by Zach Kincaid
Christ in you, the hope of glory.
It sounds simple enough, but the mingling of heaven and earth doesn’t just happen, at least not for our distracted eyes and ears. Sometimes when we think about faith, we lean into accenting the spiritual over the grittiness. But faith carries weight, gravity, and history. Christ in you, the hope of glory, begins at the beginning, where nothingness blooms into a garden, into seas, into beasts and birds, rocks and trees. God speaks it into being and it is. And for humans, God breathes in his very own breath. That starts it – Christ in you, the hope of glory – but that’s only the magical start of a bumpy rollercoaster ride ahead.
Much more happens.
A rebellious tower is built, a boat to counter it, and a flood to wash all of it away and baptize the world with promise again. Jacob’s ladder gives us a glimpse of a Promised Land move-in strategy (though it is many years away), as angels drop down and move in all directions. Dreams carry us to Egypt for 400 years until lamb’s blood ushers God’s people out and into the wilderness, where God will guide Moses to Sinai. The place of the burning bush becomes the place of a glowing man descending to bring God’s law to the people. A cloud, fire, quail, manna, watery rocks – they paint those days into legends as they renew the world with the charms of heaven, the hope that maybe this covenantal God will not break his promise.
Christ in you, the hope of glory comes into closer view.
Joshua parts the same water that Jesus will baptize, and he attempts to kill all the might-be giants but stops short. Yes, the Promised Land becomes an established land for Israel, but all is not well. God’s people begin to hide behind the hedges of doubt and guilt, just like the first couple. They adopt the cultural practices despite judges roaming the neighborhood dressed in long hair and carrying tent spikes, ready to strike heads or rip people into 12 parts. Prophets give it a go with dire warnings mingled with precious promises that peace will come. They get fire to hurl from heaven, carry cattle yokes, strip themselves naked, and even spend several nights in a big fish. None of it seems to stick with the people – this God is real and wants a relationship. Kings join the circus as main conductors. They fill the land with massive egos that invite witches to the table, steal wives away from husbands, and showcase what one of them writes: everything is meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing is gained under the sun.
Well, how about not chasing the wind?
Christ in you, the hope of glory seems far, far removed.
The oft-forgotten (by Christians) Maccabean revolt some 150 years before Jesus’ birth is a long shot in establishing a renewed hope. Greeks rule Judea and Egypt under the tyranny of Antiochus IV. His entry into Jerusalem is accompanied by a massacre of nearly 80,000 Jews and the desecration of everything sacred including emptying the Temple and sacrificing pigs in the name of Zeus on its altar. Under the leadership of the Maccabee family, Jerusalem is militarily regained and put under autonomous Jewish control. The menorah is relit with oil for only a day, yet it lasted for eight. It stands as one of several miraculous victories when Jews had no chance of winning, up there with the stories of Joshua, Gideon, and more recently David Ben-Gurion (1948 formation of Israel) and Levi Eshkol (1967 six-day war).
Christ in you, the hope of glory and the light who penetrates the darkness is nearly here.
“In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus,” Luke writes in the opening chapters of his Gospel. Here’s the timeline: the Maccabees revolt happens in 164 BC, the Romans under Pompey invade Judea in 63 BC, and by 47 BC, Herod the Great is the client king of Rome. But what of Augustus? Shakespeare makes Julius Caesar the most infamous tyrant of the Roman world. There is much to Caesar’s story, good and bad, but to our point, he eventually proclaims himself emperor for life and Brutus kills him on the Senate floor. Despite the desperate attempt to maintain a republic, Rome is altered and emperors replace the semblance of democracy until the empire’s eventual demise many years later. The first emperor to successfully claim such a title is Augustus and for a time the allusion of peace for 200 years, what historians label as the Pax Romana sets in… and…
Christ in you, the hope of glory, puts on flesh and dwells among us.