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Living the Word

Fulfilling the Time
By Verna J. Dozier
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God is working God’s purpose out/As year succeeds to year
God is working God’s purpose out/And the time is drawing near
Nearer and nearer draws the time/The time that shall surely be
When the earth shall be filled with the glory of God
As the waters cover the sea

So runs a triumphant hymn of the last century—edited with a touch of inclusive language! It strikes a fitting note for our last reflections before Advent, the season of watching and waiting and expecting.

"Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom?" Somehow we human beings have never got the point. God has done God’s work. Created a good creation. Created human beings with freedom to choose. Lived out before us the Way. Still we come to the end of each liturgical year gazing up into heaven.

The patient God still waits.

These scriptures call us to ponder how God acts, the God whose coming we await at Advent.

November 13
God Doing the New Thing
1 Samuel 1:4-20; 1 Samuel 2:1-10 (in place of the psalm); Hebrews 10:11-14, (15-18), 19-25; Mark 13:1-8

The plea of Hannah’s husband to his grieving wife, "Why is your heart so sad?" recalls last week’s psalm, "Why are you cast down, O my soul?" And in the Hebrew scripture this week, as last week, God comes to the aid of a woman. The culture saw childlessness as a curse, even though Hannah’s husband obviously didn’t. He favored her above the child-bearing Peninnah, and his pitiful plea, "Am I not more to you than 10 sons?" indicates that in Hannah’s husband God was doing a new thing.

But this scripture is not Elkanah’s story. It is Hannah’s. Hannah bargains with God. The intensity of her prayers misleads the priest, but in the end she has a son, a major figure in Hebrew history, Samuel, priest and prophet and the last of the judges of Israel.

Keeping her vow, Hannah brings the child to the temple, and the song she sings is the psalm for this week. It is a song for the ages because it echoes richly in Mary’s song of exaltation when she visits her aged relative, also surprisingly pregnant. Mary’s song magnifies the Lord as did Hannah’s.

Hannah sings: "He has brought down the powerful from their thrones/And lifted up the lowly." As Robert McAfee Brown says, "Reversal is the order of the day in the kingdom of God."

The strange 13th chapter of Mark is called a "little Apocalypse." It would seem to be Jesus explaining the last days to his disciples, but beyond our lesson in verse 14 is a parenthesis, "let the reader understand." Has Mark inserted a revolutionary broadside into his gospel?

Our lesson begins with the disciples’ awe. Ched Myers, in his political reading of Mark, sees the stage direction of Jesus taking a seat facing the temple as the dramatic action symbolizing Jesus’ utter repudiation of the temple state, the entire socio-symbolic order of Judaism, and its exploitation of the poor. A word so timely it might have been spoken to our headline religion: "Beware that no one leads you astray."

The epistle picks up on the theological dimension of the new thing that God is doing with the destruction of the temple as seen through Christian eyes. We are back to the old gospel hymn:

Not all the blood of beasts/On Jewish altars slain
Could give the guilty conscience peace/Or wash away the stain
But Christ the heavenly Lamb/Takes all our sins away :A sacrifice of nobler name/And richer blood than they.

VERNA J. DOZIER is an educator and lay theologian in Washington, D.C. She is the author of The Dream of God: A Call to Return (Cowley Publications) and The Authority of the Laity (The Alban Institute).

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From Sojourners Online, copyright 1994 Sojourners, July 1994, Vol. 23, No. 6.

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