Epiphany 3 A

Epiphany 3-A

1/22/17 CTK

Mt. 4:12-23

 

Zebulun and Naphtali are kind of funny names, but they play an important part in the story of salvation, they come up in today’s lectionary readings, so I just want to give a little background, biblical history. Please bear with me and any historians in the crowd please forgive any mistakes.

 

Around 1250 BCE Moses led the people of Israel through the wilderness to the Promised Land. Book of Exodus. Then Joshua led them into the Promised Land, known also as Canaan. Book of Joshua.  These people there were made up of twelve tribes, each named after one of Jacob’s children – remember God changed his name to Israel so his descendants were the “people of Israel” or his son Joseph – each of these tribes settled in a specific designated area and that area took on the name of that tribe. So, the tribe of Judah, one of Jacob’s sons, settled in the south part of Canaan, basically, came to be known as Judah.

 

So Zebulun and Naphtali were also the names of two of Israel’s sons, their tribes settled into an area in the north; a naturally beautiful part of the country – rural mostly, some gorgeous terrain, hills, a big lake, land suitable for farming. They settled there, but unfortunately as time passed over the centuries, the Assyrian Empire started to grow and to gobble everything around it, including these lands of Zebulun and Naphtali, which were by then parts of Israel. This would have been around 500 yrs. after Moses and Joshua and the original settlement.

 

The Assyrian strategy was when they conquered a people was vicious. To keep them weak, they broke up their social fabric, they destroyed the infrastructure. It was a strategy that Spain also used, for example, when they were finally driven out of Mexico. It’s probably still not that uncommon today. We think about what happened in Europe in WWII and in Eastern Europe today on the edges of the old Soviet Empire. Trying to destroy a people. Moving people around to weaken ethnic ties.

 

Around this time, roughly, the prophet Isaiah was active and for Isaiah, the names Zebulun and Naphtali had become synonymous with horror. They had never really recovered. In the same way that for people of a certain generation the names Rwanda or Haiti bring up images of horror and sadness.  For Isaiah, these were a people who walked in a land of deep darkness. They were a people whom the Lord had brought into contempt he says.

But when Isaiah wants to prophecy blessings from God, bring a message of hope for the children of Israel, a salvation you might even say, he uses the examples of Zebulun and Naphtali, the most wretched of all people, and promises restoration. He tells of a great light dawning on that darkness. Today we hear God say through the prophet that someday, “There will be no gloom for the people who have lived in anguish. They have seen a great light. On them, light has shined.”  And notice how the verb tenses are mixed up in their verb tense. There will be no gloom, light has shined, the people rejoice. It’s the future, it’s the past, and it’s happening in the present. I think that’s deliberate, a least in translation, the prophecy is that God’s mercy and grace has come into the world, and it will come, is coming now. Into people’s most desperate situations. That light shone, shines, and will shine. Not completely yet, but sometimes we get real glimpses of that light, already.

 

I read an obituary this week for a man named Adolfo Kaminsky who died at 97 yrs. old, was living in Paris with his daughter. He was Jewish, as teenager in France he joined the anti-Nazi resistance. Talk about a place that sat in darkness – Europe during WWII.  As a young kid Kaminsky had worked for a dry cleaner and learned to remove blue stains so he in the resistance he used that skill to remove from official documents Jewish-sounding names like Miriam or Moses, written in supposedly indelible ink and fill in gentile sounding names so that people could have identification papers they could use to get out escape the Nazis who would have sent them to concentration camps, gas chambers, ovens. Darkness.

 

He risked his life every day to save others, mostly children. One time he forged 900 birth baptismal certificates and ration cards for Jewish children and had to do it in 3days. He went two days without sleep because he says he told himself, “In one hour I can make 30 documents. If I sleep for one hour, 30 people will die.” They figure he and his group saved 10,000 people from the gas chambers.

 

Jesus said in John’s Gospel “I am the light of the world.” The gospel writers read Isaiah and said, “that’s Jesus.” But Jesus also said to the people who come to him,

“you are the light of the world.”

 

He died last week, 97 years old. A light, shining in the deep darkness.

 

In Jesus’s day, guess what the region of Zebulun and Naphtali was called Galilee.

That’s where Jesus was from. And in those days people from Galilee were still considered to be ignorant, mongrel hicks by the good Jews from the south.  Nazareth, in Galilee, was Jesus’ hometown. It was a rough neighborhood.  And so was Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee. He went there to call his first disciples Matthew tells us and begins his ministry of teaching and healing and feeding and freeing people, in the land of Zebulun and Naphtali.

 

Those were Jesus’ people. The ones he called the light of the world.

 

So apparently for Isaiah, for Jesus, and for us, that’s where it all starts. With the most abject, the most despised, in the darkest places in our lives the world and in. That’s where hope begins. That’s where the light has shined in the darkness, it will shine, and it is already shining, even now.