So runs a triumphant hymn of the last centuryedited 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
Gods 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 Hannahs husband to his grieving wife,
"Why is your heart so sad?" recalls last weeks
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
Hannahs husband obviously didnt. He favored her above
the child-bearing Peninnah, and his pitiful plea, "Am I not
more to you than 10 sons?" indicates that in Hannahs
husband God was doing a new thing.
But this scripture is not Elkanahs story. It is
Hannahs. 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 Marys song of
exaltation when she visits her aged relative, also surprisingly
pregnant. Marys song magnifies the Lord as did
Hannahs.
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).