Sunday 19 December 2021 - Advent 4

 Theme                God’s kingdom fulfils all God’s promises              

Sentence             NZPB p. 553 

Collect                NZPB p. 554 

Praise and honour to you living God;

your coming will be like a thief in the night,

like lightning flashing across the sky.

Grant that we may be ready,

and our hearts answer, Come Lord Jesus.

                           

Readings                                             

Micah 5:2-5a

Psalm 80:1-7

Hebrews 10:5-10

                        Luke 1:39-45

There is a 'wow' factor when precise predictions are made which are later fulfilled.

Micah predicts that Bethlehem will be the place of origin of the future shepherd king of Israel. The psalmist, by contrast, is predicting nothing but crying out to God as the shepherd king of Israel, 'Stir up your might, and come to save us!' (v. 2b). His prayer is answered by Micah's prediction coming true according to the gospels of Matthew and Luke: both of which tell us the story of Jesus, the shepherd king of Israel, being born in Bethlehem.

The reading from Hebrews offers a different perspective on the role of Christ.

If Micah and Psalm readings lead us to think of Jesus Christ's role as shepherd king, this reading is about Christ as high priest. 

- As shepherd king, Christ leads Israel to become a great nation, with the twist that this greatness is expressed through a vast international movement of Christians rather than through a restored militarily and politically independent country. 

- As high priest Christ transforms the internal spiritual centre of Israel: no longer is it the Jerusalem Temple and the sacrificial system anchored to it, now it is Jesus Christ himself. The connection point (according to Hebrews 10:10) in this unfolding sequence from prayer to prediction, from prediction to fulfilment, from one way of being God's people to another way is 'God's will.'

God's will would be nothing at all if it were words predicting a future course of events which never came true. Luke's gospel from beginning to end is enthusiastic about God's will coming true, about the promises of God being fulfilled. Sometimes Luke demonstrates for us that Jesus Christ is the fulfilment of ancient prophecies. Other times Luke show us that a promise or forecast at the beginning of Jesus' story is fulfilled later in that story.

The end of our gospel reading takes us straight to this enthusiasm of Luke: Elizabeth, a kinswoman of Mary, herself pregnant with an unexpected yet promised child, celebrates Mary's pregnancy: it is a fulfilment of a promise made to Mary and she is to be blessed because she believed that promise. In these and other ways through the gospel, Luke hammers home to his readers the simple point, What God promises, he fulfils; what God wills, comes to pass.

Our gospel reading stops short of Mary's famous song which we know as the Magnificat. That song is the national anthem (as it were) of the kingdom of God: in this kingdom the shepherd king acts to answer the prayer of the psalmist in Psalm 80, 

'He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy' (1:54). 

But if our eyes continue to read through the whole of the gospel we find that through the coming of the baby born in Bethlehem, this kingdom is the fulfilment of all God's promises.