Christ:
a ‘sign to be opposed’
Texts: Galatians 4.4-7; Luke 2.22-38
When Jesus is taken to the temple in Jerusalem to be dedicated to the
purposes of God, Luke has an old man named Simeon say the following
prophecy over the child:
Now my eyes have seen your
salvation you have placed in the midst of all peoples, a light for
revelation to the Gentiles and for the glory of your people Israel . .
. This child is destined for the falling and rising of many in
Israel. He will be a sign to be opposed so that the inner
thoughts of many will be revealed . . .
Here Luke wants to foreshadow three themes that will become very
important in his gospel as the story unfolds. The first is about
the identity of Jesus as God’s messiah. The messiah, he says, is like a
very bright light in the world, a light with such glory that everyone’s
secret agendas (whether for good or for evil) will be penetrated and
revealed for what they are. The second of Luke’s themes takes the
form of a paradox. Though the light of the messiah is very
bright, not everyone will see or understand what his light signifies:
forgiveness, salvation, peace and freedom for all. For many, his
light will be a threat. They will name it ‘evil’. They will
do everything in their power to oppose and extinguish its power.
But the light will not be finally defeated, Luke assures us, it will
not go out for ever. It will rise from its death to burn even
more brightly, and this according to a parable that Jesus will later
take as his defining mark and sign: the story of Jonah. A third
theme, and the one that concerns us most this morning, is a question
that Luke’s text will always ask of its readers: what shall you
do with this Christ? When the light reveals your secret thoughts
and agendas, will you allow God to forgive you, to free you for
salvation and peace? Or will you oppose and deny and obfuscate
until the end?
So, let us examine each of these themes in a little more detail.
First to the idea of Christ as a sign or portal of God’s light in the
world. There is a long tradition in Israel of thinking about God
as a very bright light. It begins, apparently, with the story of
the Exodus. There God is consistently seen as a flame of light
that guides the Israelites from the darkness of their slavery in Egypt
to the brightness of their freedom in the promised land. There is
also a long tradition that associates the flame of God’s glory with
certain human beings, those who take a lead role in the people’s
salvation. Moses’ face, we are told, glowed with God’s glory
everytime he returned from conversation with Yahweh. Out of these
traditions grew a view that the Jewish messiah, when he came, would be
like a sign or portal of divine light in the world, a conduit by which
the light of God’s glory would be let loose to free everyone who walked
in valleys of darkness or despair. We read some of those
prophecies a week ago when we celebrated the birth of Jesus. So
it is by this route that we come to Simeon’s prophecy over the infant
Jesus, that he shall be the glory of the Jewish people and a light for
all people’s everywhere. Jesus, Luke tells us, will be the
messiah in this specific sense: that he will save the people from
their sins, that is, from everything that keeps them in a state of
slavery.
But this takes us immediately to the central paradox in Luke’s
gospel. If the Christ is born a divine light to the gentiles and
the glory of his people Israel, how is it that this light is hidden to
so many? Why is it that so many oppose him from the beginning,
and eventually have him killed? Why do they not see who he is,
why do they not fall down and worship him? Luke’s answer is
literary and theological. ‘Don’t take the metaphor of the light
too literally’, he says, ‘for the light of Christ is a very different
kind of light than you are used to thinking about.’ It is not the
light that we human beings make for ourselves: it is not the glory of
our kings and rulers, or the translucent beauty of the human body so
celebrated in the sculpture of the Greeks. Neither is it the
light that accompanies everyone who fulfils the law of their community
or culture, so that everyone looks to them as paragons of virtue or
success. No, the light of Christ is rather different. It is
an uncomfortable kind of light, a light that penetrates into dark
places that are usually kept secret. It is an ultra-violet kind of light, that
glows with a subdued intensity to show up both the dark stains in the
heart of those the world would look to as glorious, but also the hidden
purity of those the world would dismiss and scorn, those who look to
the grace of God, alone, for any sense of light or virtue.
The light of Christ is therefore, first of all, a light of revelation. It exposes and
makes manifest the truth of our humanity. That is why it was the
humble, the poor and the desperate who actually recognised the light of
Christ. These were people who knew full well that their lives
were broken. They knew full well that no matter how hard they
tried, they could never generate lives of apparent success and bathe,
therefore, in the light of social and cultural approval. In
Christ they heard the word of God’s love and forgiveness. In
Christ they learned a way to live with generosity and joy, free from
the norms of success or failure generated by their societies. In
Christ they learned how to live as though all that mattered was the
mercy and kindness of God. And so they learned to practise mercy,
to give themselves away as though nothing could possibly be lost in
doing so. But the many others, those who would not recognise
Christ’s light, were exposed by that light nevertheless. In their
clinging to the dominant norms of self-generated power and success, in
their opposition to his preaching about God’s love for the poor and the
powerless, these others were shown up for who they were: slaves of
society and of fashion and of conventional morality, people who could
not recognise themselves as
poor and powerless, people standing in desperate need of God’s word of
mercy.
The light of Christ is revealed most surely, Luke tells us in chapter
11 of his gospel, under the paradoxical parable of Jonah. Simeon
said that Christ would be a ‘sign to be opposed’. In chapter 11
we learn what this most offensive of signs is: that, like Jonah
in the belly of the fish, the Christ would lie dead in the earth for
three days, but would then rise as a sign that God had vindicated his
cause. The message of the parable is a scandal, a stumbling block
for any who believe that the way of the messiah is that of power-over others, rather than power-for others. The sign
of Jonah has surely proved a stumbling-block for anyone who looks to
God to confirm their greedy and indifferent lifestyles. For at
its heart the sign of Jonah speaks of the willingness of God’s son, out
of love for the world, to give even his own life that life might return
to the dead and to all who walk in the shadow of death. The sign
of Jonah is therefore double-edged. It tells us that the way of
God in the world is that of love and grace and the generous giving of
one’s self. But it is also a sign of judgement on all who do not
live this way.
And so, finally, we come to the question Luke asks of his
readers: what shall you do
with this Christ? When his light reveals your secret
thoughts and agendas, will you allow God to forgive you, to free you
for salvation and peace? Or will you oppose and deny and
obfuscate until the end? ‘Obfuscate’ is a big word. It
means ‘to cover up’. There are many who are privileged to hear
the word of Christ and experience the enlightenment he brings who then
choose to take up their cross and follow him, beginning always with
recognition that they will never be truly free apart from God’s mercy
and help. But there are many who hear Christ’s word and
experience his light who then choose to obfuscate or cover up the truth
that light exposes because, deep down, they are in denial of the truth
and their whole lives are lived according to the logic of a lie.
What this lie amounts to, in the end, is an attempt to remake the world
in the image of the unredeemed human heart, mistaking darkness for
light, evil for good, and freedom for slavery. That is how we get
to the absurd situation we are in at present with the ‘war on terror’,
where we are told that our freedoms need to be taken away in order to
secure our freedom, or that peace can only be achieved through
war. This is nothing but the very essence of sin, as the New
Testament understands it. It is the lie that we can know what is
good and right and just apart from worship of God. We cannot.
So what will you do with this Christ? When his light shines on
your world and your heart—on the way you do your business, on the
behaviour that you model for your children and grandchildren, on the
things that you treasure more than anything else in the world—what will
you do? Will you cover up the truth and oppose it? Or will
you fall at Christ’s feet and beg for his mercy, his peace, and his
joy? I promise you, that if you choose the latter, if you will
risk losing yourself for the sake of the gospel, Christ will take you
in his arms and give you a future hitherto unimagined, a future that
shares in the kingly inheritance of all God’s children.
Glory be to God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so
now, and for ever, world without end. Amen.
Garry
J. Deverell
1st Sunday after Christmas, 2005
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