Advent 2
Devotional
Water From the Well
Lectionary Devotional For Cycle A
Object:
Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to a king's son.
-- Psalm 72:1
The psalmist yearned for a righteous king who would establish justice and bring peace to the world. For Israel, the king was the anointed one of God. The anointed one was the one who had been chosen by God as God's special servant. The Hebrew word that we translate "anointed" can also be translated "messiah." In Greek that same word is christ. Israel believed that it was God who chose their kings, and each king was to be the anointed one, or the messiah, or christ. In Isaiah 11, when the kingdom was failing, they recalled their glory days when David, the son of Jesse, was their king. This was the image Israelites used to form their hopes for the future. Projecting that vision into the future, they prayed that God would bring them a messiah, or christ, who would establish justice and equity on the earth. This christ would defend the cause of the poor, defeat the oppressors of the world, and allow righteousness to flourish and peace to abound. Jesus seemed to embody for his early disciples those very qualities. When he reached out to the excluded, healed the sick, fed the hungry, and chastised the rich and the powerful, they saw him establishing equity. The fact that he was crucified without God intervening to prevent it was a crisis of faith. It was only with the resurrection that they understood that Jesus was the Christ who would "judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice." The fact that he came and yet the world continues to display injustice and oppression becomes a crisis of faith for contemporary Christians. During Advent, we live in an "already but not yet" time frame. We believe that Jesus is the Christ and did embody the hope of Israel for the peace and justice for which we yearn, but each Advent season we are invited to believe that Christ will come again to complete his work. In the meantime, we are to live as if that might happen at any time.
-- Psalm 72:1
The psalmist yearned for a righteous king who would establish justice and bring peace to the world. For Israel, the king was the anointed one of God. The anointed one was the one who had been chosen by God as God's special servant. The Hebrew word that we translate "anointed" can also be translated "messiah." In Greek that same word is christ. Israel believed that it was God who chose their kings, and each king was to be the anointed one, or the messiah, or christ. In Isaiah 11, when the kingdom was failing, they recalled their glory days when David, the son of Jesse, was their king. This was the image Israelites used to form their hopes for the future. Projecting that vision into the future, they prayed that God would bring them a messiah, or christ, who would establish justice and equity on the earth. This christ would defend the cause of the poor, defeat the oppressors of the world, and allow righteousness to flourish and peace to abound. Jesus seemed to embody for his early disciples those very qualities. When he reached out to the excluded, healed the sick, fed the hungry, and chastised the rich and the powerful, they saw him establishing equity. The fact that he was crucified without God intervening to prevent it was a crisis of faith. It was only with the resurrection that they understood that Jesus was the Christ who would "judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice." The fact that he came and yet the world continues to display injustice and oppression becomes a crisis of faith for contemporary Christians. During Advent, we live in an "already but not yet" time frame. We believe that Jesus is the Christ and did embody the hope of Israel for the peace and justice for which we yearn, but each Advent season we are invited to believe that Christ will come again to complete his work. In the meantime, we are to live as if that might happen at any time.
