Today’s readings are about exile and homecoming, of captivity and freedom. That might seem pretty straightforward, but since this is the Bible, the message comes with a twist.

Jerusalem had been conquered and its leadership deported and exiled to Babylon, a just punishment for Israel’s history of unjust and unfaithful kings, and for her sacreligious and scandalous devotion to other gods. Israel’s kings failed to rely on God, and the temple leadership had promoted worship of idols. For her apostasy and idolatry God would inflict punishment: subjugation by a foreign power, cooptation of the monarchy, desicration and destruction of the temple, and exile to a foreign land. Israel’s devastation would be complete. According to the prophets, all this was justly deserved, and was, moreover, a testimony to God’s sovereignty and authority, a witness to the God who manifests his glory in history with his people, sometimes against them. Yet even when he acts against her, because God had vowed to remain faithful to his promise to be Israel’s God and that Israel always would be God’s special people, God promises here to lead his people home, or at least some of them, in a new Exodus, through the desert that for their benefit and to God’s glory would blossom into an oasis. This would be a miraculous sign of Israel’s new beginning. The blind will see, the deaf hear, the lame leap, and the dumb will speak. Not just the nation, but individuals would be freed from their personal exiles and captivities, signs not just of Israel’s new beginning, but a sign of creation’s renewal as well.

But there’s a kicker: all this was outside reality as experienced. Rather it was a vision of a new world that had not yet come into being. Israel’s actual release from captivity would not be the new creation, but it would be a real sign of it. What mattered to Israel’s prophets was that the world’s blessing and future hinge on what God will do with Israel, if not now then in the future. Israel’s future blelssing is the key that opens up creation’s final future with God. Creation’s hope is tied to Israel’s future, and what the future has in store for Israel and all the nations is life and blesing. But—and this is the other part of the prophet’s message--it is a future blessing that comes with a price: “Here is your God,” Isaiah proclaims. “He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense.” The new creation that is given birth through Israel’s history with her God comes when the world has been judged, Israel first.

How strange, but true, that God’s blessing comes with judgment, and that God’s blessings are usually hidden amidst the injustice, chaos, loss, violence, mayhem, disappointment, and failure we experience. And indeed, in the event, Israel’s homecoming was vastly different than what Isaiah describes. Some Israelites returned to Jerusalem, others who had made a home in Babylon decided to stay. Those who returned found the going rough and the homecoming disappointing. Political intrigue continued, life was hard, and the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the temple was a long, complicated, and arduous task. The miracle of homecoming was so messy as to be unrecognizable as a miracle.

Psalm 146 reflects Isaiah’s theme of opening the eyes of the blind, adding that the oppressed will receive justice, the hungry fed, and the captive set free. It too is a picture, not of this world, but of the new world when the Lord himself will rule in place of mortal rulers in whom, the psalmist says, there is no help, who return to the earth, and whose thoughts perish. Only the Lord can help, only with him is there hope, because unlike earthly rulers, the Lord keeps his promises. Blessing will come, but only through a kind of palace coup when all earthly rulers will have been subjected to the Lord’s rule. Our experience differs from what is promised, for we must continue to haggle and struggle with, and if we are very unlucky to suffer under, the weak and imperfect rulers we have. We must continue to wait patiently for God’s kingdom to come and thus for his eternal, just, and blessed rule.

In our gospel reading Jesus responds to the peadings of a woman for her daughter who was possessed of an unclean spirit, but who as a gentile was considered to be of no more value than a dog. Why should Jesus give her the time of day? Yet it is a gentile who recognizes God’s power in Jesus and is persistent in importuning him; and because of her recognition, persistance and faith, the woman’s daugthter is healed. Jesus then goes on to heal a deaf and dumb man in the region of the Decapolis. The location is important. The Decapolis was a collection of Hellenistic city-states that promoted Roman culture and pagan religious observance. It was a gentile region, and it was there that Jesus performed a miracle whereby the man, presumably a gentile, was healed of his hearing loss and inarticulate speech. The crowd, also presumably gentile, recognized in Jesus the one who can make happen what Israel’s prophets had proclaimed, and for which Israel continued to hope. The point?-- It is Jesus who ushers in God’s new age, for Jews and gentiles alike, when the eyes of all the blind shall be opened, all the deaf made to hear, all the dumb to speak, and all the lame to walk. That it is gentiles who see this and believe it is itself a sign of creation’s imminant ultimate renewal in Christ.

And yet, creation, and a divided and contentious human community still look pretty much the same.

One of my seminary professors asked us seminarians the following question: “What do you suppose happened to all those people Jesus healed, including the ones he raised from the dead? Answer: They all died! New creation comes only after an absolute ending. Healing comes only with disease. Resurrection in Christ is resurrection from the dead. Before we can be renewed, healed, and live, we first must die. Before we can be forgiven, we must be judged. The promise of creation’s renewal and its future blessing does not come before its judgment and end.

What the prohets proclaimed and the psalmists envisioned--the coming of God’s new creation, the kingdom of God--is fulfilled in Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. He is the final living embodiment of God’s promise to Israel fulfilled, a promise that is extended to all nations. It comes, however, through God’s initiative, in his time, as a result of his righteous judgment and even his wrath that strangely accompany his love, and in mysterious ways that only he can comprehend. God’s final blessing for creation comes, as Luther said, through struggle and strife, struggle and strife against demons and decay, against the ravages of illness, and against the forces of death. That is why faith, as the writer of Hebrews tells us, “is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” [Heb. 11:1].

Recently I’ve been in conversation with various people who claim to have lost their faith. They cannot reconcile God’s promise of life and blessng with what they see going on: divisive and sometimes vicious church politics, rank injustice in society despite a near life-time’s efforts on behalf of the poor and the disadvantaged, the devastation of illness despite a faithful life and fervent prayer, the holding on to a faith that seems like spitting into the wind.

But perhaps this is just the point. As Luther said repeatedly, our biggest temptation is that we want to be God. We lose faith because we cannot accept that God does not see things as we do, or act as we would. Our personal lives and our world are a mess and there is no real hope in sight. Is that God’s fault? Yet we hear today that the defeated exiles will return home in triumph, the blind will see, the deaf will hear, the dumb will speak, and the lame will walk. We hear that though our trust in rulers is in vain, God will establish justice and peace for all. We hear today that Christ, who triumphs over the demons, is humanity’s new beginning.

Israel constantly struggled with the questions we have raised, but at the end of the day, had to maintain that the Lord’s purpose for his creation is life and not death and that the Lord cannot be defeated by death and still remain the Lord.

It is the very strange God of Israel, who is Lord of all. His ways are not our ways. His final word and act for his people and for the world is blessing and new life, blessing and new life, however, that come only through struggle, strife, judgment, and death. Thus for blessing and life we still must wait, a waiting that takes place, we must always remember, between crucifixion and resurrection.

-Amen-