And So It Begins
Luke 3: 1 – 22 As I sat with our text this week, I was taken in by shifts of perspective. Let me unpack that a little. If our gospel writer were directing a documentary film about the life of Jesus, I imagine a series of camera shots here in Luke’s third chapter that zoom wide and explore a big picture moment and then that zoom in dramatically to explore some small but vital detail, a detail which is somehow juxtaposed against the prior view. We enter today’s text zoomed out to a wide angle, high level image - with an historical time marker – a list of political figures who represent a structure of power influenced by (or at the disposal of…) Roman control. The named historical figures give us a sense of calendar time – we can estimate that this is approximately 29 CE. That means that we are a long way from the infant and child Jesus of the Christmas and Epiphany stories. John and Jesus who we met in utero are now men, fully grown, in fact middle age...