The waiting time for Christmas is almost over. But so what? After all, there is nothing special about waiting. It's what we're waiting for that matters.
One of my favorite Christmas scripture readings takes place when John is in prison. It is a gospel that confronts us with the need to make a choice about what we are waiting for.
John is no small figure in scripture. He bellows to peasant and king alike across the land that the world cannot continue as it has been, that we have to learn to think differently, to live differently, to see life differently. And for those actions John paid the price. He is in prison in this scripture, for confronting King Herod.
John has unmasked the evil of the system, he has called both synagogue and empire to repent their abandonment of the Torah, their substitution of Roman law for Jewish law. John, in other words, is a strong and thunderous voice. He calls in no uncertain terms for repentance. He announces the coming of the Messiah who would -- like Moses -- free the Hebrew people again.
But in prison, John, weary from trying, disheartened by failure, surely depressed, maybe even struggling with his own faith, sends a messenger to ask Jesus what surely must be more than a rhetorical question: Are you the one who is to come or shall we wait for another?
Are you the one for whom I have spent my life preparing? Are you the one I gave up everything to announce? Are you the one who shall free Israel -- or have I wasted my time? Has it all been for nothing? "Are you the one?" John pleads.
But if John's question is bad, Jesus' answer is even worse. Tell John, who has lived to banish the empire, that the blind see, the lame walk and the poor have the gospel preached to them....
Not a single mention of an army to rout the garrisons, no talk of thunderbolts and falling thrones, no designation of the leader who would overthrow the emperor. No great religious crusade, even. No new outburst of religious enthusiasm, no embellishment of the temple, or the sacrifices, or the processions. No great blinding political or religious action at all. What John was waiting for, what John expected -- the rise of Judaism to new glory -- did not come.
The answer was searingly, astoundingly, clear. John had spent his life doing church, but Jesus did not come to do church; Jesus came to do justice. The Messiah was not about either destroying or renewing the old order. The Messiah was about building a new one where, as Isaiah said, the desert would bloom, the wilderness would rejoice, sorrow and sighing would flee away and the good news of creation would be for everyone.
On Christmas the question becomes ours to answer.
For what have we waited? For what have we given our lives? For religious symbolism or for gospel enlightenment? For the restoration of the old order or for the creation of the new?
Think carefully about the answer because on it may well depend the authenticity of our own lives and the happiness of many who are even now crippled by unjust systems, blinded by their untruths and fooled into believing that, for them, God wants it that way.
Merry Christmas to you all. And may, where you are, the desert be brought to bloom.
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toward another person or creature on this planet, brings him
to life. We don't need Christmas to remind us of Him. That's
my wish, what I wait for.
Thank You Sister Joan.
For me JC was never a Christian, in fact the term 'Christian' was not even coined until the days of Paul, about 3 decades after Jesus walked the earth as a man.
Jesus was a social justice, radical revolutionary nonviolent Palestinian devout Jewish road warrior who rose up and challenged the job security of the Temple authorities by teaching the people they did NOT need to pay the priests for ritual baths or sacrificing livestock to be OK with God; for God already LOVED them just as they were: poor, diseased, outcasts, widows, orphans, refugees and prisoners all living under Military Occupation.
What got Jesus crucified was disturbing the status quo of the Roman Occupying Forces, by teaching the subversive concept that God preferred the humble sinner, the poor, diseased, outcasts, widows, orphans, refugees and prisoners all living under Military Occupation above the elite and arrogant.
The early followers and lovers of Jesus were called members of THE WAY-being THE WAY he taught one should be; Nonviolent, a Peacemaker and one who did the will of the Father. "What does God require? He has told you o'man! Be just, be merciful, and walk humbly with your Lord." -Micah 6:8
"I said, you are gods: you are all children of the Most High God."-Psalm 82:6
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=64&Itemid=195
While it is great that you have formed an opinion regarding Jesus, and are certainly free and able to do so, not all, share that view.
There is a beautiful, undelying mystery to Christianity that fulfills itself when the scriptures are brought together in the mind of the believer of Jesus' divinity. Suddenly, the totality of it all makes sense, and leaves one not humbled, but restored. Jesus came to heal as is evidenced in scripture and ones own life.
"What got Jesus crucified was disturbing the status quo of the Roman Occupying Forces, by teaching the subversive concept that God preferred the humble sinner, the poor, diseased, outcasts, widows, orphans, refugees and prisoners all living under Military Occupation above the elite and arrogant."
For you, that is certainly true, but others, myself included, would disagree.
only goes to show the intellectual vigor of his so called followers, i guess.
Jesus on the other hand, expressly taught against extremism. I have not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it. To fulfill something is to both fully fill and fully end at the same time. A glass fully filled with water lacks emptiness, just as extremism and irrational law lacks justice.
They lack the opportunity for spiritual and intellectual enlightenment, equality. Jesus did not come to destroy law, because that would create chaos, but to initiate justice through just laws through minds and hearts.
Jesus gave the Sabbath back to the people. Therefore people will create just laws, through enligntenment, or they won't. Freedom of and from religion, or any "beliefs", are opportunities for "we the people" to do justice, or not; to grow and develop or to fall away in despair.
Theists are often accused, by atheists of "cherry picking", only wanting the good stuff and disregarding the bad, and yet atheists do the same thing.
If freedom of religion means freedom from religion, then freedom of speech means freedom from speech. SCOTUS "must" cherry picks the law, in an attempt to avoid extremism/irrationality, or we would fall into chaos, despair.
Atheists/secularist no less cherry pick the law then do theists cherry pick the scriptures.
As such their argument turned accusation, fails.
What he meant was do not just accept what your elders tell you-THINK for yourself!
And 2,000 years ago the cross was NOT a piece of jewelry. The cross had ONE meaning- it was the empires method of capital punishment for any radical, revolutionary, dissident, trouble maker and disturber of the status quo.