Dec 18: Jesus the Long Expected King

Gherardo and Monte di Giovanni: King David
with Queen Beatrix, King Matthias of Hungary and King Charles VIII of France in the background

Saturday of the Third Week in Advent

Reading I: Jer 23:5-8

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety (NRSV, Jer 23:5-6a).

Lord, every human who has ever lived meets you at each moment of life from the very first in the womb. You speak your one Word to us, you bestow your life on us and you call us to grow in that life. Not once but over and over. There is no person to whom this has not happened. It is the defining experience of human existence. Even the sinner in turning away from you is constantly called back.

Hearing the one Word, even in the power of the Spirit saying “yes” to the Word, does not bring full understanding. We hear, we accept, we are called forth again but understanding comes gradually.

When we first recognized you as our God summoning us forth, we were a people enslaved in Egypt. We thought that you were merely calling us out of physical slavery and we thought that our future was the land.

How we dreamt of the land. All through the desert, as you led us, we dreamt of nothing except life for us as a people in the land.

But once in the land, there was only strife and injustice. We begged you to name a king to rule over us, but still there was more conflict and then division followed by conquest and deportation into foreign places.

In exile we went on dreaming of a return to the land and especially of a king to reign in righteousness and justice, a branch of the house of David to rule over us.

In the resurrection of Jesus, whom you sent among us, your only begotten Son, the Word incarnate whom we banished from this earth by cruelly putting him to death, we came to understand that our king has finally come. But he is not a king as we expected. He comes, not to rule over us, but to serve us all, even to death. And his kingdom is not here although it has its beginning here. It is finally not the land. It never was the land. It is the kingdom of God, your final rule over all creation, and it belongs to the world to come. You have invited us all, Lord, to live in it forever.

Jesus is truly the new David, forever our king, and not just of those among us whom you, Lord, called out of Egypt but king of all people.

In Jesus we have finally understood that it is not the land but eternal life with you, Lord our God, a destiny to which all are called, a destiny that has its beginning even here on earth in the life which you share.

With each moment, as we continue to say “yes” to you, Father, in the moment, help us to grow more and more in your life and in our understanding of it.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.