One obvious answer is more poetry; and that, in a sense, is what both Paul and John offer here. The Ephesians passage is a sweeping retelling of Israel’s story: God’s choice of his people, the redemption from Egypt, the unveiling of God’s wider purpose, the revealing of his will, and the personal presence of God as his people journey to the land of promise. Only it has all happened fully and finally – in Jesus the Messiah. Try reading the passage with the emphasis on ‘him’ each time, to bring out the surprise: it is in him that all this has happened, not in some other Jewish moment or movement, not in the rule of Caesar or any other feature of world history. The story is familiar, the hero unexpected. Open your ears, says Paul, and hear how the songs of the prophets have at last come round into the major key. Learn to listen for the echoes. Watch the picture come up in three dimensions, or maybe even more.
John 1 suffers from carol-service repetition. It becomes audible wallpaper: the headmaster’s drone tells the school only that it’s nearly time for mince pies. Almost worse: it is usually cut off at v. 14, producing the literary and theological equivalent of leaving the spire off a cathedral.
Try taking one image and seeing the whole Johannine poem reflected in it. In the beginning … You are standing in the dark looking eastwards out to sea. The stars flicker overhead. The first signs of light, and of life: grey pre-dawn sky, seabirds around the breaking waves. Grey turns to green, then gold. Curtains still closed inshore, oblivious to the wakening glory. Stars fade, sea and sky catch fire, and the bright, overpowering disk emerges. Too radiant to look at, but in its light you can see everything else. The heavens declare God’s glory, new every morning: was Psalm 19, along with Genesis 1 and Exodus 32—34, among the many passages in John’s mind?
New Year resolution: read the New Testament while the Old is still echoing around the mind’s rafters.
The First Sunday of Epiphany
Isaiah 42.1–9
Acts 10.34–43
Matthew 3.13–17
John’s baptism can easily seem a mere introduction, the soon-to-be-forgotten starting point. The early Church clearly didn’t see it like that, since John continues to haunt the story in all four Gospels and Acts. This wasn’t just surreptitious polemic against John’s continuing followers. It was positive: John was the heaven-sent prophet through whom the Messiah was to be revealed. Mentioning him reinforces Jesus’ messiahship.
This is particularly striking in the Cornelius story. Peter, speaking to a Gentile, makes no attempt to de-Judaize his message. It is essentially a messianic statement, as indeed the title ‘Jesus Christ’ in v. 36 indicates: Jesus is the anointed one, whose works of healing were the signs that ‘God was with him’ (a phrase used of David among others). The resurrection demonstrates that Jesus’ death was messianic, despite appearances; and now this Jesus is to be judge of living and dead, the dispenser of divine forgiveness. All of this sustains the claim that Jesus, the Messiah, is Lord of all the world – a title which, as Cornelius would recognize, was claimed by his own boss. There lies the true challenge to the non-Jew: to see the Jewish king as the world’s true Lord.
The story of Jesus’ baptism in Matthew’s Gospel, therefore, is both a further challenge to Herod – here is God anointing his true king under the nose of the old one, somewhat like Samuel anointing David with Saul still on the throne – and the beginning of the confrontation with, as well as the welcome for, the whole world. It explains why the foreign kings (if that’s what they were) brought him gifts. It explains why another centurion, in Matthew 8, knows that he possesses authority. If he is the anointed Messiah, he is Lord of all. The mere announcement of this messiahship, as Acts 10 bears witness, is the thing that carries the power of the Spirit. It declares that Israel’s God has brought his people’s long story to its strange moment of truth. The whole world is now to be addressed by the one who is both Israel’s representative and God’s own son (‘Son of God’ is a messianic title before it is a trinitarian one).
But the large agenda set before the servant-Messiah in Isaiah 42 is accomplished only by implication in the Gospels. Matthew clearly believed that Jesus fulfilled Isaiah 42, and that his death was the primary achievement of the task there set out. But if he knew in his day that the good news still needed to be carried to all the nations, would he not say in ours too that ‘the coastlands [still] wait for his teaching’ (42.4)? If it is true that the Messiah will not faint or be discouraged until he has established justice in the earth, how is that steady, tireless programme to be implemented by those who, today, claim to be anointed by his own royal Spirit to proclaim him as Lord of all?
The Second Sunday of Epiphany
Isaiah 49.1–7
1 Corinthians 1.1–9
John 1.29–42
Our question to Isaiah is always, ‘Who is the Servant?’ Israel, replies the prophet (Isaiah 49.3). But the far harder question is, ‘Who is Israel?’
To this, Isaiah gives three concentric answers. The nation as a whole, the people abhorred by the nations (v. 7). Those whose task it is to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the survivors of Israel (v. 6). And also one who stands over against both nation and remnant (50.10: the remnant are those ‘who hear the voice of the servant’). Nation, remnant, individual form a lasting pattern.
As Christians we want to add: Jesus, naturally; and the apostles (Paul often uses Isaianic servant-language to describe his own work). Worryingly, the New Testament also adds: ‘ordinary’ Christians (not that there are any such, but you know what I mean). We can’t get off the hook of the demanding servant-vocation by supposing Jesus has done it all. The Isaianic pattern still awaits fulfilment: if God’s justice and salvation are to reach to earth’s bounds, it will be through servants, equipped with the spirit of the Servant.
This is the basis of Paul’s appeal to Corinth. Before he launches into the letter’s many problems, he lays down a foundation. God’s people in Corinth are summoned to be saints and worshippers (v. 2); great grace has been poured out on them (v. 4); God has given them many gifts of speech and knowledge (vv. 5–7). God is faithful, and will now give them strength (vv. 8–9). They belong to the koinonia the partnership, of God’s Son, King Jesus, the Lord (v. 9).
But that partnership is not just a dining club where one can settle down and enjoy fellowship. It is a business partnership with a purpose: to address the sin and pain of the world with the love of God unveiled on the cross. Paul is about to call the Corinthian church to model and implement the genuine new humanity through which alone God will overturn the wisdom and power of the world. This is the servant-vocation, first-century style. It remains the servant-vocation still.
The fluidity of Isaiah’s servant-concept therefore has nothing to do with the prophet’s being unable to make up his mind or to bring the picture into clear focus. It has to do with God’s continuing determination to work through his created order, through his chosen people. Through Jesus, yes, as the true Israelite, the firstborn of all creation, but also now through those who belong to Jesus; lest, salvation having been accomplished in Jesus, the world and the human race be merely passive thereafter. So, in John’s account of Jesus’ baptism and the first disciples, Andrew’s announcement (‘we’ve found the Messiah!’) is matched, balanced, by Jesus’ comment (‘Simon, eh? I’m going to call you Mr Rock’). When, through the window of God’s revelation, you recognize the unique Servant,