Luke 1:46b-55
This morning’s passage is Mary’s celebrated prayer of praise given while visiting her cousin Elizabeth. She praises God for what he has done for her personally, for the people of Israel and for the world, through the Son she will soon give birth to.
Mary is joyfully aware that God loves her and is committed to blessing her and her people. Despite the humble condition of her life – a teenage girl from a poor family, pregnant before being married — she is confident that God is with her and for her.
During the Christmas season, we particularly reflect on Jesus as our Emmanuel – God with us. But we can also think of Jesus as God-for-us.
In Jesus we see that God is a gracious God who loves us beyond measure, who is fully committed to us. We see a God who is on our side, who has our back, who is for us, not against us.
In all our imperfections and in all the challenges of our lives, God loves us and wants to bless us. God’s gracious presence is a gift wonderfully beyond all consideration of merit. We’re God’s beloved and we’re precious to him. God is for us more than we are for ourselves.
Jesus’ parables and other biblical stories reveal the many ways in which God is for us. They help us see how very much God loves us. So that we will be confident, as Mary is, that God is fully and completely committed to us.
Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son, perhaps better entitled the parable of the compassionate father, shows us that God is for us scandalously. This is a well-known story about God’s love and readiness to forgive. We miss its power if we don’t realize how unlikely the father’s response was in his cultural context.
By demanding his share of the inheritance while his father still lived, the son was treating him as if he were dead. But then things get even worse. The son sells the land for cash and leaves. This was as bad as son could be. Not only demanding title to the land, but selling it, depriving the father of its produce and income. Shockingly, the father allows the son to do all this. And he later joyfully welcomes him home when his son returns with nothing.
A father in that time and culture would not have acted with such disregard for social custom and his own dignity. It would have been scandalous. Such a father would have would have lost the respect of his peers and brought great shame on himself and his family. The father’s acquiescence to his son’s demands would have cost him far beyond the loss of income.
In this story, Jesus is telling us something profound about who God is and what he is like. Jesus is saying that God bears all things for our sake, including our wrong-doing and rebellion, because he loves us.
God loves each and every person in all our imperfections and shortcomings, even those who reject him, even those who might seem to be lost causes, and is always ready to welcome them home with open arms. That’s the nature of God’s scandalous love for us and for all people.
An interaction between God and Abraham described in Genesis 15 shows us that God is for us vulnerably. This strange event involves what to us is a bizarre ritual with animal sacrifices. But understood in the context of the time, it’s an astonishing illustration of God’s love and commitment to us humans.
In that passage, God is making a covenant with Abraham and his descendants. God tells Abraham to sacrifice several animals, cut them in two, and place their halves opposite each other to create a pathway. At night God passes through the pathway in the form of a blazing fire and takes an oath to fulfill his promises to Abraham.
This astounding event reverses the usual form of swearing allegiance. Normally, when a lesser chieftain made a covenant with a more powerful ruler, the lesser and weaker person was required to walk through the animal pieces and swear an oath of loyalty to his new King. The purpose of the slain animals was to say, “May this happen to me if I break my oath of allegiance!”
Incredibly, here it is God who took the part of the lesser and weaker party to swear on his own life his commitment to Abraham and his descendants, who include us through faith in Jesus.
Here God sets aside his majesty, humbling himself to commit himself unquestionably to his beloved children. That’s how much God loves us, how much God is for us.
Jesus’ parable of the day laborers in the Gospel of Matthew shows us that God is for us extravagantly. You will perhaps remember that the owner of a vineyard goes to the marketplace five times in one day to seek workers — at 6, 9, 12 noon, 3 and 5, taking all those who were there.
This parable would have sounded extremely odd to Jesus’ hearers. The owner would appear ridiculous, going every three hours, including the last hour of the workday. No owner did that, and certainly not in person.
As with most of Jesus’ parables, there’s something unexpected going on here. Jesus is saying that the vineyard owner cares extravagantly about the lives of these job seekers. If a laborer didn’t get hired on a given day, his family would probably go without dinner. The owner understood this and had compassion on them, so again and again he personally sought them out to give them work.
God is like the vineyard owner, Jesus is saying. God knows our desperate human need for him and for the life only he can give, and he keeps reaching out to us humans over and over again in love. God just doesn’t give up on us.
In these and other biblical stories God shows himself to be bountiful in self-giving love. How far does God go? How scandalous, vulnerable, and extravagant is his commitment to us? “God so loved the world that he gave us his Son.”
God humbled himself and gave himself fully, becoming one of us, showing us how to live a truly human life, and dying on a cross as a criminal and outcast for our sakes. In Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection we see beyond question that God is for us, not against us.
That God is for us doesn’t mean that things will always go the way we wish, that we will avoid all suffering. It does mean that God will use our hardships to bring good to our lives, especially the good of making us more like Jesus. Whatever our situation, God is at work to mature us in Christlikeness as we keep trusting in him.
“God, make me more like Jesus,” a pastor friend has noted, “is the prayer God always answers ‘yes.’” Gracious God, help us to trust like Jesus, to be faithful like Jesus, to love like Jesus.
Maturing in Christlikeness also comes from being honest with ourselves and with God about our shortcomings, recognizing and confessing our misdeeds.
Knowing that God is for us doesn’t mean we ignore our sins. Rather, because God loves us, we are free to sorrow for our wrongdoing and work to change our lives without fear of God’s rejection. We know that even in our sinfulness, God is for us, not against us.
The theme of this 3rd Sunday of Advent is joy. And,indeed, God is for us joyfully. Intimate fellowship with God is the greatest human joy. And wonderfully, fellowship with us is also God’s great joy.
One of my favorite Old Testament texts is the enchanting verse in Zephaniah 3:17 which reads that God “will take delight in you with gladness.”
The literal wording of that verse reads God will dance with shouts of joy for you. Can we visualize that? God joyfully dancing in delight for us! Our relationship with God is a joy to us and to God. And it’s a foretaste of the wonder-filled communion we’ll have with God in the world to come.
To close this message, we’re going to play a recording of the song “And the Father Will Dance,” based on this Scripture. It’s sung in English, and we’ll project the words in Spanish.
[The song “And the Father will Dance” by Carey Landry can be found on Youtube.]
Brothers and sisters, God is for us! And “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”