• Isaiah 42: 1-9

The Lord announces how the Lord’s restoration of the “covenant people” and, through them, all nations, will be accomplished.  The Lord will use “my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights….”  The Lord will put the Lord’s “spirit” upon this person, who will “bring forth justice to the nations.”  This selected person will not “cry out” nor even bruise nor break a “reed,” but will “bring forth justice…;  the coast lands wait for his teaching.”  The Lord’s true identity is revealed as creator of “heavens” and earth, “who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it.”  The Lord’s true identity is further exposed as the initiator of a “covenant to the people,” which, in turn makes God’s people “a light to the nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out prisoners from the dungeons….”  The Lord possesses this peculiar, unique “glory.”  Given the Lord’s unique attributes, only the Lord can declare: “See, former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare, before they spring forth, I tell you of them.”

• Psalm 29

Some scholars see in this psalm a literal translation of a Canaanite psalm to Baal, a “thunder-god,”  while others see it as a Hebrew re-cycling of  Canaanite imagery.  The Lord’s voice “thunders” over the sea, breaks the cedars of Lebanon or causes them to dance like a calf.  It is like flames of fire; or, it “shakes the wilderness.”  The Lord’s “voice”  induces the “birth pangs” of wild animals and “lays bare the forests.”  It was even in the Great Flood.  May this God “give strength” and bless God’s people.

• Acts of the Apostles 10: 34-43

In Lukes’s narrative, “The Acts of the Apostles,” the conversion of the Roman centurion, Cornelius, (chapter 10), marks the pivotal transition to take the gospel beyond the Jewish people.  Given its significance, it is a story of angels, messengers in “dazzling white” and an appearance of the Holy Spirit.  In this excerpt, Peter is given the privilege of presenting a summary of the early church’s witness.  First it must be made clear:  God “shows no partiality,” but welcomes/uses any who do “what is right.”  The “message” the first followers have was conveyed by and then about Jesus Christ– “he is Lord of all.”  It began “after the baptism that John had announced” when Jesus was declared the “anointed one.”  Consistent with all God’s past anointed ones, Jesus did “good,” healed “all who were oppressed by the devil,” for “God was with him.”  Peter now adds a personal verification: “We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem.”  Peter and the others personally vouch for his crucifixion and his being raised by God “on the third day.”  They even ate and drank with him as “chosen witnesses.”  God then commanded them to “preach… and to testify that he is the one ordained by God….”  “The prophets” were witnesses in their own times, too.  Now “everyone” who believes can know the liberation of forgiveness.

• Matthew 3: 13-17

Matthew’s telling of the baptism of Jesus uniquely depicts John the Baptizer’s attempt to “prevent” the act because, he says, “I have need to be baptized by you….”  Only after Jesus assures John that it is somehow a “fulfillment” does John consent. Immediately as Jesus comes up out of the water, “the heavens opened” and the “spirit of God” descended, and settled on Jesus, just as a dove would.  A “voice form heaven” unmistakably declared: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

The Hebrew scriptures bear witness to two distinct and unique purposes for God’s “voice”– to create and subsequently to re-create.  God speaks and creation emerges; God speaks directly or through prophets and order is restored.  Anyone chosen/anointed by God to speak on God’s behalf can be accepted as authentic if he or she meets one, and only one, criterion– their words and their actions “bring forth justice.”

The Second Testament, the Christian testimony, witnesses that Jesus is one of those “anointed” ones.  Not only does his public ministry begin with all the appropriate signs of a Holy One– the “voice” from heaven and the obvious gift of God’s Spirit, this time fluttering and alighting as a dove would— but the result of his words and public deeds as justice/healing.  But then the tradition gets radicalized: “anyone” can become a collaborator of and with God’s justice!  (This radical announcement split the early church, and still disrupts!)

That other occasion in Matthew’s narrative (12:18b) when God said about Jesus “I will put my Spirit upon him, and he shall proclaim justice”  prompts Catherine Keller to link in Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming the audibility of God’s voice with God’s Spirit anointing of a “Holy One” with the consequence of the announcement and the doing of “justice.”  She observes that in biblical texts, the impact of God’s Spirit is always the same: “The spirit will not transcend or obliterate differences; rather differences are intensified precisely by being brought into relationship.” (p. 232)  When God first speaks and bestows God’s Spirit, creation begins, but later on, when God speaks to give Law, initiate covenant and to demand justice, community with all the inherent mutual obligations of one to another comes into being; in short, justice is born.  “Justice is love under conditions of conflict,” Keller insists. (p. 233)

The baptism of Jesus as depicted in the gospels with the intrusion of God’s “voice” and the appearance of God’s spirit evokes the deep, long, passionate love affair between God and God’s people; in the same event, it inaugurates a new iteration of the ancient  promises in Jesus.  Once more, God speaks in and through an anointed one who advances “justice”  and, even more than the past, radicalizes “forgiveness.”  “See, former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare, before they spring forth, I now tell you of them.”