Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11

More promises from Isaiah this week. Promises of renewal. We skipped over Chapter 53 that has a "suffering servant" dying, but it's still clear that this and sections of Isaiah around it are an influence on the Jesus story. We see words like "bridegroom" and recognize them as words used to refer to Christ. But was this Isaiah author referring to the only begotten Son of God? If he was, he didn't make that very clear.

But we usually don't get clear messages from the Bible. What we really get are the messages of the people who were reading Isaiah and accepted it to mean something to them. Sometime around the 1st to 3rd century, the Biblical authorities were saying this was a prophecy of a Messiah and that prophecy had come to pass. In "Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel After the Exile" (1986), John Barton argues the way scripture was interpreted changed after the Babylonian exile and into the Hellenistic period. Scripture became isolated, fragmented, no sense of coherence. Different sects of Jews could make their own future predictions and moral examples from whatever fragment they choose. This led to and continued on through Christianity. Barton believes, and I tend to agree, that we can never get back to the original intention of these pre-exile writings.

1 Thessalonians 5:16-24

This passage takes us back to a time when hallucinations are not a problem, "Do not despise the words of the prophets". Unless someone is crippled by them, to the point they can't take care of themselves, these would be reported as genuine miracles. People who are hallucinating may not be accepted into all the social circles, but they could easily find places where they would be accepted.

Martin Prechtel, a Mayan shaman who lives in the 21st century speaks of a similar tradition of his people, where mental illness is not something to be cured, but to be revered. They may not be able to understand the visions, but they don't dismiss them as wrong. They listen to them and try to include them in the community. You may not agree with that, but it's better than putting them in snake pits or giving them electro-shock therapy like we were doing not too long ago.

We also know however, that what we want to be true can be self induced. We know there are charlatans today who pretend to have visions. This is a danger when groups are forming, like this one in the wilderness with John the Baptist. Acceptance into the group requires shared belief and perception. It would have been hard to tell who was authentically reporting their inner most thoughts and who was faking it. From our perspective 2,000 years later, it's impossible. In a time when people needed a community to survive, but couldn't fit into the culture that had jobs and social boundaries, it would be tempting to leverage any advantage you had. If you were good at it, you could at least gain comfort, or maybe even esteem.

John 1:6-8, 19-28

As just about anyone who has picked up a Bible knows, there are two creation stories in the first two chapters. There are actually more. Proverbs 8 has the birth of Wisdom. We just had Isaiah 50 with the numbering of the structures of the cosmos. The 4th gospel starts again with "In the beginning". This beginning has the "Word". Did they leave that out before? Was it not important? Did we miss some allegory or symbolism? I'm not going to try to answer these questions because so many others have already tried. Some can find Jesus or at least hints of his coming in every Old Testament story.

We have here a testimony by someone. Few still stand by the idea that this is John of Zebedee. John the Baptist dies rather early in the story, so I'm sure it's not that John. Sometimes I look up what apologists say about such things, but I don't see much point this time. We get that the authority of John the Baptist comes from the prophecy of Isaiah and we get that he is breaking conventions. He is performing a ritual that should be only done by messiahs and the like, but he's not one of those. He just knows something about the messiah coming.

Trusting someone who makes claims like this, someone who just showed up out in the wilderness, is not a wise move. The Pharisees are not the heroes of this story, but they take the role of guardians of the status quo here and ask for credentials. The symbol here to me is of hope, tempered a bit by the conventional. I don't know about you, but I would love to find wisdom just wondering around in the wilderness. It's harder to imagine now, since we value wisdom more and we have better ways of preserving it and passing it on through institutions, but for much of human history, if your wisdom did not match that of the king or others with power, the wilderness would be where you could speak freely. We also have better ways of checking if people are legitimate and we expect people to have some evidence that their wise ideas can actually pan out and produce results.

So I'm a bit torn with this story. It is hopeful of a new age when an oppressed people can speak truth to power, but it is a story trapped in its time. I would rather live in a time when oppressed people have better ways of expressing themselves, when they have access to media and can use the same tools the political leaders are using to determine what is true. Well, the tools the political leaders SHOULD be using. Those are the tools of the scientific method, data, and evidence, checking each other's work without regard to consequences, but strictly looking for what is factual and verifiable. Very few people even conceived of those tools back then, we learn them in elementary school now. We should be applying them liberally. For me, they are our best hope.