would rush home after work and prepare something for Christmas Eve.
O N E
As a twin sermon series on Isaiah’s prophetic utterances on God’s Servant, I would like to meditate on the images that describe the situation of the servant based on its historical context and its implications to our life as a Church and as God’s Covenant people.
Isaiah confronts us with the imagery of the servant who is like a young plant springing up in a hostile environment. Such a plant would be blighted and would not grow to its full beauty or proper form. This emphasizes the utter helplessness of the servant. The servant is despised and rejected.
A common theme in laments is rejection of the sufferer by the community (Psalm 22:6-8). In biblical times, people often considered prosperity and success as blessing from God. Misfortune or illness suggested that the person had sinned and God was punishing them (Job 4:7-9).
This points to a major issue at stake in the crisis of exile. Throughout the Old Testament there is the conviction that God had chosen the Israelites for a special purpose, as expressed in the promise to Abraham: "all peoples on earth will be blessed through you" (Genesis 12:3). The blessing and success of Israel were not just reward for right conduct. They were a witness to the world of the nature and character of Israel’s God (Numbers 14:11-19).
Patrick Horn, a writer made a summary of the story “Twelve years a slave.” This story is biographical and a movie was produced in 2013 and I was able to see the film sometime in 2015 on Netflex. This is the summary:
Solomon Northup was born a free man in Minerva, New York, in 1808. His father, Mintus, was originally enslaved to the Northup family from Rhode Island, but he was freed after the family moved to New York. As a young man, Northup helped his father with farming chores and worked as a raftsman on the waterways of upstate New York. He married Anne Hampton and they had three children together.
During the 1830s, Northup became locally renowned as an excellent fiddle-player. In 1841, two men offered Northup generous wages to join a traveling musical show, but soon after he accepted, they drugged him and sold him into slavery. After years of bondage, he came into contact with an outspoken abolitionist from Canada, who sent letters to notify Northup's family of his whereabouts. An official state agent was sent to Louisiana to reclaim Northup.
After he was freed, Northup filed kidnapping charges against the men who had defrauded him, but the lengthy trial that followed was ultimately dropped because of legal technicalities, and he received no remuneration. Little is known about Northup's life after the trial, but he is believed to have died in 1863.
In the film, details of his slavery showed how he was whipped when he violated his master’s rules in the farm or in the household chores. He struggled so much and writing letters to his family was clandestine, or hidden from his masters. But he did not surrender to his fate, or to the calamitous situation he was forced into. Finally, was freed about some intervention from an abolitionist of slavery in Canada. His story fits well the description of prophet Isaiah of the Israelite servant.
Our history of colonization by Spain and the U.S. was characteristically brutish and the colonizers subjected our fore-parents to violent punishment or were killed for disobeying the rules of the colonizers. The initial preaching of the Christian Gospel in the Reformed or Protestant perspective in Iloilo and the entire Island of Panay by the American missionaries was met with resistance by the Roman Catholic priests and the loyal adherents of the Catholic faith and in obedience to the rules of the friars. In 1901, the converts to the Protestant Christian faith were excommunicated by the local priests. From that experience the Protestant churches that grew up in a barren religious soil felt they were the oppressed servants of God.
T W O
The elaborate description of the suffering Servant of God by prophet Isaiah has come to a point where the God’s servants were physically abused that allowed their physical bodies to gave-in to the extent of violence inflicted on them. Most interestingly their persecutors or tormentors them sacrifices to appease themselves of the sin—the violations of God’s covenant to themselves and appear justified before God. But the suffering servant/s of God, took all the burden of sin. It is a kind of transference of the guilt of sin to the innocent victim.
Part of the disturbing aspect of the exile was that the nations would look at the downfall of Israel and conclude that Israel’s God was not really God at all. The Israelites had not honored God themselves and so had caused the nations to scorn God and His people. If Israel remained a laughingstock, despised and loathed by the nations, then God’s people, and therefore God, would have no witness in the world, says Dennis Bratcher in his commentary on the text. The major theme of this section of Isaiah is that the community would be restored to again fulfill its mission to the world as a "light to the nations" (42:6, 49:6; 60:1-7; note Ezekiel 20:9-22).
The servant has borne our infirmities . . .our sorrows. The realization here is that the servant’s pain is not just his own. He is bearing the pain and grief of others. Jeremiah had touched on the idea that the exiles in Babylon were bearing the consequences of the past sins of the entire nation. Individually the exiles were as sinful as other people.
But as a group they were innocent (v.9). They should not have to withstand the pain of exile for the entire nation, past and present. Here the community begins to realize that if they have a future, it is because innocent people suffered the consequences of someone else’s sin.
The long history of our churches in the UCCP shows that in many ways we have suffered because of being a minority I society. But then looking inside and out of our churches we realize that we have suffering servant’s pigmentation in our minds and hearts. Our churches came into being as alternative faith communities to the dominant Roman Catholic church. However, the North American missionaries asserted the credibility and effectivity of their mission work through the establishment of schools in villages and towns, even the remotest villages of the Cordillera region, there are mission schools that are struggling to stay afloat just to serve the educational needs of the communities. The early development of our churches including Maasin Church was focused on evangelization, education, women and youth ministry.
There was a clear expression of diakonia or social work among the economically depressed communities, but then middle class members who have political clout and economic power created a donor-receiver relationship in the church, rather than mutual sharing of resources. So the master-slave relationships that has been embedded in the Filipino culture persisted and conditioned our church leaders to act as if they are the landlords of the church, rather than a humble servant. The innocent ones suffer because of the sin, or breaking of the law of just sharing and love for God and neighbor.
Is the UCCP still a church that emulates the servant spirit in its mission and ministry? Do our programs embody the values of the Kingdom of God? Are the ethical norms of our relationship in the church express our commitment and loyalty to God in Christ? Are we working together to achieve the common goals that the church has set as a community of faith? It looks like the personal and family vested interests predominates the relationship in the church. I believe that God would want to see us help strengthen the unity of the church, for we all belong to the oikumene/ household and just economy of God.
When the National Executive Council was able to raise some funds to help support church workers who were adversely affected by the lock down, the church workers who receive it were appreciative of the help they received. Also, the church ought to be sign of hope and restoration to those homes and livelihood were damaged by strong typhoons. The fishing community in Bosoboso, Laurel town, Batangas was impacted by the eruption of Taal volcano about a year ago receive 10 units of basic shelter from the Church through fund assistanc from a Korean partner. The Church as God’s servant people must respond appropriately to the issues and concerns, carrying with her the servant spirituality.
T H R E E
The New Testament writers understood the connection of the prophesies of Isaiah with regards to the Servant of God who will give them a new beginning, a new way of leadership of God’s people. The experience of social alienation and economically depressed are building blocks for visioning for a brighter future. Many people around the world have always dreamed of abundant and peaceful future. For Isaiah alongside the Israelites both in captivity in Babylon and the restoration, saw that a new community of God’s people had arisen through the forgiveness of God because of the suffering of exiles in Babylon.
As they witnessed the death and resurrection of Jesus, they grasped the truth that in Jesus God was again allowing The Innocent to bear the consequences of the guilty. Only this time it was on a far greater scale. And this time it was God in Christ reconciling the whole world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:18-19)!
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So this is Christmas Eve and we celebrate Jesus Christ birth in Bethlehem. Our Gospel writer articulated the fulfillment of God’s promise of a Savior.
John Petty, tells about the text from Luke, he said:
Luke was not writing history. He was writing theology in narrative form, which is much more important and much more interesting. He starts off by noting the big wheels of the world and how they like to jerk people around. Roman power makes Joseph dance to its tune, sending him across the country to get "counted" so that Rome could get more efficient at taking his money for taxes.
Whenever Caesar, or local governors like Quirinius, ran censuses, there would be uprisings and revolts. The tax burden was already excessive, and people lived in a grinding poverty, under the bootheel of Rome, that was getting worse, and not better. Some historians trace the emergence of the zealots--we could call them “pro-palestinian rebels”--to the uprisings against the census of Quirinius. The zealots, in turn, were part of a chain of events that led to the Roman-Jewish War of AD 66-70.
Luke is writing about the true "savior of the world," one from the line of the great King David. He looks to Bethlehem, the city of David, and not to Rome, the city of Caesar.
Jesus is identified as Mary's "first born son." The word is prototokos. So time came when Mary has to deliver her baby and there was no room for Joseph and Mary in the kataluma or the upper room of a house, the guest room--not, in other words, some wayside hotel, barn, or cave. In the case of Joseph and Mary, the guest room was already taken-and they had to stay in the other "room" which, at night, would be home for animals, but during the day would be cleaned up and used by the family.
The birth is announced to shepherds in the field, and not to the powerful in rich palaces. The scandal of the virgin birth is not so much that Mary was a virgin. Lots of famous people were said to have been conceived by various gods, including Caesar Augustus himself. The scandal was that Jesus--a poor kid from a remote town--was born of a virgin.
Angels tell what is happening from the perspective of God. The shepherds are bathed in light (perilampo)--the glory (doxa) of the Lord! The shepherds were absolutely terrified—but were instructed not to fear. The angel announces "good news (euangelion) of great joy for all the people"—a joyful message to you, a great gladness, which will be to all the people."
Luke didn't invent the word euangelion. It was a word that was commonly applied to Caesar. "Euangelion! Good news! Caesar is victorious in Gaul!" In the case of Jesus, the "good news of great joy" is for "all the people-not just the powerful, in other words, as was commonly the case, but rather all the people, even, ironically, the very people who thought "good news" was only for them.
The word savior was a politically-charged term since, after all, Caesar Augustus was known as "the savior of the world." He had brought order to the world after a long war. Luke's announcement of Jesus as "savior" is a way of saying, "Jesus is Lord, and Caesar is not." Moreover, this "savior" comes from the house of David. He is not only "lord," but “messiah."
The angels go into heaven, and the shepherds "said to one another. All the shepherds are involved in the discussion. They were not told what to decide, but decided themselves. Discussion in the New Community is egalitarian, not top down.
They go immediately to Bethlehem and see "this thing that has happened which the Lord has made known (ginosko) to us."
The shepherds share what they have learned. Already, we get signs of the mutuality and reciprocity of the kingdom of God. The shepherds share with each other, and with Joseph and the words of the shepherds stir "all" who hear them. They return praising God.
Jesus Christ is born the true savior of the world--not Caesar Augustus, the oppressor, false savior of the world, protector of those with power and privilege, but Christ the Lord, whose birth is "good news of great joy for all the people.
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References:
1. Dennis Bratcher, http://www.crivoice.org/isa53.html
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