Out of Egypt (Third Sunday of Advent)

Flight into Egypt, circa 1320 by Giotto (Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, Assisi, Italy).

And he said to me, “You are my servant,

Israel, in whom I will be glorified.”

-Isaiah 49:3

“When Israel was a child, I loved him,

and out of Egypt I called my son.

-Hosea 11:1

It has, for a while now, been of popular mind to utilize the Old Testament as a prophecy machine. Plug in an Old Testament prophecy to a New Testament passage and see if something matches up. If they do, it’s like winning a game of slots in Vegas or, God forbid, Reno. But like any gamble, matching prophecies up is mostly a losing game. Nevertheless we work this way: find a verse in the Old Testament, plug it into a verse in the New Testament, and — ding-ding-ding — we have a winner! After that, you’re done. Prophecy was fulfilled and that settles it.

We probably do this because we think it is what the New Testament is doing when it quotes the Old Testament. After all, they seem to be playing the game and winning. But the prophets, when you read them, seem to be so much larger, so filled with what Abraham Heschel called, “divine pathos,” or, the sharing of “the divine reaction to human conduct” (Heschel, The Prophets, pg. 290). What they shared through their words was a Word — through their sentences came a pathos, a sense of who God was and what it was…