Hearts In Conflict
Luke 2:25-35
In studying this scripture lesson, one key question came to
mind: What does it take to be really ready to die? Whatever it takes, our hero,
Simeon, was ready, for he had seen the Christ child. Every instinct within him
told him that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. He
believed the Holy Spirit beckoned him to the temple that day so he came.
And when the parents brought in the child Jesus, he took Him
up in his arms and blessed God and then issued forth with the immortal nunc
dimittis, one of the great hymns of the church—"Lord, now let
thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word; for mine eyes have
seen thy salvation which thou hast prepared in the presence of all peoples—a
light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for the glory of thy people Israel.”
Life needed to give nothing more to Simeon; he had seen the
Christ. It was the fulfillment of all that he could hope for. Judaism has had
its saints and Simeon bore the two characteristics of Jewish piety—he was
righteous (he kept the law) and he was looking for the Messiah. If you were a
Jew in Israel, those were your two important goals—to be righteous and
to expect the Messiah.
Simeon was a member of a small minority group of Pharisees
who were known as "the Quiet in the land." They believed in a life
of constant prayer and quiet watchfulness until God should come. All their lives
they waited quietly and patiently for God. Simeon was like that—in prayer,
in worship, in humble and faithful expectation; he was waiting for the day when
God would comfort His people, God had promised to him through the Holy Spirit
that life would not end for him before he had seen God's own anointed King.
In the baby Jesus, he recognized the King and he was glad.
We can visualize it as a lovely scene in the temple. There
was that distinguished looking old man taking that little babe in his arms and
saying, "This is it, Lord; I've fulfilled my life, now I can depart in peace." A
very touching scene, now he was ready to die.
But now a harsh note. Simeon looks at Mary and says,
"Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel and
for a sign that is spoken against (and a sword will pierce through your own soul
also), that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed." I think the New
English Bible translation is more graphic: "This child is destined to be
a sign which men reject and you too [Mary] shall be pierced to the heart. Many
in Israel will stand or fall because of Him, and thus the secret thoughts of
many will be laid bare!
Here's that beautiful scene with Simeon feeling so gloriously
fulfilled, and he ends that little love-in with a very harsh prediction that
must have struck ominous terror in the heart of Mary.
A few days earlier there had been that lovely manger experience
with its angel voices, its awe-inspiring shepherds, all truth and beauty touching
the most beautiful chords of instinctive sentiment in our hearts. Then Simeon
injects the jarring note, to put our hearts in conflict. This lovely child will
grow up to be a man, and will be looked upon as not so lovely. Simeon is saying
that there may be deeper consequences to the incarnation than any of them could
imagine at that idyllic moment in the temple.
The manger scene gives us such pleasant satisfaction; it is
so significant and precious to us. But history tells us that we must carry our
thoughts forward to the man into whom the child of Bethlehem would grow.
God displayed a kind of divine weakness in bringing Jesus
into the world in the quiet humility of a stable behind an overcrowded inn, and
He took Him out of the world in the overbearing and humiliating weakness of
the cross.
Does this imply that God Himself is weak? Dare we speak of
a God who is weak? Doesn’t this grate against all we have been taught—that
God is all powerful? How could the God who created the fields, the mountains,
the thunderous skies and a blazing sun be a God of weakness? The religious reality
may be that God chooses weakness, not that He Himself is weak, but that He chooses
weakness as His most effective-working hypothesis; for it has been proven time
and again that power and strength may indeed win wars, but they always lose the
peace. God shows us this clearly, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer has put it in his book, Prisoner
for God, (Macmillan, 1958, p.164):
“God allows Himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross.
God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way, the only
way, in which He can be with us and help us.
“[The Bible] makes it crystal clear that it is not by His omnipotence
that Christ helps us, but by His weakness and suffering.
“This is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions.
Man's religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world;
he uses God as a ‘deus ex machina.’ The Bible, however directs him
to the powerlessness and suffering of God; only a suffering God can help.”
The Christian world does not realty come of age until it abandons
a false conception of God and brings alive the God of the Bible, who conquers
power and space in the world by His weakness. John the Baptist said,
"Behold the lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world,"—not
the tiger of God, not the lion or the cobra, but the Lamb of God.
When Simeon said, "Behold this child is destined to be
a sign which men reject," he could well have meant that Jesus would be rejected
as a far-out radical whose weapon of weakness was simply too strong for them
to take—with all their faith placed in the potency of power.
But for us to accept fully the idea that weakness is the saving
grace of the world is too great a risk. It involves a complete change in our
value system. It means a revolution in which things are turned topsy-turvy. Weakness
becomes strength and strength becomes weakness. The men who admired the way of
power would reject the Christ, would hate Him and be easily persuaded that He
would have to die. The men who loved His way of weakness would be utterly devoted
to Him and follow Him to their own death. This would be a sword to pierce a mother's
heart.
The lovely Babe from that manger grew up to be a man, but
a man who was intolerable “...to the eminent citizens, to leading men of
affairs, to the authoritative men of the church and state…. He offended
their prejudices; he challenged their conventions; he set up standards of right
and wrong which blasted their respectability. He outraged them because they
felt that He was always ignoring the best people and championing the common crowd" (Interpreter's
Bible, Commentary on Luke, p.62).
I like to imagine that manger scene extending beyond the Biblical
frame and consider what might have happened later. The Bible doesn't tell us
what happened after the shepherds left the manger that awesome, angel-filled
night. The next verse in Luke 2 says, "And at the end of eight days, when
He was circumcised, He was called Jesus...." So I wonder what happened during
those eight days. Joseph and Mary had been on their way to Jerusalem when the
birth pangs forced them into that stable just a few miles from Jerusalem.
What happened on day two, three, four, and five? Did anyone
at the inn go out there to the stable and see if they might be of help? Did the
chef at the inn send out a bowl of custard? Did the innkeeper come out and say, "Finally
I've got a room for you, bring the baby inside"? Did the emcee in the hotel
dining room announce before the evening show,
"We have some great news for our guests. An unusual event happened here
just a couple of nights ago. A baby was born to one of our guest families. Mother
and Son are doing fine. There was no room for them when they arrived, but now
space has opened up and they're in Room 23."
That's wild speculation, but those eight days had to pass
somehow, and I can't help but think there must have been some interest expressed
by people at the inn or around the town, for that sort of news travels rapidly.
But the point is that it must have been thought of by those hotel guests, aside
from the unusual stable circumstances, and one could also say unstable circumstances—it
must have been thought of as a pleasant, cheerful event, unrelated to any of
the drastic issues of their lives. The birth of a child shuts out the harsh realities
of the world. It is the time of rich sentiment.
Who would have guessed that that lovely baby would grow to
be the man they hated and would have no compunctions about killing? He grew
to be the one who put hearts in conflict. He would later set up principles for
life that every stubborn instinct in them rejected.
As we look forward to days ahead, we shall certainty enjoy
the high sentiment of Christ, but we might also remember that it is also a time
when cross and crèche came together. You can’t have the crèche without
the cross, and the cross inspires the strength of weakness that the crèche introduced
into our lives. It is the sheer humility of that manger scene that gives it consummate
strength.
When I speak of the weakness of God, I mean only the weakness
that refuses to display brute strength to accomplish mankind's purpose. Gods
so-called weakness carries a power all its own. It is love born of the humiliation
of the cross, and that is the love that truly conquers.
Simeon was ready to die because he had seen that power in
the face of the Christ child. And in spite of all the headlines of crime that
we read, in spite of all the sword rattling that seems to be the diplomatic strategy
of a fearful world, in spite of the darkness of the principalities and powers
that always—in the name of greed and fear—try to rule the world,
the world is still brimming full of Christian love born of that child. I am sad
that the warm idealism of the manger story can have no place in the harsh, threatening
rhetoric that is hurled back and forth between the protagonists and the antagonists
of the Persian Gulf situation. I think the manger story, belonging to western
Christianity, makes it possible for such idealistic conversations of peace to
emanate from our side of the conflict, but not possible from the other side,
because their religious history has no such tableaux of peace—they have
no manger story. This is partly why a meeting of the minds is so difficult as
the clouds of war darken.
But, back to Simeon. He was ready to die because he had seen
that power of total peace and love in the face of the Christ child. And once
you know the full force of this weak, yet so strong power, you, too, are ready
to die, because you know that death has no dominion over Christian lovers.
None of us wants to die prematurely; we want to live to the
ripe years of Simeon. But if I should be called to my final home early, I can
thank God for the powerful weakness that put Him on a cross that I might truly
know that love is the only pathway to His kingdom on earth. And you and I taste
of that kingdom in the daily demonstrations of humility, of love, of caring that
are shown to us. So we are ready to join the order of Simeon. The love of Christ
enables us to say, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,
for mine eyes have seen my salvation."
Thy salvation—not the false salvation of power and connivance
born of fear, which is not salvation at all—but God's salvation, the salvation
of love.
It's a difficult theme to preach; it does put our hearts in
conflict. We've got to arm ourselves against all the forces of the world that
are pitted against us. That is the darkness of this world. But Simeon's readiness
shows us the light shining through that darkness. It does not erase the darkness,
for the world's darkness will always be here. But we can love each other through
that darkness, for we, too, have seen the Christ child, both in His cradle of
love and on His cross of weakness.
And do you know where I see that light shining? I see it when I look into
your eyes. That's where it is—when we look into each other's eyes. If it
doesn't shine there, where else will it shine?
Dr. Donald B. Ward (Deceased)