Jesus and the Renovation of the World

by Rev. Jim HollandThe Bible is the story of God’s decided purpose to renovate a world broken by sin. But even before man’s fall into sin, God is interested in his world being made even more beautiful. In the very creation account of God’s overflowing love for the world he created, God’s concern is for the people he created to make his world even more stunning! They are to take the raw material of the physical world God made and bring further order and development to it.After the fall, we see in the call of Abraham God’s decided purposes again to renovate his world. In the call of Abraham, we see God’s heartbeat for his people and for the larger world: “I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing…in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:2-3) For centuries, God burned his image and his ways into a people, Israel, but it is not until the New Testament that we clearly see the way God is going to re-make the world. It was hinted at in the Old Testament, but the mystery is not fully revealed until the Incarnation of Jesus—God himself came and entered the broken world.There is a sense in which all is “type and shadow” (to use Paul’s words in Colossians) until Jesus comes. The prophets talked about God, but Jesus is God—he is, in his very flesh, the revelation of God among us. The Incarnation is God saying, “This is how committed I am to my broken people and my broken world.” The Incarnation is God within our human categories. But what is so odd about the whole thing is how very counter-intuitive it is: God as an infant, God born to peasants, God born away from the power centers of the world, God working a blue collar vocation most of his adolescent and adult life, God submissive to the very authority structures he ordained and created, God dying with the charge of being a political subversive. It boggles the mind.Don’t throw stones at the disciples; they didn’t get it either. On numerous occasions, the twelve men he lived life with essentially called him out. They we aghast at the ill treatment he received from religious and civil authorities and seem to be waiting for him to throw off the mantle of disguise and ignite the revolution that would forever overthrow the oppressor and make the world a new place. While they might not fully understand who he is (God almighty), they know he can calm storms and raise the dead; what are swords and pikes against that? Peter eventually has enough and pulls out a sword he had long wanted to wet with the blood of his oppressors and Jesus calmly rebukes him, as a parent would a child who doesn’t have enough understanding to really comprehend what is going on. No, Jesus’ way to renovate the world was not through slaughtering his oppressors, but loving them and forgiving them, through himself being slaughtered, and in so doing, bearing our sin away.During the Advent season, it is our tradition at St. Patrick to light Advent candles. Each one of the four candles is symbolic of something that comes in the revelation of Jesus—hope, peace, joy and love. During this season of Advent, Brian and I will be talking about these things, but not like you think. Hope, peace, joy and love are words we hear thrown around by both believers and non-believers alike, to the point that they have almost become a cliché. The world we live in is cynical, and cynicism has a self-righteous quality about it, like, “Yeah, we hear those words and it is all talk; nobody really believes that stuff.” Likewise, these words tend to get filled with the cultural trapping of the day, and again loose their power to transform.It is not that love, joy, hope and peace are words particular to a Christian vocabulary—they are not. All religions get great currency out of these words, as did the Jews in God’s revelation to them in the Old Testament. The Roman world into which Jesus came was steeped in the obsession with virtue, and also made use of these words. But when Jesus came, something amazing happened. We see in Jesus the embodiment of these words—the living reality. We don’t have the option to wonder what they mean or look like in the real world. All we have to do is look at Jesus, and his life filled them with enough meaning to renovate the world in which we live!So, let the party begin! Let us decorate the house, adorn the tree, hang the garland, burn the Yule log and drink rivers of eggnog. Let us feast to the founder of the great feast as we await with hopeful anticipation one day having a seat at that great feast Jesus will throw for all his people, when he finally puts down all sin, sickness, tears and brokenness. Yes, if Scripture is to be believed, that is what awaits us because of the Incarnation and death of Jesus. But until then, now—right now—let us live with abandonment and gut-wrenching joy at the wonder of God made flesh.It is in the living out of love, joy, hope and peace that we do as Jesus did when he came he came to fulfill some old, old promises made to Abraham—“to bless us and make us a blessing to the world around us”. Here is the thing. When you are indifferent, bitter, hopeless and filled with anxiety, you may be a lot of things, but one thing you are not: a blessing to people around you. In fact, you are someone who sucks the life out of people.Advent is about Jesus! Our celebration (yes, though filled with many trappings and myths as well) is directed to him. He is the reason we party. He is the reason we feast. He is the reason we lavish gifts, and he is the reason we festoon the house—he came! So, the prayer I have for myself, my family, and our community is that our joy would be unspeakable, full of glory and about Him and our participation in the renovation of a broken world.