Monday • 5/3/2021
Week of 5 Easter
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 56; Psalm 57; Psalm 58; Daniel 9:20–27; Colossians 3:18–4:18; Luke 7:36–50
Comments on Luke 7:36–50 from DDD 10/8/2020: https://tinyurl.com/3ur9bzx9
This morning’s Canticles are: before the Psalm reading, Pascha Nostrum(“Christ Our Passover,” BCP, p. 83); following the OT reading, Canticle 9 (“The First Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 12:2–6, BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)
Daniel 9:20–27, the angel Gabriel’s message to Daniel, is one of the places that interpreters diverge wildly. The majority of interpreters read the “seventy-weeks” prophecy as a prediction of desolation, even if they disagree over whether the desolation comes from Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 167 B.C., the Roman general Titus in A.D. 70, or the Antichrist at the end of time. A minority of interpreters read the seventy-weeks prophecy as a prediction of the coming of the Messiah, even if his coming is accompanied by a heightening of evil. (I find myself siding with the Messianic minority.)
Seventy weeks. The seventy years of exile, Gabriel explains, are going to open out onto “seventy weeks,” a symbolic 490 years (7 x 7 x 10), at the end of which Messiah (“the Anointed One” of Daniel 9:25) will come, and “make an end of sin, make atonement for iniquity, and bring in everlasting righteousness” (Daniel 9:24). Gabriel’s message: Messiah will bring God’s great Jubilee, the perfect crown of seven cycles of seven years (see Leviticus 25). Similarly, the prophet Isaiah had looked beyond the Babylonian Captivity, when God would institute his Jubilee: “the year of the Lord’s favor, the day of vengeance of our God” (Isaiah 61:2). In Luke 4, Jesus says that he has come to usher in this very thing, God’s Jubilee: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21).
God is always in the process of moving history toward the complete restoration of his creation. He has embedded a sabbath principle in the life of his people, an expansion of weeks, months, and years. It’s a pattern of working and resting, of people piling up debt and then seeing it forgiven, of people slipping into bondage and then tasting liberation, of people losing inheritances and then having them restored. All in anticipation of an age of final rest, of release from every indebtedness and from every bondage, and of a return to a sense of place in “a better country” (Hebrews 11:16).
The “who” of the Jubilee: Messiah. The bringer of God’s Jubilee is the “Anointed Prince” (Daniel 9:25) whose coming will follow the rebuilding of God’s temple, and who will also “confirm a covenant with many” (Daniel 9:27, my translation; I believe that the “he” at the beginning of verse 27 refers back to God’s Anointed One, though I understand why that may not be obvious to every reader). The verb that the NRSV uses in the phrase “make a strong covenant” and that I render “confirm a covenant” is hig̱bir, and it comes from the same root as Gabriel’s name, “God is Strength.” I think Gabriel is referring not to an Antichrist’s false and broken covenant, but to the resurrected Messiah’s ratification in the church’s life (verse 27) of the covenant he has forged with them by his death (verse 26—see the next point).
The “how” of the Jubilee: “Cut off.” Isaiah had said that the Suffering Servant would be “cut off from the land of the living” for the transgression of God’s people (Isaiah 53:8). Gabriel’s thrilling message to Daniel is that this is how Messiah “finishes the transgression, puts an end to sin, and atones for iniquity” (Daniel 9:24). That is also why Gabriel circles back in verse 27 to refer to Messiah’s confirming of a “strong covenant with many.” And “the many” with whom covenant is made in this verse resonates with Isaiah 53’s language of the Suffering Servant’s work applying to “the many”: “The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. … [he] was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many” (Isaiah 53:11b,12b).
So definitive, so consequential, and so exhaustive will this sacrifice be that it will be the final sacrifice. That is why Gabriel tells Daniel one of heaven’s greatest secrets: Messiah will “make sacrifice and offering to cease” — any sacrifice offered after this would be presumptuous. It is why Paul resisted the blood-shedding act of circumcision for Gentiles. It is why Paul exhorts us to offer our bodies as living—not dead!—sacrifices to God (Romans 12:1z-2). It is why the anachronism of the physical temple had to go. As the writer to the Hebrews says, speaking, I believe, of the physical temple which was still standing in his day: “…what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear” (Hebrews 8:13b).
The “already/not yet” of the Jubilee. God’s magnificent saving work takes place, but not without resistance. God builds, Satan tries to tear down. That is why Gabriel also includes sober notes about how the rebuilding of the temple will happen “in a troubled time” (Daniel 9:25). It’s also why Messiah’s work meets—indeed, prompts—such a harsh response. He is, after all, “cut off,” and the resistance that emerges is horrific: enemies of God’s people will destroy the city and the sanctuary, and there will be an abomination that desolates (Daniel 9:26b,27b).
Thus, Ezra and Nehemiah had to face their detractors when they built the second temple. Thus, Antiochus did desecrate the second temple, though the Maccabean revolt brought its restoration.
The Roman general Titus demolished the physical temple despite Nero’s lavish embellishments of it. However, he was unable to crush the even more beautiful spiritual temple, that is, the house of living stones (1 Peter 2:5), that had already begun to emerge through the spread of the good news of Christ Jesus. Ironically, Titus’s work put an exclamation point on the fact that blood sacrifice and offering no longer needed to be made.
“Many antichrists” emerged immediately in the early church to destroy God’s new temple (1 John 2:18,22; 4:3; 2 John 7). Many more will arise until that predicted horrible figure arises who presumes to pronounce his own deity in the new temple, that is, the church (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4). And then the end comes. Simultaneously evil will have reached its full measure, and so will God’s calculation of the salvation of the full number of elect Jews and Gentiles (Romans 11:12,25). Christ will win his final battle, bring the resurrection, and usher in “a new heavens and a new earth.” And death shall be no more, nor sickness, nor sighing, nor tears, nor frustration.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
Image: From El Greco, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons