John Shearman's Lectionary

INTRODUCTION TO THE SCRIPTURE
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
February 7, 2010

ISAIAH 6:1-13. Here we have another classic example of a prophet called to a special ministry. As the smoke of the morning sacrifice wafted through the temple, Isaiah had a vision and heard an angelic voice praising the holiness of God. He then realized his own and his fellow Israelites’ unworthiness before God. One of the angelic beings touched his lips with a live coal, thus cleansing him to speak. Isaiah heard the voice of God calling for a messenger and he responded. But the message God gave him to deliver was one of unmitigated judgment.

PSALM 138. Unlike most of the psalms, this hymn of thanksgiving by an individual is thought to be from a small “Davidic collection.” (Psalms 138-145.) This meant that it was ascribed to King David rather than being composed by him. It expresses gratitude for God’s blessing as well as trust in God’s love and purpose.

1 CORINTHIANS 15:1-11. In this passage beginning his great confession of the resurrection, Paul states as simply as possible what he had learned from the apostles. He had met some of them – notably Peter (Cephas) and James – in Jerusalem when he returned there some time after his conversion. First, he concentrated on the facts he had been told. Could this summary have been what the apostles in the earliest Christian community were teaching in the first years after the resurrection? Then he too makes his claim as “the least of the apostles” and reiterates his dependence on God’s grace for that.

LUKE 5:1-11. Behind the gospels as we now have them, there was a long tradition of stories about Jesus’ teaching and miracles repeated by word of mouth before being put into written form. Toward the end of the 1st century CE Luke gave a much more elaborate story than either Mark or Matthew. He connects this story of a miraculous catch of fish with the calling of the first disciples. John tells it as one of Jesus’ resurrection appearances (John 21). Taken together, the tradition represents a promise of the ultimate success of the apostolic mission.

A MORE COMPLETE ANALYSIS.

ISAIAH 6:1-13. Here we have another classic example of a prophet called to a special ministry. My OT professor, the late Rev. Dr. R.B.Y Scott, made this passage the starting point for his lectures on prophecy. He had written a highly regarded book, The Relevance of the Prophets, and at the time he was lecturing to us at McGill in 1948, he was writing the introduction and exegesis of Isaiah 1-39 for The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 5. His analysis of this passage in this latter volume is a valuable contribution to the understanding of prophetic visions and oracles.

The ancient temple in Jerusalem faced east. The daily sacrifice was offered as the sun rose over the horizon formed by the Mount of Olives. Rays from the rising sun flooded into the temple through its great doors causing its burnished gold and copper accouterments to shine gloriously. As the smoke of the morning sacrifice wafted through the temple, Isaiah, saw a vision and heard angelic voices praising the holiness of God.

Isaiah was possibly a cousin and certainly a courtier of King Uzziah, who had just died. Uzziah’s reign was one of the longest of the kings of Judah, 783-742 BCE. In his last years he suffered from leprosy and was replaced by his son Jotham as regent. This was also the time when Assyrian power was on the rise throughout ancient Mesopotamia and the wider Middle East. Uzziah’s reign included an expansion into both Philistine territory to the west that controlled trade routes to Egypt and Edom, to the south where there were valuable trade routes to Arabia. As the prophecies of Amos and Micah also reveal, this was a very prosperous period in the nation’s history.

In this passage Isaiah was in mourning and went into the temple, as was his wont, to offer a lament. As he worshiped in the familiar surroundings, he sensed the divine presence in a dramatic new way. God, of course, is invisible; yet Isaiah did have such a vision. Or was it just the hem of God’s robe and the attending seraphim, which represented the divine presence to him? Quickly afterward, Isaiah recognized his own unworthiness before God and that of his fellow Judeans. The experience overwhelmed him. That he should become the prophet to proclaim God’s judgment on his nation’s moral and spiritual decay was furthest from his imagination. Great revelations come to faithful men and women in the midst of the mundane experiences of life.

In Isaiah’s vision, one of the angelic beings touched his lips with a live coal from the altar, thus cleansing him to speak for God. He heard the voice of God calling for a messenger and he responded, “Here am I, send me.” But the message God gave him to deliver was one of unmitigated judgment. It must have been a fear-filled experience. To be called to speak God’s judgment against his own people would have frightened the most courageous of men or women in that day of woeful events as is in ours. One only has to hear or see to the attack ads created for contemporary political campaigns to realize how much the prophet exposes him or herself to community ridicule.

Yet there are men and women willing to present the divine alternatives to our petty human machinations of history. The people are the ground-breakers for new advances in faith and witness to the purposes of God in the world. It was so for Isaiah, who with Amos and Micah in the late 8th century BCE set forth a vision of divine justice and righteousness which remains as convincing for us as it was for them. These elements of Israelite prophecy had close affinity to the actual events of that time when the great empires of Assyria and Egypt were in conflict. Israel, the northern kingdom, and Judea itself was constantly threatened with invasion and the imposition of foreign religious practices.

PSALM 138. Unlike most of the psalms, this hymn of thanksgiving by an individual is thought to be from a small “Davidic collection.” (Psalms 138-145.) This meant that it was ascribed to King David rather than being composed by him.

There are some twenty such hymns of thanksgiving by individuals preserved in the religious literature of Israel. Isaiah 38:10-20 and Jonah 2:2-9 are examples found in the OT. The apocryphal books of Ecclessiasticus (Sirach), the Psalms of Solomon and the Odes of Solomon contain others.

Like most others, this psalm is from a post-exilic date. The absence of any thanksgiving sacrifice points to an unusual level of spiritual development rarely found except in some of the prophetic literature which condemned the temple sacrifices. Or it may date from a time before the reconstruction of the temple when the normal sacrifices could not be celebrated. It also reflects a universalism echoing that of Second Isaiah (vss. 4-6) for earthly kings are said to worship God as do the humble; and God does not despise their praise. The psalm ends with an declaration of trust in God’s love and purpose. Vs. 8 certainly provides a very preachable text.

1 CORINTHIANS 15:1-11. Paul states as simply as possible what he had learned from the apostles whom he met in Jerusalem when he returned there some time after his conversion. This probably occurred less than a decade after the resurrection. Some scholars believe it may have been no more than a year or two. Could this have been an early Christian creed? It summarizes what the apostles were teaching in those first years after that momentous event when the apostolic church was feeling the full flush of its new faith.

One point stands out in Paul’s repetition of this statement of faith. To him, the resurrection was something experienced by those few who had seen and spoken with the risen Christ. It was also Paul’s firm conviction that the same risen Lord had appeared to him on the Damascus Road. The ambiguity between faith and fact remains with the Christian community to this day. Faith does not attempt to be factual. Rather it expresses a spiritual interpretation of deep and often inexplicable psychic experiences. It uses the language of image, symbol and metaphor to describe what persons of faith have experienced amid the ebb and flow of ordinary events which a reporter or historian might well record differently as observed facts or strange myths.

The resurrection experience symbolized for Paul and the other apostles that Jesus Christ, who had been executed as a criminal, was very much alive. Death had not conquered him; he had conquered death and was now with them in spirit. There were still many living in Paul’s time who could testify to this experience. The reference to the risen Christ’s appearance to five hundred people may be an alternate reminiscence of Pentecost as that event had been told to Paul by the apostolic community.

Quite possibly Paul was the first to connect the death of Christ to the ancient Israelite tradition that sin could be forgiven by the shedding of blood. This belief had its roots in the ancient practices of offering sacrifices to the deity common to all ancient religious traditions. In some traditions human sacrifice had also been quite commonly practiced. Even in Israel as late as the 7th century BCE reign of Manasseh (ca. 687-642 BCE) there had been evidence of this. Among the Jews, animal sacrifice in lieu of human sacrifice was related closely to the celebration of the both Passover and Yom Kippur. In this context Paul interpreted the crucifixion of Jesus as a self-offering which had a similar effect of dealing with the human problem of sin and alienation from God.

Note too that Paul adds himself as “the least of the apostles.” One view of the narrative in Acts presents Paul and Peter as rivals for leadership of the Gentile mission. In Galatians and here, Paul gives some basis for this hypothesis. He numbers himself among the apostles, though with self-deprecating diminution. He goes on to reiterate his total dependence on God’s grace for his status and gives his fellow apostles credit where credit is due. They all share the resurrection faith which is the heart of the gospel for us as well.

LUKE 5:1-11. (Author’s note: This passage is also covered in a new blog posted here: http://studiesinluke.blogspot.com. Look on the list to the left for #7 – Calling The First Disciples. The content of this blog introduced a Bible study with a group of seniors at Glen Abbey United Church, Oakville,ON, Canada.)

Luke tells this story of a miraculous catch of fish in connection with the calling of the first disciples. His version is much more elaborate than the brief accounts of Mark and Matthew. John tells it as one of Jesus’ resurrection appearances (John 21). Behind the gospels as we now have them, there was a long tradition of stories about Jesus’ teaching and miracles repeated by word of mouth before being put into written form. Assuming that all versions referred to the same event, which some commentators doubt, they speak to the future mission of the apostolic church. It appears to be a promise of ultimate success though not without long and difficult toil on the part of the disciple community.

At first, the ekklesia (i.e. the apostolic church) meant simply a group of Jews of humble origins, many of them unlettered and poverty stricken, who had responded to the preaching of Jesus and believed in his resurrection. Then as now, fishing was not always a lucrative occupation, but one which required much skill and patience, hard work and long hours. These men were partners in a small business in which they had invested their whole lives. Catching and marketing of fresh fish, a major food in Galilee at the time, was not always a profitable trade. In that climate, the fish would have to be caught during the night and sold in the marketplace within a few hours. Often the results were disappointing. However, this story is told for its metaphorical significance rather than as a factual vignette of the harsh life of the Galilean fisherman.

Luke has a way of weaving the whole tradition into his story as he tells it. His audience was two generations removed from the events he narrates and unfamiliar with the places in which those events occurred. So he did not have to be concerned about chronological order. His intent was primarily evangelical. For instance, he has Peter call Jesus first “Master,” then “Lord.” Those are titles which Luke reserves for disciples. Non-disciples used the term, “Teacher.” The title “Lord” appears in Luke twenty-one times; twelve of them in pericopes peculiar to Luke. It can be argued that here Luke was thinking in post-resurrection terms when the apostles had fully realized that Jesus was the Messiah for whom such a title was appropriate. As has been pointed out many times, the original creed of the apostolic church was the simple statement, “Jesus is Lord.”

So also Peter’s confession of sinfulness in his plea that Jesus depart from him is appropriate to a post-resurrection attitude. It reiterates the gospel call to repentance as the antecedent to Christian discipleship. Luke had emphasized this as the message John the Baptist had preached (3:1-20) and which Peter had also proclaimed in his Pentecost sermon in Acts 2:38. It may also have some reference to Peter’s denial of Jesus in the court of the house of Caiaphas (22:54-60).

The late Professor G. B. Caird pointed to Jesus’ choice of these “hard-working but intensely loyal men, ever aware of their own shortcomings, as those whom he needed to carry the gospel into the world.” Does not the present evangelistic environment call for a disciple community of similarly dedicated, loyal and hard-working persons? Certainly not those who may lay claim to moral perfection or spiritual greatness would not fit the requirements. Caird’s analysis of this passage is a valuable contribution to the understanding of how prophetic visions and oracles affect us: “On Simon at least the impact he made was a profoundly moral one, resulting in a sense of sin. It was not the miracle that brought him to his knees but the grandeur of sheer goodness.” (Caird, G.B. Saint Luke. The Pelican New Testament Commentary, 1965.)

INTRODUCTION TO THE SCRIPTURE
Fourth Sunday of Advent – December 20, 2009

MICAH 5:2-5a. This prophecy presents an overview of Israel’s long and tragic history from the time of King David onward. Following the return of a remnant of the nation from exile in Babylon, a new ruler was intended to bring peace and prosperity because he would be strengthened by God. The early church saw the promise of the Messiah in this passage.

LUKE 1:47-55. The psalm and the gospel lessons form a single reading from Luke 1. Mary’s Song, known for centuries by its Latin name The Magnificat, was almost certainly modeled on Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 2:1-10. It promises the social justice of the messianic age for which the world is still waiting in hope.

HEBREWS 10:5-10. The message of this obscure passage indicates that Christ was born to die as the sacrifice for the sin of the world. It quotes Christ, but in reality it is a quotation from Psalm 40:6-8. That psalm is a song of praise and petition seeking God’s help. This interpretation emphasizes the sacrifice of Christ on the cross which God willed as vastly superior to the repeated sacrifices in Israel’s temple ritual.

LUKE 1:39-45. The story of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, John the Baptist’s mother, has an air of immediacy and intimacy about it. Some have speculated that the story came from Mary herself. On the other hand, the birth narratives of Luke are in the form of oral legend and poetry which may have circulated as a separate collection long before the gospel was written about 80 AD. However they may have come into being, the stories were meant to convey the faith of the church, then and still, that in Jesus, the God who loves the world came to bring all who believe into a living relationship with God now and for all eternity. This is still as good news to our age as it was to the first Christians two thousand years ago.

A MORE COMPLETE ANALYSIS

MICAH 5:2-5a. Micah (or Micaiah, meaning “Who is like Yahweh?) Came from a small village in the Judean foothills, Moresheth-Gath, about halfway between Jerusalem and Gaza. He was a contemporary of the better-known Isaiah. Yet the two prophets had a markedly different outlook, perhaps because of their different status in Judean society. Micah had the viewpoint of the common people of the countryside; Isaiah, that of an aristocrat and courtier. Micah could speak from harsh experience of the suffering of ordinary folk in a time of intolerable injustice and political turmoil, roughly 742-697 BCE. His village lay near the Judean stronghold of Lachish and close to the cities of the Philistines, in the pathway of every invading force. No “minor” prophet, he and Amos became the voices of the rural people who suffered under almost constant oppression.

The late Bruce Vawter, of DePaul University, IL, described Micah’s time in these words: “His prophetic career may have begun about 725 BCE when it had become evident that the northern kingdom of Israel – where prophecy had begun and which had always been the ‘elder sister’ of the kingdom of Judah – was now doomed to disappear into the voracious Assyrian empire. Judah, by a combination of statecraft, collaborationism and religiously unacceptable compromise, would still be able to hold off the inevitable for a time; indeed, it outlasted the Assyrians only to become the prey to their Neo-Babylonian successors. But this was done by the sacrifice of national and religious integrity, and in the end the result was the same.” (Oxford Companion to the Bible, 517)

In the book as it now stands, Micah’s own prophecies have been considerably adapted to changed conditions, added to and amplified by later editors. Vawter thought that this excerpt came from the prophet himself. Rolland E. Wolfe, formerly professor of Biblical Literature at Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, thought that it was part of an appendix added in postexilic times dealing with “the restoration of Israel by resorting to militaristic means …. (which) breathes vengeance upon other nations.” (The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 6, 922)

This prophecy presents an overview of Israel’s long and tragic history from the time of King David onward. It marvels that a Davidic lineage that lasted nearly half a millennium could come from such a small place as Bethlehem. Following the return of a remnant of the nation from exile, a new monarch of David’s line would bring peace and prosperity because he would be strengthened by God. This is distinctively different from the post-exilic vision of Deutero-Isaiah in that here the deity will delegate authority to the Davidic monarch in what will amount to a theocracy. Deutero-Isaiah envisioned Yahweh being the shepherd of reconstructed Israel. (Isa. 40:10-11)

As Matthew 2:6 states, the early church saw in this passage the promise of the Messiah and applied it to Jesus. The Matthean text is not taken from either the Hebrew or the Greek LXX of this passage and may be an original translation. Some scholars believe that the quotation is the sole source of the tradition that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

HEBREWS 10:5-10. The message of this obscure passage indicates that Christ was born to die as the sacrifice for the sin of the world. In our modern celebration of Christmas, we tend to neglect this important aspect of our faith: the Easter story begins at Christmas.

The passage quotes Christ, but in reality it is a quotation from Psalm 40:6-8. That psalm is a song of praise for God’s help and has no messianic connotations at all. However, this excerpt does echo the prophetic messages of Micah 6:6-8 and Jeremiah 31: 31-34. This interpretation lifts up the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, which God willed, as vastly superior to the repeated sacrifices of Israel’s temple ritual. The Christian doctrine of sanctifying grace which enables us to be obedient to God’s law of love finds its simplest definition here. It also opens us to the dangers of supersessionism and dispensationalism, theological positions that are no longer tenable in contemporary global religious and multicultural dialogue.

The interweaving of the Old Testament and the Gospel also stands out in this passage. Both testaments are essential elements of a mature Christian faith. From time of Marcion in the middle of the second century CE attempts have been made to exclude the Old Testament from Christian scriptures. This cannot be done because both parts tell the same story of God’s redemptive activity for the restoration of God’s creation – and all of humanity as part of creation – to its proper relationship to God.

This is what the author of Hebrews means by his use of the word “sanctified.” The Greek word is hagiazo (trans. “to make holy”). The only way for us to be made holy is in relationship to God who alone is holy. The claim of the author of Hebrews is that, according to divine will, only through faith in the sacrifice of Christ is this possible.

There has been a widespread misunderstanding that evangelical Christians emphasize only personal holiness. Such a limited view ignores the significant leadership of many 19th and 20th century evangelicals as William Wilberforce, Anthony Shaftesbury, Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhard Niebuhr and numerous others that to be fully expressed holiness must include the whole social order and all cultural systems. Even John Wesley himself in the 18th century regarded sanctification as incomplete as long as society remained unchanged by converted Christian men and women. Accordingly, the celebration of Advent and Christmas must include not only a genuine concern for the poor and disadvantaged, as in the original legend of St. Nicholas, but also a witness to God’s will that the reign of God be established in all human relationships and social institutions.

LUKE 1:39-45 AND LUKE 1:47-55. Because the psalm and the gospel lessons form a single reading from Luke 1, we comment on them together. These two passages are part of a series of Marian narratives from which the doctrine of the Virgin Birth and other aspects of traditional Christology developed. Together they form a creative and poetic flowering of what the church believed from its beginning: that God had come into human life for our salvation through faith in and following Jesus Christ in everyday living. Like so much else in the gospel story, the influence of the prophets of Israel, and especially their sense of divine justice and messianic hopes, can be clearly seen. The birth narratives read like an unfolding drama gradually introducing the central character of the gospel, Jesus, the Jewish Messiah/Christ.

The story of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, John the Baptist’s mother, has an air of immediacy and intimacy about it. Some have speculated that the story came from Mary herself. On the other hand, the birth narratives of Luke 1 and 2 are more likely oral legend and poetry which may have circulated as a separate collection long before the gospel was written about 80-90 CE. Later extreme examples of this kind of story show that the church needed to distinguish between what was valid revelation and what was merely imaginative speculation. This task fell to the Church Fathers of the late 2nd and 3rd centuries when the New Testament canon was given its final form.

On the other hand, the story as it stands gives some very natural insight into these two women’s experience. They rejoiced in each other’s pregnancy. They needed each other’s support. They realized how blessed they were to be bearing God’s miraculous gifts to humanity. What modern mother who willingly and intentionally bears a child does not sense the same joyful hope that they felt?

Mary’s Song, known for centuries by its Latin name The Magnificatt, was almost certainly modeled on Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 2:1-10. But that the circumstances of that source are more closely parallel to Elizabeth’s, who like Hannah, conceived late in life. Most likely Luke or his Jewish source composed a typical hymn of praise based on Hannah’s prayer and other Old Testament references. (vss. 49-50 cf. Ps. 103:17; 111:9) These were adapted to fit this situation, a common practice of New Testament authors. As it stands, the psalm promised the social justice of the messianic age for which the world is still waiting in hope.

However they may have come into being, these passages conveyed the faith of the church, then and still, that in Jesus, God who loves the world came to bring all creation into a living relationship with God now and for all eternity. This relationship extends to every human activity and institution as well as to each individual. There can be no social justice where people are not free or deprived of a fair share of the world’s resources. Some may see this as a basis for pre-emptive assaults against powerful opponents of political democracy and a free market economy. This would be a mistaken interpretation. The evidence of Old Testament prophecy and New Testament Christology is that God makes use of events manipulated by human agents to redeem creation. The Incarnation and the Resurrection had but that one purpose: the redemption of the world through the spiritual resources made available through faith in Jesus Christ, born of Mary.

WHO IS HE?

A poem for Christmas.
Rev. John Shearman

It was a stone manger, that place where he lay;
not a fine oaken cradle, but a box filled with hay.
His mother sang to him suckling her breast,
while shepherds came kneeling at angels’ behest.

Is this the Messiah? Not a king, but a child,
Just like our children in a world just as wild.
Does God really want us to follow this boy?
Can he be the Saviour who has not one toy?

The hopes of the world, invested in pain,
will not bring another; there’s nothing to gain
in pining and searching, in warring and strife;
for God’s saving love came in that helpless life.

An Epilogue:

For those who seek some resolution to the endless controversy about the Virgin Birth, a relatively new book by Geza Vermes, The Nativity: History and Legend, (Penguin Books, 2006) offers a reasonable position. Vermes concludes that since the custom of the times regarded child marriage as normal and virginity was thought to continue until puberty, it is entirely possible that Mary did conceive after her first ovulation but before her menstrual cycles began. That would mean that she was technically “a virgin” at the time of her conception. He supports this view with quotations from the Mishnah and the Talmud that distinguishes between two different understandings of virginity: one that terminates with sexual intercourse and one that ends only with the onset of menstruation, i.e “a girl who has seen blood even though she is married.” (See Vermes, “The virginal conception in Luke.” 78-81.)