June 18th, 2022

The title for this Sunday is the Second Sunday after Pentecost. And depending on the date of Easter, the readings begin a ‘walk’ through most of the Gospel according to Luke. For those who are more familiar with this setup, the texts for this Sunday are also called ‘Proper 7’ of the ‘C Series’.

The Old Testament text is designed to fit together with the reading from the Gospel, and that Old Testament reading may not only be unfamiliar, but its connection to the Gospel text may not be very clear. Looking a bit closer at the Old Testament text may therefore be helpful to understanding its connection to both the Gospel text and the Gospel itself. You might call this a short ‘bible study’ (or ‘a Sabbath Day’s Journey with a text’). There may also be an appropriate connection, not only to the Christian Church found in Acts, but to the present Church today.

The Gospel text for this Sunday is Luke 8:26-39, Jesus healing a man with demons. The Old Testament text is from Isaiah 65[:1-9], and this is very near the end of the entire book. Some people think that later parts of the book were written later in history, mainly because they are filled with such good news when Isaiah the prophet was in the middle of such bad news. This text also has both good news and bad news in and around it.

The previous chapter to the text, chapter 64, might be a good chapter to read sometime, especially because of the use of the name ‘Father’ when referring to God within that chapter. That title is extremely rare in the Old Testament. And the last couple of lines [the verses are numbered differently in the Hebrew] before the Old Testament reading may also be helpful in getting a proper context. In a somewhat-literal translation, the text reads in this way, and this is basically Israel’s perspective when talking to Yahweh, the LORD:

House of our holiness and our beauty, where our fathers praised you, it is as burned of fire, and all of our desirable things, it is as a ruin. Will you, upon these things, restrain yourself, Yahweh? Will you be silent and afflict us to an extreme?

Those verses end with Isaiah asking Yahweh if he will be silent. And chapter 65 starts with Yahweh’s answer. He ends up not being silent. But how he reveals himself is different from what a person might expect. Here are the first couple of lines of the text (and, again, in a somewhat-literal translation), of his answer:

I revealed myself to not they asked; I was found by those who sought me not; I said, “Here I; here I,” to a nation not he was called by my name.

If you would compare other translations to the above text, you might notice a slight difference. In the text above, negatively stated of course, he WAS CALLED by my name. In other readings, he basically CALLED on his name. Those other readings make the second line similar to the previous one, again negatively stated, those SEEKING the LORD (not those who are BEING SOUGHT by him). To make a long story short, in the Hebrew language, the meaning could be either way. (To be more specific, for those who are familiar with the Hebrew, when the vowels were added, the meaning was declared to be ‘he was called’.)

You may appreciate the fact that, in the end, there is no difference to being called or to call. Whether a person is called by the LORD’s name or calls on his name, from what we know of ourselves and our good works—which could be called ‘forgiven’ works, and THAT’s the reason they could be called ‘good’—we do not deserve any attention from the Lord of the universe. Anything that happens is ultimately a gift—although sometimes it CERTAINLY does not seem that way. As the man possessed by demons needed help, so do we. And he does. And everything is suddenly different because Jesus enters the picture, since his name means ‘savior’ or ‘rescuer’.
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Perhaps that is the reason why the name of Jesus is so important in the early church in Acts. It is even said that people are baptized in the name of Jesus (see Acts 2:38). The preposition is not the same though, as was given at the end of the Gospel according to Matthew, where Jesus tells his followers to baptize INTO the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The preposition, when dealing with the name of Jesus, means basically ‘UPON’, on the basis of, and the position is the important thing with this preposition. And Jesus/salvation/rescue is a great position for the work of something that encompasses the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.