Dec 6 – gentiles too?
2009 October 20
Week Two Dec 6 Text: Is 60; Mt 2:1-2 Isaiah promised special blessings for the city of Jerusalem. God shifts this blessing from Jerusalem to a child born in Bethlehem. The birth is not only for the Jews but the Gentiles as well as noted by the arrival of Gentile Arabs. One baby for (Jew and Gentile) all the nations. INVITATION: Consider the oppressed children: Honduras emphasis
not sure that the three wise men/kings etc (in what most scholars hold as a literary trope) are all of them Arabs. I think, traditionally, at least one of them as been thought of as Persian.
how about an emphasis on the oppressed, in, say, Allentown?
what, precisely, is the connection between Is 60 and the Messiah? What, if anything, can we know about that connection with any kind of cultural certainty?
More to the point, what is meant, precisely, by saying “God shifts his blessing from Jerusalem to the child born in Bethlehem?” Standing alone, that sounds like dispensationalism. Isaiah 60 is at the very least about the return from exile and the future blessing of Zion, and we’re not saying (are we?) that God was at one point serious about the Is 60 prophecy but is no longer? Certainly, Is 60 has yet to come true. If we wish, we may allegorize it into a Christianized eschatology of the New Jerusalem or something, but that doesn’t strike me what the text would have meant to its original hearers/readers (of course, in fact, it can’t be).
There’s this strong theme in parts of the Isaiahs that even though the blessing of the Messiah will be for all people, it is centered in and pouring out from Zion. I’m not advocating that view, either, but I am saying that it’s pretty complicated.