Jeremiah 31:7-14; John 1:1-18

Monday, December 27, 2010

A prophet has an advantage over folks who see only as far as their eyes will take them: she does not have to scope down to one generation's lifetime. Nor is she limited by personal memory. Or experience. As bitter or sweet as the fruit might be for her, or for a particular people at any given time or place, the prophet's vision is not thus encumbered. This is good, because Jeremiah, in his case, has invested a lot of text space lamenting the bitterness of Israel's broken story - each crushing moment, one tragedy after another. Israel has been scattered. Near extinction. But now the prophet speaks of Israel as if it – they? - are a single person infused with ascendant power.

The creation of Israel unfolds for us, who have not only Jeremiah, but the gospel, in a great spiral of hope. I say “creation of Israel” because the concept of Israel, the singular demographic, is being overwhelmed by it's association with a God who is reshaping the very ground of it's existence. And on his terms, who will employ inconceivable resources to do so. God builds blessing on the ruins of the failed state - of things - ethnic entities, nations, religions, individuals, the body itself.

In the origination stories, Genesis' Jacob, Israel, was a person. At times, he was an exceedingly lonely, cut-off individual. Israel is now, again, in this prophetic fashion, a single person. Just as the Torah writers incorporated the highs and lows of that ancient trickster into the Abrahamic blessing, Jeremiah lets the tears of the scattered multitudes “baptize” them into a march of deliverance where “home” means unity - one voice singing one doxology. Communal Hebrew plays tricks with plurals and singulars. We could learn from it.

Where does this spiral of salvation stop? It doesn't. It continues to unfold in John's gospel prologue on a scale that reveals to us that Jesus of Nazareth's rejection among his own people is part of a creation epic involving the whole world of nations and people! Through him, whom, we find, has been with the Creator from the beginning, Israel is being formed along with the whole creationin a great spiral of historic events wherein the geographical coordinates of Zion, while fixed in the bedrock of Jerusalem, are simultaneously manifesting themselves in the cosmos and through the psyche of every man, woman and child on the planet. Such is Israel's destiny. We've never quite understood it. How can it be that such scattered people and nations as ourselves find our way into that throng singing through the tears as we walk into the glory of the Creator's passion?

The other day I watched a fund-raising piece for St. Jude's Childrens Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. In the video we got to know a few of the children there with cancer. Their time there was anything but tragic. With love and caring hands, state-of-the-art treatment, they embraced hope, even in the face of death. Perhaps what Jeremiah saw was the source of light that gleams in the eyes of the fourteen year old girl who will never see anything in her remaining time on earth beyond the lines of IV's and monitors sunk in her failing body. That's just simply not the whole story for her. Nor who she is becoming. In her hospital gown she is wearing the mantle of the prophet. She knows this deeply, and feels beyond her experience. The vision is there. God folds it all - the pain of exile, the possibilities - into the epic. Nurses and attendants. People with bit parts. Strangers. Viewers. You and me. The child is not alone in the march home. She is Israel. Born not of flesh and blood, alas, nor of human will, but of the spirit of God.

It is the spiral of hope.

© 2010 Andy Gay