🦁 Advent 1-2
Readings: Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19; Zechariah 14:1-9; 1 Thessalonians 4:1-18.
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Reflection
Hello and welcome to the second day of Advent. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from Psalm 80, Zechariah 14, and 1 Thessalonians 4. I have to apologize, I made a bit of a mistake with the upload, and so this didn't come out when it's supposed to, but I am hoping to get it out before lunchtime.
Some things to notice about today's readings. The Psalm I, I often kind of skip over. Just, they're, they're Narratively, they're doing something differently than, literarily, they're doing something different than narrative. But I did want to point out, I'm interested in Zechariah, but in 1 Thessalonians 4 when it saw, 1 Thessalonians is And a undoubted letter of Saul, um, and so we think he definitely wrote it.
Whoever it is that is claiming to be Paul, 1 Thessalonians is one of the letters that they think is genuinely his. And in the next chapter, we, in 1 Thessalonians 5, we had the armor of God, and It's kind of building to it that, you know, that when the, he starts talking at the end about a cry of command, the archangels call on the call of God's trumpet and those are going to die and everything.
It's, it's martial imagery, you know, it certainly kind of inspires John later in the revelation, the apocalypse of John and he's building toward the armor of God in 1 Thessalonians 5. I want to say eight, but in Zechariah, I thought was, as I was reading it, I was thinking, I think Zechariah is also the prophet who declares Joshua son of Josedach to be not just the high priest who returned from exile after a generation in Babylon and built the second temple, Joshua's temple but that Zechariah also is uses imagery in chapter three uh, of his work that makes Joshua son of Josedach not just the high priest, but also the king.
In Zechariah three, he talks about how he will wear a crown on his head. And the talks about how he will save and rule combining the role of the high priest with that of the king. In the, in the Hebraic imaginations kind of consummate. Kings are not as important. It was judges in ancient Israel that were the political kind of head of state.
And as their political identity and imagination evolved and developed, Joshua son of Josedach is, becomes this shining example. He builds the temple and he's not a king. Zerubbabel is the, is the kind of provincial ruler underneath Cyrus of Persia. But the combining of the priestly with the political Is I don't think is done anywhere else for a specific person actual person.
And so when he talks about battle Zechariah sees has a very peculiar political theology and as I read Zechariah this morning where it talks about Where the the Lord will stand on the Mount of Olives on the east and it will be split into, into a wide valley and the rivers will flow out. It made me think of Jesus's arrest.
And as he weeps over Jerusalem, it's typically from the Mount of Olives at Gethsemane, the Garden of Gethsemane. And so he has this interesting. pHilosophy, theology of rulership, where I can only imagine that the rivers are Jesus's blood. If this is a messianic prophecy, that by dying, Jesus is doing battle with the forces, supernatural evil forces, whatever you want to call them.
But he, he is gathering everybody to Jerusalem to battle. Verse 2, and the city shall be taken and the houses looted and the women raped. Half the city shall go into exile, but the rest shall not be cut off from these. It seems as though Zechariah is kind of foreshadowing and it was written and compiled before Jesus's time But it seems to be predicting or foreshadowing Jesus and the entire trial, the entire passion as a, a battle scene.
He will go up and the, the mountains will be split and it won't be cold, right? It probably happens in the summer. It'll be a continuous day, which evokes, Joshua, when they battled the Gibeonites, I believe. Not the Gibeonites. They made a treaty, but the, the longest day with Joshua. I believe it was in the Canaanite, the, the campaign in Canaan to take the promised land in Joshua 6 through 12, where the day, the sun stands still in the sky.
In other words, making a continuous day. And so I think that Zechariah has in here the makings of this Joshua figure, drawing from Joshua, son of Nun. Who made the son stand still? Joshua's son of Joe Zak, who rebuilds the, the, the temple in all its glory. The second temple um, before the Herodians and Hamans kind of corrupt the priesthood and it falls away from this zite line, et cetera, et cetera.
Zes seems to have a very. elaborate and mature political theology that wraps in the, the leadership of the Son of Nun, the priestliness of the Son of Josedach, and prefigures or anticipates Joshua's Son of Mary and Son of God to be the final embodiment of that. Now, Zechariah, as I said earlier, didn't write, wrote well before Jesus time.
It was compiled in Hebrew and Greek, you know, Two centuries or three centuries before Jesus was born. And so it makes me think that God is doing this thing that Zachariah caught, caught a glimpse of what God had in store in, in Jesus and in tying Jesus to the, to the, you know, the richest, most nuanced and complicated and ornate, I suppose, political theology of, of.
The, the Hebrew kind of imagination, the Old Testament, and within the context of, you know, Jesus coming in the flesh in Advent, and this feels very much like an Advent text, Zechariah, I don't know if any. Interpreters have seen or would agree with this. I don't know. I haven't read it. I'm just, as I was thinking and reading the text and thinking about what I've been learning in the midst of, or through this podcast for the last, it took a year after four years of doing five years there are these connections that I think are really important not to overlook.
To not shy away from these difficult texts that involve violence and battle and rivers possibly of blood flowing out of Jerusalem, like, yeah, it makes us uncomfortable, but that's kind of the point. God is supposed to be revered. We're supposed, there's supposed to be a certain trepidation when we think about the things of God.
And so maybe this has something behind it, maybe it doesn't. I will post. Links in the show notes to the armor of God so you can see first Thessalonians 5. I'll also link in Joshua son of Josedach And I think I have on there his Where he appears in Zechariah 3 and Zechariah 6, but it's really interesting stuff and I Apologize for missing my my own deadline.
I'll Make sure it's uploaded and just kind of scheduled tonight so that it's 3 a. m. Pacific time, 6 a. m. Eastern time so that if there are any grunts who listen to this before they go to first formation that they have access to that ahead of time. Again, I'm sorry I delayed a little bit, but I hope this reading and, and this podcast has been as fruitful and will continue to be as fruitful for you as it has been for me.
