
You'll find me still blogging daily on my Advent blog until Christmas Eve with hopefully some helpful meanderings to provoke, to ponder and to find peace with during this holy season.
My Advent blog, Five Minutes Space, can be found here...
A Prog Vicar's Journal of: Sermons Theological thinking Church musings... and a near obsessive love of Progressive Rock, Metal, Jazz and a whole bunch of musical bewilderment!
Son of man here appears to be a title referring to the humanity of the author, much how the word "human" may suffice in English. It is not a respectful appellation, but a humbling one (in some cases, an arguably abject one), and this use is a consistent pattern throughout Ezekiel.
In other words, the son of man, is a downtrodden figure that the prophet Daniel then links with a divine figure, the coming Messiah, a theological link that was strengthened during the time before New Testament.
In the New Testament, Jesus uses the term in similar ways, but some think he might just be referring to humanity generally.
How do we deal with this this Advent? The Son of Man is coming - that's what Advent is about. Getting ready for the arrival of the Messiah figure - God's chosen leader who would forge a new relationship between humanity and God and free humanity from the oppressive regime that they were bound by. Then it was a longing for a Divine King freeing people from the rule of the Romans. Today it might be a longing to be freed from debt, from habit forming behaviours and led to a better way of living. Or if the Son of Man refers to the whole of humanity, then a longing that a better 'version' of humanity is coming, is made possible by God. Either way it is a hopeful vision indeed... God's take on things, is that He longs to free us and enable us to be the people that He and we (however deep down we may need to look) long to be...
39 One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding* him and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah?* Save yourself and us!’ 40But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.’ 42Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into* your kingdom.’ 43He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’
For the last decade progressive jazz trio The Bad Plus (Ethan Iverson, Reid Anderson and Dave King) have been stirring up a musical stew that defies easy description. Drawing on classical, jazz, rock, pop and beyond, they force their listeners to rethink notions of what differentiates one style of music from another. The London Jazz Festival returns to Kings Place to celebrate their 10th birthday.
"We really care about classical music, and we also care about the more improvisational forms like rock, pop and jazz," says Iverson. "I believe that we can pay composers like Ligeti and Stravinsky and Babbitt the respect they deserve, and we can also recognize composers like Kurt Cobain and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters and David Gilmour as poets at the same time." King agrees: "We consider the whole spectrum to be worthy of our detailed attention and worthy of the same respect."