How Odd of God

Sunday of the Epiphany

Ruskin Heights Lutheran Church

Isaiah 60:1-6

Ephesians 3:1-10

Matthew 2:1-12

January 2, 2011

There is a whimsical couplet of Ogden Nash:

How odd of God

To choose the Jews.

For reasons at which we can only guess, God chose the Jews to be the vessel to carry his revelation to the world.

So it is that of all the ancient peoples of an old and ancient world, only the Jews remain – a people unique to themselves, to the world, and as our faith teaches, unique to God himself.

The Philistine, the Assyrian, the Canaanite and Hittite, all those names we know from the Bible, all of them are gone – all gone to dust leaving only broken relics, cracked pots, and burial ossuaries. Gone too are their gods and goddesses.

Of all the ancient peoples, only the Jews and their God remain while all others have vanished.

There is no earthly reason why the Jews should have survived and ravishes of the centuries. After Israel split into two kingdoms following the death of Solomon, the Assyrians carried the northern kingdom into exile and oblivion, the so-called ten lost tribes.

The Babylonians carried away the other half not too many years later.

Like all the other captive peoples swallowed up by those massive empires, the Jews too should have faded from history.

In the ancient world, when a nation was conquered, defeated, so were its gods. War as much a contest of national interests as it was a contest between gods.The God of Jerusalem vs. the gods of Babylon – there was an epic fight – and the God of the Jews lost. It was a military defeat that was also a theological crisis. The Jews had to struggle for an answer: Where was God?

And that brings us to the 60th chapter of Isaiah.

The early Isaiah begins as a prophet of warning. Israel – as he thunders away – has abandoned God and judgment is coming by way of Babylon.

And it does.

But from the calamity that was exile, Isaiah sends a new message.

“Arise, shine; your light has come!”

“Nations shall come to your light . . . and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.”

The light of course is God and the nations – the gentiles, you and me – shall see in Israel the light of God that shines for the world.

This exactly is what St. Matthew’s story of magi and star and gifts and Mary and her child is all about – gentiles coming to the Christ.

The light that is Israel shines in Christ and the wise will seek it.

Through the millenniums of history, the Jews stick fast with God –

– no, more accurately, through the millenniums of history God sticks fast with his people, his chosen –

– and through them and through no others reveals his salvation of humanity.

Why? Why through the Jews? Well, because God is odd. There is no other answer. For inexplicable reasons, Jesus himself said it, “Salvation is from the Jews.”

What to make of that?

Even St. Paul doesn’t know what to make of it.

Speaking of this to the Ephesian church, St. Paul uses the word “mystery” no fewer than four times in two short paragraphs to talk about what God has done.

My editorial instincts almost demand I get out my red pen and circle that word everywhere it appears and count off for repetition.

But St. Paul has no word – no other word – to describe what God has done through Christ, who was born of the Jews.

Yet by this mystery, gentiles like us become fellow heirs, members of the same body, partners in the promise that was the promise Isaiah declared.

I don’t like the phrase New Testament or Old Testament, or New Covenant or Old Covenant. Maybe we should say First Testament and Second Testament, just to keep them in their proper order.

But no matter, for there is but one testament, one promise, and through Christ – St. Paul makes this clear in other places – we gentiles have been “grafted” onto the tree of life.

We don’t even get our own “branch.” We are a graft.

And all this comes about through Jesus the Christ who is the living embodiment of God’s unfailing love for humanity.

St. Paul doesn’t know what to make of this.

He does not know why God does this.

All he knows is this.

God did it “to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things. . . .”

And the only thing left for us to do is “proclaim the praise of the Lord.”