As many of you who know me may realize I can be a bit cynical - sometimes this cynicism is merited like when watching a Brad Pitt movie, but other times it can be a bit much and may lead to me making small children cry. Anyway in my defense, I do have to say though that the Bible does sometimes back me up in my cynicism, like with what we have today in Isaiah. It may not seem cynical at first blush but let me just read a brief snippet and see if you can see it. Here goes:
I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,
my whole being shall exult in my God;
for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation,
he has covered me with the robe of righteousness,
as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland,
and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.
For as the earth brings forth its shoots,
and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up,
so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise
to spring up before all the nations.
You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord,
and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.
Okay, for the less cynical of you out there it might take a minute to spot. I mean it does sound pretty nice – it is full of phrases like, “robe of righteousness” and “My whole being shall exult in my God.” But still it is there. So let’s start by taking a look at the theme of the reading. What it is basically saying is that at some point in the future we will be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord. And the reason why we will be this crown at some point in the future is because we will be pure and righteous. And therefore by being pure and righteous we will give off this sort of radiant glow like the jewels in a crown. And I admit this does not seem very dark and brooding. In fact, it sounds like we are pretty awesome, but let’s go back a little ways and see how it is that we actually get to this point of being a royal diadem. And ask did we get there of our own accord or was it because of something that God did? And while I will not go as far as saying that the narrative implies that God is going to put some lipstick on a pig it is somewhat similar. Just look at some of the verbs that are used to describe this procedure. God is said to clothe, cover, adorn and to deck us. We end up being a crown of beauty, because God essentially dresses us up as one, not because of any qualities of beauty that we possess ourselves. In today’s reading there is no understanding that we are capable of doing any of this by our own will. All of which paints a not terribly rosy picture of humanity. We are awful until God does something about it.
And so what is going on here and why exactly do we have this reading on the first Sunday after Christmas? Well believe it or not it really is a distillation of the Christmas message, which posits in the words of John’s Gospel that God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son to the end that all that believe in him should not perish. You see the only way we do not perish is because of what God has done. The message of Christmas is that God of his own will has figured out a way to save us from ourselves through the birth of his Son in Bethlehem of Judea. And what is so interesting and yet so wonderful because God has a very realistic opinion of us – we are not fooling him. What a strange and marvelous thing and how counter our prevailing culture. To love people despite knowing all of their problems and shortcomings. To come to rescue a people who are in no way deserving of being rescued. If that doesn’t fill you with gratitude I don’t know what will.
But if God comes to save a people not worthy of saving what does that tell us about how we are to behave? Well it rather obviously points out that we should also love those who are unworthy of being loved. Because obviously if God does that for us who are we to say that we are not interested in such behavior? God announced on Christmas that he loved us despite the fact that when left to our own devices we are not very loveable. But God is willing to make us righteous or to cover us with a robe of righteousness as Isaiah puts it. And therein lies the second lesson from Christmas. The first being the joy and gratitude that we should exude over Christ coming into the world, the second is for us to act towards humanity the way that God acts towards us.
And that seems to be a real problem for us because we seem to be very good at justifying in our minds why other people simply are not worthy of being loved. It may be because they have different political opinions than we do – perhaps they have committed the unforgivable sin of having a different view on tax policy than we have or it may be something else, but whatever the issue we are very adept at putting people in categories that make it okay for us to not love them. For while on some level we know that we are to love one another as God loves us we very easily come up with a list of caveats to explain why others do not really fall into the category of one another. But based on what we hear about humanity today in Isaiah it is exactly because we know terrible things about other people that we should love them, not despite.
I once had a parishioner proudly tell me that she would never forgive her son because of how he had treated her late husband. I don’t recall exactly what the son did, but I think it was fairly rotten, but that is kind of the point. As Jesus says in Luke, “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.”
And all of this may sound like we are setting ourselves up to be doormats for Jesus, that we should just sit back and take abuse and love people anyway. And the answer to that question is both yes and no. There is evidence of both answers in the life of Jesus. We have Jesus overturning the tables in the temple, which is not terribly meek and mild, but we also have Jesus going willingly to the cross despite the fact that he had done nothing wrong. And so there is obviously a balance to be struck. And I think the problem nowadays is we error on the side of overturning the tables. We really like to tell others the things that they are doing wrong. But nowadays there does not seem to be enough of us who will willingly go to the cross. Sometimes we may need to step back and say that we are going to love others simply because they are created in God’s image just like us. God has no illusions about humanity and its capacity for horrid behavior – I mean this baby which we celebrate this season will be crucified in just a few short months. And while we are not God and cannot clothe people in garments of salvation we can look at people as being capable of such, capable of being made righteous by God. Christmas is about an unearned gift and our reaction to it should be to give unearned gifts to the rest of humanity so that we may be God’s both now and forevermore.