The belief that ancient people had that some nations had a ‘special’ destiny is something we find it hard to grasp. Israel understood itself corporately as the ‘chosen of God’, whilst the Romans, through claiming ancestry from one or more of the gods, thought it their divinely sanctioned duty to conquer much of the known world. But when the Prophets we know as Second Isaiah wrote from captivity in the Babylonian Empire in the 6th century BCE, it is clear that they took their understanding of ‘chosenness’ and radically adapted it. They understood their relationship with the One God as embracing all humanity. God, it appears does not have favourites. This was to have huge implications which echo down through the ages, casting serious doubt on the Israeli attitude to Palestinians or places like India, with its caste system. We might even ponder its critique of the British Class System.
As we saw last week, Second Isaiah’s Great ‘Servant Songs’ of which we have one today (Isaiah 49: 3.5-6), speaks of his utter certainty of his special role, given him from his conception, and marks this colossal sea-change in his understanding of God’s call and his mission. ‘It is not enough for you to be my servant, to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back the survivors of Israel. I will make you the light of the nations so that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.’ Clearly Jesus knew the Servant Songs very well, and we can appreciate the role they had in shaping his ministry.
On Christmas morning at the daytime Mass, our Gospel was John the Evangelists great Prologue, in which he laid out the identity of Jesus and wrote of the reception of his ministry. Here in John (1:29-34) we get the interpretation of this by the Baptist, illustrating precisely what it will mean. He describes Jesus as ‘The lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.’ Now of course Jews were familiar with the symbolism of the lamb, the animal slaughtered at Passover, the remembrance of their great Exodus from Egypt and the making of the people. But what we have to remember is that the Baptist was not a Jerusalem prophet, in fact he seemed to despise the Temple and its elite, he had his ministry of repentance for Israel out along the Jordan, that place of transition to a new life, a promised land, far from the city, and clearly saw Jesus as the ultimate sacrifice for sin – and not simply for Jews but for the world. Judaism had abandoned human sacrifice hundreds of years ago, unlike their pagan neighbours, and we can be quite sure that John the writer literally meant the slaughter of Jesus, rather than using it as a metaphor, and so did the Baptist for the Prologue has said ‘He came to what was his own and his own people did not accept him.’ All Gospel writers wrote their stories of Jesus in the shadow of the cross and his appalling death, so that we can be sure that the literal sacrifice of a human being was understood. Whereas Passover took place as an annual event, with the slaughter of the lambs as a ritualised event, the slaughter of Jesus would be a unique event, only this man could die for the sin of the world. John’s Gospel of course, alters the entire chronology of the Gospel to have Jesus die at the time of the slaughter of the Passover lambs, as John presents Jesus as the final sacrifice. There would be no more such events, and as he wrote in the 80’s, in the aftermath of the failed Revolt of the Jews when the Temple and all its rituals were destroyed, we can appreciate the significance of the great shift out from Judaism to embrace the world.
The Baptist is used, as in the Prologue, to emphasise the eternal existence of Christ. John makes the odd and twice repeated comment ‘I did not know him myself’ or in better translations ‘recognise him’; pointing to the fact that the Baptist had to learn about the identity of Jesus. Significantly he says that he saw the Spirit come down from heaven upon Jesus, and he understands that this same Spirit will be given to his followers. In this the Baptist comes to know that Jesus is the ‘Chosen One of God’. Immediately after this, Jesus’ own ministry kicks off in Galilee, with his selecting of his followers; the first of the ‘signs’ of his Jesus’ divinity at the wedding in Cana; followed immediately by Jesus’ attack on the Temple as he flings out those who defiled the court of the Gentiles by using it as a marketplace, and made money. As this court was the place where pagans were allowed to pray in the Temple, we immediately begin to understand how Jesus is not given for a narrow Judaism, but gifted to the world.
This taking out of the Good News to the entire world is seen in our Reading from 1 Corinthians (1:1-3). Paul links together his appointment by God as an apostle, a ‘sent’ one, and the Christian criteria ‘All the saints everywhere who pray to our Lord Jesus Christ; for he is their Lord no less than ours.’ Corinth was a pagan city, and so many of the believers there would have been converts from paganism. Anyone familiar with Paul’s Letter will be aware just what a difficult path it proved to be for Corinthian Christians as they adapted to living lives in conformity with Jesus; yet we know from his letters that Paul was utterly committed to this task. It would be from Corinth that he wrote to other Christian communities in the Mediterranean, from that cosmopolitan twin port city with its eminent capacity for communication with others through trade by the ships that went out all over the ocean. Paul, the one-time persecutor of Christians and a devout Pharisee had himself to learn the way of Christ, becoming for him a ‘light to the nations’. No doubt he had to adapt his teaching methods to people of greatly different cultures from his own, using his knowledge of the Jewish background of Jesus, and enabling foreigners to appreciate why some of its practices were binding to the faith, whereas others, circumcision and the Jewish law were not. It’s an example we too need to follow.
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