Wounds that Heal, pouring out the soul, and Advent week 4

 After a LOT of hopeful Isaiah build up to the coming promised one as light, a descendent of the the best king ever, a shepherd who seeks out the wandering and makes a road through the wilderness, a righter of wrongs . . . chapter 53 must have slammed into expectations pretty jarringly. Because the glorious one we are holding on to see is presented there as an unattractive, weak, victimised person. Even lambs for the sacrifice sound too fluffy and pure for the describers in chapter 53. The messiah would not be a winner. He would not be a superhero. He would be scarred and depleted and killed. 

The followers in the first century didn't get this any better than we do. Perhaps Mary and Joseph began to grasp the very dangerous outsider path they had entered when they were homeless for giving birth, and fleeing from murderous soldiers. 

But Isaiah 53's lamb's wounds are not punitive. They are restorative. The one who comes and pours out His soul does so with cosmic consequence, the beginning of a reversal of all that is harmful, painful, sad, wrong, despairing. His suffering is our healing.

This Advent season, as all Advent seasons, that is good news. The ADF attacked Ntoroko crossing the Semliki river about 50km north of us, a group of 40-ish rebels, on Tuesday. The Ugandan army responded quickly and definitively and we're already back to calm, but a stark reminder of the stakes of warfare all around us. A day later a family came to describe the life-threatening birth disabilities of their newly born baby and we went to examine him, pray, and refer him for emergency surgery at one of the two medical centers in the country that can handle it. That evening we got a threatening letter from the lawyers representing the family that unjustly reclaimed land the mission bought decades ago. Every day desperate people are asking for money for preparing for Christmas. Insecurity, illness, injustice, poverty . . . these four hardships are not just words, they are the fabric of everyday life all around us. 

Into that world, the lamb who was despised and rejected and killed but in the process re-set the path of the universe to all-things-new . . . is good news indeed. Something worth watching for, Advent and always.

And as we are left to keep slogging through the already-but-not-yet of His having come but still to come and bring this process to completion . . . nothing brings us more Christmas hope than a visit from one of our kids. So I'll throw in a few photos this week that point to the very healing that Christmas begins, the making right of all the separation and sorrow of the world!