Isaiah 45:1-7
As many of you know, there is a reason christening shares a root with Christ, and it is not because the baby is accepted into the Body of Christ, though that is true. Christ means the anointed one in Koine Greek. The baby is anointed with water, though holy oils may also be applied, while the anointing of Jesus and other important leaders in Ancient Near Eastern traditions was always with oil.
Think about the anointing by Samuel of the youngest son, David, called in from watching the flocks, or the 23rd Psalm, traditionally attributed to David, which includes the line “you anoint my head with oil.”
If you watched the coronation of the United Kingdom’s new old monarch, King Charles the Third, you may remember that he was anointed with oil that had been consecrated in Jerusalem, though the anointing itself was done behind a screen, out of public view.
Jesus Christ, then, is properly Jesus, or more accurately Yeshua, the Anointed One. And for the record, his middle initial is not H.
If the Israelite renewal movement surrounding Jesus understood him as the anointed one, the messiah, or deliverer, in the tradition of their faith, he was certainly not the first. Indeed, today’s second scripture reading begins “Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus.”
Translation into modern languages obscures and reflects theological bias, but if you look at the Hebrew, the word is “mashiah,” and in the Septuagint, the ancient Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures used by the Christian testament authors, you cannot help but notice that it reads “his Christ,” “tou Christos” when it describes Cyrus.
Cyrus is the messiah or Christ in a very particular historic context, so let’s do a quick run down.
The warlord Saul had formed a nation-state out of a loose tribal confederation in Canaan. David’s coup d’etat put him on the throne, and he was succeeded by one of his sons, Solomon. This was one single century in which the borders of the kingdom roughly paralleled today’s nation-state of Israel.
But the Davidic kingdom fell apart after that, with the northern half, called Israel or Samaria, often in conflict with the southern half, called Judah.
Canaan was dangerously located between the great river valleys, the Nile to the southwest and the Tigris-Euphrates to the northeast. The cultures of these river valleys had the resources to support militarism and expansion.
The northern kingdom was the first to fall, to the Neo-Assyrians, based on the upper Tigris. Their approach to conquest involved ethnic cleansing. The records of the Neo-Assyrian ruler, Sargon II, indicate that over 27,000 Israelites were forcefully relocated to Mesopotamia, a huge number in those days, while many fled to the southern kingdom, and the conqueror brought in settlers from other ethnic groups. This gives us the tradition of the Ten Lost tribes.
The small group of Israelites who remained in the north came to be called Samaritans, the despised “other” by the time Jesus tells the story of the man who was mugged and left in a ditch. The Samaritan form of the ancient Israelite religion still exists, though there are fewer than a thousand Samaritans left.
Neo-Assyria had its own problems. The province at the mouth of the Tigris-Euphrates river valleys, Babylon, took advantage of other rising threats to throw off the Neo-Assyrian yoke. Neo-Assyria failed as Babylon continued to rise, eventually rivaling Egypt. When Judah dithered about which power it would obey, Babylon swept in, destroying Jerusalem and the Temple, and dragging the elite and artisans back to their capital. Though sometimes called the Babylonian Exile, Babylonian Captivity is a more appropriate description.
Which brings us to Cyrus. He ruled an empire east of Babylon, in what was once Persia and is today Iran. Just as Babylon had conquered Neo-Assyria, the Persians conquered Babylon.
Cyrus had a very different approach to conquered lands. He allowed the captives held in Babylon, both Israelites and others, to return to their homelands and rebuild. This is the setting for the Book of Ezra, a theological and historic setting worthy of a few sermons and lectures as well, but we’ll leave that for another day.
Now that you know the historic context, you can see why the unknown author of today’s reading, writing from Babylon in the tradition of Isaiah, would see Cyrus as God’s anointed who would deliver the Israelite people.
That Cyrus was not Hebrew is weird, but nothing outside of that breaks with the key concepts of the Hebrew messiah. The messiah was to be a great warrior king. About that…
Jesus is not a great warrior king. The two incompatible birth narratives with their supposed genealogies aside, he is not born into an important family. His father is not a priest, certainly not a king. In fact, what passes as a king when Jesus is born, Herod the Great, is not even ethnically Jewish.
And while Jesus may have actually been born in Bethlehem, he is associated with Nazareth, part of the region of Galilee. This was in the old northern kingdom, the first part of the Davidic Empire to fall to outside forces. It was cosmopolitan, a mix of cultures going all the way back to Solomon granting twenty cities to a foreign ally, five centuries before the exile and a millennium before Jesus. While the region was re-assimilated into the Israelite polity a century before the birth of Jesus, it was no Jerusalem. When you think about the cultural context of the ministry of Jesus, you should probably think of a place like Queens, less melting pot and more stew.
Everything about Jesus is the opposite of the expected messiah. He offended Israelites, who were looking for God to send a warrior-king to free them from Roman rule and establish a new Israelite kingdom. Instead, he was executed by the Roman occupier at the request of competing Jewish factions, murdered by the state at the request of the religious.
This makes for a pretty straight-forward theology for those of us who claim to follow the Way of Jesus. God’s power does not follow human forms of power. God’s victory comes not through might, but through the amazing power of love, through service and healing.
Any theology that directly correlates economic or military power with divine blessing has nothing to do with Jesus. It is a heresy.
If Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem on a warhorse leading an Army, we would have an entirely different religion.
Yet, all too often, we lift up as modern idols those who bully their way to the top in business or politics or sports, and even those who simply inherited power through no particular talent of effort of their own.
What is worse, billionaires and bullies are often seen as specially blessed, and sometimes as divine agents. We see this in the cult that surrounds a man the justice system has determined is a sex offender and a con man, surrounding the son of an emerald mine owner who makes claims to genius.
Holy mystery is real, but it does not run through Goldman Sachs, a mega-church in Houston, the Vatican or Yankee Stadium. Definitely not Yankee Stadium. Humans are just humans, wonderfully and terribly made. We do great things and not so great things.
We can be thankful that the news media occasionally celebrates average hard-working folks, the postal carrier retiring after decades on the same route, the crossing guard that saves a child’s life, but these feel-good stories get drowned out as thousands rally for cheating World Series champions, as billionaires bully Congress in a country where money is speech and corporations are people, and where far too many believe that the rich deserve to be rich and that the poor deserve to be poor.
Cyrus was a powerful warrior-king, and even a very competent ruler, considered by some greater than Alexander. The kingdom he led would eventually stretch from the Balkans to the Indus, though it would begin to decline after the forces of Darius the Great lost to the Greeks in the Battle of Marathon.
And here we sit, celebrating not the Persian Messiah, but instead celebrating the Nazarene, because Jesus turns every structure of power and privilege upside down. Because humans tell the story of racial purity but God’s story includes Rahab and Ruth. Because humans want a Cyrus and God send Yeshua on a donkey. Because humans want golden temples and golden toilets, and God gives us changed lives instead, a kid with burn scars who no longer has seizures, a man who once was blind, but is no more.
Amen.