Received via email.

Rebellion and Promise

Luke 1:57-80: Zechariah’s Prophecy, The Kingdom New Testament

The time arrived for Elisabeth’s child to be born, and she gave birth to a son. Her neighbours and relatives heard that the Lord had increased his mercy to her, and they came to celebrate with her.

Now on the eighth day, when they came to circumcise the child, they were calling him by his father’s name, Zechariah. But his mother spoke up.

‘No,’ she said, ‘he is to be called John.’

‘None of your relatives’, they objected, ‘is called by that name.’

They made signs to his father, to ask what he wanted him to be called. He asked for a writing tablet, and wrote on it, ‘His name is John.’

Everyone was astonished. Immediately his mouth and his tongue were unfastened, and he spoke, praising God. Fear came over all those who lived in the neighbourhood, and all these things were spoken of throughout all the hill country of Judaea. Everyone who heard about it turned the matter over in their hearts.

‘What then will this child become?’ they said. And the Lord’s hand was with him.

John’s father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit, and spoke this prophecy:

‘Blessed be the Lord, Israel’s God!

He’s come to his people and bought them their freedom.

He’s raised up a horn of salvation for us

In David’s house, the house of his servant,

Just as he promised, through the mouths of the prophets,

The holy ones, speaking from ages of old:

Salvation from our enemies, rescue from hatred,

Mercy to our ancestors, keeping his holy covenant.

He swore an oath to Abraham our father,

To give us deliverance from enemy hands,

So we might worship him, holy and righteous

Before his face to the end of our days.

You, child, will be called the prophet of the Highest One,

Go ahead of the Lord, preparing his way,

Letting his people know of salvation,

Through the forgiveness of all their sins.

The heart of our God is full of mercy,

That’s why his daylight has dawned from on high,

Bringing light to the dark, as we sat in death’s shadow,

Guiding our feet in the path of peace.’

The child grew, and became powerful in the Spirit. He lived in the wilderness until the day when he was revealed to Israel.

Luke, like Matthew, anchors the story he is going to tell in the story of the Old Testament. But Luke, unlike Matthew, broadens this story almost immediately so that we are reminded that what God does for his people is actually of world-wide relevance. Luke Chapter One is full of echoes of First Samuel, of the original birth and call of Samuel, then Samuel’s ministry of finally anointing King David. He is wanting to say that John the Baptist, whose birth is like a new Samuel, is going to anoint the new and true King, Jesus, in his baptism.

But in Chapter Two, Luke broadens that perspective because ‘in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled, registered for taxation’. Suddenly we find ourselves not only on the map of Israel, but on the map of Rome, the greatest empire the world had ever known. And Luke wants us, I think, to relish the fact that Caesar in Rome gives a decree and at the far end of his empire, the ‘back of beyond’, as far as he was concerned, a young man and his intended bride go on a journey to Bethlehem and have a child. This is, in fact, the true King who is going to make Caesars, in the days to come, shiver in their shoes until finally they relent and acknowledge Him to be the Lord of the world.

All of that Luke is hinting in the way he sets the story up. And indeed, when we get to the genealogy of Jesus in Luke, we find that the genealogy goes back, not to Abraham, but actually to Adam. Luke is telling us the story of Jesus, as the story of the world, as the story of the whole human race, which is addressed by the God of the Old Testament, the God of Israel, who is now made known in Jesus.

Luke also indicates, right from the beginning, that this story is about the temple, about the judgment on the present temple, and about Jesus as the one who is building the new temple. The Gospel of Luke begins in the temple with Zechariah, who is given a vision, and not believing the vision, because the angel tells him that his wife is going to have a child and he doesn’t initially grasp that at all. Then, Jesus is presented in the temple, which is unique to Luke. This goes on right to the end of the Gospel of Luke. Right at the end of the Gospel of Luke, the disciples are in the temple praising God.

But the temple has been under judgment. As we find again and again in the Old Testament, the present Jerusalem temple has become the symbol of resistance to the will of God, a symbol of the fact that Israel is hard-hearted. The temple encapsulates the two stories we have seen throughout the Old Testament: the narrative of promise and of God’s presence, as well as the narrative of Israel’s rebellion.

In Luke 15 we find Jesus encapsulating the point of God’s presence and Israel’s rebellion in three parables. We find in Luke 15, ‘Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to Jesus to listen to him’. Luke has many scenes where people are having parties and feasting with Jesus. And people grumble about it. ‘The Pharisees and Scribes are grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with him”’. In other words, how could he possibly be announcing God’s kingdom? Because if he was really an agent announcing God’s kingdom, he would be respecting and favoring and spending time with the rest of us who are trying to keep the law—the rest of us who are ‘righteous’ and being faithful to Israel’s God. Jesus tells them the three parables: The Parable of the Lost Sheep, the Parable of the Lost Coin, and the Parable of the Lost Son, or the Parable of the Lost Sons (because the parable is as much about the older brother as it is about the younger). Each of these stories is about explaining why there is a party going on.

Here’s the punch: ‘Just so I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance’ (Luke 15:7). Jesus is saying, ‘When I am sharing fellowship with and welcoming and forgiving sinners, then the angels are having a party upstairs’. What he is saying is that we should be having a party downstairs as well. What he is doing, therefore, is joining together heaven and earth. He is saying that what I am doing is the actual instantiation on earth as in heaven of the celebration that is going on in God’s court among the angels. The angels are having a party and so should we! Heaven and earth coming together.

Then the risen Jesus, in Luke 24, explains how the whole story of Jesus’ life and death all fits together. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus are puzzled because they thought that this Jesus whom they followed was going to redeem Israel, that he was the one who was going to do at last what they have been waiting for hundreds of years. But they crucified him so he couldn’t have been the one. Jesus says, ‘You have it entirely upside down and inside out…. was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter his glory?’.

The entire narrative is shaped by the creator God, shaped through Exodus, shaped through the story from Abraham to David, shaped by exile and the promises of restoration.

As we read Luke, we should see it as the culmination of that great scriptural story, but now being transformed into a new mode: the mode of mission, the mode of suffering, the mode of holiness, the mode of following Jesus to the ends of the earth.

N.T. Wright from a lecture in the course The Many Storied World of the Bible (not yet released).