The season of Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas, is a time to be honest about everything that’s still broken, all the healing that hasn’t happened yet. When Christmas finally comes, we will praise the God who has come into our midst, but until then, we remain in the language of Advent, in which God’s transforming work in and around us isn’t done yet. While the season of Advent makes room for the sourness of not-yet-healed brokenness, it is also a joyful waiting. God is going to come through for us, for everyone who awaits the fulfillment of promises. God is going to set all things right and we will anticipate it with excitement. It’s no secret that the world around us is broken, as well as every human heart. And so it is a joyful proclamation that God won’t let our sorry situation stay that way forever.
This is the very same joy we meet in the final words of the prophet Zephaniah. “Sing aloud, O daughter Jerusalem. On that day it will be said to Jerusalem: Do not fear, O Zion and do not let your hands grow weak. The LORD is in your midst. He will rejoice over you with gladness and renew you in his love. He will exult over you with loud singing.” (Zephaniah 3:14, 15, 17)
Does it occur to us that God wants to sing to us? That our own songs to him are born out of the song he is already singing to us? God wants to share his joy with us, and the day is coming when we will at last experience his joy fully. His love is going to make us completely new. Enemies will be dealt with, the prophet also goes on to say. Disaster will be no more. Oppression of the powerless by the powerful will be no more. God is doing away with all of it. There will be a total reordering of the world in which oppression cannot exist. God will gather up the lame and the outcast and change their shame into praise and renown (or as Jesus puts it – blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth). None of this is either/or. God is making all of this happen – the end of injustice, the reordering of power in the world, and the joyful, loving renewal of the human heart. All of this will be our new reality when, as Zephaniah puts it, “God is in our midst.”
So do not fear and do not let your hands grow weak, says the prophet. There is much we still fear, isn’t there? We fear not having enough and not being good enough. We fear our hands are in fact too weak, that we’re utterly useless and powerless. We fear the shame of being found out for how weak and useless we think we are. We fear that God is not in our midst after all. But when God comes into our midst, none of this will be cause for fear anymore.
When we meet John the Baptist in Luke 3, he sounds a lot like Zephaniah. A social reordering is happening in which those will the power to bully and extract wealth will no longer do so. Those who have too little will receive what they need. All of this will happen because “one more powerful” is coming, says John. Christ will be in our midst, and it will change everything – from a sweeping end of all injustice to the renewal of the human heart.
The crowds listening to John are “filled with expectation” at this good news (Luke 3:15). And we join them in their excitement as we anticipate God’s will to finally set our world and our hearts right.
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