All the Families of the Earth

Genesis 12:1-3, just three verses – that sounds so slight and insignificant. Yet these three verses have been called “central not only to Genesis but to the whole of the Bible's storyline.”¹ If that's the case, then certainly we don't want the break we took from Genesis for Advent to make us forget what came before. In the beginning – I hope we remember – God made the heavens and the earth. God crafted the world into a cosmic temple ripe for his indwelling, and he beheld these things as “very good” (Genesis 1:31). And as he furnished his temple with varied forms of life, “God blessed them” with fruitfulness and greatness so that they could each flourish and fill their domains (Genesis 1:22). This included his own images within the temple: “God blessed them” not only with that same fruitfulness and greatness, but also with power and dominion and glory (Genesis 1:28).

That was the condition creation was meant to have: blessing. Blessing, according to Israel's neighbors, was a powerful “wish for someone to receive the good things of life.”² God wished simply, always and everywhere, to give the good things of life to everything and everyone. He blessed his creation with existence, he blessed his creatures with life, he blessed that life with a beautiful hierarchy of glory culminating in human beings whom he blessed so extravagantly that it should make us weep tears of joy just to think it. The blessing was a share in the life of God, and, for us, also a share in his creative power and kingly rule.³ And so “God blessed the seventh day and made it holy,” enthroning himself in his creation on that crowning sabbath (Genesis 2:3).

But then we disregarded our blessing. We wouldn't keep holy what was holy. We'd believe half-truths over the Whole Truth, would cherish lesser goods above Supreme Goodness, would desire skin-deep beauties while sneering at Perfect Beauty (Genesis 3:1-5). We bit off more than we could chew, we broke ourselves, and we hid from the Healer (Genesis 3:6-13). Unqualified blessing could hardly be the only word there, and so, for the first time, the word 'cursed' was heard, aimed indirectly at the guilty pair (Genesis 3:14-19). Fallen from the upward course we were made to soar, we moved out to a worsened world to try to rebuild upon “the ground that the LORD has cursed” (Genesis 3:22-24; 5:29). That curse made itself painfully known, not least when a son of Adam sold himself into sin's slavery so severely as to slay his sole sibling (Genesis 4:8). Magnifying his father's foibles when faced with his folly, he was the first man directly cursed by God Almighty (Genesis 4:9-11). Yet even in him was the original blessing not all taken away (Genesis 4:17-22).

The human family marched on through the ages, growing across the ground, succeeding in their main endeavors (Genesis 6:1). But their endeavors were so oft evil that, after untold ages of compounding corruption, only one righteous heir to the race was left to pluck from the wreckage (Genesis 6:5-11). God warned Noah in advance to build a box that could hold the seeds of a new world (Genesis 6:13-22). Then came the rain, and washed the spiders out – along with the rest of what God had made. It could hardly get further from blessing than when God lessened the land until it vanished 'neath oceans of chaos, undoing creation (Genesis 7:11-24). Only God's faithful mercy toward Noah, determined to make blessing the last word, lit the spark of a new cycle of creation. God diminished the waters of the abyss, calling forth the world once more (Genesis 8:1-13).

And to refill that world, off the ark came “every beast, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth..., by families” (Genesis 8:19). Now that sounds new. And God offered once more original blessing, as intact as our sinful hearts and minds could bear. “God blessed Noah and his sons” (Genesis 9:1-7), and he made a covenant with all living flesh on the earth (Genesis 9:8-17). But this human family, like the first, failed to cooperate, leading father Noah to speak an out-and-out curse on one whole lineage (Genesis 9:25); and not all his best wishes for his more honorable sons could remove the wrench thrown deep into the universal-blessing idea from that, a wrench which would take millennia to work out. As one scholar remarks here, in light of such corruption and sin, “God's blessing cannot be separated from human responsibility.”⁴

God's goal had, all along, been “a universal blessing” of his creation.⁵ But could that plan even mostly succeed? In time, this one human family became a whole world, condensed and represented in a single people so fearful and proud that they built a city with its idol tower boasting equality with heaven above – and all for what? To let them dictate humanity's future, to ensure their lasting fame, to give themselves a self-won safety – in effect, to bless themselves by themselves (Genesis 11:1-4). Unimpressed, disappointed by their common corruption, “there the LORD confused the language of all the earth, and from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:9). And so the ancient world was scattered, as the Bible invites us to imagine it, “by their families, their languages, their lands, and their nations” (Genesis 10:31).

Alas, we became, in the prophet's words, “the families of the lands” which “worship wood and stone” (Ezekiel 20:32). It had proven pointless to keep punishing all these families for their idolatrous forgetfulness of God (cf. Amos 3:2). Mabbul and Babel, flood and tower, had proven that God's dealing with humanity en masse would only work out to our detriment. These avenues to God's universal-blessing goal were dead ends. We'd need “a new divine initiative,” working apart from those previous cycles of action and reaction.⁶ We'd need to hear a word bright enough to “counteract the dark tones of universal judgment” boiling over in the last nine chapters.⁷

And so, as we've learned since mid-November, rather than use up all the world's paper telling us parallel stories of God's work with each one of these human families, the Bible traces forward from here just one family line of note – the obscure, long-suffering, and idolatrous one leading to Terah and his sons in Ur (Genesis 11:10-32). It was on this household, out of all humanity, that God set his eye, as if to say in advance, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth” (Amos 3:2). It was to one of Terah's sons that God spoke, whether in deep-south Ur or far-north Harran. As it would later be said: “You are the LORD, the God who chose Abram” (Nehemiah 9:7), chose him in a way none of his cousins or neighbors or anybody else had been chosen. From here on out, Abram – a nobody, by the world's estimation – would spiritually “stand at the center of humanity.”⁸

But that central position could only be reached by marching to the margins. God's opening overture to Abram, out of the wild blue yonder, was devastating in its ferocity, demanding a sacrifice of everything Abram valued in life: “Go! Go from your land, from your relatives, from your father's house, to the land that I'll show you!” (Genesis 12:1). These burdens are so heavy and sudden and painful that it's no wonder God doesn't let up before he gives Abram 'a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.' In what follows, God unfolds a promise using seven key pledges to create something spiritually new.⁹ And five times in this little speech, God uses some form of the word 'bless' – that's the same number of times we've heard of God or somebody else cursing someone or something so far, and also the number of times we've heard about God as the agent of blessing up until now.¹⁰ Now God says 'bless' five more times, gripping us with the sense that what God is saying here has as much meaning and joy as the entirety of universal history leading up to this holy moment.

God proclaims to Abram, in simple terms, “I will bless you” (Genesis 12:2) – yes, “I will bless you, and you will be blessed... with so much blessing... that it will last for all time.”¹¹ This phrase is highly ambiguous and open-ended,¹² and yet it's “the key to all other promises” that follow for Abram.¹³ Abram can likely expect to enjoy material prosperity arranged by God: his labors will pay off, his resources will multiply, he'll find himself in a good social position, and so Abram can expect to be “altogether joyful” (Deuteronomy 15:6 16:15). And maybe, after years of not multiplying, will God give Abram offspring after all? The potential hope here “sets up a key issue for the narrative that follows,” and we'll have to wait and see.¹⁴ Beyond that, what other blessings could be hinted at here? Abram, personally, is promised a goodness in his life – what more needs he to know?

But God isn't done talking. “I will bless those who bless you,” he adds (Genesis 12:3). That is, anyone and everyone who wishes Abram well, anybody who willingly contributes to Abram's well-being, anybody who looks out for Abram – well, all may rest assured that God will, in turn, reward them in kind.¹⁵ God's favor will rest, not only on Abram personally, but on all who support Abram and ally themselves with Abram or even just show Abram some basic human kindness. “Whoever gives [Abram] a cup of water to drink... will by no means lose his reward,” you might say (Mark 9:41). God is almost saying to Abram, “Whoever receives you receives me” (Matthew 10:40), hence “I will consider as friends those friendly to you.”¹⁶ Like the Ark of the Covenant, Abram's presence will call down blessing on wherever and with whomever he dwells in peace (2 Samuel 6:11). Abram should therefore be everybody's favorite guest; his approach should be heralded with shouts of joy! As a “promise for those outside the chosen community,” Abram will be Patient Zero in a blessing epidemic for all who receive him rightly.¹⁷ To paraphrase: “To those who honor you, I will give an abundance of good things.”¹⁸

But, also like the Ark of the Covenant, Abram can be touched wrongly, dishonorably, which turns the blessing on its head (2 Samuel 6:6-7). A mistreated Abram in your midst is a guarantee of judgment. God adds that “the one who dishonors you, I will curse” (Genesis 12:3). “If any of the dwellers of the earth greets you with evil,” one old poem paraphrases it, “I shall set on him my curse and hatred.”¹⁹ To dishonor Abram, to despise or demean him, to dismiss him as irrelevant or inconsequential, or (worse) to wish ill upon him or seek to hinder or harm him, is an offense that God hereby commits himself to take very personally. To borrow some later words from the Gospels, “the one who rejects you rejects me” (Luke 10:16).

Now, think what that means for Abram personally. God has asked him to give up every worldly defense, and to go live among total strangers who have no bonds that might dissuade them from swindling, bullying, assaulting, even slaying him. God here assures Abram of a deterrent, that “whoever maltreats him will be punished with exceptional severity.”²⁰ They'll learn the hard way, if they have to, that to even mildly mistreat Abram is to win outsized penalties from on high, “for they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” (Hosea 8:7).²¹

But God is very deliberate in how he phrases himself here. When God speaks about “those who bless you,” he uses the plural; but when he mentions “the one who diminishes you,” that's singular. God is hinting that those who mistreat Abram will actually be the minority, that most people he meets will typically welcome and bless him. What's more, the verbal form of 'I will curse' is a lot weaker than the verbal form here of 'I will bless.' Right down to the Hebrew grammar of it all, the blessings are so much more intense and emphatic, exuberant and vigorous, than the curse, because God is still infinitely more interested in lifting up than in casting down!²²

So kindness to Abram will pay off! Hospitality to Abram will bear dividends! Those who associate themselves with Abram won't at all regret it. That's what the next fourteen chapters will work out. As one early Christian summed them up, “all who received him gladly were blessed, while those who treated him improperly fell under a curse.”²³ In fact, once Abram has turned into a great nation, even a pagan prophet hired to curse that Abram-Nation at their lowest will compulsively compare them to an Eden garden and pronounce that “blessed are those who bless you, and cursed are those who curse you” (Numbers 24:9).

But even with this, God isn't yet finished. In the seventh of the seven parts of his call, he tacks on a sabbath “addition of still further liberality,” greater generosity to Abram,²⁴ by means of “that promise which,” as Luther put it, “should be written in golden letters and should be extolled in the languages of all people.”²⁵ That promise caps off a creeping blessing: first it was “a blessing on Abram personally,” then “a blessing (or curse) on those with whom he interacts,” but now at last there's “a blessing on the entire human race.”²⁶ “In you,” says God, “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). Given the curious reference four chapters ago to all the animals leaving the ark “by families” (Genesis 8:19), maybe the blessing here even exceeds humanity!

Here, says the Apostle, “the Scripture... preached the gospel in advance” (Galatians 3:8). The good news is that God hasn't given up on his intentions to bless the whole creation! God hasn't forsaken us, hasn't doomed or damned us, hasn't abandoned us to the curse! God has just chosen a craftier strategy, a route down the side alley and through the back door, to smuggle his blessings to us before we can figure out how to cheat ourselves out of them. And that crafty strategy is that, rather than address all humanity en masse directly, God will choose just one man to be his vessel, his conduit, his channel through whom blessings will flow to all.²⁷

Abram is chosen, Abram is elect – but not because God does care about anyone else. Abram is elect because God cares about everyone else! For God so loved the world that he chose one friend to use to anchor blessing back into the world, for every family on earth. God elects the particular to be cause of the universal; God chooses one for the benefit of all. God opts “to invest this narrow slice of humanity with the promise of a new future,”²⁸ “to make Abram a mediator of blessing for the world,”²⁹ so that “all the world's peoples shall flourish on his account.”³⁰ As one scholar puts it, God choosing Abram here is “an initially exclusive move for the sake of a maximally inclusive end..., for mission (in the broadest sense of the term).”³¹

Abram is invested here with a mission, as if in a mighty word of command: “Be a blessing!” (Genesis 12:2).³² Of the seven things God says to Abram, this buried commandment is the core, the heart, the sun all the others orbit, the anchor to which all else is tied.³³ All families who tread this terrestrial ball shall be blessed in Abram, but Abram is summoned to active cooperation with God's plan to use him as a channel for those blessings. He is thereby “called out by God for a mission... cosmic in its implications, involving the fulfillment of God's promise to bless his creation.”³⁴ To that end, Abram “must engage in God's promise... and God's plan.”³⁵ Abram must “live his life as a source” – or, better, a conduit – “of blessing to others.”³⁶ Abram will need then to surrender himself to be remade, clay in the Potter's hands (Jeremiah 18:6). And in each interaction he has with people, he'll have a choice to make: to attend to the other's deep need so as to meet it with God's blessings, or to seek first his own protection and welfare. Abram will have to consciously become transparent and allow God's light to shine through him. To be a blessing like that is thus a vocation that will reshape Abram's entire life.

And this command, in light of the promises that follow it to unpack it, must surely blow Abram's mind to bits. Abram can understand what it will mean for him personally to be blessed, of course. And Abram can daydream what it will mean if people who meet him receive treatment from God in accordance with how they themselves treat Abram. But for all families of the earth to be blessed in Abram, and for him to be commanded to actively mediate that blessing to them? What could that mean? Is Abram to spend his days as a world traveler, circumnavigating the globe until he's been welcomed by each family there is, a slow-motion Santa Claus? Then his destination must be indefinite, a never-ending voyage that the technology of the time could never sustain (Abram has no flying reindeer!). How, then, can Abram dare embrace a command that condemns him to failure before he takes a step, yet will yield him no rest until his bones are dust? On the other hand, if Abram has a definite destination, then how can he be a blessing to families as distant as the Elamites and Ethiopians, to Gog and Magog and Tarshish, who've never heard his name? How can Abram bless those whose hands he never shakes, whose doors he never darkens, at whose table he neither eats nor drinks? How in practice can Abram live his life for the unmet? And how can he ever be a blessing to those who persist in choosing to be cursed?

In more ways than one, the promise is inconceivably gigantic for the shoulders of one man. As we said, Abram will have to become a great nation – a nation which, in some mystical way, is Abram – and then we'll have to see whether that Abram-Nation can triumph over their tempting instincts, can bless warring enemies, can seek out distant families until the hearts of all families are improbably won. But if the Abram-Nation can't overcome temptation, won't persevere in the mission of blessing, then “does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God?” (Romans 3:3). Or can it yet be, as the prophet said, that “as you have been a byword of cursing..., so will I save you, and you shall be a blessing” (Zechariah 8:13)?

There are so many psalms that drip with the language of blessing, but if there's any psalm we should know, it's one of the other ones, #22. That's the one that leads off with the heart-wrenching line, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1). Jesus quoted it as he hung on the cross (Mark 15:34), as he “became a curse for us, for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree'” (Galatians 3:13). In fact, that psalm sounds suspiciously like advance notice of the crucifixion. “All who see me mock me..., they wag their heads: 'He trusts in the LORD; let him deliver him!'” (Psalm 22:7-8) – which is just how the crowds and priests mocked the crucified Jesus (Matthew 27:39-44). “They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots” (Psalm 22:18) – that's also in the psalm, and it's what the soldiers did as they crucified Jesus (Mark 15:24).

But the psalm is a prayer for deliverance: “O LORD, do not be far off... Save me from the mouth of the lion!” (Psalm 22:19-21). What began in fearsome woe opens into a beautiful picture of the outcome if God does not “despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted” (Psalm 22:24), if the Father hears the Son's prayers, not by snatching him from the cross, but by providing new life beyond the cross. What then? “I will tell of your name to my brothers,” first of all (Psalm 22:22): Jesus' post-resurrection appearances will preach to his disciples. “From you comes my praise in the great congregation” (Psalm 22:25): Jesus will be praised as the Spirit rushes from heaven to indwell his congregation on earth. “The meek shall eat and be satisfied” (Psalm 22:26): The Church will be spiritually filled as they routinely eat Christ's Body and drink Christ's Blood from “the cup of blessing that we bless” (1 Corinthians 10:16). And then “all the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD” – 'remember' once they're evangelized, 'turn' because they're converted – “and all the families of the nations shall worship before you” (Psalm 22:27). In fact, all families of the earth “shall eat and worship,” says the psalm, basking in the blessings of God to all generations (Psalm 22:29-31).

And that is what the promise to Abram was all for, that is how Abram will ultimately become a blessing, that is what it meant from the beginning. As Luther put it, “in these few simple words” in Genesis, “the Holy Spirit has thus encompassed the mystery of... the Son of God,” for “who else shall we say has dispensed this blessing among all nations except the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ?”³⁷ He's the Greater Abram who proclaims with his every heartbeat that his Father is exalted indeed. And all the families of the earth are finally blessed in this Greater Abram, because this Greater Abram chose the cross. He allowed himself to be disparaged, demeaned, and dishonored, all while he claimed all curses back to Eden “so that in Christ Jesus, the blessing of Abraham might come to the nations, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith” (Galatians 3:14). And then the very ones whose impiety had scorned and crucified him could, by faith freshly working by love, instead be justified, be sanctified, be glorified, be “blessed along with Abraham” (Galatians 3:9). In Christ Jesus, “the nations have come to share in [Abram's] spiritual blessings” at last (Romans 15:27).

And just as Abram was promised to become a great nation for the nations, so the Greater Abram is made a Great Body of Christ, with the person of Jesus as the Head from whom the remainder of the Body grows (Colossians 2:19). The early Christians realized that the 'totus Christus,' as St. Augustine called it, means Jesus with his Body, “the whole Christ in the fullness of the Church, that is, as Head and Body..., in whom we are each of us members.”³⁸ As those members, God “has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:3-4).

For if Christ is the Greater Abram, then the Body of Christ is an Abrahamic Body, a Body Blessed and a Body whose treatment determines the fate of all families. As Luther put it, “whatever will be achieved in the church until the end of the world, and whatever has been achieved in it until now, has been achieved and will be achieved by virtue of this promise, which endures and is in force to this day.”³⁹ If God would bless everyone who blessed Abram, now God blesses whoever will bless Christ, which means welcoming and honoring his Body, the Church. And if God would curse one who dishonored Abram, then God curses whoever disdains and demeans Jesus, including those who, thinking they honor him, fail to honor his Body, the Church. As Luther observed, “the kingdoms of the entire world were destroyed because they harmed the church,” while here God “promises a blessing to those who befriend the church.”⁴⁰ And so, through the ups and downs of history, “the eternal blessing of the church has remained unshaken,” and so it does still, despite our foibles and failures.⁴¹

But as an Abrahamic Body, the Body of Christ can't be content to be a mere recipient or a passive touchstone. The Body of Christ is, by nature, a Blessing Body. Ours is the mission cosmic in its implications. Ours is the summons too gigantic for the shoulders of any mere man. The Body of Christ walks the earth still because the families of the nations still need the Body of Christ to be a blessing to them – a blessing the Body cannot be without the active cooperation of its members with its Head! Like it did for Abram, the mission requires our transformation, each and all, into a new kind of person⁴² – a Christ-person, a Christian, a blessing-bearer.

If all families of the earth are to be blessed in Christ, which entails being blessed in and through the Church, then that rules out so many of our ancient and modern tribalist temptations to do good selectively. The blessing is for the Haitian and Somalian and Indian families no less than for the English and German and American ones, and the Church can't pick and choose. And although God may punish those who scorn the Church, that's his business. So far as ours is concerned, our Head bids us “bless those who curse you” (Luke 6:28), while his holy servant Paul reminds us to “bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse” (Romans 12:14). Out of our mouth come words of blessing; with our hands are worked works of blessing, even for those who curse and crucify us. Because we have a purpose in the world. We have a mission. We are the Blessing Body, who continue in the world today this commission given to an astonished Abram nearly four millennia ago. We are a sign that, however the signs of the times may read, God's plan is still to bless his whole creation, and he will not give up until, through the cracks we create in the curse's shell, we flood the world with his goodness and glory. Thanks be to “the God and Father of the Lord Jesus, he who is blessed forever!” (2 Corinthians 11:31). Amen.

Sudden Fire, Hidden Glory

“The True Light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him” (John 1:9-10). Last Sunday, we took a tough and hard look at the darkness before the dawn, with a big helping hand from the 'Preacher' we met in Ecclesiastes. His crisis was born of viewing the world with semi-secular eyes, as a cage closed off as an isolated system. And yet he himself knew that there was a breach. “God is in heaven, and you are on earth” – true enough, Preacher – but still there was on earth a “house of God” where one could “draw near to listen” (Ecclesiastes 5:1-2). And because of that, the days we remember in Advent were not an unmitigated darkness after all.

For although “the world did not know him, he came to his own” (John 1:10-11). As a ragtag bunch of tribes had surrounded a desert mountain, suddenly the summit “was wrapped in smoke, because the LORD had descended on it in fire” (Exodus 19:17). And after a covenant had been stated and sealed, “Moses went up the mountain, and... the Glory of the LORD dwelt on Mount Sinai.... Now the appearance of the Glory of the LORD was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the Children of Israel. Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain, and Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights” (Exodus 24:15-18). Amidst fire and smoke, the True Light laid bare to Moses his plan to extend his dwelling into our world in a carefully regulated way – don't play with fire! – in a special tent where he could meet with humanity: “Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst” (Exodus 25:8).

Despite self-corruption in Israel that put the plan in jeopardy, in the end the project went forward. “And all the craftsmen among the workmen made the tabernacle with ten curtains” (Exodus 36:8), hung over a frame and surrounded by a large courtyard. “Thus all the work of the tabernacle of the Tent of Meeting was finished” (Exodus 39:32); and, after being assembled and furnished on New Year's Day and consecrated with holy oil, “then the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and the Glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle; and Moses was not able to enter the Tent of Meeting, because the cloud settled on it and the Glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle” (Exodus 40:34-35), “and fire was in it by night” (Exodus 40:38). As Israel recentered the community around this roving tent wherein the Glory dwelt, they needed to be scrupulously holy.

In the land of promise, they anchored this Tent of Meeting at Shiloh (Joshua 18:1), where it rested for centuries and proved, alas, that even there, worship could be exploited by the likes of Eli's sons (1 Samuel 2:22-36). The Ark of the Covenant was foolishly abused in battle, where it was captured by the Philistines – “the Glory has departed from Israel!”, went the words of woe (1 Samuel 4:21) – and even when it came back, it was returned not to the Tent of Meeting but to the ordinary house of Abinadab at Kiriath-jearim (1 Samuel 5-7). Only years later did King David fetch the Ark from there – though, when a man died for touching the Ark on the way, King David was gripped with fear: “How can the Ark of the LORD come to me?” (2 Samuel 6:9), leading him to store it for three months with Obed-edom the Gittite, whose house the LORD blessed through its presence (2 Samuel 6:10-11). Reinvigorated with hope, David then led the Ark to Jerusalem, where David had pitched for it a new tent (2 Samuel 6:12-17), while the vacant original tent found its way to Gibeon (2 Chronicles 1:3).

David felt this wasn't a permanent solution. He lamented that “I dwell in a house of cedar, but the Ark of God dwells in a tent” (2 Samuel 7:2). God replied that he had never questioned his earthly living arrangement (2 Samuel 7:6-7), but, in honor of David's desire, he would give David a son to “build a house for my name” (2 Samuel 7:13). In time, that son, Solomon, declared that “David my father could not build a house for the name of the LORD his God because of the warfare with which his enemies surrounded him..., but now the LORD my God has given me rest on every side..., and so I intend to build a house for the name of the LORD my God” (1 Kings 5:3-5). For seven and a half years, Solomon's workers labored on a stone-and-cedar building ninety feet long, thirty feet wide, forty-five feet high, with a fifteen-foot vestibule in front and surrounded by side chambers all around, embedded in a lavish court up on the mountain height (1 Kings 6:1-10). “So Solomon built the house and finished it,” dividing off an inner sanctuary inside it as a Holy of Holies, “and he overlaid the whole house with gold,” inside and outside, “until all the house was finished” (1 Kings 6:14-22).

Then came the blessed moment of dedication, when “they brought up the Ark of the LORD, the Tent of Meeting, and all the holy vessels that were in the tent” (1 Kings 8:3). “Then the priests brought the Ark of the Covenant of the LORD to its place in the inner sanctuary of the house, in the Holy of Holies, underneath the wings of the cherubim” (1 Kings 8:6), “and when the priests came out of the Holy Place, a cloud filled the House of the LORD, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, because the Glory of the LORD filled the House of the LORD” (1 Kings 8:10-11). What had been true of the Tabernacle was true now of this new Temple: “Sinai is now in the sanctuary!” (Psalm 68:17).

And so the True Light dwelled secretly amidst “thick darkness” in “an exalted house, a place for you to dwell in forever,” said the king (1 Kings 8:12-13). “But will God indeed dwell on the earth?” he wondered. After all, “heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!” (1 Kings 8:27). Nevertheless, hoped Solomon, God's name and glory would fill the house, which would thus be specially linked to “heaven, your dwelling place” (1 Kings 8:39). “The LORD our God be with us, as he was with our fathers,” Solomon prayed, and “may he not leave us or forsake us” (1 Kings 8:57).

In response, God gave Solomon a vision, assuring him: “I have consecrated this house that you have built by putting my name there forever. My eyes and my heart will be there for all time” (1 Kings 9:3). But he warned him that, if the sons of David were faithless stewards of the kingdom, then “the house that I have consecrated for my name, I will cast out of my sight..., and this house will become a heap of ruins” (1 Kings 9:7-8).

Over the years, a few kings were faithful, but many were faithless indeed. Solomon's own son Rehoboam led the people after “the abominations of the nations” all around (1 Kings 14:24), so no wonder the Egyptians invaded, stealing “the treasures of the House of the LORD” (1 Kings 14:25-26). But Rehoboam's grandson Asa “was wholly true to the LORD all his days, and he brought into the House of the LORD the sacred gifts of his father and his own sacred gifts, silver and gold and vessels” (1 Kings 15:14-15) – until even Asa quickly took them back to use as a bribe to secure a military alliance with Damascus (1 Kings 15:18-19).

In a later day of crisis, this Temple was a safe haven for Asa's infant great-great-grandson Prince Jehoash, saved by his aunt Jehosheba, wife of the high priest Jehoiada. The little prince was sheltered in the Temple's side chambers for six years (2 Kings 11), and after he came to the throne at age seven, “Jehoash did what was right in the sight of the LORD all his days, because Jehoiada the Priest instructed him” (2 Kings 12:2). Jehoash had ordered a collection taken up for repairs to the Temple, “but by the twenty-third year of King Jehoash, the priests had made no repairs on the house” (2 Kings 12:6), and only after a royal scolding did they “pay it out to the carpenters and the builders... and to the masons and the stonecutters, as well as to buy timber and quarried stone for making repairs on the House of the LORD” (2 Kings 12:11-12). But even Jehoash, when a military emergency came, raided the sacred gifts and gold from “the treasuries of the House of the LORD” to bribe the king of Damascus to leave Judah alone (2 Kings 12:17-18).

Jehoash's great-great-grandson Ahaz began to pollute the Temple courts, as a sign of his service to the Assyrians (2 Kings 16:10-20), while Ahaz's son Hezekiah, though righteous, paid off invading Assyrians with “all the silver that was in the House of the LORD” and even “the gold from the doors of the Temple of the LORD” (2 Kings 18:15-16). Only with the encouragement of the prophet Isaiah did King Hezekiah recover courage enough to lay down the Assyrian threat in the temple courts and pray for deliverance (2 Kings 19:14-19) – “and that night, the messenger of the LORD went out and struck down 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians” (2 Kings 19:35). Hezekiah's son Manasseh more severely defiled the Temple when “he built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the House of the LORD, and he burned his son as an offering..., and the carved image of Asherah that he had made, he set in the House” (2 Kings 21:5-7). But his grandson Josiah, like a new Jehoash, ordered further repairs to the neglected Temple (2 Kings 22:3-7), and when the high priest Hilkiah rediscovered Deuteronomy in the temple archives (2 Kings 22:8-11), Josiah sought with all his might to reform the people, purging the Temple of every implement of paganized worship (2 Kings 23:4-14).

Alas, it was too late; the sins of Manasseh had marked a point-of-no-return (2 Kings 23:26-27). And following Josiah's premature death, it didn't take long for everyone to return to their abominations. The Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem in the year 597 BC, and Nebuchadnezzar “carried off all the treasuries of the House of the LORD... and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold in the Temple of the LORD, which Solomon king of Israel had made, as the LORD had foretold. He carried away all Jerusalem..., ten thousand captives” (2 Kings 24:13-14), among whom was a twenty-something priest-in-training named Ezekiel.

Living in exile, Ezekiel began having visions (Ezekiel 1:1-3), where he saw “the appearance of the likeness of the Glory of the LORD” like “brightness all around” (Ezekiel 1:28). Fourteen months later, in September of 592 BC, his visions whisked him all the way back to Jerusalem, to gaze through the north gate into the temple courts, “and behold, the Glory of the God of Israel was there” (Ezekiel 8:1-4). But as Ezekiel dug his way in, what he found shocked him to his core. “There, engraved on the wall all around, was every form of creeping things and loathsome beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel; and before them stood seventy men of the elders of the house of Israel,” burning incense in the darkness (Ezekiel 8:10-11). In an escalating series of abominations, Ezekiel found women wailing over a pagan god and men facing away from the Temple to worship the rising sun (Ezekiel 8:14-16). No wonder God complained of Judah that “when they slaughtered their children in sacrifice to their idols, on the same day they came into my sanctuary to profane it” (Ezekiel 23:39), as “her priests have done violence to my law and have profaned my holy things” (Ezekiel 22:26). And so, step by step, Ezekiel watched in his visions as the Glory withdrew from the Holy of Holies to the threshold (Ezekiel 9:3), then to the eastern gate of the temple courts (Ezekiel 10:18-19), and at last flew away from the city altogether (Ezekiel 11:23). The Temple had become an unholy house of darkness, forsaken by its God.

There could be but one outcome. A few years after Ezekiel's vision, “Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came with all his army against Jerusalem and laid siege to it” (2 Kings 25:1), until at last they broke through, and his commander “burned the House of the LORD” down to its foundations (2 Kings 25:9). “Should priest and prophet be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord?” Judah wondered (Lamentations 2:20). But why not? There was no Glory in the place any more. The high priest Seraiah was executed in Nebuchadnezzar's presence, and “so Judah was taken into exile out of its land” (2 Kings 25:18-21).

It would have been so easy then to give up – to say that the Glory had disappeared for good, that the True Light had been extinguished from our earthly realm, to say that the darkness had overcome. But when Ezekiel heard of the great burning, then he began to hear the promises of hope. Israel seemed as dead and gone as an army decayed to dust in the valleys, but the Spirit of the LORD could bring life to dry bones (Ezekiel 37:1-14). “And I will set them in their land... and will set my sanctuary in their midst forevermore; my dwelling place shall be with them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people. Then the nations will know that I am the LORD who sanctifies Israel, when my sanctuary is in their midst forevermore” (Ezekiel 37:26-28).

Years passed, and in 573 BC, Ezekiel's eyes were opened once again. “In visions of God he brought me to the land of Israel and set me down on a very high mountain” (Ezekiel 40:2). Gazing south, his guide showed him a vast city, over 45,000,000 square feet, ringed by twelve gates named for the twelve sons of Israel (Ezekiel 48:30-35); and there was a temple which dwarfed the one that had burned down (Ezekiel 40-42). After a tour of its courts, gates, and sanctuary, “then he led me to the gate, the gate facing east; and behold, the Glory of the God of Israel was coming from the east, and the sound of his coming was like the sound of many waters, and the earth shone with his glory” (Ezekiel 43:1-2). Ezekiel witnessed its entry and received a commission to go “describe to the house of Israel the temple, that they may be ashamed of their iniquities” (Ezekiel 43:10).

Ezekiel died in exile, but Babylon's darkness was overcome, as the prophets had foretold. In the reign of the Persian conqueror Cyrus, the first wave of exiles returned to their lost homeland. There, “the builders laid the foundation of the Temple of the LORD,” but “many of the priests and Levites..., old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice” (Ezra 3:10-12). God raised up prophets like Haggai and Zechariah to inspire Governor Zerubbabel, a great-great-grandson of King Josiah, and the new high priest Jeshua, to “rebuild the House of God that is in Jerusalem” (Ezra 5:1-2), despite the people's obvious uncleanness (Haggai 2:14). Even though the temple they were building clearly didn't match what Ezekiel had seen (Haggai 2:3), God assured them that “the latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former” (Haggai 2:9). Zechariah heard God declare, “I have returned to Zion, and... Jerusalem shall be called the faithful city” (Zechariah 8:3). Around 515 BC, this Second Temple was completed and dedicated (Ezra 6:14-18). But unlike in the days of Moses or Solomon, and unlike what Ezekiel had seen, nowhere do we read of the Glory of the LORD filling it.

More years began to pass, and new names creep across the page: Ezra, Nehemiah, Malachi. To tell the truth, 'Malachi' might not even be a name; it means 'my messenger,' and traditionally Jews have supposed it was a pen name used by Ezra, a scribe and priest who was some relation to Jeshua. Some modern scholars have suggested that Malachi was a prophet who followed Ezra and Nehemiah,¹ but there's a better case that Malachi preached a generation after the Second Temple opened but still a couple decades before Ezra's arrival.²

In a day when the Persian king was sending out messengers to intimidate the nations into submission, Malachi lifts up the awesome responsibility of the priests in Jerusalem: “The lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and they should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the LORD of Hosts” (Malachi 2:7). But that was obviously not what was happening: Israel's priests “have turned aside from the way” and so have “caused many to stumble by your instruction” (Malachi 2:8) – hence why God picked 'my messenger' to preach to these failed messengers.³ The messengers needed a renewal of their rightful message, else hope would die.

Given the failure of the priests to inspire and guide them, the people were in an even worse shape. After such a long back-and-forth history, with the lofty promises of prophets seeming to vanish into thin air, they observed that, so far as they could see, “evildoers... put God to the test and escape” (Malachi 3:15). They struggled to believe that the LORD actually upheld any difference between good and evil; an amoral god seemed the most plausible explanation for the course history had taken, and they despaired of seeing a God of Justice in the world (Malachi 2:17). No wonder they concluded that “it is vain to serve God” (Malachi 3:14) – empty, false.

As a result of their despair, they grew morally and spiritually lax: “Judah has been faithless, and abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem” (Malachi 2:11). Despising the LORD's Table, the sacrificial altar in the Temple, they offered sickly sacrifices that would never impress if sent to a Persian governor as a gift of tribute (Malachi 1:7-8). Withholding their tithes because of the crushing burden of Persian taxes, they were effectively robbing God, as much as every king before them who'd raided the temple treasuries for monies with which to pay off worldly powers (Malachi 3:8-9). By these kinds of behaviors, “Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the LORD, which he loves, and has married the daughter of a foreign god” (Malachi 2:11).

So Malachi has a message for them – an uncomfortable renewal of hope in darkened times. Only in the day of salvation would they actually “see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked” (Malachi 3:18). They have to understand that, if they fear threats that the Persian king will come and burn their city down unless they roll over and beg, there's a Greater King coming, a Glory arriving. “The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple” (Malachi 3:1). Their fears have been misplaced onto a succession of worldly empires, when this is what should concern them. “Who can endure the day of his coming,” asks the prophet, “and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap” – abrasive, agonizing, leaving behind a purity raw and scorched but clean (Malachi 3:2). “The Light of Israel will become a fire... and will burn and devour his thorns and briers in one day” (Isaiah 10:17).

Suddenly he'll arrive – but not without forewarning. “I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me” (Malachi 3:1). That echoes the earlier voice “crying: 'In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD..., and the Glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together'” (Isaiah 40:3-5). “The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming” (Malachi 3:1). “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome Day of the LORD comes, and he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction” (Malachi 4:5-6). This messenger's advent “will signal the king's imminent arrival.”⁴ “For behold, the Day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble..., but for you who fear my name, the Sun of Righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings..., and they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day when I act, says the LORD of Hosts” (Malachi 4:1-3).

Once the Messenger and the Lord are here, “he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver” (Malachi 3:3). Thus the LORD's “arrival and fiery purge will result in an onset of acceptable offerings,” unlike the sickly sacrifices and taken-back tithes so lamented. For “they will bring offerings in righteousness to the LORD; then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD, as in days of old” (Malachi 3:3-4). Worship will be made new.

And only then will they understand the words of Ezekiel, now nearly a century old. For he had clearly seen a temple grander than the Second Temple which Malachi beheld so profaned. In this temple yet unbuilt, “the Glory of the LORD entered the Temple by the gate facing east..., and behold, the Glory of the LORD filled the Temple” (Ezekiel 43:4-5). This, God says, really is “where I will dwell in the midst of the people of Israel forever” (Ezekiel 43:7). And as for that eastern gate, “no one shall enter by it, for the LORD, the God of Israel, has entered by it; therefore it shall remain shut” (Ezekiel 44:2). “And I looked,” said Ezekiel, “and behold, the Glory of the LORD filled the Temple of the LORD” (Ezekiel 44:4), and from it would flow water that restores life and replants paradise in the world (Ezekiel 47:1-12).

Centuries elapsed, and the Second Temple was desecrated by the Greeks, reconsecrated by the Maccabees, and expanded by the cynical whims of Herod. It was in his days, contrary to all his desires, that Malachi's prophecy bore its fruit. The messenger of preparation was coming. “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John” (John 1:6). He was son of the priest Zechariah, who, while burning incense in the Second Temple, saw a messenger from heaven, Gabriel, who predicted this son to come (Luke 1:5-13). As that messenger from heaven said, John “will be great before the Lord..., and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother's womb; and he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared” (Luke 1:15-17). Zechariah, too, was moved to prophesy to his newborn son that “you shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the Sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:76-79). And so John “came as a witness, to bear witness about the Light, that all might believe through him. He was not the Light, but came to bear witness about the Light” which was so soon to come (John 1:7-8).

What had happened, though it wasn't yet known, was that the prophecies not only of Malachi but of Ezekiel and the rest were coming to pass. For before John had even been born, that heavenly messenger Gabriel touched earth once more in Nazareth of Galilee, meeting not a priest but a village girl so lovingly prepared for a mission – she, more than any other, was fully graced by the Lord (Luke 1:26-30). Shortly, said the messenger, “the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1:35). And no sooner did she consent than it happened: “The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us” (John 1:14), “using as his own body the temple that came from the Holy Virgin” (cf. John 2:21).⁵

For in that moment, the Glory of the LORD had arrived through the eastern gate, the Virgin Mary's womb – a gate never to be opened or entered again (Ezekiel 44:2). And the Glory of the LORD – the Word – filled the Temple – the humanity, of tangible body and rational soul, conceived that moment to incarnate God in our very nature (Ezekiel 43:5). From him would flow the rivers of living water, the Holy Spirit, which would restore life and replant paradise (John 7:37-39). What Ezekiel had seen in his vision was nothing less than the Incarnation taking place, the Body of Christ enshrining the Glory of the Living God!⁶

Once the Word had become flesh inside her, once the Glory had filled his Temple within her, Mary ventured to the hill country to visit her kinswoman Elizabeth, the priest-born wife of the priest Zechariah. And no sooner had Mary spoken a word than John, the fetal prophet not yet seeing, leapt for joy, as David had danced before the Ark in its procession (Luke 1:39-41; cf. 2 Samuel 6:14). Filled with the Holy Spirit, Elizabeth reacted to Mary as David had to the Ark, questioning, “Why is this granted to me, that the Mother of My Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:43; cf. 2 Samuel 6:9). Only she spoke, not with David's fear and trembling, but with gratitude and reverence and awe. So she blessed Mary and “the fruit of your womb,” the LORD in his Holy Temple being built on uterine holy ground (Luke 1:42). “From now on, all generations will call me blessed, for He-Who-Is-Mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name!” answered Mary (Luke 1:48-49). No sooner would this Child be born, after all, than to neighboring shepherds another heavenly messenger would come down, “and the glory of the Lord shone around them,” heralding the birth of a Savior (Luke 2:6-11). And as Mary and Joseph brought the Child Jesus to Jerusalem, to make a lawful offering out of their poverty, so it began to be fulfilled: “the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple” (Malachi 3:1).

The Lord himself said that “all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John, and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come... to restore all things” (Matthew 11:13-14; Mark 9:12). John, for his part, would “baptize you with water, but He who is mightier than I is coming, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie! He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire! The winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor...” (Luke 3:16-17). It was the very next day that he laid eyes, maybe for the first time, on Jesus. “I myself did not know him, but for this purpose I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel” (John 1:31), and so “this joy of mine is now complete” (John 3:29). The result was that “we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

“He came to his own, and his own did not receive him” (John 1:11). “The Light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the Light, because their works were evil” (John 3:19). “I came to cast fire on the earth,” he said, “and would that it were already kindled!” (Luke 12:49). “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12), insofar as “all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God” (Romans 8:14). For if the Body of the Word is the Temple indwelt by the Glory, what does it mean for us if receiving the Spirit makes us cells in the Body of Christ? “You yourselves, like living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:5), which, joined together under Christ the Head, “grows into a holy temple in the Lord..., a dwelling place for God in the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:21-22). Here we have a hidden glory, because the Church becomes the same House wherein the True Light burns secretly in the darkness, raising up “a pure offering... among the nations” (Malachi 1:11).

Someday, as Malachi foretold, the Lord will come again “like a refiner's fire” (Malachi 3:2), “when the Lord is revealed from heaven with his mighty messengers in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance... on those who do not obey the gospel..., when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints and to be marveled at among all who have believed” (2 Thessalonians 1:7-10). But on the other side of the flames awaits the city Ezekiel saw – but its measurements will make Ezekiel's dreams look half-baked, it will outshine his wildest dreams, “and I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb..., and the Glory of God gives it light” (Revelation 21:10-23).⁷ Then will this Advent resolve in its Perfect Christmas; then will the Temple truth be full; then will the True Light leave no room for shadows; then will worship be infinite. Hallelujah, what joy!

All the World's a Cage

Advent. It's a season of waiting. It's not – no matter what the stores might tell you – the same as the season of Christmas. Christmas begins on December 25. We aren't there yet. We're waiting. This is Advent. Classically, Advent represents two things: a memory of the past wait for the Messiah's birth during the days of the former covenant, and an experience of the present wait for the Messiah's return as Judge during these days of the new covenant. So, on the one hand, Advent connects us with Israel's experience of hearing the prophets and looking ahead to what we see as accomplished, and thus a time of celebration; but on the other hand, Advent is a time for Christians to contemplate the Four Last Things: death, judgment, heaven, hell – hence why Advent was originally a time of fasting before the feast, just like Lent before Easter. That's why the colors of the paraments on the altar, and the colors of the Advent candles themselves, match the same colors we use during Lent.

So you'll forgive me if, at least to start out, this message doesn't have the cheer you might have expected when you thought it might be Christmas. Today I'd like to take us back, back to a world before the dawn. Last Sunday, in the reading the Hesses did as they lit the first of our Advent candles, we heard a message from the Prophet Isaiah. That message was premised on there being a world of “people who walked in darkness,” a world that “dwelt in a land of deep darkness” (Isaiah 9:2). In the verses before those words, verses we seldom read, the prophet depicts a people living in fear and hunger and rage, “and they will look to the earth, but behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish; and they will be thrust into thick darkness” (Isaiah 8:22).

What would it really mean to walk in darkness, to dwell in a land of deep darkness? What would it be like to live in a world and a universe “that have no dawn” (Isaiah 8:20)? What would it have meant to be closed in, as though locked into the world as a confinement – to feel all air as stale, to be claustrophobic in the cosmos, to see nothing but walls closing in and be quarantined from any mysteries beyond?

In effect, that's a quintessentially modern condition. One of the hallmarks of our secular age is that people instinctively think of the universe as a closed system, not an open one. We strive to find meaning within the world we can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, analyze, subjugate, in isolation from every concern which we can't, those things which modernity has screened out of consideration, if not out of existence. There can be no “meaning from outside,” because, as some scholars would put it, “modernity is locked into itself and utterly dependent on its own resources for finding a way amidst the challenges of our day.”¹ We and the world alike are 'buffered selves,' no longer permeable to spiritual presences that might transcend our particular meaning. By ruling out consideration of anything beyond the observable, tangible world-system, our experience and outlook become merely secular, that is, worldly, pertaining to the age and world we're capable of knowing under such stringent limitations, which demand that “we assume the view from the inside.”² And what does that world-system look like from the inside when it's a closed system, isolated from anything more above or beyond it? Shakespeare's melancholy character Jaques, in his comedy As You Like It, quite famously remarked that “all the world's a stage.” But for those who treat the earth as a closed system, we might quip that all the world's a cage.

Long before the modern era, during the days we remember in Advent, there lived a man who took a good, hard look at life in the cage and drove himself mad. That, at least, is something like what we see in a book of our Bibles we probably don't spend much time in: Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is a hard book to read, because there are so many layers we don't recognize, and so its contents shock and concern – as they're meant to.

Think of the book of Ecclesiastes as a story about a dad taking his son to the theater. Some families might go out to see a stand-up comic on stage, but this dad is bringing his son to a different kind of one-man show: a stand up tragedy performance. The dad is the narrator at the start and end of the book, and he wants his son to meet and confront this stand-up tragedian, this actor working out his intense existential struggles on stage while playing the role of King Solomon – although, in the play, the character is just called 'the Assemblyman' or, more conventionally, 'the Preacher.' The meat of the book is the text of the monologue the actor performs, though it isn't necessarily the same as the message the dad wants the kid to get, which may be still more different from what the story's author wants us to get. Like I said: lots of layers make things complicated – and rich.³

But the actor, 'the Preacher,' is a wise man, a sage, who wants to understand the world from his own point of view. He looks at the world as a somewhat closed system – and, unlike most people who do, he understands the world as a kind of cage. He's assessing the world by what he can see, he's studying life as limited 'under the sun,' and he's torn. He's torn between things he knows, pieces of wisdom handed down, the view of life he was taught and that somewhere deep in his heart still affirms, and the world he sees when he stubbornly looks no further than the bars of his cage. In the dark and damp prison of life, he's torn by a conflict between what he claims his heart knows and what his eyes and ears can tell him. That conflict is leading to a place of crisis.

So what kind of secular world does the Preacher find in the cage? What is this darkness he's seeing? He's got quite a problem on his hands, as he analyzes his world. The world he experiences is a closed system in the dark, and – just as those without rhythms of night and day are driven mad, and just as solitary confinement is ruinous to the human psyche – so the cage of the world feels claustrophobic, insubstantial, futile, maddening to him. It's extremely boring to live in a cage, because with the world as a closed system, there's nothing for its processes to do but repeat themselves. Like he says, “all streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness – a man cannot utter it! The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:7-9). Within this closed system 'under the sun,' things repeat. There's nothing new worth discovering; it turns out somebody's already found it. Just as the streams flow and flow without filling up the sea, so experiences flow and flow into our eyes and ears without filling us, without satisfying us. To this Preacher, such a cage of a world is unspeakably exhausting.

And when he applies human wisdom to it, where the beginning of such wisdom is observing the world, he has to ask: “Who knows what is good for man while he lives the few days of his futile life, which passes like a shadow?” (Ecclesiastes 6:12). What's our human good, what has meaning? Life passes like a shadow, darkness overspreading the world. Life's days are few, not many. Life is as insubstantial as vapor, an exhaled breath you can just barely see in the cold – the thing easiest of all to disturb, with no significance as it goes. That obsesses the Preacher, as he wrestles for meaning in a closed world and comes up empty-handed: “I have seen everything that is done under the sun – and look, it's all futility, shepherding the wind!” (Ecclesiastes 1:14). As Paul would later say, “the creation was subjected to futility” (Romans 8:20). Everything done in the world is a bundle of frustration that comes up empty-handed, like desperately trying to chase the wind into a sheepfold.

The Preacher considered whether the virtues of hard work might escape futility, might mean anything. But as his eyes see it, the root of whatever skill we apply to our labor derives from worldly ambition and from envy of others, a mimetic desire to have what they have and be what they are (Ecclesiastes 4:4). That's not exactly good – and where does it get us, in a closed world? “What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils under the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation; even in the night, his heart doesn't rest. This also is futility” (Ecclesiastes 2:22-23). “All his days, he eats in darkness in much vexation and sickness and anger” (Ecclesiastes 5:17). Life in the cage is toiling and eating in darkness, a life that forces stress and anxiety on us so that everything we taste is tainted by our sickly sorrows.

Can't we enjoy the fruits of that toil, though? The Preacher claims to speak from Solomon's experiences with wealth and worldly success – of many houses and vineyards and gardens, of servants and herds and flocks, of silver and gold stockpiled, of singers to entertain him daily, of concubines aplenty for the pleasures of the night (Ecclesiastes 2:4-8). “Whatever my eyes desired, I did not keep from them; I kept my heart from no pleasure..., and this was my reward for all my toil” (Ecclesiastes 2:10). But “he who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income – this also is futility! When goods increase, they increase who eat them” (Ecclesiastes 5:10-11). Hence, after everything this character says he's tasted in life, “all was futility, a shepherding of the wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 2:11).

Well, Preacher, what about the achievements of the intellectual life? What about knowledge? What about the path of wisdom? On the one hand, he says, “there is more gain in wisdom than in foolishness” (Ecclesiastes 2:14). But, on the other hand, that gain is impermanent, because life is impermanent as breath; hence, the impact of wisdom in this life is ultimately trivial, since the wise and foolish get dumped in the same grave when the shadow passes (Ecclesiastes 2:14-16). Plus, a lifetime of wisdom is as easily outweighed by one foolish choice as a sweet perfume is tainted by a dead fly in it (Ecclesiastes 10:1). It's so much easier to ruin than to build that failure is, for all intents and purposes, inevitable – that's what he's saying. “So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me: everything is futility, shepherding the wind” (Ecclesiastes 2:17).

What about leaving a legacy, at least? Does that have benefit? Is that meaningful? Is that worth it? Here the Preacher isn't really any rosier. Whatever he's built, whatever he's taught, “I must leave it to the man who will come after me, and who knows whether he'll be wise or a fool? Yet he'll be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is futility” (Ecclesiastes 2:18-19). Even if the Preacher claims, “I became great and surpassed all who were before me” (Ecclesiastes 2:11), yet even the greatest who achieved the most in life have no assurance that their name will endure – or, if it does, that it'll be a good one in how it's received. Of even the mightiest and wisest of kings, the Preacher says that “those who come later will not rejoice in him. Surely this also is futility and a shepherding of the wind!” (Ecclesiastes 4:16).

Ultimately, the Preacher says, all the efforts we invest in life are a gamble. No matter how smart somebody is, no matter how well someone plans, no matter how strong or diligent or careful people are, “time and chance happen to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11). The world, seen by this view from the inside, is capricious, based more on luck than on skill or quality. Them's the breaks. That's life. There are these forces of the world that keep you trapped, that keep you in the cage, that keep you in the dark.

We moderns like to think that a closed-system world, a limited world, is more understandable, able to be subjected to our scientific gaze. But actually, by dimming the lights and screening out all context beyond the tangible world, we discover the world-in-itself as inscrutable. Certainly the Preacher finds it that way. He can't figure out the world. There are appointed times and seasons in which different ways of living fit. After all, “for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). So “there is a time and a way for everything” (Ecclesiastes 8:6), “a time for every matter and every work” (Ecclesiastes 3:17). If so, then matching the matter or work to the time is all it should take to thrive. And this woe-torn Preacher was always taught to believe that “the wise heart will know the proper time” to apply this or that insight out of his bag of proverbs to the world (Ecclesiastes 8:5).

But what's driving him crazy is that the times and seasons aren't obvious. Which is the time to keep silence, and which is the time to speak? Which is the time to gather things together, and which is the time to throw them away? When it is time to embrace, and when is it time to put some distance between people? When has the time for peace given way to the time for war – and when will it be time to go back to peace? A human being “cannot find out” the times' and seasons' order and arrangement “from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) – the view from the inside of the cage doesn't allow for that. Therefore, “man's evil lies heavy on him, for he does not know what is to be, for who can tell him how it will be?” (Ecclesiastes 8:6-7). “However much a man may toil in seeking, he will not find it out; even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out” (Ecclesiastes 8:17). All this wisdom turns out to be pretense: he's as in the dark about it as anybody.

As if a confusing world in the dark weren't bad enough, this cage is an unpleasant prison, one of violence and of woe, where oppression and injustice have always run wild and unchecked “when man had power over man to his hurt” (Ecclesiastes 8:9). There in the dark, without a sense that there are prying eyes looking on to judge, the world is a place where those who gain an upper hand exploit those they find beneath them. “Behold the tears of the oppressed,” cries the Preacher, “and they had no one to comfort them!” (Ecclesiastes 4:1). There's no one coming to the rescue, if the world is a closed system. We can imagine all we like that we become other than who we are by the power of our own collective choice, but the cage is the cage, and the Preacher sees no source of comfort or salvation under the sun. “Surely oppression drives the wise into madness” (Ecclesiastes 7:7). The fact of injustice in the world is so debilitating that it breaks the human mind and spirit.

The story of the cage, as the Preacher tells it, is that “the hearts of the children of man are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead” (Ecclesiastes 9:3). When? There's the rub: “man does not know his time,” any more than the deer sees the bullet the second before the trigger's pulled (Ecclesiastes 10:12). It can't be stopped or avoided: “No man has power to retain the spirit or power over the day of death” (Ecclesiastes 8:8). “It is the same for all, since the same event happens to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean.... This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that the same event happens to all” (Ecclesiastes 9:2-3).

Worse yet, owing to the veil of darkness drawn over our eyes by the cage, we can't observe what awaits us upon that common event. “Even though he should live two thousand years, yet see no good, do not all go to the one place?” (Ecclesiastes 6:6). “As he came from his mother's womb, he shall go again, naked as he came, and shall take nothing for his toil that he may carry away in his hand” (Ecclesiastes 5:15). And “who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth” (Ecclesiastes 3:21)? So far as can be seen under the sun, “there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in the underworld where you're going” (Ecclesiastes 9:10), where “the dead know nothing and have no more reward..., and forever they have no more share in all that is done under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 9:5-6). If the injustices of life make the Preacher announce that “better is the day of death than the day of birth” (Ecclesiastes 7:1), the obscurities of death make him lament that “a living dog is better than a dead lion” (Ecclesiastes 9:4).

So long as the cage is a cage, darkness must reign, and our pretended satisfactions within the cage are but delusions we've invented as coping mechanisms. These all flounder in the face of cosmic indecipherability, regnant injustice, and mysterious death⁴ – which is why we try to hide behind myths of scientific pursuit, moral progress, and the joys and pleasures of life. No wonder, early on in his considerations, the Preacher “turned about and gave my heart up to despair” (Ecclesiastes 2:20). The cage has broken him. All each can hold out hope for, it seems, is “a little cheer before I go” (Job 10:20-21), “a handful of quietness” (Ecclesiastes 4:6), “to eat and drink and see good in all the toil with which one toils under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 5:18).

All the Preacher is capable of saying, as he closes out his time on stage, is the advice to not think of the world as he has. “Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come” (Ecclesiastes 12:1). The Preacher knows more than his eyes and ears would tell him. He knows that, whatever may be true of this world, “God is in heaven,” deserving of reverence and awe from within the world (Ecclesiastes 5:2). “Walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment” (Ecclesiastes 11:9) – a mysterious “work of God who makes everything” (Ecclesiastes 11:5). The Preacher, and each of us, are living “the few days of his life that God has given him” (Ecclesiastes 5:18). “To accept his lot and rejoice in his toil – this is the gift of God” (Ecclesiastes 5:19). “He has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The cage is dark, but “light is sweet, and it is pleasant for eyes to see the sun” (Ecclesiastes 11:7).

The Preacher's frustrations, compounded by his own weird way of seeing the world (as the father skewers with a few good tongue-in-cheek quips on the way home from the show at story's end), are rooted in the fact that the human heart holds longings that a closed-system world can't satisfy. As C. S. Lewis put it, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”⁵ But in the Preacher's case, in Advent's case, if we find in ourselves a longing which meets only futility within the world, then either creation was made for futility without hope, or else the world is not meant to be a closed system after all – the cage was meant to be broken.

The Preacher we meet in Ecclesiastes couldn't find out what was from the beginning (Ecclesiastes 3:11), but the Apostle declares that “that which was from the beginning” is what “we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we looked upon and touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1). The Preacher's failing efforts to see and hear transcendent meaning in the world, to taste eternity on earth, have somehow been satisfied in what the Apostle has heard, seen, touched, and thus known.

So tell that Preacher to yield the stage to the Apostle, because this is a wisdom that finally promises profit. The Apostle declares that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; he was in the beginning with God” (John 1:1-2). That word, 'Word,' is a flexible one in Greek: Logos. It can mean a word, like an ordinary word that's spoken. It can also mean reason itself. It can mean the transcendent pattern on which the world is based. So here we find this Word, this Wisdom, which was “in the beginning with God” – beyond the walls the Preacher took as his boundaries. Our frame of reference here is decidedly not 'under the sun.' And this Word is the opposite of futility, the opposite of vanity, the opposite of fruitlessness. This Word is the basis of the rationality of existence. Before there was a world at all, there was a Word – a Divine Word.

And of this Divine Word preexisting the world, the Apostle preaches to the Preacher that “all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:3). This Word is the “God who makes everything” (Ecclesiastes 11:5). The pattern imprints the world, meaning that the world is modeled after rationality, not after irrationality. All things were made through the Creative Word. Nothing has come into being that doesn't bear the mark of the Word. And “he has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The world is a place of beauty, and even these curious times and seasons all flow, one to the next, as ways for the world to more diversely and fully show forth the infinite fullness of the Word its model.

Not only was “the world made through him,” but this Word “was in the world” (John 1:10). In the darkness of the prison, in the mundanity of the cage, the seeming secularity of being under the sun couldn't block out this Word. Silently abiding in the foundations of every nature, quietly shepherding the generations that come and go down the halls of history, the Word whispered to the world that there was more. “Yet the world did not know him,” the Apostle laments (John 1:10). That's the whole reason why the world seemed like such a cage! The world refused to know the Word that made the world and was in the world. “God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes” (Ecclesiastes 7:29). “They became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened; claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:21-22). Is there a better summary of Ecclesiastes than that?⁶ Because we didn't know the Word enmeshed in the world, our faculties were blinded and deafened so as not to recognize the world as founded on the Word. No wonder the world itself became opaque to us in its darkness, stripped of the only contextual reference that gives meaning.

The Apostle goes on to declare that “in him was life” (John 1:4). The grave uncertainty of the grave lacks all bearing on the Word. He restores life wherever he abides, because Life Itself is the infinite ocean of his heart. If the Word is our reference point, then the mysteries of death gain their reason back, and it becomes clear that “creation was subjected to futility... in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption” (Romans 8:20-21). But “if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:25). We wait because there can be, after all, a share in goodness beyond the veil of oblivion. “In him was life, and that life was the light of men” (John 1:4), “a light for the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness” (Isaiah 42:6-7). The world need not remain dark, nor need it remain oppressive. This light can “establish it and uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore,” if only it dawns (Isaiah 9:7).

The Word, “the True Light which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world” in a new way (John 1:9), “full of grace and truth” in our midst beneath the same sun (John 1:14). The world may feel at times like a cage, it may look like darkness, it may appear cold and confining and frustrating. But when the True Light fully dawns, “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone” (Isaiah 9:2). Eternal Light moves into the world, throwing the system wide open; the cage shatters, the bars lie in ruins at his feet. That, at least, will be the message of Christmas: “the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

What is Advent but the wait for the cage to be broken? What is Advent but the wait for the darkness to fade? What is Advent but the wait for the system to be flooded from the outside it assumed it was isolated from, an 'outside' which all along turned out to be more internal to the world than what the world is made of? No longer need we think that there's nothing new, that the patterns and processes of a closed-system world are on repeat. For “behold,” says a Voice from above, “I am doing a new thing! Now it springs forth – do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:19). When this Sweet Light is seen, then the eye will indeed be satisfied in the seeing.

So now is the time of our longing – but a longing that has a satisfaction the world couldn't afford. Now is the time of our waiting – but a waiting upon a hope that gives its promise. If the days look few, yet “you will find it after many days” (Ecclesiastes 11:1). In this hope “you know the time..., for salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed” (Romans 13:11). If the days are dark, yet “you are not in darkness” (1 Thessalonians 5:4); we need not shepherd the wind, for the Spirit will shepherd us. So in these days of waiting, “fear God and keep the commandment” (Ecclesiastes 12:13), “for to the one who pleases him, God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy” (Ecclesiastes 2:26), “as with joy at the harvest, as they are glad when they divide the spoil” in victory (Isaiah 9:3). And “whatever God does endures forever” without subtraction (Ecclesiastes 3:14). The shadow cannot blot it out; the cage cannot keep it at bay; time and chance cannot prevail over hope! So let us, weary but not despairing, wait for the Word, Wisdom, Light from above to restore our joy. Amen.