🦁 Advent 2-7
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to the 14th day of Advent. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from Psalm 27, Malachi 2, and Luke 1. And as the Wednesday reading, we are at the end of the liturgical week, but the readings reflect back on the reading from Sunday, which is now live and you can see after it had been reserved for first forward subscribers.
And the reading today from I'm sorry, Luke 1, the birth of John the Baptist, some of the things that you would notice if you're a soldier, are some of the language around what Zechariah is doing. ZEchariah is a priest, and he's not the high priest, he's just a priest. Later, it is said that his wife, Elizabeth, is a son of is, I'm sorry, a daughter of Aaron, and she and her blood relative, cisgenus, one gene or one blood, um, they are both, therefore, daughters of Aaron.
And so, that makes John the baptizer and Jesus, or Joshua, son of God and son of Mary, they're both descended from Aaron. Which is only to say that they are of the Levitical bloodline. Whether they're from the line of Zadok, I can't remember, though Matthew and Luke might preserve it in their genealogies.
And the, the language here, I mentioned their genealogy because Zechariah, we sometimes think of Jesus as descending from David, but that's not what the text says. And there's certainly some mixing, not mixing up, but crossing of the, the tribal lineages. I don't doubt that he had some blood of Judah in him, but it doesn't, he does not, he doesn't inherit any, you know, genetic material from Joseph.
And Joseph is the one, the text says, who is descended from David. And so the emphasis is on the priestly line. And the priests were the ones who were essentially the kind of political or, you know, socio religio political kind of heads of state. So Zachariah plays a very important role. The, the Levitical priests, the, you know, those who weren't the high priests, they did a bunch of the menial tasks surrounding the temple economy.
And this is difficult because Jesus has a lot of really difficult things to say about the temple economy and, and how it has become corrupt through, you know, greed and you know, political appointments. There's no Zadokite, who's a high priest and hasn't been for several generations, and so it's seen as illegitimate.
But Zechariah's a son of you know, married to one of the daughters of Aaron and is a Levitical priest himself, and he's just doing the things that he needs to do. He's probably aware of the corruption, but he's He's got a job to do, um, and specifically uses the language in verse 8 of division and duty and, you know, soldiers will recognize that.
That's a military unit, right? A division is above a grade, um, and below an army. There's, you know, third army, fourth army, whatever. And then duty is something that we all have to pull. Even officers have duties, you know, 24 hour duties or other, you know, details. They've got a, they've been assigned to that they probably don't want to do.
And so it's menial, it's mundane, it's routine, but he is, it's his time for duty. And another connection between John and Jesus is that it mentions that Zechariah is of the order of Abijah. And I can't remember exactly how far back it goes, but Abijah Joshua were priests Returning from the Babylonian exile and they there was a rotation.
I think there was nine. Maybe there's twelve you know essentially Priestly clans that would then rotate through the duty and a Baija comes just before Joshua son of Josedek, the high priest who also did, you know, the normal priestly duties and who also did the high priestly duties of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah and etc.
So there's this important parallel between Jesus, whose, you know, birth name was Joshua and John or Yohanan, the, the baptizer and their families. It is a, a reflection back, not only on the priestly line, but on the prophetic influence, right? John is, is gonna have the power of Elijah. He's also going to be very much like a Nazirite.
He won't take strong drink or wine, even from his mother's womb, which is the language used in Numbers 6 for the Nazirites, as well as for Elijah himself, who didn't drink strong drink, and he wore A hair shirt and eight locusts. And he lived in the desert, which is something very similar to what John will do.
And so these parallels are being drawn out. But we shouldn't miss the military parallels. Joshua, son of Jo Josedach. is kind of this precursor to Joshua, son of Mary and of God. But it goes back even further to the 6th book of the Bible, Joshua, which is the anglicized version of Yeshua and Yeshu Yeshua and Yeshu, and also essentially meaning salvation and Joshua, son of Nun.
Who was the military commander that captured the promised land under the command of God. And Joshua son of Nun, Joshua son of Josedach, and Joshua son of Mary are the only Joshuas in the entire Bible who are called Joshua son of X, Y, Z, right? There's other Joshuas, there's a governor of Jerusalem.
There's there's a priest in some random period of time, but they are not called son of anything that Title Yoshua or Joshua, or Salvation Son of God, or Son of Joe Zak, or Son of None. tHese were all supposed to be of a part combining the priestly cast and duties. With the leadership or rulership expectations and responsibilities, but not kingly.
Israel does not have a monarchy. They asked for a king to be just like all the other nations and no longer be set apart. And then God makes this promise to David, because David's a great ruler. He's like, I'm gonna make your, your throne go on forever. But it's a, it's an import from foreign culture to have a monarchy.
And so let's get away from the language of Rulership and kingship in terms of monarchy and Jesus because Jesus isn't a king He's a high priest and a judge essentially because judges in Israel are those who save Israel from their enemies Who save Israel from their sins? which is how Samson is described, um, and so it's important to see all of how this symbolism and language are mixed in together.
Some of it you already know, we're in the season of Advent, we use Isaiah a lot, the child will lead them, lay down next to the adder, all the rest, but there's other symbols and other nuances and evocations that we miss if we don't understand that the Bible assumes a certain amount of military experience.
We live in a society that doesn't have a draft, doesn't expect its members or its citizens to defend our borders. And that's new, historically. And so we come at the text with an altered view of that soldiers and veterans can help us get back to. Soldiers and veterans, not just like, you know, the typical ones, you know, Cornelius and Des or dependents like Lydia but people next to you in the pew who may have served for some time, but you might not know it because they might not want to tell you.
SoLdiers, veterans, military families are integral to the story of God because they're integral to the heart and the life and the activity of God and Mary and God's Son.
