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Some of the most fascinating people we encounter in the Bible are the prophets of the Old Testament. To be a prophet was not an envious thing, and few in ancient Israel would likely have told their parents that they wanted to be prophets when they grew up. Because to be a prophet meant that you would place your life in the balance…that you would be despised by many and appreciated by few. And your life may very well become the target of those who felt threatened by you…and those people were often the ones with the power to, at a whim, remove your head.
Prophets were the conscience of Israel. They held up the people of God to the standard of the law and the covenants. They were the voice calling for fidelity and uncompromising commitment. They pointed out sin and wickedness with clarity and precision and exposed the secrets of the heart before the discerning gaze of a righteous God.
But there was another function of the prophet that those prone to apocalyptic visions of doom and gloom often overlook…the prophet was also a visionary who saw things that most others failed to see. This vision into the future was marked by a vision of what could be in spite of what actually is. This wasn’t a denial of reality but the conviction that reality is not a fixed, determined constant but open and malleable, able to be moved in directions that sometimes are surprisingly new. In other words, prophets were those who stood up in the midst of an anxious, fearful people trapped by the threatening visions of the immediate reality before them and dared to see a way-out giving hope and courage to move a people forward into freedom.
The context of the first four verses of Isaiah chapter 9, our Old Testament reading today, is a bleak historical situation in which Israel (the small northern kingdom) is facing a brutal attack from the superpower Assyria. Prophecies of judgment for sin are present. But even though Israel has gotten herself into this mess in which she now finds herself, her God will not ultimately forsake her but, through Isaiah, promises a messiah, a coming Child, a Wonderful Counselor, a Prince of Peace, who will bring light and lasting peace to a land devastated by darkness and war. The yoke of burden she now bears will be broken and she will know the salvation of God as on the day of Midian. But what was the day of Midian? The day of Midian refers to the decisive victory of Israel, led by Gideon in Judges 6 and 7, over the oppressive Midianite army, symbolizing God’s powerful deliverance from bondage. Isaiah highlights God’s faithfulness to Israel in the past in order to offer faith and hope to her now in her current crisis: though all you see now is darkness and deep gloom, a liberating light is about to dawn once again!
What is at stake here not the power of Israel or even her faithfulness, or not, toward her God. What is at stake is the power of God and God’s faithfulness to Israel. A prevailing question tucked in the back of Israel’s mind has always been: have we sinned so greatly that our God will finally give up on us and leave us to become prey to our oppressors? This was a nagging question with which she had to contend throughout her history. This is, unfortunately, true also of many in the Christian church whose beliefs about God are determined more about what they do than upon who God is. But have we really heard the gospel? Have we really understood it?
St. Paul says he has come not to baptize but to preach the gospel…and not with eloquent words so as to empty the cross of its power…for the message about the cross is the power of God to save. What does this mean? It means that when we look upon the crucified messiah, we see the revelation of God in its purest form. The cross is the revelation of the unfathomable and unhinged love of God gratuitously given in total freedom without coercion or constraint. It is love unconditional, unrestricted, and unlimited. It is the peak of the glory of God, where the light of God’s love shines brightest. It is a disarming folly, a most unexpected and unimagined declaration of the wisdom of God that communicates something absolute and all-determining. It declares that you are infinitely loved no matter what you have done, no matter where you have been or where you come from, no matter what you look like or how you speak, no matter what you have or don’t have, no matter what you can do or can’t do. You are the beloved of God and God sees you and knows you and God’s desire for you in not ever condemnation but only salvation. And in this declaration of love comes the confirming, vivifying Spirit that was always within, but it now felt and known. So that now, even though darkness may seem to prevail, a light has shown, and we know that this light will ultimately cast out this darkness. All this flowing out from the wounded side of our crucified God.
And then another question arises: how do we live into this light? How do we allow the light of God’s love shine out through our lives? This happens for us just as it happened for Jesus…and just as it happened to those he first called to follow him.
Notice that, in today’s Gospel, just after Jesus first hears of John’s arrest, he withdraws to Galilee. Jesus had just gone down from Galilee to Judea to be baptized by John and is subsequently driven by the Spirit into the wilderness down there in southern Palestine to be tested by the devil. It is immediately after this that Jesus hears about John being arrested. The Gospel seeks to communicate that the age of John is coming to an end…that the path has been paved and that it is now time for Jesus to become the fulfillment of what John, with his baptism of repentance, began. So, he withdraws to his hometown of Nazareth in Galilee to begin to tell his own story. But notice, he leaves Nazareth and goes to the land of Zebulun and Naphtali, which would have been just north of Nazareth. The point being, as we will also see in those he will soon call, the withdrawing from what is familiar, the detaching from what is custom, in order to hear and discover a deeper truth about oneself and to give oneself the time and space to reconstruct a life on this new foundation. It plays itself out in Jesus’ call to Simon and Andrew and to James and John…leaving their parents and their livelihood in order to hear and discover something new…in this case, something profoundly new.
This call of Jesus to follow him…to be driven into the wilderness, away from family and the familiar customs which can so often hijack our minds and keep them bound in subservience to those customs, is quintessentially a monastic call. We hear the Lord call us to come apart with him, leaving everything behind. And in that place of the stripping of the old self we begin to hear and discover a new self, a deeper and more secure self that begins to reveal itself not by our ascetical efforts or our “perfect” monastic observance, but only by our unencumbered, contemplative listening…and hearing…the divine voice saying, “You are my beloved, with you I am well pleased.” It is in that voice and that voice alone that the light of God’s glory erupts in and through our lives. It is in that voice alone that the power to cut through the lies and illusions of our old self lies. And it is only after every other voice has been silenced that we can hear it and know it and then begin to live it. Everything else about the monastic life to this is secondary. Without this…the personal knowledge of God’s love for us…a root of bitterness will likely soon spring up.
It might be important, here, to point out how John and Jesus were both similar and different. They both entered upon the public stage preaching…and they preached on a similar theme: repentance. But where John stopped, Jesus continued. While John focused on repentance, Jesus focused on what this repentance could lead to: the presence of the kingdom of heaven in the here and now. This was unique from the message of John…and, for that matter, from what anyone else had ever dared to preach. Jesus’ message was as clear as it was shocking: the hoped for time of God’s salvation has come…it is here…it is now. And the question which confronted the first disciples who heard this shocking message also confronts us: will we leave the old behind…without looking back…and focus all our heart and mind on the one leading us into the great unknown? Will we trust this voice, this experience, this deep longing of our hearts? Brothers (and sisters), let us indeed trust it because that is the only place where the great transformation of our lives…and of all of life…can take place…where the epiphany of our true selves hidden in Christ can shine out and offer the world a way through the darkness.
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