🦁 Advent 3-7
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to the seventh day of Advent three, or the third week of Advent. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from Psalm 125, Malachi 3, and Mark 9. Very short reading. And it has to do with Elijah as we reflect back on the readings from this prior Sunday.
And The thing about Elijah, that he appears in the New Testament because a lot of people think that, you know, Jesus is the new Elijah. Here in Malachi and elsewhere it was promised that Elijah would come again because as we read, I think yesterday, that he did not die. He never, he never suffered death.
He was just taken up into heaven and in the chariots of Israel. And so there existed this belief that he was coming again and he would do something important and combine that with some of the messianic and prophecies. People thought that Elijah and the son of man or the Messiah might be one in the same.
And it seems as though in Mark You know, they, they ask him why does Elijah must come and Jesus answers him that the son of man and Elijah aren't necessarily the same thing. He says, Elijah has come and they did to him whatever they pleased as it was written of him. And Elijah here. It's John the Baptist, Jesus's forerunner and, you know, blood relative of some kind people might say cousins or maybe Elizabeth and Mary were cousins.
Again, we read this earlier about how the genealogy of Jesus the, the word is just cis genus, one gene, one blood, right? So it's not just like some random Distant relative, it's not just friends, there's some kind of blood relative, and that makes Jesus and John also related. So Elijah is known for all of his powerful deeds, miracles, his confronting power which is what John the Baptist did and it's what Jesus did and the transfiguration We see Elijah and Moses and Jesus being the third person.
anD this, the, so there's this kind of maelstrom, this tornado of prophetic, messianic eschatological hopes. And, you know, just as, as we do today, back in the first century of Palestine, they were trying to make sense of all the, these, you know. Folklore, tales, prophecies, like, in the moment, you know, nobody knows really which one is most important or what's most reliable, most clear, what's more obtuse.
And I sometimes liken these messianic things to the, the legends, plural, of Arthur. And I remember as a kid, I thought Arthur was a real person. I thought they were, they were real, right? No, they're all, you know, there was. Certainly some kind of inspiration, but more importantly, there's this whole oral tradition that arose out of this person.
And I want to say the 7th century or the 6th century. And then, you know, little tiny tidbits get really embellished and other little tiny tidbits kind of stay uniform or kind of simple. And this is what the messianism of the 1st century was like. It happens with Joan of Arc too, a soldier saint. Who there is some you know.
Prophet or wizard or something. anD he tells this tale of a coming, you know, deliverer. And that person was later made out to be associated with Merlin. And then Joan was, you know, the coming of that of that special person. But I digress. And so there's, there's a bit of, I want to be honest and say prophecies, I, I feel like get this weird rap of like fortune tellers looking into a crystal ball.
And it's easier to dismiss them. It's easier to kind of discount them. I think prophecies are more like you're at the base of the stairs. You see a toddler at the top and you think if someone doesn't put up a baby gate or teach the kid to stay away from the top of the stairs, that kid's going to get hurt.
Is that prophetic? Kind of. I mean, are you telling the future? Possibly. Maybe. Probably. Right? And so I, in the socio economic political world of the ancient Israelites, this is a bit of truth telling, a bit of fancy and kind of folklore, but they're trying to make sense of it. And Elijah is, is one of these certainly historical figures, but also probably had a lot of embellishment in the telling, just like Moses.
And so it's important to differentiate in our, you know, be able to admit some of that stuff that we do to make sense from, from nothing. You know the thing like was he, was Mary always a virgin? No. She had kids, but. A very large number of Christians believe that she has never had kids and never had sex.
And we use this kind of weird, modern language around sex sexuality. But so I think it's important to Understand some of the things that are less important and less central to the meaning of what God does in Christ, like, say, the Immaculate Virginity or the Perpetual Virginity of Mary. aNd then what are the more important things, like turning the other cheek, loving your neighbor?
And so doing those things are, they feel boring, but also they're, they're, they're really powerful. aNd I'm, I want to keep it short because the readings are short, but I also wanted to point out that the, the Lord of hosts, which we hear in verse three in Micah Micah four, three, Malachi four, three, sorry.
thIs word hosts is this weird King James language applied to this Hebrew word Sabah, which is armies or assemblies or companies or And so when we see the Lord of Hosts, we're borrowing from the King James, but like who, who says hosts outside of the Bible? It's the Lord of Armies. The, the commander or the, the highest person overall, you know, Kyrios, Lord over the, over all the armies, the Lord of Hosts is the Lord of Armies.
And I'll put that in the And the show notes, but it's really interesting kind of coupling with Elijah and Moses which we get in both in Malachi and then in other parts of Mark, we didn't read it today. But to be careful about the language and the, the, what the language is doing. You know, here we have Lord of hosts, which is Sabbah, which is armies.
We don't like to think of God as. As we think of militaries, which we think of them as violent, and we, we don't want to think of God as violent. But also there's a grain of truth there, that if we, if we mix up this, you know, kind of stew, we're going to gain some things, we're going to lose some things.
But if we are more careful about, you know, understanding what the language is doing, why it's doing, where it came from. I think a lot more of our own understanding will certainly be unlocked, but also the greater appreciation we might have of God because the greater, you know, the more comprehensive of a picture that we can possibly perceive might come, might come with that as well.
