GOSPEL, FIRST READING & PSALM TRANSCRIPT (Subscribe or Login for Full Transcript):
First, obviously the prophecy is focused on geography. I talked about this before, geography matters. Where is Bethlehem? Well Bethlehem is in the south. It's in the southern territory, the southern part of the holy land, which was referred to as Judah, right. So this particular town, Bethlehem, was famous not for its size, it was a small place, but for its associations with King David. So Bethlehem was the birthplace of David, it was the place of his family. And 1 Samuel 17 tells you that David lived in Bethlehem along with his father Jesse and the sons of Jesse there. So in a prophetic context when Micah brings up the city of Bethlehem, as soon as you say Bethlehem a First Century Jew would think David, the city of David, the King of David.
Alright, second though, you’ll notice there's a little second name added here, a little appendix so to speak. It doesn't just say, “But you, O Bethlehem,” it says, “But you, O Bethlehem Eph’rathah,” right. Now why does it add Eph’rathah? Well I’m not exactly sure. But I can't help but notice the fact that Eph’rathah is mentioned elsewhere in the Old Testament as a town that's close to Bethlehem, that's linked with Bethlehem, but which is first mentioned in the Bible with reference to a woman in the Old Testament, the mother of Israel whose name was Rachel. So you might remember in the Old Testament Jacob is the father of Israel. Jacob was the brother of Esau, he’s the son of Isaac, and his name is changed by God to Israel. And he becomes the father of the 12 sons who are the 12 tribes of Israel. So you could say in a very literal sense that Israel, Jacob, is the father of Israel the people, right, he's the patriarch. Well, he was also married to a woman named Rachel and Rachel, likewise, was the mother of Israel. She was the matriarch, so to speak, of the 12 tribes of Israel. And what’s interesting is, if you go back to Genesis 35 we have a story of Rachel's death and burial. And guess where this mother of Israel dies and is buried? She's buried at Bethlehem Eph’rathah. So let's look at the passage for just a minute. This isn’t the Old Testament reading for today. I’m just throwing this in as a little Advent gift to you, so this is just a little extra Christmas gift, a little lagniappe here. But I think it's interesting because in Genesis 35 we see the mention of Ephrath which is linked into Eph’rathah in the prophecy of Micah. So Micah wants you to think back to this text we’re about to read. So Genesis 35:16 says this. This is the story of the death of Rachel, the mother of Israel. It says:
Then they journeyed from Bethel; and when they were still some distance from Ephrath, Rachel travailed, and she had hard labor. And when she was in her hard labor, the midwife said to her, "Fear not; for now you will have another son." And as her soul was departing (for she died), she called his name Ben-o'ni; but his father [Jacob] called his name Benjamin. So Rachel died, and she was buried on the way to Ephrath (that is, Bethlehem), and Jacob set up a pillar upon her grave; it is the pillar of Rachel's tomb, which is there to this day.
Alright now you might be thinking, Dr. Pitre what does that have to do with Micah 5 or any of that? Well, two things. First, just notice that Bethlehem Eph’rathah echoes the story of the place where Rachel was buried. And sure enough to this day, not just to the day that Genesis was written but to the present day, you can go to Rachel's tomb near Bethlehem. And people do go to Rachel's tomb there, Jewish people go there, to honor Rachel as the mother of Israel. And there is a practice among some Jews even of asking for Rachel's intercession to pray for the Jewish
people. And the reason they do this is because the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, chapter 30 and 31 says that Rachel is weeping for her children because they were no more. Now Jeremiah is writing hundreds of years after Rachel had died and yet he describes her as alive and mourning with her children, praying for her children so to speak, interceding for them. So the Jewish tradition developed that Rachel wasn't just the mother of Israel that she was also kind of great intercessor on behalf of Israel. And that somehow through dying in childbirth, right, she kind of embraced that suffering and became the suffering mother of Israel.
So if you go back to the first reading for today notice what Micah says there. He's describing the coming of the Messiah, and look what he does. He links the prophecy of the Messiah to this image of a woman who is in travail, right. Go back to the prophecy he says, “from you [Bethlehem Eph’rathah] shall come forth for me one who is ruler of Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days...he shall give them up until the time when she who was in travail has brought forth.” Well, who is this woman who was in travail in the Old Testament, near Bethlehem Eph’rathah? It was Rachel, the mother of Israel. Who through her suffering brings a child into the world, Benjamin, the last of the 12 tribes.
And so I just bring this up because Rachel is a link, an Old Testament link, to Mary as mother of the Messiah. I don’t have time to do this in this video, but in my book Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary I have a whole chapter — I’m really excited about this particular part of the book — showing how the New Testament depicts Mary as the new Rachel, as the new mother of the church, the mother Israel, and in particular as the mother of sorrows. Just as Rachel was sorrowful and suffered for and with her children in the Old Testament, so now Mary as the new Rachel suffers, in the sense mourns, for the sorrows of her children, but also intercedes for them and prays for them as a maternal intercessor with her people. In fact the Jews had a tradition that when Abraham and Jacob, and like some of the other patriarchs Abraham or Moses, when they would pray and ask God to bless the people of Israel, on one occasion God wouldn't listen to their prayers. But when Rachel interceded for the people of Israel God heard her prayers because of the sorrow and the suffering that she endured as the mother of Israel.
So all that to say Micah here is describing this future time when the mother of the Messiah, who is kind of like a new Rachel, is going to give birth to the Messiah in Bethlehem. Which is, by the way, where Rachel was buried, so it’s all connected images to Rachel there. And that through her a ruler is going to come forth in Israel whose origin is from ancient days. And the Hebrew here is literally from the days of ‘olam, the days of the age, or you can translate that from the days of eternity. So all the church fathers saw in that a kind of shadow or clue that this future king, who’s going to be born in Bethlehem near where Rachel's tomb was, that this fu- ture king wouldn't just be an earthly king, that he would be a divine Messiah, be- cause his origin was from eternity. A pre-existent Messiah who was not created when he came into the world but rather existed with the Lord and then assumes a human nature in the incarnation. And comes to us as man in this little city of Beth- lehem, the town of David, the town near where Rachel the mother of Israel was buried by Rachel’s tomb.
SECOND READING TRANSCRIPT (Subscribe or Login for Full Transcript):
...with that in mind, it then goes on to say:
Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said,
“Sacrifices and offerings thou hast not desired,
but a body hast thou prepared for me;
in burnt offerings and sin offerings thou hast taken no pleasure.
Then I said, ‘Lo, I have come to do thy will, O God…’
Now in this case, what the author of Hebrews is doing is taking the words of a psalm, Psalm 40, and attributing them to Christ. Now if you go back to the Gospels, you’re never going to find a passage in which Jesus quotes Psalm 40 when He’s in conversation with someone else or when He’s praying, but what the author of Hebrews is reflecting here is the awareness of the fact that the book of Psalms isn’t just a book of prayers; it’s also a book of prophecies, and that Jesus in His earthly life as a first century Jew, would have prayed the book of Psalms. They would be sung every week at the synagogue, and they were also memorized and chanted by Jews (devout Jews) as part of their prayer life.
So you can take any one of the psalms in the book of Psalms, and even just on a human level, recognize and assert that Jesus would have prayed these words. At the same time, on a more providential level or salvation historical level, the author is also recognizing that Jesus not only prayed the psalms, He also fulfilled them in His life. So what the Hebrews is saying here is that this psalm, Psalm 40, was fulfilled whenever Christ’s Body was prepared for Him — in other words, His humanity, when He assumes that humanity, that human flesh, when He comes into the world in the Incarnation.
And here’s where we get to an aspect of the Incarnation that we tend not to think about — “we” meaning predominantly Gentile Christians. So I don’t think most Gentile Christians lay awake at night, kind of wondering, “Why is it that we don’t practice animal sacrifice anymore?” This is not something that concerns us. But it was a concern in the first century AD, because for Jewish believers, the animal sacrifices were part of the old covenant law. They were part of the Mosaic law. They were commanded by God. They were the way you worshipped God, and yet, eventually they come to cease.
So what the author of Hebrews is doing here is taking this psalm and saying — which says:
Sacrifices and offerings thou hast not desired,
but a body hast thou prepared for me…
…for the one who is speaking, who has come into the world to do God’s will. And here what we see being expressed is a very important Old Testament idea — namely, that animal sacrifice in the old covenant was ultimately about a kind of visible ritual expression of obedience to God.
So for example, if you go back to 1 Samuel 15, the most famous statement of this is from the prophet Samuel. Just listen to this for a minute as a principle. In 1 Samuel 15:22, Samuel says:
“Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,
as in obeying the voice of the Lord?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,
and to hearken than the fat of rams.
For rebellion is as the sin of divination,
and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. (1 Samuel 15:22-23b)
Okay, so that principle — that obedience is better than animal sacrifice — is kind of the Old Testament foundation not only for the reasons that animal sacrifices were offered out of obedience to God’s revelation in law, but also in anticipation of what Hebrews is describing here … that ultimately Christ is going to come into the world to offer the ultimate sacrifice which is obedience. Not just the sacrifice of His Body but the sacrifice of the will to the Father. Think here of Gethsemane. As Jesus’ human nature is reacting to, responding to, anticipating the suffering of the cross, what does He say?
… nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done. (Luke 22:42b)
That’s really the heart of the mystery of the cross.
And so what Hebrews is saying here is, in essence, that the reason that Jesus becomes incarnate, the reason He comes into the world, the reason God prepares a human body in a sense of a human nature for Christ the Son to assume, is ultimately so that He can express and enact obedience to the Father on the cross. His whole life, in other words, His very birth, His very Incarnation coming into the world, is ordered toward the sacrifice of the cross in which He’ll enact the supreme act of obedience to the Father by laying down His life. So Hebrews continues:
When he said above, “Thou hast neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law)...
Meaning the law of Moses…
… then he added, “Lo, I have come to do thy will.” He abolishes the first in order to establish the second. (Hebrews 10:8-9)
Now pause there. What does that mean, the first and the second? Well, later on in Hebrews in chapters 9 — well, before, and also again in 11 and 12, all the way through to the end —the author is going to talk about the two covenants, the first covenant and the second covenant, the old covenant and the new covenant. And although it’s absolutely true, like in the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus says that He doesn't come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, there is a sense in which certain aspects of the law are going to actually pass away. And the premiere example of this is, in fact, animal sacrifices.
So for example, while… whereas the Ten Commandments don’t pass away in the new covenant (that they still have to be obeyed), the sacrifices of bulls and sheep and goats and lambs and turtle doves that are part of the sacrificial system of the Old Testament and the Jerusalem temple in particular — those are in fact going to pass away once Christ offers the supreme and perfect sacrifice of Himself on Calvary. And that’s what the author of Hebrews here is illuminating and establishing. And what he says is, and this is kind of the upshot of the whole thing:
And by that will…
Meaning by the act of obedience of Jesus on the cross…
… we have been sanctified…
We have been made holy…
… through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. (Hebrews 10:10)
This whole passage — it’s interesting — it begins with the Incarnation. Then it moves to the question of animal sacrifice, and then it ends with the cross. Because the point of the passage is to explain to the first readers of the letter to the Hebrews why it is that it’s not necessary to participate in those animal sacrifices any longer, because the perfect sacrifice of the Body of Christ has been offered once and for all.
In this last week of Advent, then, it’s interesting. We’re not just looking forward to Christmas in a sense. We’re also, in a sense, going beyond Christmas to Calvary. We’re looking forward to the
reason for the Incarnation, the
reason for the Nativity, and the
reason for the Nativity was ultimately Calvary and then, of course, the Resurrection
.
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