Read Luke
1 for background to this post.
The Bible’s Good News booklets (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John) begin obscurely in a strange character, John the Baptist. It’s not
immediately clear how this is good news for us. After Luke introduces his
topic, he launches into the story of John’s birth. So how does this relate to good news?
While it’s not readily apparent to modern readers why Luke starts
here, it’s not difficult to understand if we know just three simple pieces of
information:
1) At Israel’s conception in Genesis
12:1-3, God promises their ancestors Abraham and Sarah that his descendants
will become a great nation that will be a blessing to the whole world—All
the families on earth will be blessed through you. That’s Israel’s purpose.
The Bible’s essential message is that the world’s hope is found in the blessing
Israel will give the nations.
2) The second bit of helpful information is to see that John’s
parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth, represent Israel at its best. Luke says about
this old couple, [They] were righteous in God’s eyes, careful to obey all of
the Lord’s commandments and regulations. That didn’t mean they were
perfect, but in this human world they were as good as you get. They
encapsulated what God wanted to see in the people of Israel.
3) But Luke also wants us to see that Israel, pictured through
this couple, couldn't produce the blessing for the world. Luke says, They
had no children because Elizabeth was unable to conceive, and they were both
very old.
It had been nearly 2000 years since Abraham’s and Sarah’s similar
story. They were infertile and it took God’s intervention to produce a promised
child in their old age. Now again he intervened in Zechariah’s and Elizabeth’s
infertility. For after all these centuries the world was in just as sad a shape
as ever. It was as if the promised nation Israel was barren—not able to give
birth to the promise. Indeed, after all this time, the great European world
power, Rome, occupied the land of Israel. Rome proclaimed itself as the good
news for the world.
One year Zechariah was chosen to perform the annual priestly
duty of burning incense in the most holy place of the temple, representing
Israel’s prayers. The prayers at this annual event were for God to send the
great promised Messiah who would save Israel—fulfilling the promise to Abraham.
In the middle of this priestly task he had an incredible vision of an angel
telling him he and Elizabeth would have a son who would prepare the people
for the coming of the Lord.
Even with that incredible experience he couldn’t
believe such an impossibility, and was rendered speechless. When he ventured
back outside to the waiting crowd, he couldn’t pronounce the priestly blessing!
This pictured Israel’s incapability of blessing the world.
Now we are another 2000 years down the road. Look at our
world. We look to political leaders for hope—but is there really hope? I have witnessed
enough American elections to see the futility in expecting much hope. If it’s
not corruption in our own government, it’s in the hopelessness of foreign affairs,
poverty, violence, disease, climate change.
The good news booklets from the Bible speak of a different
kind of hope that transcends world affairs as they stand today. Once upon a
time, that hope took the world by a storm, but over time the church turned and
twisted the message into an entity that copied the political establishment. It
began to serve itself instead of the world and ignored the kinds of problems it
was best positioned to address: poverty, hopelessness, injustice, prejudice, discrimination,
inequity. No wonder why the church lost its influence in the western world. But
the message of good news transcends church bureaucracy and corruption.
Today the church needs to shed itself of ineffectual, 'barren' self
talk, self-righteousness, judgment, bureaucracy, corruption, and return to the
simple Good News. For there aren’t many in our western hemisphere who see good
news in the church.
Especially all those people who have become disaffected
from the church over the years—don’t give up on Jesus. He far transcends your
experience of ‘church’. He far transcends the church. Go back and read these
first century Good News tracts, and see what inspired a worldwide movement.
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