Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost; 13 November 2022; Proper 28C (RCL); Isaiah 65:17-25; Canticle 9; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19.
We are clearly winding down the liturgical year — we’ve arrived at the apocalyptic material in Luke’s Gospel. Luke tones down significantly what he borrows from Mark’s Gospel, pushing the impending end even farther into the future. Even the arrest of the disciples will not signal the end. Luke has change Mark’s material neatly to give us a hint of what’s in store for Peter, and especially for Paul in the second volume of Luke/Acts. Paul will make his defense before kings and governors, but clearly not ad lib, but in carefully crafted speeches.
What I notice most about the readings assigned for this week is the stark contrast between the material in Luke, and Isaiah’s vision of the future. Luke foresees a future in which even the glorious temple has been destroyed (easy to do when you’re writing after the fact), while Isaiah sees a peaceful future — almost a return to Eden (note that the serpent’s food shall be dust — a reference to Genesis 3:14).
Luke had to explain the recent past (if he is writing around the year 90, the sack of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple in 70 CE is in living memory) in terms that kept events within God’s scheme of things for this little community. Isaiah is suggesting that the former things are no longer where we will find God active, but in the future, in the new thing God is doing.
Like Luke’s community, we certainly live in a time in which we hear of wars and rumors of wars, when nation rises against nation and all the rest, though we are not ourselves currently under any great threat. It is unlikely that any of us will be turned over to prisons for our identity as disciples of Jesus, nor have to make our defense before kings and governors. Within some traditions of Christian, there is a great deal of speculation on current events as signs of the end, but Luke seems to warn us against thinking it’s any time soon. Before all this occurs, he says, other things will happen first.
While Luke’s description of events seems only too real, Isaiah’s vision of things to come seems an impossible dream. In the violent and checkered history of that little strip of land along the eastern end of the Mediterranean, it has rarely happened that people could build houses and then live in them. In 1948 and years following, so many houses have changed hands, usually violently, that Isaiah’s vision must still be far in the future. The number of refugees in this world is truly staggering.
It is also interesting to me that (at least in this passage) Isaiah does not describe the Temple in this future. It is described here and there in the final chapters of Isaiah, but doesn’t seem to have the prominence it occupied in the earlier chapters. And certainly no monarchy is described in the final chapters of the book. What is described is an agricultural “enough-ness.” People have what they need. And this is no complete return to Eden — people still have to plant and cultivate, but the earth cooperates.
Two weeks ago, the lectionary assigned a reading from Habakkuk, in which God instructed the prophet to write the vision plainly on tablets. Habakkuk never filled in the content of that vision, but Isaiah seems to do a pretty good job. If it seems to delay, God told Habakkuk, wait for it. This is a vision by which we can critique things as they stand now, even if it seems a long way off.