Friday of the Third Week of Easter

Lectionary: 194

Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will raise up a righteous shoot to David; As king he shall reign and govern wisely, he shall do what is just and right in the land. In his days Judah shall be saved, Israel shall dwell in security. This is the name they give him: “The LORD our justice.”

After forty-two generations of Abraham's sons, in which the LORD prepared the Jewish people through centuries of trouble, disappointment, violence, and grief, Joseph the just man, of the House of David, appears. Jeremiah, the prophet of today's first reading, had believed that the former greatness of David's royal city Jerusalem should be restored by the reappearance of David, or one like him, a son of David. He would make Jerusalem great again.

The synoptic Evangelists -- Matthew, Mark, and Luke -- name the Nazarene's father as Joseph: Matthew and Luke add that Joseph was a Davidic descendant and native of the ancient king's hometown, Bethlehem. 

The lesson is simple: everything that is happening and will happen follows God's plan. Nor is it hard to understand God's ways since the prophets had foretold it in detail. 

As the Pentecost-inspired witnesses of Jesus's resurrection streamed from Jerusalem to announce the Gospel to the whole world, the Evangelists laboriously documented the foundations of this new religion in ancient Jewish traditions. The Gospel Revelation fulfilled a history of revelations from Abraham to John the Baptist. (John the Evangelist will go a step further as events in the life of Jesus fulfill his own predictions.) 

Born of Jerusalem's paroxysm of violence on Good Friday and the eerie silence that followed it for fifty days until Pentecost, Christianity was an exciting, chaotic wave of enthusiasm. People were suddenly gaga believers in the man they had despised and condemned to death. His disciples were not only preaching his doctrine, they were healing the sick and raising the dead. When religious and civil authorities intervened the movement only metastacized, spreading from city to city, and eventually to Europe and Africa. 

But for all the excitement it needed historical validation. Nothing comes from nothing and this movement has to come from someplace deeper than enthusiasm. And so the Evangelists, recalling Jesus's example, combed the Hebrew scriptures and found innumerable references to God's promised Messiah. 

Saint Matthew and Luke were especially committed to this process. Religious, civil, and intellectual authorities should understand that what we're seeing is not, with reflection and contemplation, unexpected. This is absolutely typical of everything we know of God. 

The Evangelists are particularly challenged to explain how a crucified man -- apparently a criminal -- can be worshipped as God. Ordinarily, only morbid curiosity would take an interest in criminals and their final days. Their stories would only show that the conman or the crook finally got what he deserved. But the Gospel celebrates God's triumph, his mighty work, over sin and death; and over everyone who would use death as final solution. 

Nothing can come between God and his people, not even their savage destruction of his Divine Son. 

It didn't begin with Joseph, the husband of Mary; it began with Abraham. (Luke would point even further back, to Adam.) 

As 2020 comes to its dreary end and we hope for a restored normal in 2021, the Evangelists remind us that God is still in charge. What seems haphazard and chaotic is actually ordained for God's purposes. We have only to watch and wait with expectation as Saint Paul assures us:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us. For creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God; for creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved.

Now hope that sees for itself is not hope. For who hopes for what one sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait with endurance.