I went and saw the latest Harry Potter movie this week. Fortunately I was away last weekend; otherwise my kids may have forced me to endure waiting in a much too long line to get in to a much too crowded theater to see it. Instead, we went to a midweek matinee; more affordable, less crowded, more relaxed.
We have all seven Harry Potter books at home. They are in various stages of falling apart. Paper dust sleeves are torn or missing; bindings are breaking; pages are coming loose. These books, I regret to say, show the evidence of having been handled and read even more than our family’s Bibles.
In what is probably a poor attempt to justify this imbalance in our reading habits, let me just say that there are many who see in Harry Potter themes that are distinctly Christian. Being a story about wizards and witches, there are of course many powers on display, powers that “muggles” like you and I can only dream about: powers to do spells, leave enchantments, and create magical potions. But guess what the greatest power of all is?
I’ll give you a hint. The greatest power of all is a power Harry Potter has, but the evil Lord Voldemort does not. Remarkably, it is a power that even non-wizards are capable of possessing. It is the power that Harry received when his own mother died in order to protect him, a power that Harry himself exercises in the final, climactic scenes of the entire series.
It is the power of love. And isn’t the power of love what we see at the very heart of the gospel? Isn’t that what we see in both the birth and the death of Jesus?
The whole plot of the Harry Potter series begins when a prophecy is given. The shortened version of the prophecy, the one that appears in the movies, goes like this: The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches...and the Dark Lord shall mark him as his equal but he shall have power the Dark Lord knows not...For neither can live while the other survives.
In an article I read online, scholars Karl and Rolf Jacobson write that this Harry Potter prophecy is the type of prophecy we usually think of when we read biblical prophets like Isaiah. We usually read them as predictions of future events that will one day come to pass. Most often, Christians read biblical prophecies as predictions that are fulfilled in Jesus.
In seminary, I learned that this is not really the way biblical prophecy was meant to be understood. Prophets like Isaiah, despite sometimes speaking in future tense, spoke of current events, not future ones. Prophecies that we apply to Jesus, I learned, were actually written in reference to contemporary figures; people like Cyrus, a ruler who liberated the Israelites from Babylonian captivity. He was, at the time, their liberator, their redeemer, their savior. He was the one they believed to be anointed by God.
Well, you can imagine what sometimes happened when seminaries like me, armed with this new knowledge, graduated and began preaching it in unsuspecting congregations. At best, the message was confusing. At worst, it was damaging.
Because even though we were right, we weren’t completely right.
Readers of the Harry Potter series know that there is some ambiguity in that story’s prophecy. It never actually mentions Harry Potter by name. It could, in fact, have applied to another wizard, born about the same time as Harry Potter; Harry Potter doesn’t become the one to fulfill the prophecy until someone – Voldemort, in fact – chooses to apply the prophecy to him.
The prophecies of Isaiah and other biblical prophets were written in regards to contemporary events and people. That is important to know. But it is also important to know that early Christians chose to apply them to Jesus; and it is important to know that they did not do so ignorantly. They likely knew about the prophecies’ original, historical contexts. But in the first century, they saw a new context. In Jesus, they saw a new fulfillment.
It doesn’t end there. As we begin our journey through Advent, we begin, once again, reacquainting ourselves with the vision God has for our time. We begin asking ourselves, once again: How will God use us to bring about the fulfillment of the kingdom of peace and shalom described by the prophets, described by Jesus? How will we use the power of love to transform our world, to restore hope to the nations, in 2010, 2011, and beyond?
The vision of the prophet Isaiah that we have before us today is a vision, a prophecy, of a world of peace; a world where all people will look to God for instruction and all nations will look to God to arbitrate and mediate for them; a world in which weapons of warfare will be beaten into tools of cultivation; a world in which war will be no more.
Clearly, for such a world to happen, we must make use of the power of love, the greatest power, the more excellent way; and who showed us how to do this better than Jesus? This scripture is fulfilled in him.
But what was this prophecy’s original context? That’s an interesting question, and one that would probably take too long to answer; because this particular prophecy appears almost word-for-word in the book of Micah. It also appears, in somewhat altered form, in the book of Joel.
Joel actually injects a bit of sarcasm by flipping the prophecy on its head. “Prepare for war,” Joel says. “Call up the soldiers. Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears. Go ahead and honor your war heroes; God will shatter them. Go ahead and judge the nations around you, because God is the judge of all nations; God will judge them and you alike.”
The reference to honoring warriors and war heroes is interesting, because, in fact, the people of Israel rarely did that. They lived in a very tumultuous time and place. War was almost a daily part of ancient Israelite life. The Old Testament is filled with accounts of war and invading armies. And yet Israel did not glorify warfare.
The surrounding nations did. They built monuments and decorated their palaces with scenes depicting the slaughter of their enemies, often in gruesome detail.
Israel seemed to live by a different vision.
That doesn’t mean Israel didn’t have armies; it did.
That doesn’t mean Israel didn’t defend itself; it did.
But as I read in another online article – this one by Baylor University religion professor John Wood – Israel’s militarism was a constant source of debate: “How can Israel be a ‘light to the nations’ while taking up arms against them? How can God be both a God of peace and a God of war?”
This debate plays out through much of the Old Testament, and no final answer is ever reached. More than once, a particular battle that is described in two or more different biblical books is described very differently, depending on the viewpoint of the one doing the describing.
And, of course, it is a debate that continues today. How can one country be a light to the nations while stockpiling weapons of mass destruction? What is the proper justification for people of faith, people of peace, to go to war? Is there ever such a justification?
It may be that we will never reach consensus on these questions, but as long as we keep asking them, there will be hope.
As long as we keep the prophetic vision of a peaceful world, there will be hope.
As long as we recognize the potential for that prophecy to be fulfilled in our time, through us, through Christ working in us, there will be hope.
As long as we remember that the greatest power of all, the power of love, lies within us, there will be hope.
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