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On Thursday morning I got a
text message from Kate Klarkowski that her daughter Diana, who lives back in
New York, had gone into labor. Kate has
checked in with me regularly as Diana’s pregnancy has come along, and each
passing month has brought with it mounting excitement, but also relief. Diana and her husband Kevin have been down
this road before, only to end up in sorrow and disappointment. But when I returned to from a walk to the
store to get some things for my lunch, Jerry in the office had a message for
me: Kate has her first grandchild, an 8 lb., 2 ounce baby girl named Frances
Delaware.
This news made me think of
another woman who finally got the baby she wanted—Hannah, the mother of Samuel. Hannah’s husband tells her not to worry that
year after year she is unable to conceive a child. He loves her and favors her and thinks that this
should be enough for her, but that is easy for him to say—he has two wives and
the other has given him plenty of daughters and sons. In
those days people believed that the gift of children was in the hands of God,
so Hannah goes to the sanctuary at Shiloh and prays fervently for the child she
longs to have.
She vows that if God will only
grant her what she asks she will dedicate the child back to him, to live a life
of special holiness and renunciation. So Hannah gets her first born son, but this
gift is not simply hers to enjoy. If we
read on in the story we find it is not a heartwarming family drama about Hannah
and Elkanah and their cute little boy.
It is about Samuel, who goes as a child to live in the sanctuary of God,
and his call to be a prophet, who goes on to anoint the first kings of Israel.
And Hannah’s Song is more than
a psalm of thanksgiving for the granting of a woman’s personal request—it is a universal
anthem of human liberation. The God whom
Hannah praises is not above caring about ordinary human beings, and Hannah’s
heart exults in his strength, who in giving a child has restored her strength. But beyond that she doesn’t make a lot of
claims for herself. She doesn’t thank the
Lord for answering her prayers, or
her rewarding her patience. It’s more
like she praises God for revealing once again just who he is.
It’s not personal—God doesn’t
play favorites. This is just how he
deals with the whole world, which he created and over which he rules with providence
and justice. Hannah is on top now, but
that’s because she was on the bottom before, and she has to watch out not to
get arrogant. The Lord kills and brings
to life, lifts up and lays low, makes poor and makes rich, and his justice is as
immovable and as perfectly balanced as the pillars that hold up the earth.
The Song of Hannah echoes in
the words of another song of thanksgiving to God, the Magnificat of Mary in the Gospel of Luke. And as we will soon be hearing, Mary is
another a woman who has improbably conceived a child.
But for Mary, like Hannah, this is not an
occasion of merely personal joy—she sings of God’s mercy in remembering Israel,
and his power to execute justice.
Somehow, Mary knows that her unborn son is an instrument of God’s
judgment on the world, that in giving him to her the mighty are cast down from
their thrones and the lowly are lifted up, the hungry are filled with good
things, and the rich go away empty. And
this is in fact who the church confesses that Jesus is, the Son not just of
Mary, but in the power of the Holy Spirit the Son also of Israel’s God, who’s
will it is to restore the wholeness of the world, and free it from the stain of
injustice and the sentence of death.
He is the Christ, the anointed
priest, prophet, and king of the world, and he will be its judge. And in fact, as the Song of Mary says, his holy
birth has already given us a sign of God’s judgment. We are already in the last days, because the
judge of the world has already come. He
dwelt among us, offering reconciling justice in words of grace and works of
mercy. He healed the sick, fed the
hungry, confronted the mighty with their hypocrisy; he brought the kingdom of
God within reach, and proclaimed that it belonged to the poor.
And the world judged itself by
rejecting him. It condemned him to die
on the cross, and so erected an indestructible sign of its own perversion of
justice. The vain pretensions of the
human race to be able to straighten ourselves out—to decide for ourselves who
is right and who is wrong, who deserves to get what she wants out of life, and
who must suffer in silence—these were nailed to the cross with Jesus and lifted
high for all to see.
But God is just, and God’s justice is mercy and forgiveness. And so she raised Christ from the dead, as we
will rise with him at the last. God has
heard the cry of the poor, has seen the tears of the mothers who have lost
their children to violence, to starvation and disease, to drugs and suicide—and
the tears of those who could not bear children.
God remembers, and in the end all will come to light, all will be
restored, all emptiness filled, and all that hurts will be healed. This is the work of Christ, the ministry of
reconciliation for which he was sent, and which we who love the world long to
see completed.
So as we come to the end of
another year the question comes up again—“When?” How long must we wait? Sometimes it feels like the world
is going from bad to worse. When we hear
about the slaughter of civilians in Syria, Afghanistan, or France, and see the
misery of migrants streaming across the borders of Europe or the United States,
it seems to us that inequality and injustice, violence and destruction and
pollution are rising to a point where something has got to give. Something has to change, but we’re not sure whether
to be hopeful about that change or to despair.
And that is the really
important question, more important than the question of “when?” (which,
contrary to popular belief, neither Mark nor any of the other writers of the
New Testament really cares about, or tries to answer). We need to know whether the long arc of history
really does bend toward justice. We need
to know if there really is some great purifying work of the spirit moving through
all this suffering, or whether we are just beginning our descent into
hell. We need to know if all the trouble
we see around us is the labor pains of our new birth in a new creation, or the
death throes of a god-forsaken world.
The children who are born
today will need, even more than we do, an answer to that question, because they
will come of age in a very different world from the one that we were born in. The masters of media spin tell us to measure this
difference by our children’s immersion in digital media and mobile microcomputers. But
the truth is they face far more sober and painful adaptations—to stagnant economic
growth and falling standards of living, to social and atmospheric instability,
both of which are prone to break out in violence. They will have to learn to do without the
profligate use of fossil energy that fueled our free-wheeling lifestyles, and to
do so quickly if they wish to have children of their own in a world worth
living in.
They will need to learn things
we have forgotten about the power that comes up from the bottom, and the wealth
that grows out of the land, and the wisdom of deep cultural tradition, that is hidden in communities of memory. They might
want to learn again about a God who created a world in magnificent harmony, who
blesses it and calls it good, and entrusts it to us to tend and keep. It will help them if they know about the
justice of that God, who does not play favorites, but whose mercy is over all
his works. And they might like to know
that the judge of the world has already come.
Our judgment of him was blasphemy, treason, and death. His judgment of us is truth and forgiveness, indestructible
life and love.
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