• Isaiah 1: 1,10-20

The majestic Book of Isaiah begins by identifying its location, Judah/Jerusalem, and its time, the reigns of the kings of the seventh century B.C.  In this context, the complaint that the prophet brings against God’s people is comparable to the legendary injustice of Sodom and Gomorrah!  Given the scope of their offenses, keeping the elaborate observances of the liturgical calendar of feasts and fasts means nothing to God: “I am weary of them.” Replace reliance on ritual time-keeping with a simple gesture of washing and cleansing and then initiate immediate actions– “seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”  “If you are willing and obedient…” you will experience bounty again, says the Lord; “if you refuse and rebel,” you will be vanquished by the sword of your enemies.

• Psalm 50: 1-8, 23-24

The psalmist invokes the splendor of God’s self-revelation “from Zion, the zenith of beauty,” and acknowledges all of heaven and earth as witnesses.  God summons God’s people, who respond with an invocation to let the heavens testify to God’s justice.  God responds: your sacrifices are of little interest to Me.  The psalm concludes with a warning/promise: those who forget God will be “torn apart;”  those who “revere” God are on the right path.

OR

• Genesis 15: 1-6

Up to this point in the relationship between God and Abram and Sara, when God promised favor, Abram remained silent.  But this time he asks God what can God give him “when I am going to end [my life] childless” and my only heir is an employee, my steward?  But God reiterates the promise that Abram and Sara will have an heir, “who issues from your loins.”  God then invites Abram to step outside and look up at the night sky with more stars that can be counted: “so shall be your seed.”  Abram “trusted the Lord.”

• Psalm 33: 12-22

From God’s perspective, the psalmist writes, God looks on the chosen and “all human creatures” and “understands all their doings.”  The Lord does not work through brute power, but gives full attention to “those who fear the Lord/on those who yearn for the Lord’s kindness.”  The faithful respond: “We urgently wait for the Lord/Our help and our shield.”

• Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16

(Today and the next three Sundays, we read most of chapters 11,12 and 13 from the Letter to the Hebrews.)

It is standard to note that the author of this “letter” makes very imaginative use of snippets from the Hebrew scriptures within the framework of Platonic epistemological assumptions.  Hence, in this excerpt there is a presumption that behind what we experience are things we cannot see but God spoke into existence.  Therefore, the faithfulness of Abraham and Sarah, for example, illustrates how those who trusted God, whom they could not see, for promises which would not be fulfilled completely until some distant future, even after they were gone.  This writer translates God’s concrete promise of heirs and a native country to this childless, nomadic, elderly couple into a longing for a “heavenly country.”

• Luke 12: 32-40

Luke’s understanding of how the disciples/church (Christ’s “little flock”) should always be ready for the Son of Man “to come at an unexpected hour” is linked directly with certain specific, immediate actions– “Sell your possessions and give alms.”  So that when he comes– “like a thief in the night”– one is not startled or unprepared, because one is currently busy doing the work which God will bring to complete fruition at that time.

Time functions quite differently among the gospel narratives.  In Mark, ordinary time is interrupted by sudden divine revelations; in Matthew, the story of Jesus is the seamless fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets.  In Luke, time functions chronologically/historically, but it can also vibrate with startling immediacy.  In his brilliant essay on Luke’s gospel in The Literary Guide to the Bible, John Drury notes: “Luke’s Jesus is the fulfilling last of the ancient prophetic line, foretelling its end, and the beginning of a new dispensation in history.”  But also for Luke, “Retrieval is not an ultimate possibility, but a current actuality with current consequences” for those in Luke’s narrative as well as any who subsequently read or hear it. (p 418ff)  Drury writes that Luke constantly refers to the past, but then “makes it recur.”  Now the non sequitur with which today’s appointed gospel begins makes sense.  In one sentence, Jesus tells the “little flock” that God “gives you the Kingdom” without any specifics about where or when or how it will occur.  If Luke stopped there, the reader might assume that this a promise of something rather vague that would be fulfilled in some unspecified future.  But in the very next sentence, Jesus gets very specific and the tense is the present tense: sell your belongings and give the proceeds to the poor!  In these two sentences we see Luke’s distinctive understanding of time:  God’s reign will come fully and finally whenever and however God deigns it to come, “like a thief in the night;”  and, God’s reign can start right here, right now as soon as anyone does ‘kingdom justice’.

In an excerpt from Against Ethics, included in The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, John Caputo explicates the uniquely biblical understanding of the “where and when” of God’s reign. Caupto writes:

“the Kingdom [of God] is neither another world beyond this world, nor another time outside time, but rather the time of God’s rule in this world, another way to be in the world.”  “It is the rule of a certain time, God’s own good time, as opposed to the time-keeping that goes on in this world, for in the kingdom time is God’s, not ours.”  Therefore, Caputo concludes, what we ought to be doing in the meantime is very clear: “the whole idea is to speak out in the name of justice, in the name of God, and to call for the coming kingdom, to pray and weep for the coming of justice.” (p. 472)

We are to pray for the coming o0f God’s reign at the very same time we are inaugurating God’s reign here and now.

Luke seems totally in sync with Isaiah who rejected, in God’s name, any obsession with time, even liturgical time, to the detriment of timely justice– “seek justice,” “rescue… defend… advocate….”  And although God’s promise to Abram and Sara would not be fully realized until long after they were gone, its fulfillment began with the birth of one child, their first.  The psalmist (33: 12-22) tells us that God keeps one eye fixed on “all human creatures” and the other fixed on any one, specific individual who yearns for “the Lord’s kindness.”  In comparison to the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, whose perspective seems to be fixed on something ethereal and remote, Isaiah, the psalmist and Luke’s Jesus has one eye fixed on God’s promises,  which no  one knows where, when or how they will be fulfilled,  and the other eye fixed on the injustice we can do something about today!  We yearn/long/work for God’s kindness/justice not just because we have some hope that it will come to full fruition in God’s good time, but because it alters how we use this day, every day, any day of our lives.  So that when God’s fulfillment comes, we are already busy doing God’s work anyway.