God with us

Matthew 1:18-25

Emmanuel—“God is with us.”

            It’s such a well-known name that we may miss how revolutionary this is. With Jesus coming into the world, God is with us. When things are rough, God is with us. When things are good, God is with us. When our life is full of despair, God is with us. This is the promise we have through Jesus with the coming of the Holy Spirit—that there is no place or time that God is not there.

            This son of Mary, through the Holy Spirit, is given two names: Emmanuel—“God is with us”—and Jesus—“He saves.” These are two promises we have—that God is with us and that God saves us. Yet, the history of the world proves that this kind of saving is not mere protection from forces of evil. Evil is alive and well, but because of this God with us, whose journey leads us to the cross, we know that there is no place full of suffering where God will not be.

            From a lowly beginning to a lowly ending, Jesus doesn’t set out on an expected course for the Messiah. He shatters expectations. First there is Mary and Joseph. The account of the Gospel of Matthew focuses more on Joseph, whose expectations are obliterated by an unexpected pregnancy. So are Mary’s, of course. This was not the engagement present they were looking for. From the beginning, God elects to enter humanity in the humblest of ways, against convention, partly to demonstrate the holy-ness of this birth but partly I imagine to demonstrate that God is with us no matter the discomfort where we might find ourselves. No matter the poverty of our circumstance.

God's left handed power

Isaiah 42:1-9

            Here, according to Isaiah, is what it means to be the chosen servant of God: He is one who will bring forth justice to the nations, not by crying out or lifting up his voice, not by force or beating down the opposition. Instead, this servant is coming with a different kind of power—the power that Robert Farrar Capon calls “left handed power.” In the Bible, there is much said about the strength of the right hand. It is the right hand that defeats nations. When you sit at the right hand you are in a place of power and prestige. In this metaphor for strength, the right hand is the good one, the strong one—sorry, left-handed folks. The right hand is the power of force.

If you Google this, you will find no less than 58 examples of God’s right hand at work in the Bible. Some say things like “Save with your right hand and answer us!” (Psalm 60:5), or “Your right hand, O Lord, is majestic in power, Your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy” (Exodus 15:6), or “He has bent His bow like an enemy; He has set His right hand like an adversary and slain all that were pleasant to the eye; In the tent of the daughter of Zion He has poured out His wrath like fire” (Lamentations 2:4). Lest you think this is only Old Testament, Psalm 110:1 is quoted no less than three times in the New Testament, saying, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet” (Matthew 22:44, Mark 12:36, Hebrews 1:13).

Human beings have a great attachment to right handed power. Strength. Conviction. Decisiveness. All of these are traits of right handed power. We so badly want God to round up all the baddies and beat them up for us, teach them a lesson, and put them in their place. So much theology around heaven and hell in the church, if we’re being honest, is about other people getting what is due them. We love the right hand of God, because it means destruction for our enemies—something the Psalmist asks for again and again. In the pre-Christmas world, the power of force and coercion is the power that speaks loudest.

By contrast, scripture barely mentions the left hand of God. The only use of left hand in the entire New Testament is Jesus saying, “But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3). There is nothing about left handed power, and I want to suggest this is very much by intention. You don’t need scripture to tell you about left handed power, because Jesus shows us by example exactly what it is. Our expectations were that Jesus would come wielding God’s right handed strength. He was supposed to be the Messiah who brought the chosen people back into the Holy Land. He was supposed to get back at those who had wronged his people. He was supposed to bring vengeance for all those killed—the powerless, the woman and children, and the warriors who gave their lives fighting for the faith. He was supposed to be the fulfillment of all the waiting for the people to get what they were due. He was supposed to be all these things, but instead he came wielding God’s left handed power, which is self-sacrifice. Left handed power is the least sexy power you can imagine. It is somebody slapping you on one cheek and turning the other and saying, “You forgot this one.” To the world, it looks like giving up. It is powerlessness and weakness and meekness and all those things that don’t look like power.

Prophet of death--prophet of hope

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:2-4, 3:17-19

Last week, we read from Jeremiah, who brought a message for those of us who have some power—to care for the immigrant, and the widow, and the orphan. Well, this week, we turn to Habakkuk, who is bringing a message of hope for those same folks who are oppressed. But… it might take some time.

I often think about what it would be like to live in the times of the prophets. Let’s say you hear this message from Habakkuk. You’re an Israelite living in the Promised Land six-hundred or so years before Jesus. The Babylonians are beginning their march toward the place where you live. Things moved slow in those days—it might be years until they got there—but you know when they arrive it’s going to be bad. So, you’re a Jew living in the land promised to you by God, knowing that within your lifetime outside invaders are coming to take it away, and everything you have—your property, your work, your place of worship—is going to be taken from you. And into this anxiety comes a prophet, in Habakkuk, preaching a message that says, “There is hope, but it may take a while.”

Now, imagine you can see the future and know that that hope is coming in six hundred years. Not only will you not see it—neither will any of your children, or grandchildren, or anybody else in living memory. By the time that hope arrives, you will be forgotten. This is the context of Habakkuk. It’s all going away, and it won’t be made right for a long, long time.

Frankly, this is why I get so agitated when people read from Jeremiah and pull out that one verse (Jeremiah 29:11) and talk about God knowing the plans he has for us and giving us a future with hope, because the prophets are talking about the same thing here! This is hope for a nation. It is hope for a telos—God’s ultimate purpose for creation. It is not a promise that life will be peachy in the meantime or that everything that is happening is according to God’s plan. This is, in fact, the opposite of what the prophets are preaching. They are telling us that things are most definitely NOT happening according to God’s plan, and that’s why the nation is being displaced, and anxiety is rampant, and this hope is far, far off. The prophets are saying that things are, in fact, really bad, and the hope we have is not one for this world, because most of us won’t see it.

At first this doesn’t feel like a better kind of hope. I can understand why we want God to tell us that it will all work out for us in ten years, because we want to experience that telos on this side of death. We want to see our children and grandchildren fulfill our hopes for them. It’s perfectly natural to give God our timetable. The problem is that it doesn’t always happen that way.