The word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness. NRSV
As the gospel spread into the ancient world, where people who encountered it and the apostles who brought it were further and further removed from Israel and the traditions of the people of the Old Testament, it became more and more necessary to locate the story of the gospel in a context to which people could relate. Remember, the 12 month calendar we know had not yet come into being, so if you wanted to locate a story in time, the best way to do it would have been to recall events and people of the time in which the story took place. It would be as if our calendars and memories of the years were removed, but events remained available for recollection, so that if we said, “You remember when that happened, it was the same year that the first astronauts walked on the moon,” or “Remember the day our son returned from the war?” or “you remember it, the last time we all gathered at grandmother’s house before she died?”
Calendars are useful, but they are not the only ways by which we mark and remark on time.
This is true of Luke’s gospel, written to a Gentile bearing a Greek name, a certain “Theophilus,” who might well not have known the historical circumstances of Palestine at the time our Advent stories took place and needed other ways to understand the times in which the accounts about Jesus happened. So, when Luke began his narrative, after a brief introductory remark or two, he wrote to this “most excellent Theophilus” about Elizabeth and Zechariah and the birth of John the Baptist, beginning, “In the days of King Herod of Judah...” After that, he continued with the story of Joseph and Mary and the birth of Jesus by locating it in “those days” when “a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered... while Quirinius was governor of Syria.” Once Jesus had grown to manhood, Luke again located the historical circumstances of his baptism by John in terms of well-known contemporary figures: Remember when that was, Theophilus? It was when “Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas,” that “the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.”
It’s similar to the reason the story of the discovery of atomic energy is seldom told without a historical reference to the end of World War II, or the struggle for racial justice always seems connected to a 1965 march in Montgomery Alabama, or the end of slavery is associated with the Civil War and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, or “Remember when Jimmy finally got his driver’s license? It was when Uncle Pete died and left him his car.”
The main thing is, it happened. The life of Jesus really happened, as surely as armies marched and emperors ruled and the Temple had high priests. Just as surely, Jesus came along and was baptized by John and then proceeded to turn the whole world upside down, and that turning is still going on, Theophilus, just look how it is turning you upside down today as I write this in answer to all your questions. This is not a legend or a tall tail told at a campfire, this is the real stuff of history, when other historical things were happening all around, tax enrollments, and the rule of new emperors, a man of flesh and blood was baptized by John, and proceeded to teach and to heal and to make the world a more fit place for God and for people.
OK, having located the story of Jesus in time and place. Luke also wanted Theophilus — and us — to know something of the mystery that was Jesus’ life among us as well as the sheer mystery of his continuing life in the world. The story in Luke in those first three chapters combines history, time-bound connections, right alongside the miraculous, outside-time things like an angelic visitation, and a birth made possible by spirit as well as flesh. There is so much about birthing in the first two chapters of Luke, the pregnancy of Elizabeth and the birth of John, the pregnancy of Mary and the birth of Jesus, it is almost a scriptural lamaze class. But there is more birthing to come in chapter 3, in our passage, though it is now a birthing of a different sort.
You often hear me speak of the difficult task of translators who try to find English words with an equivalent constellation of meaning for the Greek words in which our New Testament was written. Well there is an excellent example of this in Luke 3, when, as we hear it in English, “The word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness.” One interesting term in that sentence, I came to learn one bright day, is not “word,” or “wilderness,” or even “God.” This interesting term is the word “came.” It stands in here for a Greek word that has around it the mystery of birth. In fact, the word means “birth,” it is, pardon my Greek, egeneto, which, if you use your imagination and a little slurring in your speech, can sound a bit like “gyno,” which would not be all that far off, because it is a form of a word we associate even today with birth. The word of God did more than come to John, the word of God was “born” in John. It wasn’t an idea born of his own fertile imagination, but was seeded in him by God, and the word ultimately was born in him and his life became an embodiment of God’s call to him to be of service to the work of the kingdom.
In the midst of all the lists of “Who’s Who” in the first century, a listing of all the bland governmental operatives doing their thing, comes this story about which most of the world would at first say, “Who’s that?” Who can even remember how to spell — much less pronounce — Quirinius or Lysanius, or who came first, Augustus or Tiberius? But it was the child of promise whose name was on no one’s short list of the up and coming who would make all things new. That’s how it can be with children amid the self-satisfied world of adults.
I remember once reading a now-misplaced article by Robert Coles, the renowned and very readable child psychiatrist, though I do have some quotes from it among my files.1 Probably his best-known works are the five volume series called The Inner Life of Children, and the subsequent three-volume Children of Crisis. In that article he recalled “a particular couple my wife and I had come to know well. They lived in a small Georgia town. They were ... hard-pressed in so many ways. They had six children. He worked in a store as a handyman. She scrubbed the floors of the local bank at night and tried hard to be a good mother during the day. She was not in the best of health. She had suffered a fairly serious bout of rheumatic fever as a child, and the result was an impaired heart valve, and periodic episodes of congestive heart failure.
“I will never forget,” he wrote, “the day when this woman told me that she was pregnant yet again. She wasn’t exactly ecstatic. She knew the burdens she was already carrying. But she did have a broad smile on her face, and her mind was not dwelling on herself, but rather, on others. ‘Oh, my two older girls are going to love this new baby!’ she said. ‘They’ll want a girl. They’re tired of the four boys we have! So, we’ll get another plate and put it on the table. That’s what my momma used to say: ‘We’re going to have a visitor, a new person God is sending here, and He’s chosen this family, and so let’s put a new plate on the table and say, welcome.’”
“‘And like my momma. I try to teach my children that it’s God who has sent them here, and it’s up to us to show Him we’re grateful. If He’s chosen us to have another of his children stay with us, then I’ll manage, and we’ll be better for it. I truly believe, even if it’ll be hard. Yes sir, it’ll be hard.’”
“Hard,” is probably the understatement of the century! It didn’t make any sense, by anyone’s standards, for them to have another child. It didn’t make any sense at all ... except in the sense that she made of it. You see, each of their children had been an Advent. A visit by God they could prepare for and welcome. And in that sense alone, the wisdom of the world was rather pointless. When the faith story and family stories intersect and then merge, they have a life of their own, and it is a little child that leads us.
And because Scripture does not tell us which child to watch or to wait for, so much of what gets in our way en route to Christmas can blind us temporarily to the visit God prepares for us. We can miss the signs of God’s coming as easily in our own homes as we can here in the church with its crescendo of activity during Advent. So we need this time with each other whether it is lighting a candle or setting a new plate at the table, just to remind us.
Children, it seems, are always getting in the way. But they do force us to prepare the way, one way or another, like it or not. And it is also true that they are too-soon gone, and we are once again on our own to straighten out the faith story, alone with the child of all history. “Guess who’s coming to visit?” is a question that excites the imagination of every child. But ultimately, for our faith, it’s an adult question en route to Christmas.
The prophet Isaiah said,
“Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
“And a little child shall lead them.”2
For all the pains Luke took to locate his story among the historic figures of his time, these two thoughts from the prophet Isaiah remind us that the things which bear the most promise for the world in which we live are generally the things that arrive with the least fanfare. As when the Word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, wandering alone, out in the wilderness.
Copyright © 2006 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved.
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Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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NOTES
1 - In a sermon by my good friend George Chorba, “Getting in the Way,” New Vernon, New Jersey, December 8, 1985.
2 - Isaiah 11:6.
