The First Sunday after Christmas
FIRST SAMUEL 2:18-20, 26: The story of Samuel is present in the accounts of the birth of Jesus that we have in the Gospel of Luke.
Mary, like Hannah, received a special child granted to her by the Lord. Like Joseph and Mary, Elkanah and Hannah brought their child to the holy place for the yearly sacrifice. Like Jesus, Samuel came to Israel at a time in which the nation was exhausted spiritually and physically, and each brought them hope. The birth of both sons was accompanied by prayers and songs and miraculous events. Each child was a "loan from the Lord," coming from God to perform that which God had in mind for each. Both boys discovered that the house of the Lord was their true home, Samuel in the shrine at Shiloh and Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem.
Both receive the highest possible praise from those who wrote their stories. In the First Book of Samuel, the young boy Samuel is said to have "continued to grow both in stature and in favor with the Lord and with humankind." In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is said to have "increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and all humankind."
PSALM 148: I can see it in my mind: a cosmic choir director standing somewhere in the heavens where he or she can be seen by all God's universe. He is directing them in praise of the Lord. She raises her baton and points to the heights of heaven:
Praise God, all his angels, Praise God, all his host!
Praise God, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens!
He points to the sun and the moon and the stars:
Praise God, sun and moon, Praise God, all you shining stars!
She turns to the earth and invites the elements of chaos to sing God's praise:
Praise the Lord from the earth, you sea monsters and all the deeps, fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind that moves at God's command! Praise the Lord!
He invites God's ordered creation to join in:
Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars!
Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds!
Praise the Lord!
She points the baton at kings and rulers:
Kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all rulers
Young men and women alike, old and young together. Praise the Lord!
Then, for no known reason, God pushes Israel into the center of the stage of history, and the spotlight of God's love focuses on this people of God's own choosing:
Praise for all God's faithful people, the people of Israel who are close to him.
The baton circles the heavens and the earth, all creation. The director raps for attention. "All together now! Let us sing it out," he calls, "Sopranos, altos, tenors, bass. Let me hear you. Sing with all your hearts":
Let us praise the name of the Lord, for his name alone is exalted; his glory is above earth and heaven! Praise the Lord!
Francis of Assisi had it right. Using Psalm 148 as his model, he composed his "Canticle of the Sun." Brother Sun, brother wind, brother fire, praise the Lord. Sister moon, sister earth, sister of the flowing waters, praise the Lord. The African-American spiritual has it right: "He's got the whole world in his hands, he's got the sun and the rain, the moon and the stars, the little bitty baby, you and me, brother, you and me, sister. He's got the whole world in his hands!" The Christian church has it right, too. The name of Jesus is exalted: "At the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth" (Phil 2:10 NRSV). Only praise can capture the mood of the psalm. Praise alone can capture the mood we feel at Christmas as once more we welcome Jesus Christ into our world and into our lives.
COLOSSIANS 3:12-17: This passage describes the heart of the Christian life in two words: "Be thankful." Three times in this passage Paul calls us to do this: "Be thankful, sing your songs with thankfulness in your hearts, do everything in the name of Jesus Christ, being thankful to God the Father through him." Grace and gratitude: these words sum up the Christian life.
In their gratitude, God's chosen ones, that small group of Christians in the large city of Colossae, are to show compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness and patience. They are to forgive one another. They are to put on love; love is the bond that unites all the virtues in harmony. They are to let the peace of Christ rule in their hearts; the peace of Christ is like a judge who awards prizes in the omni-present games of Greece, who in quietness and confidence decides, controls, rules, arbitrates over the issues of life. They are to let the word of Christ dwell in them richly, the word spoken in the gospels and applied to our lives through the working of the Holy Spirit. We Christians do this because when God came to us in the person of Christ, Christ showed us compassion and kindness, patience and forgiveness. We love because God in Christ loves us. We let the peace of Christ dwell in us, because God in Christ brings us this peace.
This kind of Christian behavior is nurtured in the midst of congregations that sing "psalms and hymns and spiritual songs." The "psalms" refer to the Book of Psalms. Christians sang them in their worship as did those who worshiped in Jewish synagogues. We have examples of Christian "hymns" in the "Hymn to the Logos" in John 1 and the "Hymn to the Exalted One" in Philippians 2; perhaps some of the songs included in the Christmas stories of the Gospel of Luke are also "hymns" of the church. As far as I know, we do not have examples of "spiritual songs," though they may be hidden in some of the small poems tucked into the various letters of Paul or in the Book of Revelation. Taken together, these psalms and hymns and spiritual songs show us the richness of Christian worship as it developed in the early church.
This passage closes with the finest statement we have on Christian behavior. "Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of Jesus Christ, giving thanks to God the Father through him." "The name of Jesus Christ" means Christ's demonstrable character, the character of Christ that we discover as we read the Scripture. Incorporating Christ's character in our own life, we are to bring the spirit of Jesus Christ, through us, into every circumstance we confront in life.
LUKE 2:41-52: This is the one story we have in all the gospels that comes from the childhood and adolescence of Jesus.
In this story, Jesus accompanies his parents to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. He is twelve years old at the time. This is probably the first time that he has been invited to accompany his parents on their annual pilgrimage. When they start home, Jesus remains in Jerusalem. They assume that he is with some of the other kinsfolk and acquaintances that had joined in this pilgrimage, so it is a full day before they miss him. (You can imagine their anguish as they search among the families for him and cannot find him.) The parents return to Jerusalem to hunt for him, and for three days they cannot find him; how their anguish must have increased! On that third day they find him in the temple. He is sitting among the teachers, talking with them, listening and asking questions. Those who heard him were astonished at his answers. His parents were astonished to find him here, and Mary takes the lead in chiding him. "Son, why have you treated us so? Your father and I have been hunting you." There is real agony in her voice when she says this. The Greek word "odunao" speaks of her intense pain. The young Jesus replies, "Why did you seek me? Did you now know that I must be in my Father's house and about my Father's business?" Nevertheless, he returned to Nazareth with them (unlike Samuel who remained in the shrine of Shiloh) and he was obedient to them. And Mary, mother-like, kept these things in her heart and pondered them. She would not know what they really meant until she saw her son hanging on a cross.
Behind this story, we have to consider the education that Jesus received that brought him to his questions in the temple. His education was primarily in the hands of his father. According to the Talmud, the collection of Jewish civil and religious law, the duties of father to son are these: "He must circumcise him, redeem him, teach him Torah, teach him a trade, and find him a wife."
Joseph had done this for his son. He had had him circumcised (Luke 2:21). Circumcision took place on the most sacred part of his whole body. With his sex organ, the male was a co-worker with God in creation. It was especially appropriate that it should be dedicated to God as a symbol of the dedication of his whole body, his whole person. Joseph "redeemed" him, that is, he performed an animal sacrifice in his behalf. Because the family was so poor, the sacrifice consisted of a pair of turtle doves (Luke 2:22-24). As soon as the boy was old enough, Joseph began to teach him his trade of carpentry.
Joseph also was responsible for teaching him the Torah, the instruction of the Jews. Students were taught in a local community elementary school called the House of the Book. Its sole textbook was the Torah, which was used for instruction in reading and writing as well as in religious education. Later the boy went to an intermediate school called the House of Study, which gave instruction in oral tradition as well as in Scripture. The Mishnah said, "At five years old one is fit for the Scripture, at ten for the Mishnah, at thirteen for the fulfilling of the commandments, at fifteen for the Talmud." At the age of 13 the Jewish boy attained the status of an adult.
Hadas-Lebel describes the kind of training that went on (Josephus 13-15). "As soon as a boy was weaned, he was expected to participate in the feast days. His father would teach him the Shema as soon as he could speak. Next came the teaching of the Torah combined with instruction in the sacred language, Hebrew. Schooling relied heavily upon memory. The child's first teacher would instruct him in the traditional readings by having him repeat aloud, a further aid to memorization; a particularly gifted student could quickly learn by heart the five books of the Pentateuch. This was supplemented by the readings of the synagogue. To make certain that all the faithful would be able to understand what was being read, each synagogue employed an official who could recite the biblical text in a language accessible to the local population, making a kind of paraphrase sprinkled with exegesis. These explanations would be followed by a sermon. This was basically for moral edification. Philo of Alexandria said it should consist of teaching in intelligence, moderation, courage, justice, and other virtues." Josephus, a contemporary of Jesus who left us a history of the time, said this of his own religious training, "Our principle concern is to educate our children, and we think it to be the most important business of our whole life." Philo added this: Jews "from their very swaddling clothes are taught by parents, teachers, and those who bring them up, even before instruction in the sacred laws and unwritten customs, to believe in one God, the father and creator of the world."
It was training of this nature that gave Jesus his profound understanding of the Scriptures of his people. Jesus became the most accurate and the most daring interpreter of these scriptures of anyone in the history of Judaism. He was already on the way to this when he met with the teachers in the temple at Jerusalem. When he returned home, he fulfilled the kind of life that every Jewish man since Samuel had aspired to: "He increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and humankind."