Micah 5:2-5“But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.” Therefore Israel will be abandoned until the time when she who is in labor bears a son, and the rest of his brothers return to join the Israelites. He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they will live securely, for then his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth. And he will be our peace. There is a question that serious readers of Scripture eventually have to face: why do two great religious traditions — Jewish and Christian — read the same ancient texts and arrive at different conclusions? Is one of them simply wrong? Or is something else going on? The prophet Micah gives us one of the most remarkable passages in all of the Old Testament. Writing some seven centuries before the birth of Jesus, he points to Bethlehem — the smallest and most overlooked of Judah’s towns — as the birthplace of a coming ruler whose origins stretch back to ancient times, perhaps to eternity itself. Ancient Jewish interpreters, including the great medieval scholar Rashi, read this as a clear messianic prophecy. The Aramaic Targum of Jonathan, written before the time of Christ, translated the passage explicitly: out of Bethlehem shall the Messiah come forth. The Jewish tradition has always known that this passage points toward something — someone — of cosmic significance. Where Jewish and Christian readings part ways is not over whether the passage is messianic, but over whether that Messiah has already come. Jewish tradition reads Micah’s words as a promise still leaning forward, still awaiting its fulfillment. Christian tradition reads them as a promise fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth, born in Bethlehem, the one in whom the ancient origins of God took on human flesh. Both traditions are reading the same words with great seriousness and great reverence. They simply stand in different relationships to the promise. This ought to give us pause — not because it suggests that truth is merely relative, but because it suggests that truth is larger than any single tradition’s grasp of it. And here the story of Babel may offer us unexpected wisdom. Genesis 11:5-8 (NIV)But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. We tend to read the Tower of Babel as a story of pure judgment — God scattering a humanity that had overreached. But look more carefully at what God says: “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” The problem at Babel was not human cooperation or even human ambition. It was the dangerous uniformity of a single voice that had made itself the measure of all things, a humanity so certain of its own sufficiency that it had no need to look upward. What God introduced at Babel — the multiplicity of languages, cultures, and voices — was not simply punishment. It was a corrective, and perhaps something more than that. The diversity of human interpretation, including the diversity of faithful religious interpretation, keeps any single tradition from mistaking its own partial vision for the whole of God’s truth. When Jewish scholars and Christian scholars read Micah 5:2 side by side, each sees something real. Each is turned toward the same horizon. And the conversation between them, pursued in honesty and humility, may bring both traditions closer to the God whom the prophet was straining to describe. The ruler Micah promised comes from the smallest place. His greatness reaches to the ends of the earth. And his name, the ancient rabbis told us, was spoken before the world began. Our Father, give us the humility to know that your truth is larger than our understanding of it, and the wisdom to learn from those who read your word from a different place than we do. May all our voices, however different, be turned toward you. Amen. This devotional was written by Jim Stovall. Grace for All is a daily devotional podcast produced by the members of the congregation of First United Methodist Church in Maryville, Tennessee. With these devotionals, we want to remind listeners on a daily basis of the love and grace that God extends to all human beings, no matter their location, status, or condition in life. If you would like to respond to these devotionals in any way, we would enjoy hearing from you. Our email address is: podcasts@1stchurch.org. First United Methodist Church is a lively, spirit-filled congregation whose goal is to spread the message of love and grace into our community and throughout the world. We are located on the web at https://1stchurch.org/.
