57-66
Baby John’s birth
57-63
God Meets Us in the Comedic Push and Pull of Real Family Life
Here we see Gabriel’s promise fulfilled!
Compare v. 58 with v. 25. Her family and community know the score and share her joy in God’s kindness (note ‘mercy’ in vv. 50 and 58).
I love the comedy of the familial push and pull here! (Compare Ruth 4:17.)
John = ‘Yahweh has shown favour’
Notice we have here a picture of husband and wife in obedience to God together.
So much of the action so far has been so homely and familial, involving everyday real people. We see God’s hand reaching into these daily realities, the supernatural meeting the natural, especially in settings of home and family life: ‘Repeatedly, this scene is bathed in the light of the miraculous’ (Green, 108).
The ‘Magic’ of Christmas Time Tells Us Something Real About the Gospel
This miracle-in-the-mess quality we find in Luke’s opening chapters is so like the homely and harassed yet ‘magical’ feel of Christmas time! This wonderful feeling we get during even the strains of this season (or perhaps ‘used to get’ for some of us!) is actually telling us something real and true about the gospel and about life under God.
Remember that the body of Christ is a family too. To be a Christian is to be a part of God’s family. We are brothers and sisters:
Children of the Father
One with the Son by faith
Bound together in the love and truth of the Spirit
This is the consistent picture of Trinitarian community in the New Testament.
And to be in this family is full of mutual sympathy and irritation and push and pull just like we see here!
God Can’t Bless Just One of Us at a Time
And really, the whole human race is a family under God (Acts 17:26, 29) and God intends to graciously bless all the families of the earth through the graciously chosen Abrahamic-Messianic family (Gen. 12:3).
Because he has made us a family of communal creatures in his image, God can’t bless just one of us at a time. His merciful joy is infectious. He’s actually designed it to work that way—he works his blessing through us to each other. (That’s also why Mary’s song shifted halfway through from what God was doing for her personally to what God was doing for all his humble people.)
Who is around us experiencing God’s compassionate blessing that we can rejoice with? And have we shared with others what God has done for us so that they can participate in our rejoicing?
One Person’s Obedience Helps the Entire Community to Know and Obey God
I love the present tense finality of Zechariah’s written sentence! (I wish I could write punchy and perspicuously like that!) (And you can just hear the maternal-paternal-sibling murmur in the background as they ‘wondered’!)
It is very important to see here that the rest of them don’t have the revelation he has—it takes Zechariah’s obedience to communicate this to the rest and pass obedience on to the community. We’re each responsible for passing on whatever ‘word’ God has given us to the rest of the community through our obedience to it.
64
Zechariah’s mute period has obviously been well spent for it is only blessing of God that comes quickly out of his restored voice. We will hear these praises in his prophetic song/poem.
65-66
Note again the holy ‘fear’ we discussed at 1:50.
They both ‘gossip the gospel’ as well as ‘lay it up in their hearts’.
The heart is the creative centre of a person and includes the mind and emotions – so they are letting all this alleged divine activity have some space in the will, reason, imagination, and feelings.
A community asking, questioning, pondering, wondering: ‘What then will this child be?’
‘In this way, Luke teases his audience, raises curiosity, and promises a return to the story of John’ (Green, 106).
The God With Hands
They recognise the hand of the Lord in all this (the ‘hand’ being a recurring biblical term for God’s activity in the world—we believe in a God with hands!).
Luke’s comment as narrator about the ‘hand of the Lord’ here then ‘underscores the sense that God is at work behind and in these seemingly ordinary practices… and suggests to us that we should join the people of the Judean hill country in pondering the future role of this baby’ (Green, 108).
67
Bendictus – From Mute Sign to Prophetic Mouthpiece in an Instant!
By including Zechariah’s song (known as the ‘Benedictus’ from the first word in the Latin version) Luke here foreshadows an answer to the question raised about this child. Like the Magnificat we are invited to ‘magnify’ God as we see his character in this poem-prophecy, but also to ponder what this God is up to in the world.
Picture this as we read it.
We can see what Zechariah’s been doing with his time of imposed silence! God graciously and comically moves him in an instant from a mute sign that the promised birth will be fulfilled to his mouthpiece proclaiming what’s to come!
Yet again, Luke features the activity of the Holy Spirit – filling Zechariah (as often in the Old Testament, for ‘heroic’ purposes, and then more frequently and in the life of every believer in the NT, also for service and praise to the Lord).
Here the Spirit fills to enable prophecy. So this poem/song, the Benedictus, is prophetic whereas Mary’s was more contemplative (though with a definite element of the prophetic).
It’s really awe-inspiring (and theo-comic!) when you think that God communicates to us verbally, in human languages, and mostly through human messengers (as opposed to, say, angels).
68
The one, long sentence of verses 68-75 forms the first half of the poem/song.
Blessing the God Who Blesses Us First
What does it mean for humans to ‘bless’ God? We usually think of God blessing us, don’t we? Well, we can bless or curse with our mouths can’t we (James 3:8-10)? And we can speak in a good-heaping or evil-heaping way toward God. (And we can bless or curse God silently in our hearts too.)
The idea of blessing and cursing is a huge theme throughout the Bible that we won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that when we ‘bless God’ we are with our hearts and mouths enlarging the praise of God in response to his blessing (enlarging) of our lives and world.
God Comes for a Visit
Here we see again a ‘visiting’ God who comes to us, involves himself with us (similar to ‘looked on’ in v. 48 and an important term throughout Luke).
‘Visiting’ might sound as if God’s not always there, always near, which of course he is always fully present everywhere. His creation, depending on him completely for its moment by moment existence as it does, can never be any ‘where’ but right in the dynamic, sustaining, creative presence of God. God upholds us and gives us breath in every moment of time and in every dimension of space. God is ‘actually not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:27-28).
But the nature of his presence with us depends on our heart relation to him – and he hopes we will reach out to him as he reaches out to us. He sovereignly creates and situates all people in such a way ‘that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him’ (Acts 17:27) just as he is reaching out to us: ‘all day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people’ (Romans 10:21; Isaiah 65:2).
Even God’s People Can Lack a Sense of His Presence for a Time
Sin is what’s creating this tension of darkly feeling toward God whilst also rejecting his guiding and welcoming hands.
This describes lostness but it can also somewhat picture times in the lives of believers, both individually and communally. Even as his people, we may not consciously and meaningfully and joyfully experience his presence for periods of time. This is for all sorts of reasons in a fallen world – sin in our own individual lives as well as sin in our community, be that the church or the society or both.
By this I do not mean that it’s always some secret, unconfessed sin in your life. That’s the mistaken diagnosis that Job’s ‘comforters’ made. It’s just an unfortunate reality in a sinful, broken, fallen world and won’t be fully remedied until the Eschaton (the Last Day) when ‘the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea’ (Habakkuk 2:14). Until the time of that theo-epistemic flooding, we take what trickles, puddles, brooks, rivers, and streams we can graciously get.
A Myriad Ways to Experience God’s Presence
We may also have a limited sense of what experiencing God’s presence means and looks like. And since we don’t ‘feel’ him in one narrow way out of a myriad of ways that he makes himself known to us, we think we are missing him. The church sometimes teaches us only one or two ways to ‘feel’ God, but the Bible shows us that we can encounter him in absolutely any and every detail of life for it all belongs to him and is sustained by him and points to and glorifies him always.
For just one example, I myself may not always feel God during a time of worship in song, but I regularly find myself exclaiming his praises with warmth of heart as I feel his presence in good literature. We each will find him graciously present with us in glory and truth and love in a myriad of ways from family to work to leisure, indoors and outdoors, days and nights, in all seasons. (It should go without saying that knowing him through his voice in Scripture and Christ, through the Holy Spirit and prayer and praise, is the ground and crown of all these other experiences.)
When we do, when we are renewed in awareness of him, especially by his clear activity in our lives, we call it a ‘visit’ from God!
God is Ever Inviting Us In
And of course the initiative is always God’s: he first ‘visits’ us in our waywardness and insensitivity and thereby enables us to respond to his visit with joy and love and faith and obedience. But we must respond or the visit will eventually turn into one of judgment instead of blessing (as the rest of the Gospel plays out in various individuals and communities). When we throw God’s grace back into his face, then we place ourselves outside the circle of his blessing. But he ever longs to bring us in, as Luke will show in Jesus’ parable of the father who pleads with the elder, prideful son to come in to the party for the homecoming of the younger, prodigal son.
A Visitation of Redemption
Depending on the circumstances and the person, we may like or dislike, look forward to with joy or dread, a ‘visit’ from someone. Everyone here in these passages is just thrilled about God’s visitation (e.g. Elizabeth’s attitude of joyful wonder in v. 43). Of course, as faithful Israelites they’ve been expecting (hoping against hope) this visit. God promised he would come to his people to rescue them and now he’s coming through on that promise which is occasion for nothing short of joy!
What is the nature of this ‘visit’ from God? It is for the purpose of ‘redemption’, to ‘buy back’ his sinfully erring people out of their slavery/captivity to their enemies. We can only visit people in prison (my Dad used to do this) to comfort and aid them through their imprisonment. God visits those in (a much greater and more permanent) prison to open the jail doors and set them free! He’s got the means and resources and connections to pull this off!
69
The Horned King
God raises up a ‘horn’! This wonderful, terrible animal appendage is a symbol of royal and warrior-like strength or power—power to save.
A Messianic horn that gores the monstrously powerful enemies of God and his people is ‘a picture of strength… The horns of an ox are used for protection and for defeating opponents (Deut 33:17). The same image is used for a warrior (2 Sam 22:3; Ps 75:4-5, 10; 148:14) or a king who saves (1 Sam 2:10; Ps 132:17). Luke’s starting point for thinking about Jesus is that he is a king’ (Bock, 51).
70
Old Testament Continuity with the New Testament
Luke and his characters never tire of sounding the note that God is true to his word – this was always planned in the Old Testament.
So again we see that the New Testament is in continuity with the Old Testament. We emphatically do not have an ‘Old Testament God’ and a ‘New Testament God’. The NT embraces and fulfils OT history rather than discarding it and starting over.
71
God’s Hand Always Trumps the Paw of the Enemy
Being rescued out of the paw of the bear as it were—God’s hand can trump any other hand! God is always the greater Wrestler!
We have REAL enemies: this is very serious. We are in terrible, existential danger! There are forces both within us and without us that are against us, that will kill us unless someone can save us.
Sometimes we realise this with sobriety and urgency and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we feel it and sometimes we don’t. It’s in the moments that this is real and urgent for us that the gospel makes sense as the unspeakably Good News that it is.
And again, in response to such mortal enemies, we see the repeated motif of God as Merciful Divine Warrior who comes to wage war on all that opposes his love and justice, to deliver the oppressed from the oppressor.
(Interesting that we’re studying this on Remembrance Sunday!)
‘We can feel the long years of pain and sorrow, of darkness and death, overshadowing his mind. Nameless enemies are lurking round the corner in his imagination and experience… But we can also feel the long years of quiet prayer and trust’ (Wright, 18).
72-73
Again, The God Who Remembers
This mighty saving hand of God comes from his character: he is faithful and merciful. His promised compassion to Israel is ‘remembered’ because of the sacred-sombre promise-contract (‘holy covenant’) he entered into with them, signed and sealed by God as the main party, to their benefit (and ours).
Like ‘visit’, ‘remember’ is an anthropomorphism like we said at v. 54: God doesn’t forget us! (As I sometimes do with my kids! E.g. collecting them from school!)
This holy covenant was sworn by God’s own verbal testimony and vow to Abraham the father of the faith.
A Gift-Giving God
A promise to ‘grant’ (ESV), to give, to provide—highlighting yet again the grace and generosity and kindness of God (a consistent Lucan theme, especially as people herald and preach the gospel throughout Acts: they herald a gift-giving God who comes to humanity bearing gifts of salvation, forgiveness, new life—cf. Romans 6:23).
74-75
What Are We Saved For?
We are saved from what would destroy us not to be set up again on our own, but to be restored to God’s household in happy, secure, perpetual ‘service’ to him—that is, serving our God-given purpose, running according to divine design. That design is that we live to the full as creative, communal image-bearers who know and glorify God in every area of life, loving God with our whole being and loving each other as ourselves. God delivers us from our enemies so that we can live in his fully human way in the holy fear of God, but without fear of harm from any enemy of God and of his world and his people.
So God saves us to share in his holiness! Instead of building a wall around his unique holy character to keep us out, he invites us in (Leviticus; 1 Peter 1:13-25: ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy’).
And his Messiah makes us righteous as well, sharing in God’s total moral purity and goodness and justice, all freely gifted to us in the Messiah’s person and work of redemption.
The Coming Purpose and Work of Baby John
The next section of Zechariah’s poem/song shifts from praising God to prophesying about the coming role of the newborn child.
76-77
Note again that John is not ‘Son of the Most High’ but ‘prophet of the Most High’, the forerunner to the Lord’s coming among his people.
Again, we see the preparatory nature of John’s calling and work. This preparation is one of giving knowledge of God’s salvation: it is epistemic-heraldic or epistemic-salvific. The knowledge he will spread is here specifically about the forgiveness of sins.
The Merciful Divine Warrior Will Take Down Another Deadly Enemy: Sin
This divinely granted forgiveness is crucial to salvation because sin is the central human problem. Like the forces of evil that the Divine Warrior comes to bring down, sin (the heart-rebellion of creatures against their Creator and all the vice and destruction this breeds) is a diabolically deadly enemy to our world and us.
So this enemy too God comes to engage in battle with very strange but powerful engines of war that we will not see in full effect until the scenes of the crucifixion and resurrection.
78-79
What is it about God that he would ‘visit’ and ‘redeem’ his people in this way? He is a God of ‘tender mercy’ (like we talked about last time).
The Sun Rises in the Land of the Darkness of Death (The Last Enemy is Conquered)
Here is evocative imagery about God’s gracious salvation-scattering visitation: a ‘sunrise’ from ‘on high’.
We’ve seen that God is coming to rescue us from the forces of evil and from our own sin, and here we see him do battle with ‘the last enemy’ (1 Corinthians 15:26): death.
Can you imagine this? Is this true? ‘If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied’ (1Corinthians 15:19). But this is the promise that is held out to us in the birth narratives of Jesus Christ and his forerunner John.
We are in darkness and ‘God is light’ (1 John 1:6) as we said last time when we talked about God’s holiness. But the shockingly good news is that God doesn’t leave us there in the pitch-black consequences of a sinful world but instead brings his ‘unapproachable light’ into the midst of our darkness somehow, miraculously!
God descends into the dark regions of death to personally guide his people out into the land of light again. This is the life and path of his divine shalom, where ‘all is right with the world’ again first by peace between God and us and then between us and one another and our world. This outrageous promise too is held out to us in these weird and wonderful births.
The God Who Saves Us from All Our Enemies
So we see God come to save us from our worst enemies, who ‘hate’ us, who will do us in without a rescuer (v. 71):
Evil forces, both human and demonic (v. 74)
Our own sin (v. 77)
And death itself (v. 79)
These are consistently shown to be the enemies of the human race and the world we live in throughout Scripture. God is consistently seen as their ultimate conqueror by his mighty grace.
‘God’s mercy, the forgiveness of our sins, the rescue from death itself; all of this points to a deeper and wider meaning of “salvation”. Luke is preparing us to see that God, in fulfilling the great promises of the Old Testament, is going beyond a merely this-worldly salvation and opening the door to a whole new world in which sin and death themselves will be dealt with. This, of course, is the message that will occupy the rest of the book’ (Wright, 19).
80
John’s intervening years—paralleled to a similar but lengthier description of Jesus’ intervening years next chapter.
Note the ‘wilderness’ training for John, like the prophet Elijah in whose steps he follows.
Summary of Luke Chapter 1:
‘Luke’s long first chapter holds together what we often find easier to keep separate. At point after point he has linked his story to the ancient biblical record of Israel, to the patriarchs, kings, prophets and psalms. He is writing of the moment when the centuries-old story was going to come round a corner at last, out of darkness into sudden light. He never forgets this larger perspective; everything that he will tell us about Jesus makes sense as the fulfilment of God’s ancient promises, the hope of Israel come to fruition at last.
‘But Luke’s story vibrates equally with the personal hopes and fears of ordinary people. Zechariah, Elisabeth and Mary stand out as real people, hesitating between faith and doubt, called to trust God at a new moment in history. It’s a mark not only of Luke’s skill as a writer but also of the nature of the God he is writing about that both the big picture and the smaller human stories matter totally. This is, after all, as Zechariah had glimpsed, the story of how the creator God came to rescue his people. It is the story, as Luke will now tell, of how God himself was born as a baby’ (Wright, 19-20).
Works Cited:
Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke
Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
MAGNIFICAT! (Luke 1:46-56, Sunday 7th November 2010)
Mary Makes a Piece of Philosophical Art in Praise of Her Saviour
Luke’s portrait of Mary continues. Here again we see she is a thinker and now we know also that she’s a poet! (Reminds me of her later adopted son, the Apostle John, whose Gospel is the most philosophical and poetic.)
Remember in all this that obedience and submission to God has brought Mary into a potentially dangerous, scandalous, and disreputable position. But even with all its uncertainty and difficulty, she chooses to contemplate and rejoice and praise and worship. She is walking by faith, trusting that if God is on the move, it’s good and desirable and she wants to participate! She’s just so glad to be chosen by God to be used by him.
So she crafts a piece of art to mull it over and express herself (like people before her in the Old Testament, not least Hannah in 1 Samuel 2). Mary’s song/poem is often given the Latin title ‘Magnificat’ from the word ‘magnify’, which is an apt title for the theme of the whole poem, for it magnifies God, enlarging our picture of him and enlarging our hearts to know him more truly.
Again, as a wonderful heroine of the faith, we need to study and emulate Mary.
Is Your God Big Enough to Worship?
46
God is the main character of Luke’s narrative, but rarely is he directly attributed with action or speech—instead he comes through in the responses of his creatures.
Luke here invites us to join our souls with Mary’s in ‘magnifying’ the Lord: making him (that is, acknowledging him as) large and great and awesome and beautiful and glorious and worthy of praise and honour and adoration and worship
The first thing we learn is thus that Mary’s God is big enough for her worship: think on that. Do you worship God? Do you ever abandon yourself in whole-hearted praise and adoration of God just because he’s so worth it, because he’s so glorious and radiant and admirable and desirable? So good and awesome that you just want to speak out good things about him, shout to him and to the world how great and lovely and beautiful and amazing he is?
Is our conception of God small? Or is he ‘that than which a greater cannot be conceived’ (as the medieval theologian Anselm rather abstractly but precisely put it)?
Let’s allow Mary’s song to broaden our view of God and expand the capability of our hearts to worship him.
The Joy Bringer, The Divine Warrior
47
Mary’s God is the source of her spiritual joy: knowing and experiencing God naturally and spontaneously provokes a response of joy and gladness in Mary. God simply is what he is and does what he does, and Mary simply rejoices in his incomparable goodness and beauty from her heart.
Mary’s God is her Saviour: a Rescuer, Deliverer, Hero (imagery that is part of a holy Divine Warrior motif running throughout the Bible) – he is not indifferent or inert, but active and involved. He knows about us and is moved to compassionate action on our behalf because of our distress.
Mary says he is ‘my’ Saviour. We can apply this knowledge of God not just to some people ‘over there’, but directly to ourselves personally, our lives and circumstances.
God Notices the Nobodies
48
Mary’s God is mindful of her
We’re not overlooked by this mighty God. We’re not too ‘low’ and insignificant to be noticed by him.
Every one of us needs a sense of identity and every one of us is chasing after it one way or another. We need recognition and meaning, a sense of our place and purpose and ‘image’ and ‘renown’, whether great or small, ambitious or simple. The question is not whether we need or try to obtain this, but how we do so and where we try to find it.
God Gives Identity and Reputation
Mary identifies herself as God’s ‘servant’: she thus places herself within his household and at his disposal. She acknowledges this as her identity rather than trying to forge some identity of her own, making her mark in the world out of her own resources, serving her own reputation and needs. No, Mary’s God is her Master and Owner. The One in charge of her care and provision and purpose and status and the One she delights to obey.
Mary’s God is the One in charge of her reputation: She’s ecstatic about almighty God’s attention on her! She doesn’t take this for granted. She ‘gets’ that this is a huge act of incredible grace that God has brought into her life by this miracle of divine messianic pregnancy. She knows that from now on people will hear her name and think ‘that was someone richly blessed by God’.
49
Mary’s God is mighty on her behalf: She is weak, but he is strong (as the children’s song goes; see also 2 Corinthians 12:9-10). She finds that God’s massive might is exercised on her behalf, for her good and blessing and is just amazed and humbled and delighted.
In Awe of the Holy One
Mary’s God is holy: his very character and reputation (‘name’) is holy. He is ‘set apart’ in a category of one: There is no other like him (as the O.T. repeatedly affirms). He is ‘wholly other’ than the creation and he is of an infinite degree of purity—goodness, righteousness, and justice on a level we can never fathom. You can count on him to be this way. God is always true to his own character. And he is awesome and wonderful in his holiness.
The mystery of this purity and otherness are captured in New Testament lines like:
‘who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen’ (1 Timothy 6:16).
‘God is light, and in him is no darkness at all’ (1 John 1:5).
‘[L]et us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire’ (Hebrews 12:28-29).
Holy Love
50
Mary’s God is merciful: This same God who is so Other to us, so radically different than us in his very nature, especially in his moral purity, yet looks on us with ‘mercy’: compassion, kindness, tenderness, with a heart that is moved with pity at the sight of our misery, moved to respond favourably toward us to alleviate our suffering (even if we brought it on ourselves). Putting these two central attributes of God together, John Wesley summed up God as ‘Holy Love’.
Philosophically, some philosophers (most famously, Aristotle) have noted that since all creation is in motion, we surely must trace all this finite movement back to an Unmoved Mover who starts it all going but who needs nothing to start him going for he is eternal, without beginning or end, self-existent and self-sufficient. There’s probably an important insight here about how the creation points to God as the Creator in the originating sense. But as a piece of reasoning all by itself without the revelation God has given us of himself in the Bible and in Jesus, it can be misleading. First of all, it’s not explicit as to whether that ‘Mover’ is still on the move! It is not clear whether he is still, moment by moment, active in sustaining his creation. Secondly, related to this, it can make God look very like an immovable, impersonal, uncaring Stone. The Bible praises God as our Rock in his steadfast love to be sure. But it is love that does not come through clearly in the idea of an Unmoved Mover. So some theologians have said we might be better, in light of the cross of Christ especially, to think of God as the Most Moved Mover! This too captures an obviously crucial insight about God. The Bible I think urges us to combine these pictures so that we see a God who is the Sovereign and Faithful Creator who is free to act according to his own holy wishes and who does not change on a whim and upon whom all things depend for their existence and who at the same time is utterly and compassionately involved with his creation, caring for all that he has made, moved by our misery to acts of pity and mercy.
‘This “mercy” is nothing less than God’s gracious initiative that is the presupposition for his creating humanity as his covenant partner and for his continued relationship with humanity in spite of the repeated opposition of men and women to his purpose’ (Green, 104).
Fear of God is Basic
Significantly, coming right off the back of her acknowledgement of God as Holy Love we see that Mary fears God.
What do you think of when you hear the word ‘fear’ in general? What about in relation to God?
‘The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge’ (Proverbs 1:7).
‘The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight’ (Proverbs 9:10).
The Bible consistently tells us that fear of God is basic. Why?
First of all, ‘fear’ is simply the proper response to the Holy One, the Self-Existent or Eternal One (Yahweh), the great I AM, the Alpha and Omega, the incomparably Good and Just and Beautiful One. This ‘fear’ is the worshipful reverence and awe spoken of in Hebrews 12:28 as well as the honour spoken of in 1 Timothy 6:16. This ‘fear’ is enthroning God above all else in our hearts, submitting to him from our core, acknowledging our absolute limit in him, bowing the knee, taking off our shoes on the holy ground of his presence.
It is also acknowledging our absolute pleasure in him for this ‘fear’ is also our delight in him, our loyalty and love for him as we reverence him. Fear of God is to brook no rival to him in the affection of our hearts.
Thus to ‘fear God’ is not static and abstract but to live our lives before his face, as pilgrims heading to our true home in him, honouring him and bringing fame and glory to his holy name by our actions and our relationships with others. To fear the Lord results in respecting the environment he has placed us in, respecting one another made in his image, caring for one another’s needs, living in just and loving community.
The Bible teaches that all good and right attitudes and actions are grounded in the fear of God. And where fear of God is missing, these good human things are undermined (e.g. Rom. 3:13-18). To live any other way than holy is to spit on God’s character, to ignore him and his fierce goodness, to have ‘no fear of God before our eyes’. And it always results not only in irreverence but inhumanity.
Again, holiness and mercy and fear all have to do with how big and worthy of worship God is. Is our God worth the praise and adoration and submission?
God is Not a Generational Thing
At this point Mary’s song moves outward from herself to encompass all of us explicitly: ‘The corporate implications of God’s activity now come into full view—as if the camera, previously focused more narrowly on Mary, has suddenly been pulled back to reveal the company of all Israel of which she is a part. Similarly, there are small hints that Israel is itself part of the larger company of all humanity who is the object of God’s mercy’ (Green, 104).
Mary’s God is faithful: this holy, mighty, saving, involved God lavishes his mercy and compassion on those who fear him in every generation. He does not change. God is not a ‘generational’ thing: some generations ‘go’ for him and some don’t. He is ever present and always the same in his character, always blessing the humble throughout history. The generation before us may or may not have feared God. We may think ‘well God was fine for them but he doesn’t work for us’. Or we may think ‘they didn’t fear God and we’re left in a Godless spiritual wasteland’. Either way, do we, in our generation, fear God? (And that is of course the best way we can help the next generation do so.)
Mary’s song invites us to do so and experience his merciful steadfastness for ourselves, in our times and places and cultures and ways and families and communities.
The Divine Clown Brings Down the Proud
51-53
Mary’s God bears his strong arm to bring down the proud and lift up the humble: again, her God is mighty and active in this world. She here especially highlights how God humbles the proud (even those who are proud ‘secretly’ in their hearts), those who rely on their power, influence, and wealth instead of on God, who show their lack of fear of God in their contempt for the poor, weak, and marginalised. In sending Jesus through Mary of Nazareth, God bypassed centres of power and demonstrated his own real power in a devious and decentralised way!
Mary’s God is the Ironic Reverser: again, her God comedically turns things on their head and puts the first last and the last first. Her God is a sardonic and farcical and slapstick Divine Clown and Divine Trickster and Divine Joker. He is no respecter of persons, but brings in his justice at the expense of those who think highly of themselves and to the hilarious joy of those who are without prestige.
Here we see the Divine Warrior in action and by his actions we see what kind of Warrior he is: ‘oppression of people, pride, claims of power, wealth… it is against such opposing forces that God has, in Mary’s image, come to do war. But he has done so not out of obligation but out of his mercy’ (Green, 104).
So, where are you and I at in relation to all this? Are we Proud, Strong, Rich, Enthroned? Or are we Humble, Weak, Poor, and Hungry? Are we on a collision course with our Maker where we will become De-throned? (Which of course does not have to be the last word if we’ll repent and believe after God graciously but decisively humbles us.)
Faith’s Forward Vision
Mary is of course looking forward in faith to how the Messiah will eventually overthrow all human pretenders to the throne and rule in righteousness, ending all oppression. Because of what God has already done in fulfilling his messianic promises (her virgin conception), she considers the rest of what he will yet do to be a matter of past tense!
This is how we also should view biblical prophecy – on the basis of the monumental and miraculous promises that have already come to pass (Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection, Pentecost), we look forward with complete confidence to God’s fulfilment of the rest of his promises (Return of Jesus to Reign Forever, Final Resurrection and Judgment, New Heavens and New Earth Full of Righteousness).
The God Who Helps, The God Who Remembers
54-55
Mary’s God is the helper of his people who always keeps his promises: we are not alone, left to ourselves and our own resources. God is with us, alongside us, to help us, to aid us just as he promises in his word.
Mary’s God remembers: Of course, God knows all and so never needs to ‘remember’ something he’s ‘forgotten’, but the Bible takes time to speak ‘anthropomorphically’ like this (attributing human actions to God) so that we really relate to God interpersonally and not in some abstract way that we can’t relate to or enter into as human beings. God doesn’t forget us or the promises and plans he has for us and his world.
The God Who Keeps His Promises to Abraham
Mary’s God is the God of Abraham: this connection to Abraham is very important to Luke and keeps recurring. This whole scene of miraculous births of course echoes those of Sarah and Rebecca, the wives of Abraham and Isaac respectively. But here Mary acknowledges that God is the God who called Abraham and promised him that he would bless him and make him great and bless every ethnicity and ‘people group’ on earth through him (Genesis 12).
And he is the God who counted Abraham righteous solely on the basis of Abraham’s trusting faith in God to keep his promises (Genesis 15; Romans 4) – the same faith Mary and Elizabeth and Zechariah and Joseph were being called to exercise in their day and we are being called to exercise today.
That is our only righteousness, to trust God to provide salvation for us in ways we can’t provide it for ourselves. Indeed, this is a poem celebrating just that. Mary’s song is all about and totally centred on a Saving God who is mighty to rescue us from the consequences of sin: ‘the God who acts out of his own self-giving nature to embrace men and women in relationship. God remembers… and acts’ (Green, 105).
Is Our God Big Enough to Worship?
Is your soul magnifying the Lord at this point? Does he look at least a bit larger to you? These are things that have to be repeatedly contemplated. These theological truths do not sink in overnight. They enlarge our worship only as we are Scripturally soaked in them over a lifetime.
Lastly, see 1:65-66 – can this ‘fear’ come upon us as we hear of these things? Can our awe and reverence and honour and delight and submission grow from hearing the word about Jesus? Like these people we have to gossip about it! It’s juicy and newsworthy! And as we gossip we have to take all this we’re hearing and ‘lay it up in our hearts’ and wonder about it and quietly ask ‘what will these boys grow up to be then?’ For the Lord’s hand was with them.
Note that ‘heart’ = reason, imagination, emotions, will – so this is thoughtful, intelligent, rational, aesthetic, dramatic, inspiring, volitional, life-changing contemplation and wonder.
A revealing question we can ask ourselves: if God is real and he is moving in the person of Jesus, would I surrender and participate, repent of my self-sufficiency and believe in Jesus as my Saviour?
Works Cited:
Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke
Luke’s portrait of Mary continues. Here again we see she is a thinker and now we know also that she’s a poet! (Reminds me of her later adopted son, the Apostle John, whose Gospel is the most philosophical and poetic.)
Remember in all this that obedience and submission to God has brought Mary into a potentially dangerous, scandalous, and disreputable position. But even with all its uncertainty and difficulty, she chooses to contemplate and rejoice and praise and worship. She is walking by faith, trusting that if God is on the move, it’s good and desirable and she wants to participate! She’s just so glad to be chosen by God to be used by him.
So she crafts a piece of art to mull it over and express herself (like people before her in the Old Testament, not least Hannah in 1 Samuel 2). Mary’s song/poem is often given the Latin title ‘Magnificat’ from the word ‘magnify’, which is an apt title for the theme of the whole poem, for it magnifies God, enlarging our picture of him and enlarging our hearts to know him more truly.
Again, as a wonderful heroine of the faith, we need to study and emulate Mary.
Is Your God Big Enough to Worship?
46
God is the main character of Luke’s narrative, but rarely is he directly attributed with action or speech—instead he comes through in the responses of his creatures.
Luke here invites us to join our souls with Mary’s in ‘magnifying’ the Lord: making him (that is, acknowledging him as) large and great and awesome and beautiful and glorious and worthy of praise and honour and adoration and worship
The first thing we learn is thus that Mary’s God is big enough for her worship: think on that. Do you worship God? Do you ever abandon yourself in whole-hearted praise and adoration of God just because he’s so worth it, because he’s so glorious and radiant and admirable and desirable? So good and awesome that you just want to speak out good things about him, shout to him and to the world how great and lovely and beautiful and amazing he is?
Is our conception of God small? Or is he ‘that than which a greater cannot be conceived’ (as the medieval theologian Anselm rather abstractly but precisely put it)?
Let’s allow Mary’s song to broaden our view of God and expand the capability of our hearts to worship him.
The Joy Bringer, The Divine Warrior
47
Mary’s God is the source of her spiritual joy: knowing and experiencing God naturally and spontaneously provokes a response of joy and gladness in Mary. God simply is what he is and does what he does, and Mary simply rejoices in his incomparable goodness and beauty from her heart.
Mary’s God is her Saviour: a Rescuer, Deliverer, Hero (imagery that is part of a holy Divine Warrior motif running throughout the Bible) – he is not indifferent or inert, but active and involved. He knows about us and is moved to compassionate action on our behalf because of our distress.
Mary says he is ‘my’ Saviour. We can apply this knowledge of God not just to some people ‘over there’, but directly to ourselves personally, our lives and circumstances.
God Notices the Nobodies
48
Mary’s God is mindful of her
We’re not overlooked by this mighty God. We’re not too ‘low’ and insignificant to be noticed by him.
Every one of us needs a sense of identity and every one of us is chasing after it one way or another. We need recognition and meaning, a sense of our place and purpose and ‘image’ and ‘renown’, whether great or small, ambitious or simple. The question is not whether we need or try to obtain this, but how we do so and where we try to find it.
God Gives Identity and Reputation
Mary identifies herself as God’s ‘servant’: she thus places herself within his household and at his disposal. She acknowledges this as her identity rather than trying to forge some identity of her own, making her mark in the world out of her own resources, serving her own reputation and needs. No, Mary’s God is her Master and Owner. The One in charge of her care and provision and purpose and status and the One she delights to obey.
Mary’s God is the One in charge of her reputation: She’s ecstatic about almighty God’s attention on her! She doesn’t take this for granted. She ‘gets’ that this is a huge act of incredible grace that God has brought into her life by this miracle of divine messianic pregnancy. She knows that from now on people will hear her name and think ‘that was someone richly blessed by God’.
49
Mary’s God is mighty on her behalf: She is weak, but he is strong (as the children’s song goes; see also 2 Corinthians 12:9-10). She finds that God’s massive might is exercised on her behalf, for her good and blessing and is just amazed and humbled and delighted.
In Awe of the Holy One
Mary’s God is holy: his very character and reputation (‘name’) is holy. He is ‘set apart’ in a category of one: There is no other like him (as the O.T. repeatedly affirms). He is ‘wholly other’ than the creation and he is of an infinite degree of purity—goodness, righteousness, and justice on a level we can never fathom. You can count on him to be this way. God is always true to his own character. And he is awesome and wonderful in his holiness.
The mystery of this purity and otherness are captured in New Testament lines like:
‘who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen’ (1 Timothy 6:16).
‘God is light, and in him is no darkness at all’ (1 John 1:5).
‘[L]et us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire’ (Hebrews 12:28-29).
Holy Love
50
Mary’s God is merciful: This same God who is so Other to us, so radically different than us in his very nature, especially in his moral purity, yet looks on us with ‘mercy’: compassion, kindness, tenderness, with a heart that is moved with pity at the sight of our misery, moved to respond favourably toward us to alleviate our suffering (even if we brought it on ourselves). Putting these two central attributes of God together, John Wesley summed up God as ‘Holy Love’.
Philosophically, some philosophers (most famously, Aristotle) have noted that since all creation is in motion, we surely must trace all this finite movement back to an Unmoved Mover who starts it all going but who needs nothing to start him going for he is eternal, without beginning or end, self-existent and self-sufficient. There’s probably an important insight here about how the creation points to God as the Creator in the originating sense. But as a piece of reasoning all by itself without the revelation God has given us of himself in the Bible and in Jesus, it can be misleading. First of all, it’s not explicit as to whether that ‘Mover’ is still on the move! It is not clear whether he is still, moment by moment, active in sustaining his creation. Secondly, related to this, it can make God look very like an immovable, impersonal, uncaring Stone. The Bible praises God as our Rock in his steadfast love to be sure. But it is love that does not come through clearly in the idea of an Unmoved Mover. So some theologians have said we might be better, in light of the cross of Christ especially, to think of God as the Most Moved Mover! This too captures an obviously crucial insight about God. The Bible I think urges us to combine these pictures so that we see a God who is the Sovereign and Faithful Creator who is free to act according to his own holy wishes and who does not change on a whim and upon whom all things depend for their existence and who at the same time is utterly and compassionately involved with his creation, caring for all that he has made, moved by our misery to acts of pity and mercy.
‘This “mercy” is nothing less than God’s gracious initiative that is the presupposition for his creating humanity as his covenant partner and for his continued relationship with humanity in spite of the repeated opposition of men and women to his purpose’ (Green, 104).
Fear of God is Basic
Significantly, coming right off the back of her acknowledgement of God as Holy Love we see that Mary fears God.
What do you think of when you hear the word ‘fear’ in general? What about in relation to God?
‘The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge’ (Proverbs 1:7).
‘The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight’ (Proverbs 9:10).
The Bible consistently tells us that fear of God is basic. Why?
First of all, ‘fear’ is simply the proper response to the Holy One, the Self-Existent or Eternal One (Yahweh), the great I AM, the Alpha and Omega, the incomparably Good and Just and Beautiful One. This ‘fear’ is the worshipful reverence and awe spoken of in Hebrews 12:28 as well as the honour spoken of in 1 Timothy 6:16. This ‘fear’ is enthroning God above all else in our hearts, submitting to him from our core, acknowledging our absolute limit in him, bowing the knee, taking off our shoes on the holy ground of his presence.
It is also acknowledging our absolute pleasure in him for this ‘fear’ is also our delight in him, our loyalty and love for him as we reverence him. Fear of God is to brook no rival to him in the affection of our hearts.
Thus to ‘fear God’ is not static and abstract but to live our lives before his face, as pilgrims heading to our true home in him, honouring him and bringing fame and glory to his holy name by our actions and our relationships with others. To fear the Lord results in respecting the environment he has placed us in, respecting one another made in his image, caring for one another’s needs, living in just and loving community.
The Bible teaches that all good and right attitudes and actions are grounded in the fear of God. And where fear of God is missing, these good human things are undermined (e.g. Rom. 3:13-18). To live any other way than holy is to spit on God’s character, to ignore him and his fierce goodness, to have ‘no fear of God before our eyes’. And it always results not only in irreverence but inhumanity.
Again, holiness and mercy and fear all have to do with how big and worthy of worship God is. Is our God worth the praise and adoration and submission?
God is Not a Generational Thing
At this point Mary’s song moves outward from herself to encompass all of us explicitly: ‘The corporate implications of God’s activity now come into full view—as if the camera, previously focused more narrowly on Mary, has suddenly been pulled back to reveal the company of all Israel of which she is a part. Similarly, there are small hints that Israel is itself part of the larger company of all humanity who is the object of God’s mercy’ (Green, 104).
Mary’s God is faithful: this holy, mighty, saving, involved God lavishes his mercy and compassion on those who fear him in every generation. He does not change. God is not a ‘generational’ thing: some generations ‘go’ for him and some don’t. He is ever present and always the same in his character, always blessing the humble throughout history. The generation before us may or may not have feared God. We may think ‘well God was fine for them but he doesn’t work for us’. Or we may think ‘they didn’t fear God and we’re left in a Godless spiritual wasteland’. Either way, do we, in our generation, fear God? (And that is of course the best way we can help the next generation do so.)
Mary’s song invites us to do so and experience his merciful steadfastness for ourselves, in our times and places and cultures and ways and families and communities.
The Divine Clown Brings Down the Proud
51-53
Mary’s God bears his strong arm to bring down the proud and lift up the humble: again, her God is mighty and active in this world. She here especially highlights how God humbles the proud (even those who are proud ‘secretly’ in their hearts), those who rely on their power, influence, and wealth instead of on God, who show their lack of fear of God in their contempt for the poor, weak, and marginalised. In sending Jesus through Mary of Nazareth, God bypassed centres of power and demonstrated his own real power in a devious and decentralised way!
Mary’s God is the Ironic Reverser: again, her God comedically turns things on their head and puts the first last and the last first. Her God is a sardonic and farcical and slapstick Divine Clown and Divine Trickster and Divine Joker. He is no respecter of persons, but brings in his justice at the expense of those who think highly of themselves and to the hilarious joy of those who are without prestige.
Here we see the Divine Warrior in action and by his actions we see what kind of Warrior he is: ‘oppression of people, pride, claims of power, wealth… it is against such opposing forces that God has, in Mary’s image, come to do war. But he has done so not out of obligation but out of his mercy’ (Green, 104).
So, where are you and I at in relation to all this? Are we Proud, Strong, Rich, Enthroned? Or are we Humble, Weak, Poor, and Hungry? Are we on a collision course with our Maker where we will become De-throned? (Which of course does not have to be the last word if we’ll repent and believe after God graciously but decisively humbles us.)
Faith’s Forward Vision
Mary is of course looking forward in faith to how the Messiah will eventually overthrow all human pretenders to the throne and rule in righteousness, ending all oppression. Because of what God has already done in fulfilling his messianic promises (her virgin conception), she considers the rest of what he will yet do to be a matter of past tense!
This is how we also should view biblical prophecy – on the basis of the monumental and miraculous promises that have already come to pass (Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection, Pentecost), we look forward with complete confidence to God’s fulfilment of the rest of his promises (Return of Jesus to Reign Forever, Final Resurrection and Judgment, New Heavens and New Earth Full of Righteousness).
The God Who Helps, The God Who Remembers
54-55
Mary’s God is the helper of his people who always keeps his promises: we are not alone, left to ourselves and our own resources. God is with us, alongside us, to help us, to aid us just as he promises in his word.
Mary’s God remembers: Of course, God knows all and so never needs to ‘remember’ something he’s ‘forgotten’, but the Bible takes time to speak ‘anthropomorphically’ like this (attributing human actions to God) so that we really relate to God interpersonally and not in some abstract way that we can’t relate to or enter into as human beings. God doesn’t forget us or the promises and plans he has for us and his world.
The God Who Keeps His Promises to Abraham
Mary’s God is the God of Abraham: this connection to Abraham is very important to Luke and keeps recurring. This whole scene of miraculous births of course echoes those of Sarah and Rebecca, the wives of Abraham and Isaac respectively. But here Mary acknowledges that God is the God who called Abraham and promised him that he would bless him and make him great and bless every ethnicity and ‘people group’ on earth through him (Genesis 12).
And he is the God who counted Abraham righteous solely on the basis of Abraham’s trusting faith in God to keep his promises (Genesis 15; Romans 4) – the same faith Mary and Elizabeth and Zechariah and Joseph were being called to exercise in their day and we are being called to exercise today.
That is our only righteousness, to trust God to provide salvation for us in ways we can’t provide it for ourselves. Indeed, this is a poem celebrating just that. Mary’s song is all about and totally centred on a Saving God who is mighty to rescue us from the consequences of sin: ‘the God who acts out of his own self-giving nature to embrace men and women in relationship. God remembers… and acts’ (Green, 105).
Is Our God Big Enough to Worship?
Is your soul magnifying the Lord at this point? Does he look at least a bit larger to you? These are things that have to be repeatedly contemplated. These theological truths do not sink in overnight. They enlarge our worship only as we are Scripturally soaked in them over a lifetime.
Lastly, see 1:65-66 – can this ‘fear’ come upon us as we hear of these things? Can our awe and reverence and honour and delight and submission grow from hearing the word about Jesus? Like these people we have to gossip about it! It’s juicy and newsworthy! And as we gossip we have to take all this we’re hearing and ‘lay it up in our hearts’ and wonder about it and quietly ask ‘what will these boys grow up to be then?’ For the Lord’s hand was with them.
Note that ‘heart’ = reason, imagination, emotions, will – so this is thoughtful, intelligent, rational, aesthetic, dramatic, inspiring, volitional, life-changing contemplation and wonder.
A revealing question we can ask ourselves: if God is real and he is moving in the person of Jesus, would I surrender and participate, repent of my self-sufficiency and believe in Jesus as my Saviour?
Works Cited:
Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke
Friday, November 12, 2010
Cousins, Mums to Be, and Embryonic Foreshadowing (Luke 1:39-45)
A Picture of Things to Come
This is where we learn that Zechariah is a ‘country priest’. (I find the simple phrase ‘hill country’ so evocative of their background.)
Here Luke narrates yet another strange and wonderful episode! And again he features the work of the Holy Spirit, this time in filling a woman of God and her unborn baby to ‘leap’ in response to the presence of their (unborn!) Lord.
Women who have been pregnant will no doubt feel this episode more fully than others. These divinely enabled pregnancies that have to run their due course again show us how the ‘natural’ processes take over quickly from the ‘supernatural’ miracle (as C. S. Lewis noted in his book Miracles).
The two unborn boys are already playing out their roles as Forerunner and Messiah: ‘Though the mothers of John and Jesus meet, the account is portrayed as a meeting of the two children, since John reacts to the meeting as Elizabeth makes clear. In fact, John’s reaction anticipates and mirrors the forerunner role that he will have in Luke 3’ (Bock, 43).
(See Gen. 25:22-26 for an interesting comparison and contrast.)
‘Blessed’ in v. 42 anticipates Mary’s thoughts in v. 48. And the reason for Elizabeth’s otherwise seemingly strange and abrupt pronouncement is seen in the way she newly identifies here little cousin: ‘the mother of my Lord’!
Elizabeth: An Amazed Saint
Again, ‘joy’ is characteristic of this story along with wonder.
Like Mary, Elizabeth too is a model believer for us, someone whose response and joy and faith and humility and obedience we should study and copy. Because of the Holy Spirit, Elizabeth ‘expresses the mind of God. This sign sets the mood for the passage. The basic response to the arrival of Jesus onto the scene of history should be joy. Elizabeth is exemplary in her response. She is an “amazed saint”… Here is humble amazement at being able to participate directly in God’s plan and see him at work (2 Sam. 6:9; 24:21). All who have a role in God’s plan should share this wonder… The attitude of Elizabeth is representative of what Luke desires in any believer. What a joy to share in the events associated with Jesus. What a joy to share life with him’ (Bock, 43-44).
The Blessing of Believing, Touched by God
Elizabeth’s Spirit-filled response also further shows us the story and character of Mary. Through Elizabeth’s obedient, joyful words God encourages Mary that she has taken the right action in submitting to his will, that there is beauty and blessing for her in placing herself at his disposal. This is a way of happiness that no amount of self-centred, self-seeking, self-preserving behaviour can attain.
The blessing of believing: ‘To be blessed is to be happy because God has touched one’s life. Such divine benefit rains down on those who trust him and his promises. Blessing emerges from God’s ability to bring his promises to completion, but to share the benefits, we must be confident that God does what he says… Theophilus and readers like him should not doubt, but rejoice and be assured that God keeps his promises. Trust and joy are two vital aspects of a successful walk with God’ (Bock, 44).
This lovely, simple, homely picture of a few believers met together in home and hearth sharing quietly but exuberantly in the wonder and glory God’s amazing grace as his gospel unfolds can be a picture of what we might glimpse in our own lives together as Christ’s church as we find ourselves miraculously and graciously caught up in the plans and purposes of his kingdom. Our part is simply to trust, love, and obey, encouraging each other with blessings pronounced on one another’s faith and obedience, mutually rejoicing in God’s love and power.
Works Cited:
Darrell Bock (1994), Luke, IVP
This is where we learn that Zechariah is a ‘country priest’. (I find the simple phrase ‘hill country’ so evocative of their background.)
Here Luke narrates yet another strange and wonderful episode! And again he features the work of the Holy Spirit, this time in filling a woman of God and her unborn baby to ‘leap’ in response to the presence of their (unborn!) Lord.
Women who have been pregnant will no doubt feel this episode more fully than others. These divinely enabled pregnancies that have to run their due course again show us how the ‘natural’ processes take over quickly from the ‘supernatural’ miracle (as C. S. Lewis noted in his book Miracles).
The two unborn boys are already playing out their roles as Forerunner and Messiah: ‘Though the mothers of John and Jesus meet, the account is portrayed as a meeting of the two children, since John reacts to the meeting as Elizabeth makes clear. In fact, John’s reaction anticipates and mirrors the forerunner role that he will have in Luke 3’ (Bock, 43).
(See Gen. 25:22-26 for an interesting comparison and contrast.)
‘Blessed’ in v. 42 anticipates Mary’s thoughts in v. 48. And the reason for Elizabeth’s otherwise seemingly strange and abrupt pronouncement is seen in the way she newly identifies here little cousin: ‘the mother of my Lord’!
Elizabeth: An Amazed Saint
Again, ‘joy’ is characteristic of this story along with wonder.
Like Mary, Elizabeth too is a model believer for us, someone whose response and joy and faith and humility and obedience we should study and copy. Because of the Holy Spirit, Elizabeth ‘expresses the mind of God. This sign sets the mood for the passage. The basic response to the arrival of Jesus onto the scene of history should be joy. Elizabeth is exemplary in her response. She is an “amazed saint”… Here is humble amazement at being able to participate directly in God’s plan and see him at work (2 Sam. 6:9; 24:21). All who have a role in God’s plan should share this wonder… The attitude of Elizabeth is representative of what Luke desires in any believer. What a joy to share in the events associated with Jesus. What a joy to share life with him’ (Bock, 43-44).
The Blessing of Believing, Touched by God
Elizabeth’s Spirit-filled response also further shows us the story and character of Mary. Through Elizabeth’s obedient, joyful words God encourages Mary that she has taken the right action in submitting to his will, that there is beauty and blessing for her in placing herself at his disposal. This is a way of happiness that no amount of self-centred, self-seeking, self-preserving behaviour can attain.
The blessing of believing: ‘To be blessed is to be happy because God has touched one’s life. Such divine benefit rains down on those who trust him and his promises. Blessing emerges from God’s ability to bring his promises to completion, but to share the benefits, we must be confident that God does what he says… Theophilus and readers like him should not doubt, but rejoice and be assured that God keeps his promises. Trust and joy are two vital aspects of a successful walk with God’ (Bock, 44).
This lovely, simple, homely picture of a few believers met together in home and hearth sharing quietly but exuberantly in the wonder and glory God’s amazing grace as his gospel unfolds can be a picture of what we might glimpse in our own lives together as Christ’s church as we find ourselves miraculously and graciously caught up in the plans and purposes of his kingdom. Our part is simply to trust, love, and obey, encouraging each other with blessings pronounced on one another’s faith and obedience, mutually rejoicing in God’s love and power.
Works Cited:
Darrell Bock (1994), Luke, IVP
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
‘May the Baby Jesus Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Mind’ (Luke 1:26-38, Sunday 31st October 2010)
For some inexplicable reason this phrase (‘May the baby Jesus shut your mouth and open your mind’) is emblazoned across the album art inside the first LP release of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Safe As Milk (1967). Whatever the good Captain meant by it, it is a very amusingly appropriate sentiment for the birth narratives of Jesus Christ. In fact, I think we should have Christmas greeting cards with this phrase! We need to be woken up out of our pragmatic slumbers and recapture the wonder of this earth-shattering Annunciation and Visitation!
In the previous passage of Luke’s Gospel we heard of an impossible birth foretold. In this passage we hear of an even ‘more impossible’ birth foretold!
26-27
God’s Initiative
Note the skilful parallelism between this birth-announcement narrative and the one previous: ‘The one account recalls and interprets the other… these scenes and especially these sons function together within the one purpose of God. Behind both chains of events thus set in motion, stands God, present via his messenger and the unveiling of his aim.’ (Green, 83-84, italics his)
It is again God who takes the initiative: he is always ahead of us, rushing to meet us long before we’ve thought to seek him.
More Theo-Comedy: Pomp vs. Obscurity
Observe again the theo-comic awe of this scene, from the throne room of God right down to a small town or village; from a supernatural high-ranking angelic being down to a poor, young girl.
Furthermore, this second ‘annunciation’ takes place not at the centre of the Jewish world, the Temple, but at ‘Nazareth in Galilee—insignificant, despised, unclean’ (Green, 84). If we expect an angelic visitation at all, we might expect it at the Temple, but not out in these outskirts!
‘Had we designed these events, pomp and circumstance probably would have attended the announcement and birth of Jesus, but God chose to use an average young woman and to announce his intentions in quiet obscurity. The fulfilment of God’s promise came to earth in an unadorned package of human innocence, without any pomp, far away from any palace. The promised one entered human life as he still seeks to meet it: at the level of everyday experience with everyday people.’ (Bock, 39; bold emphasis mine)
(Again, Luke names small-time, seemingly insignificant characters that history would have no other reason to know of. It reminds us that God knows us and calls us by name: see Ex. 33:17; Is. 43:1)
Christmas Mystery
We see a consistent meeting of supernatural and natural in Luke’s opening chapters – which creates a lovely and realistic-mysterious context for the Christmas season! Like the lights already going up, we’re starting early too!
Again, note Gabriel’s connection to the prophecies of Daniel and thus the ‘eschatologically charged’ atmosphere here. Luke also very briefly but carefully notes that Joseph is in the Messianic line.
28
The Grace-Greeting
The word ‘favoured’ again points us to God’s grace. We aren’t told of anything about Mary that shows she deserves to be so favoured by God through some merit of her own achievement.
‘“Favored one,” then, functions as a name for Mary, designating her as the object of divine benefaction. This reality is accented and clarified by its repetition in v 30, then celebrated (with rejoicing!—v 47) by Mary in v 48. God has given his favor to one who had no claim to worthy status, raised her up from a position of lowliness, and has chosen her to have a central role in salvation history.’ (Green, 87, emphasis his)
Divine ‘With-ness’
‘The Lord is with you’ is a phrase that signifies God’s nearness to us and involvement in our human predicament. This language is ultimately fulfilled in the Incarnation (Immanuel, ‘God with us’, Matthew 1:23).
We cannot think of God as far off and aloof and be thinking of the Biblical God. ‘The Lord is with you’ is the consistent language of the Bible to describe God’s relation to us by his grace.
Also, ‘this language is often used in the OT with reference to a person chosen by God for a special purpose in salvation history; in such contexts this phrase assures human agents of divine resources and protection.’ (Green, 87)
God consistently promised ‘I will be with you’ to the people he called to serve him: e.g. Gen. 26:24 (Abraham); 28:15 (Jacob); Ex. 3:12 (Moses); Jer. 1:8 (Jeremiah); Acts 18:9-10 (Paul). Also, see Matt. 28:18 (the disciples—i.e. us!).
As and when God calls you to serve him, to participate in his purposes, he is in that very moment also promising to be with you to empower you to do his will. He never ‘sends us off’ somewhere to report back to him later. He goes with us into his mission in the world.
29
Responding to God with Heart & Head
The words ‘greatly troubled’ or ‘much perplexed’ show again that for Mary in her humility this is completely unexpected! She’s thinking, ‘What?! Why me of all people?’
Mary knows this is a gracious, undeserved (and thus unprecedented!) visitation. She doesn’t think ‘of course God wants to send a top man down to give me a special message!’ Quite the opposite: she can’t really understand at all why God would want to visit her in this way. She’s baffled and a maybe a little flustered.
And in the words ‘tried to discern’ or ‘pondered’ we see Mary is a thinker! (A deep young lady!)
Here we have a believer responding to God’s revelation with both emotion and contemplation—heart and head (which should be our reaction to God’s word, the gospel, too).
30
Again, we see the consistent ‘don’t be afraid’ in angelic greetings. And Gabriel reiterates GRACE (‘you have found favour with God’).
31-33
The Name and Nature of this promised Child:
‘Jesus’ (or Joshua or Yeshua) means ‘Yahweh saves’.
Luke shows that this Child’s ‘greatness’ is infinitely greater than John’s. ‘Both are important in the realization of God’s redemptive will, but Jesus is primary.’ (Green, 84)
‘Son of the Most High’, ‘throne of David’, and the never-ending, everlasting ‘reign’ and ‘kingdom’ are all Messianic references, echoing Scriptures like 2 Samuel 7:13-14, Psalm 2:6-8, and Psalm 89: 20, 26-27.
34-37
God as Outlaw
‘According to Luke’s Gospel, God purposes to bring salvation in all of its fullness to all persons. But, as becomes immediately clear already in the birth narrative of Luke 1-2, this is not an aim that will be reached easily or without resistance. It requires the affirmative and committed responses of people like Elizabeth, Mary, Simeon, Anna, and others (both in the narrative and outside of it), for God’s aim necessarily involves the collusion of human actors’ (Green, The Theology of the Gospel of Luke, 24).
I love that choice of the word ‘collusion’ here to describe God involving us in his purposes. It sounds dodgy and shady, like God’s doing something illegal and offering to let us in on it if we want a cut of the action! And, indeed, he is being ‘devious’ to the prideful authorities and powers that set themselves up in opposition to him. God is the Outlaw in this scenario, undermining and taking out corrupt human ‘lawmen’.
Mary’s Deep-Thinking Faith
So, in God’s ‘collusion’ with human actors that we’ve seen so far, what’s the difference between Mary’s questioning of the miracle and Zechariah’s?
‘Zechariah responds… with hesitation and unbelief. Mary, on the other hand, though she is only a young girl, embraces God’s plan, proclaiming herself as God’s servant.’ (Green, 84)
Zechariah requests a sign (‘How will I know?’) and Mary requests an explanation (‘How can this be?’): ‘a request for information, not proof’ (Wright, 12).
‘Although Mary’s role in the realization of God’s salvific will is crucial, the initiative and powerful work of God are much more so. Ultimately, the purpose of Mary’s question… is to emphasize that all of this is God’s doing.’ (Green, 89)
We may think that faith never questions or ponders or thinks through anything, but that to be authentic and pleasing to God it has to be rather naïve. But Mary here is an example of how ‘faith seeking understanding’ (as old philosophical theologians put it) actually helps to show God’s grace and power, to make it all the more clear that these things are of God and not of us. And so through this deep-thinking form of trust, Mary’s faith (and ours) actually grows deeper and surer than it would have without her thoughtfulness.
Mary is Not Left Alone in the Decision to Believe God
‘Mary’s faith is put on the line at the start. Will she believe that God has the capacity to create life within her? God does not leave her alone in the decision’ (Bock, 42).
God does not leave her alone in the decision. That is so crucial to see. God demands great faith of us, yes, to trust him for the humanly impossible. But even that trust in him is something he comes to our aid to enable us to respond to him with.
A Piece of Practical Evidence
Here Mary is given reassurance first in the form of practical evidence: another miracle in the life of someone she knows, her cousin Elizabeth. Notice how the fact that they are relatives is only just now revealed to us by Luke’s fine storytelling craftsmanship!
Connecting the Dots of Her Worldview
Secondly, God helps Mary’s faith to understand in the form of a theological-philosophical-personal word of reassurance. This comes in the form of the logically necessary and persuasive proposition: ‘If God, then all things are possible’ (see also Genesis 18:14).
This simple and elegant piece of reasoning reminds her of what she already knows (but hardly dares believe!) and helps her connect the dots of her worldview personally and intellectually. Gabriel gives ‘affirmation of the infinite possibilities with God… highlighted all the more by Gabriel’s denial of the impotency of any word of God’ (Green, 92).
Open to Omnipotence
Does this provoke and challenge our own worldviews? Do we need to connect up the dots of our worldview also? Do we need to see that what we say we believe (e.g. God is Creator and Redeemer of the world) entails other important truths (e.g. that God can reach into the world he made and work humanly impossible miracles)? Are we limiting God and the possibilities of what he can do?
I’m reminded of the famous philosopher, Antony Flew, who recently recanted his atheism and became a theist (though not a Christian). He entitles one of the chapters in his new book ‘Open to Omnipotence’. He realises the logic of his new worldview position. If there’s a Creator at all, then he’s powerful enough to reach into history and do whatever he wants to! For the seeker, it’s now a matter of recognising whether, where, and when he has done so!
I can’t help but note that as a student of philosophy I find Gabriel’s statement rationally impeccable! Sceptics often sound as if a ‘virgin conception’ is the thing that is so ludicrous, when in fact all they’re saying is that their worldview is atheistic and thus doesn’t allow for God creatively working in his creation in new and unique and surprising ways. But they have to disprove God to disprove this miracle (as a miracle). If the existence of the classically theistic (more specifically the Judaeo-Christian) God is granted, then the possibility (and indeed likelihood, given the truth of the O.T.) of a virgin birth is only to be epistemically expected.
It’s not that Gabriel’s declaration proves something. It just keeps things rationally consistent and sets the stakes thrillingly high. ‘If God, then all things are possible to him.’
Not a Tame Lion
If we can accept the Incarnation at all, then the Virgin Birth should look like a piece of cake after that!
So there’s just no getting round the ‘outside the box’, mind-boggling, divine mystery of the gospel! It’s just not every going to be humanly containable, take it or leave it. Just as they say of Aslan in Narnia: ‘He’s not a tame lion.’
Indeed, a number of philosophers and thinkers have found the ‘impossibility’ of the literal, historical Incarnation to be just the thing that helps them believe Christianity is true. It’s too outrageous a claim for a human religious system to just invent and maintain with such persistence and consistency. If God were to actually reach into our history to save us by his power, we surely must (in a paradox) expect it to look beyond all human expectation—and to be beyond all human comprehension, to be a profound and shattering Mystery. Otherwise it just looks like we’re making it up! God’s not going to ‘come down here’ and do something all sweet and safe and tidy and neat and cosy and digestible. No! He’s going to do something God-like to save us! (Of course!)
Historically Speaking
On a less philosophical and more historical note, it’s worth mentioning that the Virgin Birth was always scandalous, even to the early church, and thus not likely to be something they would just ‘make up’:
‘The ancient world didn’t know about X chromosomes and Y chromosomes, but they knew as well as we do that babies were the result of sexual intercourse, and that people who claimed to be pregnant by other means might well be covering up a moral and social offence. Yet Mary’s story is told by both Luke and Matthew, in versions so different that they can hardly be dependent on one another; in other words, the story seems to have been widely known in the very early church, rather than being a fantasy invented several generations after the fact. Why would these two writers, and devout Jewish Christian congregations that passed on such stories, have done so, giving hostages to fortune in this way, unless they had good reason to suppose they were true?’ (Wright, 9-10)
The Questions are Profound
‘Is God’s power such that he can create life and exercise sovereignty over it? This is a question Jesus’ birth should raise. Would people believe the claims surrounding Jesus? The questions are profound. Wonderful things come in surprising packages, but they can come, because God has the power to deliver them’ (Bock, 43).
How might Gabriel’s reassurance of God’s transcendent-immanent power and goodness and faithfulness (self-consistency) come home to us in our lives right now? (We should certainly first and foremost be reassured that whatever God promises in his word is not only eminently possible but also will in fact come to pass. Then we can also think about how he’s speaking into our day to day lives by his Word and Spirit about our specific life path right now.)
The Son of the Most High is Really and Truly a Human
Do note that ‘Luke has no thought that this might make Jesus somehow less than fully human.’ (Wright, 10) When we talk about the Son of God being born of a woman, we are not talking about some divine being in a human disguise—we are talking literally about God the Son supernaturally and divinely humbling himself to a measure we cannot fathom and actually being born as a fully human baby to grow to be a fully human man just like anyone else would.
Oh the Mystery and Magic and Myth of the true, historical story of Christmas!
Under the Dark Wings of the Holy Spirit
Again, we have the person and activity of the Holy Spirit (so in this passage we have ‘christology’ and ‘pneumatology’ mingled). Notice the Spirit’s ‘with-ness’ and power as the Paraclete (the Counsellor-Comforter who ‘comes alongside’ in John 15-16). This also relates to the very first appearance of the Spirit in Gen. 1:2 – pictured as a mother bird brooding, which is where later biblical imagery of being sheltered under God’s ‘wing’ is derived. And all this connects to Gabriel’s word-picture of how the Holy Spirit will ‘overshadow’ Mary (see also Luke 9:34; and compare Exodus 40:35).
Furthermore: ‘The Holy Spirit is identified with God’s power in a way that anticipates Acts 1:8.’ (Green, 90)
So even though this isn’t the Temple, a holy, glorious manifestation of God’s hovering presence is promised!
‘God’s creative overshadowing power’ (Bock, 42) – a mysterious but philosophically sound reassurance. ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon Mary, enabling her (as the Spirit always does) to do and be more than she could by herself. But at the same time “the power of the Most High” will overshadow her. This is something different: God himself, the creator, will surround her completely with his sovereign power.’ (Wright, 10)
We are in the midst of a mystery of mysteries here and our cleverest response is probably to bow and worship and receive the Lord’s presence and power through his word by the Spirit in the measure he lovingly and sovereignly gives us.
Just ‘a’ son of God? Lingering Possibilities
The ‘holy’ ‘Son of God’—Israel’s king had always been given the honorific title of ‘son of God’ but in vv. 32-33 the kingly sonship is taken an infinite step further: ‘This birth would be the first step in bringing the promise to David to its permanent, ultimate fulfilment. This long-held Father-son relationship was to reach unique heights in Jesus’ (Bock, 41).
‘As with a good deal of New Testament language about Jesus, this is both a huge theological claim (Jesus is somehow identified with God in a unique way which people then and now find hard to grasp and believe) and a huge political claim (Jesus is the true ruler of the world in a way which leaves Caesar, and the powers of the world today, a long way behind).’ (Wright, 11-12)
This is quite a huge claim in the mouth of a supernatural heavenly messenger. But the action will be homely and grassroots once again after this, leaving these promises and possibilities lingering in our hearts and minds just as they were lingering in the hearts and minds of these very regular people. We still need to ‘taste and see’ the truth and goodness of these claims for ourselves through a process of discovery.
‘Earth Up’ vs. ‘Heaven Down’: how most people meet Jesus today
Mary ‘did not understand the angel’s promise to be a declaration of Jesus’ ontological deity… the full implications of these statements will not be realized for some time. Luke chooses to present Jesus form the “earth up”—that is, showing how, one step at a time, people came to see who Jesus really was. He starts with Jesus as the promised king and teacher who reveals himself as Lord in the context of his ministry. Only slowly do people grasp all of what is promised.
‘This approach matches how most people today come to see who Jesus is. Drawing on two thousand years of theological reflection about Jesus, the church often tells the story from heaven down, but there is merit in Luke’s path. It is the path of people’s experience… Both approaches [e.g. John’s ‘heaven down’ and Luke’s ‘earth up’] are true; they are just different ways to consider the person of Christ. The church has tended to emphasize John’s approach, because it is the full story, but there also is value in unfolding the story gradually as Luke does.’ (Bock, 42)
A sense of appropriateness, hard to define, easy to recognise
‘Of course, no one is likely to be convinced of Luke’s story who isn’t already in some sense open to the possibility that Jesus, though certainly a fully human being, was also the one in whom Israel’s God had made his personal appearance on the stage of history. [Paul, of course, focuses exclusively on Jesus’ death and resurrection, never mentioning the virgin birth.] But to those who have come to some kind of faith in the crucified and risen Jesus, whose minds are thus opened to God being uniquely present to him, there is a sense of appropriateness, hard to define, easy to recognize, about the story Luke and Matthew tell. It isn’t what we would have expected, but it somehow rings true.’ (Wright, 11)
The Challenge of the Child
‘Put all this together – the conception of a baby, the power of God, and the challenge to all human empires – and we can see why the story is so explosive. Perhaps that’s one reason why it’s so controversial. Perhaps some of the fuss and bother about whether Mary could have conceived Jesus without a human father is because, deep down, we don’t want to think that there might be a king who could claim this sort of absolute allegiance?’ (Wright, 12)
38
Mary as a Model for Believers
Study Mary’s response! Study and emulate her attitude and action! She is a great hero(ine) of the faith. (And remember her young age! Even ‘teenagers’ can hear and respond to and be used by God.)
Note: ‘It’s important to stress that the story says nothing about Mary remaining a virgin after Jesus’ birth. That’s a much later idea.’ (Wright, 10)
In the phrases ‘Here am I’ and ‘the servant of the Lord’ and ‘let it be to me according to your word’ we see how Mary finds her identity in God: that is, she is who she is in virtue of her humility, obedience, trust, belief, and hope in God.
She gladly abandons herself to God no matter the personal cost:
‘She unreservedly embraces the purpose of God, without regard to its cost to her personally. Her response is exemplary, demonstrating how all Israel ought to respond to God’s favor’ (Green, 92): ‘she says the words which have rung down the years as a model of the human response to God’s unexpected vocation’ (Wright, 12).
Luke paints Mary as a simple, humble believer who is thoughtful, open, obedient, trusting, worshipful, and faithful—BY THE GRACE OF GOD!
A Matter of Love, Doing the Otherwise Unthinkable
‘We aren’t talking about a pagan god intervening roughly and inappropriately in the affairs of mortals, but about the one who, as St Augustine said, made us for himself. When he takes the initiative, it is always a matter of love, love which will care for us and take us up into his saving purposes. Mary is, to that extent, the supreme example of what always happens when God is at work by grace through human beings. God’s power from outside, and the indwelling Spirit within, together result in things being done which would have been unthinkable any other way.’ (Wright, 11)
Luke’s narrative so far prompts us to ask: how will we respond? Like Zechariah or Mary? Of course, both are faithful in the long run! Will we take the long or short route?
This story is intentionally and inherently about far more than these few individuals: it is about all Israel at that time and subsequently about all people throughout time and whether they will be in ‘collusion’ with God or not: ‘the real needs here are not of Mary or even of Zechariah and Elizabeth. Israel is estranged from God, under alien rule, oppressed. God’s covenant with his people has not been realized fully. Hence, God is intervening in human history to bring forth an everlasting kingdom. In doing so, he solicits and embraces the partnership of Zechariah and Elizabeth, and Mary—themselves Israelites and representative in their own ways of the people of Israel.’ (Green, 84)
Works Cited:
Darrell Bock, Luke
Joel Green, The Gospel of Luke
Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone
In the previous passage of Luke’s Gospel we heard of an impossible birth foretold. In this passage we hear of an even ‘more impossible’ birth foretold!
26-27
God’s Initiative
Note the skilful parallelism between this birth-announcement narrative and the one previous: ‘The one account recalls and interprets the other… these scenes and especially these sons function together within the one purpose of God. Behind both chains of events thus set in motion, stands God, present via his messenger and the unveiling of his aim.’ (Green, 83-84, italics his)
It is again God who takes the initiative: he is always ahead of us, rushing to meet us long before we’ve thought to seek him.
More Theo-Comedy: Pomp vs. Obscurity
Observe again the theo-comic awe of this scene, from the throne room of God right down to a small town or village; from a supernatural high-ranking angelic being down to a poor, young girl.
Furthermore, this second ‘annunciation’ takes place not at the centre of the Jewish world, the Temple, but at ‘Nazareth in Galilee—insignificant, despised, unclean’ (Green, 84). If we expect an angelic visitation at all, we might expect it at the Temple, but not out in these outskirts!
‘Had we designed these events, pomp and circumstance probably would have attended the announcement and birth of Jesus, but God chose to use an average young woman and to announce his intentions in quiet obscurity. The fulfilment of God’s promise came to earth in an unadorned package of human innocence, without any pomp, far away from any palace. The promised one entered human life as he still seeks to meet it: at the level of everyday experience with everyday people.’ (Bock, 39; bold emphasis mine)
(Again, Luke names small-time, seemingly insignificant characters that history would have no other reason to know of. It reminds us that God knows us and calls us by name: see Ex. 33:17; Is. 43:1)
Christmas Mystery
We see a consistent meeting of supernatural and natural in Luke’s opening chapters – which creates a lovely and realistic-mysterious context for the Christmas season! Like the lights already going up, we’re starting early too!
Again, note Gabriel’s connection to the prophecies of Daniel and thus the ‘eschatologically charged’ atmosphere here. Luke also very briefly but carefully notes that Joseph is in the Messianic line.
28
The Grace-Greeting
The word ‘favoured’ again points us to God’s grace. We aren’t told of anything about Mary that shows she deserves to be so favoured by God through some merit of her own achievement.
‘“Favored one,” then, functions as a name for Mary, designating her as the object of divine benefaction. This reality is accented and clarified by its repetition in v 30, then celebrated (with rejoicing!—v 47) by Mary in v 48. God has given his favor to one who had no claim to worthy status, raised her up from a position of lowliness, and has chosen her to have a central role in salvation history.’ (Green, 87, emphasis his)
Divine ‘With-ness’
‘The Lord is with you’ is a phrase that signifies God’s nearness to us and involvement in our human predicament. This language is ultimately fulfilled in the Incarnation (Immanuel, ‘God with us’, Matthew 1:23).
We cannot think of God as far off and aloof and be thinking of the Biblical God. ‘The Lord is with you’ is the consistent language of the Bible to describe God’s relation to us by his grace.
Also, ‘this language is often used in the OT with reference to a person chosen by God for a special purpose in salvation history; in such contexts this phrase assures human agents of divine resources and protection.’ (Green, 87)
God consistently promised ‘I will be with you’ to the people he called to serve him: e.g. Gen. 26:24 (Abraham); 28:15 (Jacob); Ex. 3:12 (Moses); Jer. 1:8 (Jeremiah); Acts 18:9-10 (Paul). Also, see Matt. 28:18 (the disciples—i.e. us!).
As and when God calls you to serve him, to participate in his purposes, he is in that very moment also promising to be with you to empower you to do his will. He never ‘sends us off’ somewhere to report back to him later. He goes with us into his mission in the world.
29
Responding to God with Heart & Head
The words ‘greatly troubled’ or ‘much perplexed’ show again that for Mary in her humility this is completely unexpected! She’s thinking, ‘What?! Why me of all people?’
Mary knows this is a gracious, undeserved (and thus unprecedented!) visitation. She doesn’t think ‘of course God wants to send a top man down to give me a special message!’ Quite the opposite: she can’t really understand at all why God would want to visit her in this way. She’s baffled and a maybe a little flustered.
And in the words ‘tried to discern’ or ‘pondered’ we see Mary is a thinker! (A deep young lady!)
Here we have a believer responding to God’s revelation with both emotion and contemplation—heart and head (which should be our reaction to God’s word, the gospel, too).
30
Again, we see the consistent ‘don’t be afraid’ in angelic greetings. And Gabriel reiterates GRACE (‘you have found favour with God’).
31-33
The Name and Nature of this promised Child:
‘Jesus’ (or Joshua or Yeshua) means ‘Yahweh saves’.
Luke shows that this Child’s ‘greatness’ is infinitely greater than John’s. ‘Both are important in the realization of God’s redemptive will, but Jesus is primary.’ (Green, 84)
‘Son of the Most High’, ‘throne of David’, and the never-ending, everlasting ‘reign’ and ‘kingdom’ are all Messianic references, echoing Scriptures like 2 Samuel 7:13-14, Psalm 2:6-8, and Psalm 89: 20, 26-27.
34-37
God as Outlaw
‘According to Luke’s Gospel, God purposes to bring salvation in all of its fullness to all persons. But, as becomes immediately clear already in the birth narrative of Luke 1-2, this is not an aim that will be reached easily or without resistance. It requires the affirmative and committed responses of people like Elizabeth, Mary, Simeon, Anna, and others (both in the narrative and outside of it), for God’s aim necessarily involves the collusion of human actors’ (Green, The Theology of the Gospel of Luke, 24).
I love that choice of the word ‘collusion’ here to describe God involving us in his purposes. It sounds dodgy and shady, like God’s doing something illegal and offering to let us in on it if we want a cut of the action! And, indeed, he is being ‘devious’ to the prideful authorities and powers that set themselves up in opposition to him. God is the Outlaw in this scenario, undermining and taking out corrupt human ‘lawmen’.
Mary’s Deep-Thinking Faith
So, in God’s ‘collusion’ with human actors that we’ve seen so far, what’s the difference between Mary’s questioning of the miracle and Zechariah’s?
‘Zechariah responds… with hesitation and unbelief. Mary, on the other hand, though she is only a young girl, embraces God’s plan, proclaiming herself as God’s servant.’ (Green, 84)
Zechariah requests a sign (‘How will I know?’) and Mary requests an explanation (‘How can this be?’): ‘a request for information, not proof’ (Wright, 12).
‘Although Mary’s role in the realization of God’s salvific will is crucial, the initiative and powerful work of God are much more so. Ultimately, the purpose of Mary’s question… is to emphasize that all of this is God’s doing.’ (Green, 89)
We may think that faith never questions or ponders or thinks through anything, but that to be authentic and pleasing to God it has to be rather naïve. But Mary here is an example of how ‘faith seeking understanding’ (as old philosophical theologians put it) actually helps to show God’s grace and power, to make it all the more clear that these things are of God and not of us. And so through this deep-thinking form of trust, Mary’s faith (and ours) actually grows deeper and surer than it would have without her thoughtfulness.
Mary is Not Left Alone in the Decision to Believe God
‘Mary’s faith is put on the line at the start. Will she believe that God has the capacity to create life within her? God does not leave her alone in the decision’ (Bock, 42).
God does not leave her alone in the decision. That is so crucial to see. God demands great faith of us, yes, to trust him for the humanly impossible. But even that trust in him is something he comes to our aid to enable us to respond to him with.
A Piece of Practical Evidence
Here Mary is given reassurance first in the form of practical evidence: another miracle in the life of someone she knows, her cousin Elizabeth. Notice how the fact that they are relatives is only just now revealed to us by Luke’s fine storytelling craftsmanship!
Connecting the Dots of Her Worldview
Secondly, God helps Mary’s faith to understand in the form of a theological-philosophical-personal word of reassurance. This comes in the form of the logically necessary and persuasive proposition: ‘If God, then all things are possible’ (see also Genesis 18:14).
This simple and elegant piece of reasoning reminds her of what she already knows (but hardly dares believe!) and helps her connect the dots of her worldview personally and intellectually. Gabriel gives ‘affirmation of the infinite possibilities with God… highlighted all the more by Gabriel’s denial of the impotency of any word of God’ (Green, 92).
Open to Omnipotence
Does this provoke and challenge our own worldviews? Do we need to connect up the dots of our worldview also? Do we need to see that what we say we believe (e.g. God is Creator and Redeemer of the world) entails other important truths (e.g. that God can reach into the world he made and work humanly impossible miracles)? Are we limiting God and the possibilities of what he can do?
I’m reminded of the famous philosopher, Antony Flew, who recently recanted his atheism and became a theist (though not a Christian). He entitles one of the chapters in his new book ‘Open to Omnipotence’. He realises the logic of his new worldview position. If there’s a Creator at all, then he’s powerful enough to reach into history and do whatever he wants to! For the seeker, it’s now a matter of recognising whether, where, and when he has done so!
I can’t help but note that as a student of philosophy I find Gabriel’s statement rationally impeccable! Sceptics often sound as if a ‘virgin conception’ is the thing that is so ludicrous, when in fact all they’re saying is that their worldview is atheistic and thus doesn’t allow for God creatively working in his creation in new and unique and surprising ways. But they have to disprove God to disprove this miracle (as a miracle). If the existence of the classically theistic (more specifically the Judaeo-Christian) God is granted, then the possibility (and indeed likelihood, given the truth of the O.T.) of a virgin birth is only to be epistemically expected.
It’s not that Gabriel’s declaration proves something. It just keeps things rationally consistent and sets the stakes thrillingly high. ‘If God, then all things are possible to him.’
Not a Tame Lion
If we can accept the Incarnation at all, then the Virgin Birth should look like a piece of cake after that!
So there’s just no getting round the ‘outside the box’, mind-boggling, divine mystery of the gospel! It’s just not every going to be humanly containable, take it or leave it. Just as they say of Aslan in Narnia: ‘He’s not a tame lion.’
Indeed, a number of philosophers and thinkers have found the ‘impossibility’ of the literal, historical Incarnation to be just the thing that helps them believe Christianity is true. It’s too outrageous a claim for a human religious system to just invent and maintain with such persistence and consistency. If God were to actually reach into our history to save us by his power, we surely must (in a paradox) expect it to look beyond all human expectation—and to be beyond all human comprehension, to be a profound and shattering Mystery. Otherwise it just looks like we’re making it up! God’s not going to ‘come down here’ and do something all sweet and safe and tidy and neat and cosy and digestible. No! He’s going to do something God-like to save us! (Of course!)
Historically Speaking
On a less philosophical and more historical note, it’s worth mentioning that the Virgin Birth was always scandalous, even to the early church, and thus not likely to be something they would just ‘make up’:
‘The ancient world didn’t know about X chromosomes and Y chromosomes, but they knew as well as we do that babies were the result of sexual intercourse, and that people who claimed to be pregnant by other means might well be covering up a moral and social offence. Yet Mary’s story is told by both Luke and Matthew, in versions so different that they can hardly be dependent on one another; in other words, the story seems to have been widely known in the very early church, rather than being a fantasy invented several generations after the fact. Why would these two writers, and devout Jewish Christian congregations that passed on such stories, have done so, giving hostages to fortune in this way, unless they had good reason to suppose they were true?’ (Wright, 9-10)
The Questions are Profound
‘Is God’s power such that he can create life and exercise sovereignty over it? This is a question Jesus’ birth should raise. Would people believe the claims surrounding Jesus? The questions are profound. Wonderful things come in surprising packages, but they can come, because God has the power to deliver them’ (Bock, 43).
How might Gabriel’s reassurance of God’s transcendent-immanent power and goodness and faithfulness (self-consistency) come home to us in our lives right now? (We should certainly first and foremost be reassured that whatever God promises in his word is not only eminently possible but also will in fact come to pass. Then we can also think about how he’s speaking into our day to day lives by his Word and Spirit about our specific life path right now.)
The Son of the Most High is Really and Truly a Human
Do note that ‘Luke has no thought that this might make Jesus somehow less than fully human.’ (Wright, 10) When we talk about the Son of God being born of a woman, we are not talking about some divine being in a human disguise—we are talking literally about God the Son supernaturally and divinely humbling himself to a measure we cannot fathom and actually being born as a fully human baby to grow to be a fully human man just like anyone else would.
Oh the Mystery and Magic and Myth of the true, historical story of Christmas!
Under the Dark Wings of the Holy Spirit
Again, we have the person and activity of the Holy Spirit (so in this passage we have ‘christology’ and ‘pneumatology’ mingled). Notice the Spirit’s ‘with-ness’ and power as the Paraclete (the Counsellor-Comforter who ‘comes alongside’ in John 15-16). This also relates to the very first appearance of the Spirit in Gen. 1:2 – pictured as a mother bird brooding, which is where later biblical imagery of being sheltered under God’s ‘wing’ is derived. And all this connects to Gabriel’s word-picture of how the Holy Spirit will ‘overshadow’ Mary (see also Luke 9:34; and compare Exodus 40:35).
Furthermore: ‘The Holy Spirit is identified with God’s power in a way that anticipates Acts 1:8.’ (Green, 90)
So even though this isn’t the Temple, a holy, glorious manifestation of God’s hovering presence is promised!
‘God’s creative overshadowing power’ (Bock, 42) – a mysterious but philosophically sound reassurance. ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon Mary, enabling her (as the Spirit always does) to do and be more than she could by herself. But at the same time “the power of the Most High” will overshadow her. This is something different: God himself, the creator, will surround her completely with his sovereign power.’ (Wright, 10)
We are in the midst of a mystery of mysteries here and our cleverest response is probably to bow and worship and receive the Lord’s presence and power through his word by the Spirit in the measure he lovingly and sovereignly gives us.
Just ‘a’ son of God? Lingering Possibilities
The ‘holy’ ‘Son of God’—Israel’s king had always been given the honorific title of ‘son of God’ but in vv. 32-33 the kingly sonship is taken an infinite step further: ‘This birth would be the first step in bringing the promise to David to its permanent, ultimate fulfilment. This long-held Father-son relationship was to reach unique heights in Jesus’ (Bock, 41).
‘As with a good deal of New Testament language about Jesus, this is both a huge theological claim (Jesus is somehow identified with God in a unique way which people then and now find hard to grasp and believe) and a huge political claim (Jesus is the true ruler of the world in a way which leaves Caesar, and the powers of the world today, a long way behind).’ (Wright, 11-12)
This is quite a huge claim in the mouth of a supernatural heavenly messenger. But the action will be homely and grassroots once again after this, leaving these promises and possibilities lingering in our hearts and minds just as they were lingering in the hearts and minds of these very regular people. We still need to ‘taste and see’ the truth and goodness of these claims for ourselves through a process of discovery.
‘Earth Up’ vs. ‘Heaven Down’: how most people meet Jesus today
Mary ‘did not understand the angel’s promise to be a declaration of Jesus’ ontological deity… the full implications of these statements will not be realized for some time. Luke chooses to present Jesus form the “earth up”—that is, showing how, one step at a time, people came to see who Jesus really was. He starts with Jesus as the promised king and teacher who reveals himself as Lord in the context of his ministry. Only slowly do people grasp all of what is promised.
‘This approach matches how most people today come to see who Jesus is. Drawing on two thousand years of theological reflection about Jesus, the church often tells the story from heaven down, but there is merit in Luke’s path. It is the path of people’s experience… Both approaches [e.g. John’s ‘heaven down’ and Luke’s ‘earth up’] are true; they are just different ways to consider the person of Christ. The church has tended to emphasize John’s approach, because it is the full story, but there also is value in unfolding the story gradually as Luke does.’ (Bock, 42)
A sense of appropriateness, hard to define, easy to recognise
‘Of course, no one is likely to be convinced of Luke’s story who isn’t already in some sense open to the possibility that Jesus, though certainly a fully human being, was also the one in whom Israel’s God had made his personal appearance on the stage of history. [Paul, of course, focuses exclusively on Jesus’ death and resurrection, never mentioning the virgin birth.] But to those who have come to some kind of faith in the crucified and risen Jesus, whose minds are thus opened to God being uniquely present to him, there is a sense of appropriateness, hard to define, easy to recognize, about the story Luke and Matthew tell. It isn’t what we would have expected, but it somehow rings true.’ (Wright, 11)
The Challenge of the Child
‘Put all this together – the conception of a baby, the power of God, and the challenge to all human empires – and we can see why the story is so explosive. Perhaps that’s one reason why it’s so controversial. Perhaps some of the fuss and bother about whether Mary could have conceived Jesus without a human father is because, deep down, we don’t want to think that there might be a king who could claim this sort of absolute allegiance?’ (Wright, 12)
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Mary as a Model for Believers
Study Mary’s response! Study and emulate her attitude and action! She is a great hero(ine) of the faith. (And remember her young age! Even ‘teenagers’ can hear and respond to and be used by God.)
Note: ‘It’s important to stress that the story says nothing about Mary remaining a virgin after Jesus’ birth. That’s a much later idea.’ (Wright, 10)
In the phrases ‘Here am I’ and ‘the servant of the Lord’ and ‘let it be to me according to your word’ we see how Mary finds her identity in God: that is, she is who she is in virtue of her humility, obedience, trust, belief, and hope in God.
She gladly abandons herself to God no matter the personal cost:
‘She unreservedly embraces the purpose of God, without regard to its cost to her personally. Her response is exemplary, demonstrating how all Israel ought to respond to God’s favor’ (Green, 92): ‘she says the words which have rung down the years as a model of the human response to God’s unexpected vocation’ (Wright, 12).
Luke paints Mary as a simple, humble believer who is thoughtful, open, obedient, trusting, worshipful, and faithful—BY THE GRACE OF GOD!
A Matter of Love, Doing the Otherwise Unthinkable
‘We aren’t talking about a pagan god intervening roughly and inappropriately in the affairs of mortals, but about the one who, as St Augustine said, made us for himself. When he takes the initiative, it is always a matter of love, love which will care for us and take us up into his saving purposes. Mary is, to that extent, the supreme example of what always happens when God is at work by grace through human beings. God’s power from outside, and the indwelling Spirit within, together result in things being done which would have been unthinkable any other way.’ (Wright, 11)
Luke’s narrative so far prompts us to ask: how will we respond? Like Zechariah or Mary? Of course, both are faithful in the long run! Will we take the long or short route?
This story is intentionally and inherently about far more than these few individuals: it is about all Israel at that time and subsequently about all people throughout time and whether they will be in ‘collusion’ with God or not: ‘the real needs here are not of Mary or even of Zechariah and Elizabeth. Israel is estranged from God, under alien rule, oppressed. God’s covenant with his people has not been realized fully. Hence, God is intervening in human history to bring forth an everlasting kingdom. In doing so, he solicits and embraces the partnership of Zechariah and Elizabeth, and Mary—themselves Israelites and representative in their own ways of the people of Israel.’ (Green, 84)
Works Cited:
Darrell Bock, Luke
Joel Green, The Gospel of Luke
Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Broken Ikons Rejoice! (A note from Luke 1 on sin, repentance, & faith)
Is the Bible Magic?
Luke’s stated aims and intentions at the beginning of his Gospel urge us to expect that we will receive reassurance about the truth, goodness, and beauty of the Christian faith from reading and pondering his account. But can we do this passively, expecting the mere mental exposure to his Gospel to ‘magically’ assure us? No. If we listen rightly to Luke’s narrative we will see that we are being drawn in, invited to participate, provoked to respond.
We are being called to use our minds, hearts, and wills to encounter God as he comes to us through this narrative. In so doing we will both ‘test’ the truth-claims of the Bible, and be tested by them.
The Grandeur of Sin
You see, the same Bible that is a window on the person of Jesus is also a mirror to our own souls. We are shown to be ‘sinners’ who in our heart of hearts are none to sure we really even want to meet Jesus!
Let’s be clear here that ‘sin’ is not first and foremost about all our little infractions of divine law such as lying and cheating and lusting and so forth. It is far more deep and devastating. Sin is the fundamental orientation of our hearts in choosing to rely on ourselves as our own kings and queens, gods and goddesses, rather than relying on our good Creator. Sin is our purposeful rejection of the one true God as the holy and sovereign and loving Lord of all and the self-appointed enthronement of ourselves in his place. Tragically and scarily we are usurpers to God’s rightful Kingship! Traitors! We are found guilty of the highest treason by the highest court.
We may not usually consciously think of sin this way. It may all sound a bit grandly dramatic! Well, yes, it is! That is actually part of the unspeakable honour and privilege God has given us in making us free and responsible agents in his image. The higher our status, the harder our fall! (Perhaps now we can begin to see why the Bible makes such a monumentally big deal of ‘sin’ and how it can be ‘paid for’ and ‘put right’.)
Longing and Loathing
So, being made in God’s image (ikon in New Testament Greek) and yet being fallen from the original state of that good image through sin (now a ‘broken ikon’), we find a struggle within us: we are simultaneously drawn and attracted to our good and glorious Source (because, as Augustine memorably put it: ‘You have made us for yourself, O God, and we are restless until we rest in Thee’) and at the same time repulsed and horrified by Him because of our state of rebellion and guilt.
We long for and loathe God at one and the same time! How do we break such an impasse? We don’t! We can’t. But our unfathomably gracious God can and does.
‘Power Tools’ Placed in Our Hands
Thus it is crucial for us to see that along with this invitation to respond to Jesus, we are also divinely supplied with the essential ‘tools’ we humanly need to respond and participate: they are placed right in our hands by the proclamation of the good news itself. That is, by God’s kind and wonderful grace when we sinners hear the good news about Jesus we are in that moment being empowered by the Spirit to overcome our spiritual stubbornness and respond to Jesus. As Jesus is presented to us throughout the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, Luke calls us again and again to, with the Spirit’s help, open our hands and grasp the response-tools God mercifully gifts to us: in one hand Repentance and in the other Faith.
Repentance: we turn (a word used often by Luke) away from our sinful self-reliance and toward Jesus as Lord and Saviour. It’s a reorientation of our lives, a re-centring: OFF of ourselves or any other idol (career, relationship, pleasure, achievement, beauty, etc.) and ONTO God; on his terms not ours. Total surrender.
Faith: we believe in Jesus, trust him, depend on him for his forgiveness of our sin and new life in his name because he has come at great cost to rescue us and provide this for us. We simply count on him to do what he came to do!
We stop trusting in ourselves and trust in God instead. We stop relying on ourselves and rely on God instead. We stop worshiping ourselves and worship God instead. We stop enthroning ourselves and enthrone God instead.
These are the God-given means by which we enter his kingdom and the eternal life he so graciously gives, by which we experience all his love and care for us and get busy with the meaningful, fulfilling, glorious purpose he has for our lives. (I don’t mean that last point in an individualistic ‘self-improvement’ or ‘self-actualisation’ sort of way – it’s far more shattering and profound and beautiful than that.)
Pilgrim’s Process
But all in good time! There’s no ‘sales close’ here: sign on the dotted line today or you may miss your chance forever! I trust that the Lord is graciously taking you on a journey and will lead you faithfully to your destination and neither I nor yourself nor anyone else needs to manipulate that process. We each simply have to do our best with God’s help to faithfully respond to the light he is giving us in this moment.
‘All the care Luke gives to the task, as noted in his preface, is designed to reassure Theophilus, who has been taught on such matters previously. Whatever pressure this believer is under, he should be confident that God has moved to fulfil his plan through Jesus. Luke is carefully building on precedent to tell anew the story of Jesus. Like a pastor comforting a believer under siege by the world, so Luke wishes to encourage his readers. Theophilus may well be asking, “Is Christianity what I believed it to be, a religion sent from God?” Whether it is internal doubt, persecution or racial tension with Jews that has caused this question to be raised, Luke invites his reader to consider the story of Jesus again and know that these indeed were events that have been fulfilled among us.’ (Darrell L. Bock, Luke, p. 33)
Luke’s stated aims and intentions at the beginning of his Gospel urge us to expect that we will receive reassurance about the truth, goodness, and beauty of the Christian faith from reading and pondering his account. But can we do this passively, expecting the mere mental exposure to his Gospel to ‘magically’ assure us? No. If we listen rightly to Luke’s narrative we will see that we are being drawn in, invited to participate, provoked to respond.
We are being called to use our minds, hearts, and wills to encounter God as he comes to us through this narrative. In so doing we will both ‘test’ the truth-claims of the Bible, and be tested by them.
The Grandeur of Sin
You see, the same Bible that is a window on the person of Jesus is also a mirror to our own souls. We are shown to be ‘sinners’ who in our heart of hearts are none to sure we really even want to meet Jesus!
Let’s be clear here that ‘sin’ is not first and foremost about all our little infractions of divine law such as lying and cheating and lusting and so forth. It is far more deep and devastating. Sin is the fundamental orientation of our hearts in choosing to rely on ourselves as our own kings and queens, gods and goddesses, rather than relying on our good Creator. Sin is our purposeful rejection of the one true God as the holy and sovereign and loving Lord of all and the self-appointed enthronement of ourselves in his place. Tragically and scarily we are usurpers to God’s rightful Kingship! Traitors! We are found guilty of the highest treason by the highest court.
We may not usually consciously think of sin this way. It may all sound a bit grandly dramatic! Well, yes, it is! That is actually part of the unspeakable honour and privilege God has given us in making us free and responsible agents in his image. The higher our status, the harder our fall! (Perhaps now we can begin to see why the Bible makes such a monumentally big deal of ‘sin’ and how it can be ‘paid for’ and ‘put right’.)
Longing and Loathing
So, being made in God’s image (ikon in New Testament Greek) and yet being fallen from the original state of that good image through sin (now a ‘broken ikon’), we find a struggle within us: we are simultaneously drawn and attracted to our good and glorious Source (because, as Augustine memorably put it: ‘You have made us for yourself, O God, and we are restless until we rest in Thee’) and at the same time repulsed and horrified by Him because of our state of rebellion and guilt.
We long for and loathe God at one and the same time! How do we break such an impasse? We don’t! We can’t. But our unfathomably gracious God can and does.
‘Power Tools’ Placed in Our Hands
Thus it is crucial for us to see that along with this invitation to respond to Jesus, we are also divinely supplied with the essential ‘tools’ we humanly need to respond and participate: they are placed right in our hands by the proclamation of the good news itself. That is, by God’s kind and wonderful grace when we sinners hear the good news about Jesus we are in that moment being empowered by the Spirit to overcome our spiritual stubbornness and respond to Jesus. As Jesus is presented to us throughout the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, Luke calls us again and again to, with the Spirit’s help, open our hands and grasp the response-tools God mercifully gifts to us: in one hand Repentance and in the other Faith.
Repentance: we turn (a word used often by Luke) away from our sinful self-reliance and toward Jesus as Lord and Saviour. It’s a reorientation of our lives, a re-centring: OFF of ourselves or any other idol (career, relationship, pleasure, achievement, beauty, etc.) and ONTO God; on his terms not ours. Total surrender.
Faith: we believe in Jesus, trust him, depend on him for his forgiveness of our sin and new life in his name because he has come at great cost to rescue us and provide this for us. We simply count on him to do what he came to do!
We stop trusting in ourselves and trust in God instead. We stop relying on ourselves and rely on God instead. We stop worshiping ourselves and worship God instead. We stop enthroning ourselves and enthrone God instead.
These are the God-given means by which we enter his kingdom and the eternal life he so graciously gives, by which we experience all his love and care for us and get busy with the meaningful, fulfilling, glorious purpose he has for our lives. (I don’t mean that last point in an individualistic ‘self-improvement’ or ‘self-actualisation’ sort of way – it’s far more shattering and profound and beautiful than that.)
Pilgrim’s ProcessBut all in good time! There’s no ‘sales close’ here: sign on the dotted line today or you may miss your chance forever! I trust that the Lord is graciously taking you on a journey and will lead you faithfully to your destination and neither I nor yourself nor anyone else needs to manipulate that process. We each simply have to do our best with God’s help to faithfully respond to the light he is giving us in this moment.
‘All the care Luke gives to the task, as noted in his preface, is designed to reassure Theophilus, who has been taught on such matters previously. Whatever pressure this believer is under, he should be confident that God has moved to fulfil his plan through Jesus. Luke is carefully building on precedent to tell anew the story of Jesus. Like a pastor comforting a believer under siege by the world, so Luke wishes to encourage his readers. Theophilus may well be asking, “Is Christianity what I believed it to be, a religion sent from God?” Whether it is internal doubt, persecution or racial tension with Jews that has caused this question to be raised, Luke invites his reader to consider the story of Jesus again and know that these indeed were events that have been fulfilled among us.’ (Darrell L. Bock, Luke, p. 33)
Note from Luke 1:2 on the role of a pastor
Just wanted to take the mention of ‘ministers of the word’ in Luke 1:2 as an opportunity to share a bit about my own role in this church plant as ‘pastor’. This phrase ‘minister’ or ‘servant’ of the word is partly how I would describe my role.
A pastor is not a Master to be Obeyed. A pastor is not even precisely a Teacher to be Learned From. Jesus is our Master and our Teacher, our Lord and our Rabbi. A pastor is a fellow-servant alongside his brothers and sisters in the church of Christ. The pastor has a specific role as ‘under-shepherd’ to our true Shepherd, Jesus, helping to care for the flock under his Care (see Acts 20:26-35 and 1 Peter 5:1-4).
My preaching and teaching of the word is a spiritual gift from the Holy Spirit given to edify the church by bringing glory to Jesus (see 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4). It has been characterised as one servant being charged with simply giving out the necessary food, money, equipment, and so forth to the rest of the household servants. In receiving the word they are properly supplied with what they need to carry out the Master’s business both in the ‘house’ and in all areas of life in the wide world outside the house itself (because of course all the earth belongs to the Lord).
This helps us see better the meaning of a classic text about Scripture’s inspiration and purpose: ‘All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work’ (2 Timothy 3:16-17, ESV).
I do this most especially by feeding them this word in such a way that they are looking to, encountering, listening to, loving, and obeying Jesus himself. And of course my own food is exactly the same. This means that the word I proclaim to them, I must also discuss and live with them so that I too can be fed and nourished by the Spirit’s illumination of the word through the whole community. Such mutual discussion and life-application of the word also helps me to work hard to wrestle with our questions and needs as a congregation and do the best I can with the Spirit’s help to pastorally interpret and apply the Scriptures into our life circumstances (1 Timothy 3:13-16).
This understanding of being a pastor also shows that I can’t ‘servant-lead’ the church all on my own, but require the skills and giftings of other servants to make the whole household function properly and smoothly. (Well, as smoothly as can be expected from a bunch of the Lord’s misfits!)
A pastor is not a Master to be Obeyed. A pastor is not even precisely a Teacher to be Learned From. Jesus is our Master and our Teacher, our Lord and our Rabbi. A pastor is a fellow-servant alongside his brothers and sisters in the church of Christ. The pastor has a specific role as ‘under-shepherd’ to our true Shepherd, Jesus, helping to care for the flock under his Care (see Acts 20:26-35 and 1 Peter 5:1-4).
My preaching and teaching of the word is a spiritual gift from the Holy Spirit given to edify the church by bringing glory to Jesus (see 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4). It has been characterised as one servant being charged with simply giving out the necessary food, money, equipment, and so forth to the rest of the household servants. In receiving the word they are properly supplied with what they need to carry out the Master’s business both in the ‘house’ and in all areas of life in the wide world outside the house itself (because of course all the earth belongs to the Lord).This helps us see better the meaning of a classic text about Scripture’s inspiration and purpose: ‘All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work’ (2 Timothy 3:16-17, ESV).I do this most especially by feeding them this word in such a way that they are looking to, encountering, listening to, loving, and obeying Jesus himself. And of course my own food is exactly the same. This means that the word I proclaim to them, I must also discuss and live with them so that I too can be fed and nourished by the Spirit’s illumination of the word through the whole community. Such mutual discussion and life-application of the word also helps me to work hard to wrestle with our questions and needs as a congregation and do the best I can with the Spirit’s help to pastorally interpret and apply the Scriptures into our life circumstances (1 Timothy 3:13-16).
This understanding of being a pastor also shows that I can’t ‘servant-lead’ the church all on my own, but require the skills and giftings of other servants to make the whole household function properly and smoothly. (Well, as smoothly as can be expected from a bunch of the Lord’s misfits!)
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