Reflections from The Hill – Luke 3.1-6 – Inns & Outsiders

An old theatre, full of badly upholstered seats, dust and the smell of generations of sweaty North Queenslanders is not the sort of place you’d expect to get a fright.

It was only when the house lights were replaced by the dim glow of the EXIT signs and the last of the conversations had ebbed away that I began to be filled with anticipation. Like everyone else, my focus was towards the stage.

Then a single spotlight shone over our heads like a bolt of lightening and a voice from outside, from the darkness at the rear, pierced the fetid air: ‘Pre-e-e-pare ye the way of the Lord’ it sang. Loud. Clear.

We were forced to sit upright. Our eyes and ears were straining backwards. Our heart speed tripled. These physical things were still to catch up with our emotions. Raw. Shock. Fear. We knew we were in for the ride of our life.

In this place, at least, there were none that we could recognise as being special: community leaders, knights of the realm (when we still had a few), medicos, the odd sky-pilot, you know. We’d all paid our money and we were all together. Leaderless.

As it was in the theatre, so it is in today’s Gospel. The word came from outside, bypassed all the powerful ones – the Herods, the Caesars, the Pilates, the Lysanias’, the sites of power and influence – and came right here, bypassing the antiseptic surrounds of a home to arrive in a shed.

It’s the way it is in Luke. Ch 1 of the Gospel is set ‘in the days of King Herod …’ and tells us about the birth of John the Baptist. In Ch 2 the setting is ‘… in the days of the Emperor Augustus …’ and that other guy, Quirinius, and tells us about Jesus’ birth. Now, in Chapter 3, Luke sets the story in more history ‘…in the fifteenth year …’ and gives us John’s message.

Three times Luke has bypassed the toffs and nobs of the world. Three times Luke has chosen to place these events – at one level, about as small and insignificant as one can imagine – right alongside the movers and shakers of the day.

Three times Luke has illustrated that God’s mercy comes from outside the usual places disguised as human weakness; it bypasses everyone we’d normally expect to be there and, along the way, it introduces us to a couple of young blokes who will grow up to change the world.

For Luke, small is beautiful, especially when it can grow bigger. There’s something later on in Luke about mustard seeds, so I’m beginning to think that it’s a bit of a theme in his writing.

Whatever else you can say, though, it’s a change of focus. This God-word came to a no-body called John, in a no-where place called the wilderness and, yet, this small and insignificant thing is more important than all the important people and events of the day.

It is still the same. Not just to the nobodies gathered in a dilapidated theatre in tropical NQ during the flower-power revolution but to the nobodies in our congregations and in the no-where places of our unremarkable suburbs and communities.

There’s more. If something is coming to, chances are it’s also coming against, against the political, religious and economic principalities and powers of the Emperors, Rulers, Governors and High Priests of our day.

Against these powers of empire stands an odd little guy called John and his somewhat more respectable cousin Jesus.

Against these powers of empire stands a word that promises to fill valleys, level mountains, straighten crooked paths and smooth out the rough bits.

Despite that, as Fr Thomas Merton* reminds us in Raids of the Unspeakable, there is still no room for the Good News: we are being drowned out by the noise of our obsessions with technology, with what the Government is doing with our taxes while, all the time, being drugged by entertainment.

Some things don’t change: those who are outside the Inns of power still can’t find any room inside. It’s no mistake that Luke is making the point that the Good News is for the drowned-out, the crowded-out, the missed-out, the worn-out and the left-out.

We can get tired of waiting for the changes to come but even those things that are difficult now will become, like many of the other things, a distant memory, footnotes on a larger story of grace and mercy and life.

*Thomas Merton, Trappist monk who died in 1968