Not Once But Always

Reflections on the Lectionary for December 8th

Zechariah and John the Baptist, Unknown Artist, Monastery of the Holy Cross, Jerusalem. Medieval.

If you’re a reader of this Substack, there is a good chance you’re a Christian, or at least you’re Christian-adjacent. And if you find yourself in church on the second Sunday of Advent, hearing (or hearing yourself speak) the Revised Common Lectionary texts for the second Sunday of Advent, you’re probably pretty familiar with the Christian story and how Advent fits into it. It’s all right there in the name: “Advent” refers to the coming, the arrival, of Jesus as the messiah—his birth into the world and the beginnings of his very important lifetime.

But the texts, practices, and ideas that surround the Christian season of Advent do not belong to us alone. This is true of the whole church year, and it’s true of Christianity itself, really. Christianity is always accompanied by Judaism, which is a fellow-traveler with Christianity in many ways. In Advent and at other times we are reading someone else’s stories, we are retelling someone else’s theologies, we are putting a twist one someone else’s histories. In its most insidious and dangerous form, this can turn into supersessionism, which is the theological claim that Christianity (and not Judaism) is the natural and divinely-ordained outcome of the traditions of ancient Israel—that Christianity has replaced Judaism, or superseded it, as the only true religion. Supersessionism is bad theology and bad practice, and we should guard against it. But even if we avoid a sharply supersessionist theology, Christianity still participates in a lot of rhetorical violence toward Judaism and a lot of erasure and co-opting of its claims, even when we might not intend any harm. The lectionary texts for the second Sunday of Advent are a great example of this, and so they are also a wonderful opportunity to be thoughtful and aware of how and why Christians use Jewish people, texts, ideas, histories, and traditions for our own purposes.

The Revised Common Lectionary gives us two texts from Luke’s gospel: 1:68-79, and 3:1-6. Both of these texts are about John the Baptist, and they both draw on the prophetic traditions of ancient Israel to make claims about John. The passage in 1:68-79 is one of four songs (or “canticles,” traditionally) found in the Gospel of Luke; you can read what I wrote about them a year ago if you want to know more. This particular song or canticle is a kind of prayer or blessing spoken by John’s father Zechariah, given in response to a question asked by bystanders at John’s birth in Luke 1:66: “What then will this child become?” Zechariah, who had been unable to speak until that moment, unfurls this blessing in 1:68-79 as a way of responding to their question about John’s fate. As he gives his prayer or blessing, notice how Zechariah structures it as a recitation of the history of salvation. Zechariah talks about how God sent a king in David, prophets to speak to the people, deliverance from enemies, a covenant to structure life, and a means toward holiness. “And you, child,” he continues, addressing his newborn son John, “will be called the prophet of the Most High.” In this, Zechariah explicitly links John to the ancient prophetic tradition (Elijah, Jeremiah, Isaiah, etc.), and he places John’s life in the context of the continuing revelation of God’s favor toward God’s people.

While Christians often view John the Baptist as a starting point or as the first chapter of a story, Zechariah’s words make it clear that John will stand in the middle of a much longer arc—one that already stretched back centuries. While Christians tend to view John the Baptist as the definitive prophetic voice announcing Jesus’ arrival, the Gospel of Luke itself makes it clear that John is only the latest in a very long line of prophetic voices announcing God’s saving work. Christians view John the Baptist as a singular figure, but when we do that, we erase or pass over a great deal of Jewish (and our own) texts.

The passage in Luke 3:1-6, the other gospel text in the lectionary this week, carries the same reminder about the depth of tradition. In that passage, Luke begins with some time stamps: Tiberius was the emperor, Pontius Pilate was the governor, Herod was the ruler of Galilee, and so on. But then, Luke ties John the Baptist’s ministry to that of Isaiah with a citation from Isaiah 40:3-5. This is a very clear reminder from Luke that John the Baptist is not doing a new thing, but that he’s carrying on a very old tradition of prophetic proclamation. John is doing it in a particular time and place, just like prophets like Isaiah did, but his work is familiar to anyone who knows the traditions of ancient Israel. And his message is familiar too; it is a message of salvation for “all flesh,” and the intervention of God into history.

This is a good moment to pause and take a step back and ask what Advent is, and what Advent is for. Because Advent shows up at the beginning of the church year (and not the middle or the end), and because Advent’s (and Christmas’s) lectionary texts often feature moments of announcement (like these passages, or the Annunciation or the angelic appearance to the shepherds or the celestial signs to the magi), it’s easy for Christians to think of these stories as the beginning of something, and to think of Advent as a season that’s about something new. But the gospels themselves take care to couch this story of Jesus’ origins in the longstanding and ongoing story of God’s intervention into the world, especially into the concerns of ancient Israel. The gospels situate Jesus’ story in the midst of what we would call Judaism and Jewish traditions. John the Baptist is not announcing a new thing here; he’s taking up a very old way of understanding God’s role in the world. God is not intervening in the world for the first time because “long lay the world in sin and error pining,” as the carol goes, but God is said to be intervening once more as part of a pattern of concern that goes through the kingly traditions and prophetic traditions, back to Moses and Abraham and even earlier.

Advent, then, carries a risk for Christians. The risk is that we will center our own theologies and our own histories, imagining that God’s work in the world originated with John the Baptist and Jesus, and that we will slide into supersessionism by accident, erasing the stories of others and tragically truncating our own. This is not only ethically dubious, but it is also theologically suspicious. I’m not one to draw lines in the theological sand, but it seems perfectly clear to me that authors like Luke and the other gospel writers absolutely meant for their readers to understand the story of Jesus (and therefore the story of John the Baptist and Zechariah and Elizabeth and others) as a new chapter in an old story, not as a new thing altogether.

For an example of what I mean, look at the reading from Baruch that shows up in the lectionary this week. Protestants don’t hold Baruch as canonical (and neither do Jews, for that matter), but Catholics and some Orthodox Christians include it as deuterocanonical. (This has to do with Baruch’s inclusion in the Septuagint but omission from the Vulgate, if you feel like getting into the weeds of textual transmission). But you don’t have to think of Baruch as canonical to understand its importance here. Scholars debate the dating of Baruch, but its composition is most often put in the first century BCE or the first century CE, meaning that it’s roughly contemporary with the context of Jesus’ life and ministry and the earliest days of the Christian tradition. Baruch is evidence, then, that the kinds of claims about the continuing intervention of God into the world that we find in Luke and other gospels was absolutely happening elsewhere in Jewish texts and thought as well. Followers of Jesus were not the only ones who thought that God was preparing to gather Israel in from its historical traumas, and gospel writers were not the only ones claiming that God’s people would “walk safely in the glory of God,” as Baruch 5:7 says. Instead, the Jesus movement emerged into and out of a Judaism that was keenly aware of its geopolitical precarity, and was theologizing history as a means for God’s salvation. Baruch is evidence that the Jesus-following Jews who wrote the New Testament weren’t the only ones who felt that God’s intervention was immanent—not by a longshot. The tradition that ended up proclaiming Jesus as messiah was only one among many movements in the first century that saw the God of Israel moving in the world.

Why did Jews (both Jesus-following ones and ones that had no connection to Jesus) think that? Let’s look at one more lectionary text for this week, Malachi 3:1-4. This passage is one of many that Christians use during Advent to contextualize Jesus’ birth, and it’s also one of many that Jews use to talk about God’s ongoing concern for God’s people. It’s an eschatological passage that expects that “the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple,” and also anticipates a forerunner messenger figure who will announce that Lord’s return. It’s easy to see how that passage could be used to refer to John the Baptist, but it’s also easy to see how it could be used for basically any prophetic figure. The reference to a return to the temple is a byproduct of Malachi’s composition during the period following the Babylonian exile when the Jerusalem temple was being rebuilt. Malachi would have been read and heard by Jews in the period of Roman occupation as a reminder that God’s presence endured even when the nation of Israel (or, more specifically, Judah/Judea) was under the thumb of a foreign occupying power. Along with the other prophets (the same prophetic tradition Zechariah mentioned when describing his son John the Baptist’s purpose), Malachi is looking forward to a day of vindication, security, peace, and uninterrupted devotion to God.

That perspective was common in Jewish prophetic texts, and it also happens to be the jumping-off point for most Christian understandings of Jesus. The earliest Christians were, after all, often Jewish, and the same stories that animated the Jewish prophetic tradition were the ones that early Christians used to understand Jesus’ identity and purpose. When this week’s two passages from the Gospel of Luke describe John the Baptist as a prophetic forerunner to Jesus, they are tapping into something very old and deep in the Jewish tradition. It is dangerous for modern-day Christians to assume that the prophetic tradition only ever pointed toward Jesus, and that Jesus (and Christianity) were the only possible outcome of God’s saving work. The biblical texts are clear, with myriad examples, that God showed up in saving ways across the history of God’s people, and that God has promised to continue to do so. Even if Christians claim that Jesus is a major instance of God’s presence—which seems to me to be a pretty central tenet of most Christian theologies—we cannot pretend that Jesus is the first, only, or last instance of God’s care for the world or humanity. We have to acknowledge—and celebrate—that God has been present and continues to be present in the world in many ways, some of which are not known to us.

None of this diminishes Advent and the way it represents, for Christians, a special and particular moment in the story of God and the world. Calling John the Baptist a prophet takes nothing away from any other prophet, and calling Jesus a savior does not erase any other of God’s saving works. Rather, when we view Advent and the story of Jesus’ birth into this world as a new chapter in the long story of God’s care and tending of the world, we can begin to see that the thing we celebrate in this season the way Zechariah sees it, as the way God is—seeking the salvation of the world not once but always, speaking through prophets not once but always, showing mercy not once but always, shining light on the world not once but always.