Saturday, 18 March 2006
Lent 4 Year B
Numbers 21: 4-9 NRSV text
Psalm 107: 1-3; 17-22 NRSV text
Ephesians 2: 1-10 NRSV text
John 3: 14-21 NRSV text
“Look to the cross and live!” The cross that is death for Jesus is life for us. Here, in John’s gospel, we have the first of the “passion predictions” (John 3: 14; cf Mark 8: 31). John frames it very differently from the synoptic evangelists. Instead of suffering, there is elevation. Instead of death, there is the promise of life. As Moses lifts up the bronze serpent on a pole in the wilderness (cf Numbers 21: 9), so Jesus will be “lifted up”. As the Israelites looked to the serpent and lived, so people will look to the crucified Jesus – and live! This is the Easter God – a God who brings life out of death.
On one level, the story of the bronze serpent is a peculiar one to invoke. The obvious parallel is just that – obvious. The dying Israelites – bitten by the serpents – are told to look up at the bronze serpent, and, in doing so, live. Jesus, similarly, will be “lifted up” (ie on the cross) and the people who look to him – “believe” – will live. But the more we think about it, the more subtle and suggestive the image becomes. Let’s explore it further.
1. John’s Good Friday – coronation day!
John has a very particular way of telling his story of Jesus and we must not try to to fit him into the synoptic mould. It’s a “theological” story – a story about the meaning of it all. Of course, all the evangelists tell theological stories, but John’s is more steeped in symbolism and imagery. In a sense, it’s the story of Jesus through God’s eyes. Or, to put the same point differently, John is less concerned to recreate “what it was like” before Easter – to recreate that journey of discovery that the disciples underwent – than to write from an expressly post-Easter perspective, and retell the story with its meaning made clear. So, for example, Jesus comforts the disciples with the promise of Easter joy (16: 16-22).
In John’s hands, the crucifixion is portrayed as Jesus’ coronation. There is the argument over the inscription, “The King of the Jews”, between Pilate and the chief priests (19: 19-22). It is allowed to stand as a sign: this man is nothing less than a king! And it is written in all the known languages of the world – Hebrew, Latin and Greek. Earlier, Jesus is crowned with thorns and decked in the purple robe of authority ((19: 1-5). The irony of Pilate’s “Ecce homo” (“Behold the man!”) is not that Jesus is pitiful, but is regal! What his mockers and enemies fail to discern is in fact true: behold – the king!
Read John’s crucifixion and try to picture it. I don’t know about you, but even before I’d done New Testament 101 at university, I always had a picture of the cross being very high. Jesus was “lifted up”. I imagined the people at the foot of the cross having to stand back a little and gaze up in order to see properly. Rather like the bronze serpent on the pole …
And just as the lifting up of the serpent was a prophetic, priestly and symbolic act – a liturgical act – so is the crucifixion of Jesus in John’s gospel. It draws the eye upward in homage – which is as it should be, because here we gaze upon our king and God’s salvation for the world.
2. Serpents and Incarnation
What on earth has the bronze serpent to do with the Incarnation? Actually, quite a lot, I suspect. The serpent is, of course, the symbol of disobedience and death. It is the serpent who, in the story of the Fall, tempts the first humans to disobey God. And that is not just a single, isolated act of naughtiness. Nothing is ever the same again – symbolised by “Their eyes were opened, and they knew they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). This primordial act of disobedience signals far more than a one-off “slip”. It signals the human determination to make a world without God. The theological shorthand for this is “sin”. It is a deliberate turning away from the source of Life. Sin and death thus become inextricably interlinked. Death is the end result of disobedience. And the serpent becomes a potent symbol of human rebellion against and rejection of God.
It is no accident, therefore, that in the story of the bronze serpent in Numbers 21, Yahweh responds to the whinging of the Israelites by sending poisonous serpents to bite and kill them. They accuse Yahweh of bringing them into the wilderness to die – when Yahweh has delivered them from slavery and death (Egypt) to bring freedom and Life. The response of the Israelites in the wilderness is explicitly a re-run of the Fall narrative in Genesis. What should be a source of Life and fellowship with Yahweh is spoiled. Yahweh sends the serpents – not so much as a “rap across the knuckles” but as way of showing the deadly consequences of rejecting Life.
But note that Moses is commanded to make an image of the serpent. Isn’t that strange? Why make a symbol of death as the source of life? Why not manna, or stone tablets – something that suggests the contrast between death and Yahweh, who gives life? There’s clearly something about the bronze serpent as a symbol of Yahweh’s power to bring life out of death. The very symbol of death becomes deconstructed because it now brings life.
Read through Christian eyes, it takes on even deeper significance. Jesus is quite explicitly the pre-existent Son of God from all eternity in John’s theology (cf John 1: 1-3). In 3:13 (the verse preceding the lectionary reading) he is the One who has “descended from heaven” (ie “come down”). This is Incarnation – God walking among us. Think about it in this way for as moment: the serpent is a symbol of death – and so are human beings! They symbolise darkness, lostness, rebellion, sin and death! And God, in order to save us, is to be found as a human being! In other words, the story of God’s salvation – from Exodus to Incarnation – is the story of God entering into lostness and redeeming it. And in the same way, the lifting up of Jesus on the cross is both the symbol of the very depths to which humanity sinks (the most potent symbol of evil) and the sign and symbol of Life! In other words, both the serpent and the crucified Jesus become the means of Life because God is there! They don’t show God’s pious horror and avoidance of the messiness and darkness of human living, but God’s embracing of it in order to save us. God, in love, embraces what is utterly opposite to God – suffering and death. And so both Jesus the man and the cross become transformed symbols. The man apparently rejected by God becomes the most potent picture of God's nearness and presence, and the cross is transformed from an engine of death into the promise fo Life, as the serpent was.
3. Salvation – the Life of God
The bronze serpent brings life for dying Israelites. They survive in order to continue their journey of deliverance with Yahweh. Jesus brings more than that. Jesus gives eternal life (3: 15f). Why do we always think of eternal life in terms of quantity? And why do we suppose it refers primarily to some other place (heaven) rather than earth? When we think like this, we effectively call creation a cosmic mistake, and salvation becomes the ultimate “Get Out of Jail Free” card (or is it rather the Move Directly to “Go” card?).
Jesus, John tells us, was responsible for creation. The purpose of the Incarnation was to save creation, not save us from it! Salvation is about Life with God in this world. Now, of course, this life is not all there is. But eternal life is primarily about the Life of God and life with God – what John calls “Life in all its abundance” (10:10). What the cross points to is that Life and God are to be found precisely in the places and moments of deepest darkness and hopelessness. The Life of God – the Light of Christ – is to be found where it has no right being! It is a Life that is stronger than death – strong enough to embrace it and rob it of its power. That is why the Light of Christ shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never been able to put it out (1:5)!
Isn’t this precisely what Paul tells us in Ephesians 2: 1-10? We were dead – cut off from God and Life, slaves to powers of darkness and destruction. God does not turn away from us, because God is “rich in mercy” (v4) and does not leave us to a living death. Instead, God “resurrects” us (v5b) in Christ. And if there is a need for life beyond death, it is because God needs all that time to show us “the immeasurable riches of God’s grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (v7). Now that is some reason for eternity! I don’t know about you, but the idea of heaven as going on and on and on for the sake of it doesn’t particularly inspire me. Longevity for its own sake runs the risk of boredom on a cosmic scale! But eternity as necessary in order to experience all the good things God has for us – that is something deeply attractive, isn’t it?
And it’s all because of God’s grace. It’s not a result of what we do, because there’s nothing we can do! Whatever needed doing was what Christ did on the cross. That is the work of salvation. And it has been done! This makes possible life in the Spirit – abundant life, life as God intends for us. The living of this life, and the transformation it brings, is what Paul refers to as the “good works”. This is what Jesus did – it was the way he lived as a human being. These “good works” are a shorthand for Christ-likeness: living in such a way as to bring Life, not death.
The first rays of the new day
We are on a Lenten journey. At this point, we are called to stand at the foot of the cross and look up. If we have eyes to see, we see two things: firstly, we “see” the darkness. The crucifixion of Jesus is never less than absolutely evil and horrific. We see ourselves exposed – we see what “sin” really means. It isn’t just the guilt that is so suffocating. What is so soul-sapping is the scale of the mess we’re in. There is no way out of the darkness. It traps us. We are held in powers that we have unleashed and created. The only end to the road is death – not just the cessation of life, but the end of everything that is worthwhile. That rings true of our experience of the world. We have created a global economy that deals death to most of the world’s inhabitants. Life for the majority of the globe’s inhabitants is hell on earth. And when we become aware of these things, then we who live in the prosperous west and north are trapped in a cycle of guilt and despair. Our best efforts to change things run into the sand. We realise that the eradication of poverty is both possible and cheap – yet there isn’t the will to sort it out. We realise the suffering we inflict on others – yet are powerless to stop it. We are like the people in Psalm 107 who realise the mess they have got themselves into (Psalm 107: 4, 10 & 17). We are “in trouble and distress”. And, like the psalmist, we cry out to the God of steadfast love who "saves us from our distress and trouble" (vv 6, 13, 19).Lent
But as we continue looking, we also see the first rays of a new dawn. This is resurrection. It is God’s new day – and it is a gift of grace. It has no right to exist. God ought not to behave as God does. It is not right - not just. Grace is an offence to any decent human being who wants to insist that justice is about deserts. God is a God of steadfast love who hears our cries and delivers us from our troubles and distress (the psalmist). God is “rich in mercy” and makes us alive in Christ (Paul). This is because God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but, though him, to save it (John). And so we see in the cross – as the Israelites saw in the serpent – not only our darkness, but God’s Life. Look up and live!
Amen.
16:00 Posted in Ephesians , John , Numbers , Psalms | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this | Tags: Bible Study
Monday, 14 November 2005
Pentecost 27
Ezekiel 34: 11-16, 20-24 NRSV text
Ephesians 1: 15-23 NRSV text
Matthew 25: 31-46 NRSV text
Sunday is the feast of Christ the King, and the parable of the sheep and the goats is a fitting climax to the block of teaching, begun all those weeks ago now when Jesus entered the temple and was asked by the chief priests and elders of the people, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you the authority?” (21:23). Matthew has gradually unveiled Jesus’ authority: he is the messiah, the son of God, the one like the Danielic Son of Man. He is the bridegroom, for whose “wedding feast” the whole creation waits. Now, in this final parable, we see Jesus, enthroned and coming in glory, to judge the world. Jesus is the climax of creation; the climax of human history.
I’ve begun to feel just a little bit sorry for the chief priests and elders. Matthew 21:23 has got to be right at the top of their list of “Questions I wish I’d never asked”! They didn’t know what they were getting into. It’s been a rollercoaster ride of surprises, shocks, and outrages – and Jesus keeps it up, right to the very end. Having stood their traditional notions of authority, God, election and covenantal faithfulness on their heads, Jesus here delivers the coup de grace. “The Last Judgment,” he says, “is not what you expect it to be! Nothing like it!” In Jesus’ hands, the parable of the sheep and the goats joins together two issues: the Jewish expectation of the culmination of history and the meaning of true discipleship.
The culmination of history in Jewish expectation was the eschatological pilgrimage of the nations to Jerusalem for the final “sorting” (cf Isaiah 2). The nations would be judged according to their treatment of Israel. The chosen people would be vindicated and take their rightful place in the world, as Yahweh’s own people. They would “inherit their kingdom, prepared for them from the foundation of the world” (v34). But Jesus radically reinterprets the tradition of Israel as the Suffering Servant (cf Isaiah 53) in terms of himself. The nations, he says, will be judged by their reaction to him! Those who saw him hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, sick or in prison and alleviated his suffering will be welcomed. Those who failed to respond to his suffering are cast out. Jesus, in other words, is like the Son of his earlier parable who is sent into the vineyard, and the tenants are the nations. He, rather than Israel, is to be the measure of all things. It is not only the Easter events themselves, but this parable also, that resulted to the christological reading of the Servant Songs and the increased prominence of the Servant tradition. It is made possible because of the relativising of Israel. If Jesus, rather than Israel, is to be the measure of all things; if the nations are to be judged by their response to Jesus, rather than Israel, then Israel too will be judged as the other nations. Israel has become just one more of the nations (as it were), because Yahweh’s intention is not a global community whose head is Israel, but instead, the new messianic community. The world has become the kingdom of God announced by God’s messiah, Jesus!
The crucial move in the parable, however, is the standard by which judgement is to be made. It is by the treatment of the very least, whom Jesus calls “my family” (v40). In other words, it is the community that Jesus makes with the marginalised that is the touchstone of the entire course of human history! This is not the same thing as the Church. Of course, the Church ought to be that community – the messianic community of the margins – but often isn’t. The treatment of the least, therefore, relativises the Church in the same way as it does Israel’s claim to be the elect community of Yahweh. The “sorting” of the parable includes the sorting of the Church, as well as the nations. Not all those who are Israel are God’s people; not all those who are Church are the messianic community. Here is a parable which cuts through complacency!
Let’s take a closer look at the parable. I am struck by two things immediately. The first is the complete absence of “theology” as a standard of sorting. We preach and teach as though Christian faith was primarily about “getting our theology straight”. Look at Christian history: we have killed on another over how to understand Christ’s presence at Communion, or on the finer points of Christology and the Trinity. Many of us spend most of our time and energy sniffing out “heretics” and evangelising those Christians who believe differently from us in the conviction that they are going to hell. I say “most of us”, because that has been the historical heritage of almost every denomination and movement in Christian history.
The second thing that strikes me is that, although response to the suffering Jesus is the criterion for judgement, no one in the parable recognises Jesus! The sheep and goats respond identically: “But Lord, when did we see you hungry, and thirsty, and naked, and a stranger, and sick, and in prison?” The sheep are not self-righteous! It’s as though they say, rather embarrassedly, “Lord, it’s great that you’re welcoming me, but honesty compels me to admit that I don’t know what you’re talking about! Are you sure you’ve got the right person?” while the goats respond in horrified indignation: “What do you mean, we saw you hungry and did nothing about it? You’ve got the wrong person! I never did that!” And Jesus says the same thing: “It’s about how you treated the very least, whom I call my brothers and sisters. Even though you didn’t realise it, you were doing it to me!”
This identification with the marginalised is what makes the parable densely theological. It relates treatment of neighbour with treatment of God. This is the Matthean equivalent of Luke’s parable of the Good Samaritan: it makes clear how Jesus understands the relationship between the two great commandments to love God and neighbour. The reaction of both the sheep and the goats to the needs of the least is shaped by compassion, or its absence. Just as the pivotal moment of the parable of the Good Samaritan is the point at which the Samaritan (in contrast to the priest and Levite) saw and was moved with pity, so the difference between the sheep and the goats is not that one group recognises Jesus and the other doesn’t, but rather that the sheep see the needs and are moved with pity.
Compassion is at the heart of Jesus’ understanding of fulfilling the Law, doing the work of the kingdom and of God. God’s heart, says Jesus, is filled with compassion. Look at Ezekiel’s image of Yahweh the shepherd in Ezekiel 34: 20ff. Here Yahweh judges not between sheep and goats but between fat sheep and lean sheep. It is the scattered flock that Yahweh will save (v22) – the weaker sheep who have been butted out of the way by their abler, fatter, more powerful brothers and sisters. Yahweh is going to “seek the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the injured and strengthen the weak” (v 16). Absurdly, this Shepherd is going to destroy the fat and the strong! What sort of shepherd does that? Only Yahweh, because the fat and the strong have set out to live at the expense of the weak and the lean. Yahweh is the God who hears the cries of the slaves in Pharaoh’s brickyards, or, to change the image as Ezekiel does here, the Shepherd who hears the cries of the lost, strayed, weak and injured. And saves those, as absurdly as Jesus the Good Shepherd will leave the 99 exposed on the mountain in order to seek the one lost sheep! It is the compassion of God which makes sense of the absurdity of grace.
Jesus is saying something profound about Christian faith and the truth of God. Christian faith is about looking with the eyes, hearing with the ears and responding with the heart as God does in Jesus. It leads to action. Jesus, as the Suffering Servant, is the one who is identified with all who suffer. The God who comes among us in Jesus does not abandon this world to suffering, but shares in it. Where is God in human suffering? In Jesus, God is with those who suffer as one of them.
Yet God is also with the suffering in the persons of those who work to comfort them, aid them and transform their situations. Truth is not something abstract. It is something to be practised. It lives – in concrete actions. It is not what we profess but what we live that discloses the deepest truths we hold about God. Believing is less about the head than it is the heart, because the heart is the deepest part of us – the seat of our deepest loves, convictions and commitments. It is the location for the things we live by. The truths of God are done, rather than spoken.
I learned this lesson when I was in Cambridge in the late 1980s, helping to run Wintercomfort, a charity for homeless people. I was a deacon of a large city-centre Baptist church at the time and Wintercomfort was looking for a place to run a winter night shelter. Our church had just completed a £1 million building project, and had a brand new hall which would have been ideal for the shelter. I was confident that the church would be delighted at the opportunity to make use of the premises for such an obviously good cause. I had to go to the next council meeting and report that permission had been refused by the church meeting, because of concerns that the new badminton floor in the hall would get scuffed. In fact, we received similar rejections from all the mainline city centre churches. The only church that offered to help was the Unitarian church – and they gave us not their hall, but their sanctuary, because they reckoned the hall was too primitively equipped with heating! The shelter was staffed by volunteers. The most difficult slot to fill was the “graveyard shift” – 3am – 5am. Every week, who should come faithfully on his bicycle for this shift but Don Cupitt – he of the Sea of Faith fame (or notoriety) who had abandoned belief in a “real” God for a thoroughgoing ethical interpretation of Christianity. So who were the sheep and who were the goats in that contemporary parable?
Spoken truth is all too often contradicted by lived truth. Yet lived truth makes sense of spoken truth. That is why Paul begins this week’s section in Ephesians with thankfulness for the Ephesians’ faith in Christ, expressed concretely in their “care for the saints” (the Jerusalem collection) in verse 15, and this leads him seamlessly into a glorious, poetical, theological reflection (vv 16ff).
Jesus locates himself firmly in the prophetic tradition: God’s purposes in calling human communities into being which bear God’s name is that they manifest God’s character of love, compassion and passion for justice. This is “lived truth”. It is, says Jesus, the only truth that matters. It is the truth by which we will all be judged, whether nation, church or individual. And he asks of us, “What happens to you and inside you when you see the deepest needs of your world, nation and community?” That is why one of the Five Marks of Mission is “Responding to human need with loving service”. A response which is motivated by compassion, with no thought of reward, is as missionary and as evangelical as any preaching or witnessing. It is powerfully disclosive, even when its intention is [only!] helping someone in need! It bears testimony to Christ the King, proclaiming, in Graham Kendrick’s words, “This is our God, the Servant King!”
Amen.
14:05 Posted in Ephesians , Ezekiel , Matthew , Year A | Permalink | Comments (3) | Email this