Wednesday, 31 May 2006
Pentecost Year B
NIGHTMARE!!! BlogSpirit have totally ruined this! I've created a new site (better layout!) on WordPress. This same article is there and it's clear. The address is http://wolabcd.wordpress.com/ Please leave a comment to show you've managed to find it! Thanks. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ Ezekiel 37: 1-14 Psalm 104: 24-34; 35b Romans 8: 22-27 Acts 2: 1-21 John 15: 26-27; 16: 4b-15 Well, folks, blogSpirit have done the dirty on me! They've made this a paying service. As an existing user, I don't have to upgrade to a paid account. Surprisingly (NOT!) I chose not to. But they've taken away the formatting features - hyperlinks to texts, bold, italic, pictures etc. Can't even get into the HTML settings to code! There are no line breaks, so I've done the only thing I can do and demarcate the sections by lines. I'm so sorry. PLEASE GO TO THE NEW ADDRESS ABOVE!!! HERE IT IS AGAIN: http://wolabcd.wordpress.com/ __________________________________________________________________________________________________ “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16: 7). Hmmm. Jesus or the Spirit? Which would we rather have, I wonder? How would we feel if we heard those words? Comforted? Excited? Would our reaction be to say, “Okay, Jesus – you be getting along now. Hurry up – not that we want rid of you, you understand, but seeing as you’ll send the Spirit …” Personally, I don’t think so. I’d want to open negotiations: “Right, Jesus: that’s one option. Now if I understand you correctly, we can’t have both – so what about you staying and we do without the Spirit? Do we get another choice here?” I’d be unconvinced. Jesus wasn’t. He’s not spinning this one and trying to make the disciples feel better about something bad – his imminent departure to the Father. He’s quite genuinely clear here: “It’s to your advantage that I go away and the Spirit comes”. Why? __________________________________________________________________________________________________ The priority of Jesus’ mission One obvious reason is that Jesus’ priority is his mission, not about making deep personal friendships with the disciples. Let’s be clear: that is not the same thing as saying those personal relationships were unimportant for Jesus. Here in John’s gospel, in the farewell narrative, Jesus has talked constantly of his love for them. He has told them that they are no longer servants, but friends. He has prayed earnestly for them, focusing his entire attention on this very special group of people. So this isn’t about lack of affection – it’s about the priority of his mission that Jesus assumes his disciples share. And the clear implication in John’s gospel is that they do. Look at the preceding verses: “None of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ But because I have said these things, sorrow has filled your hearts”. The disciples, in other words, know both that Jesus is going to the Father and that he must. They don’t try to argue him out of it, or protest, or break down at the prospect. They have shared his life and love, and so they share his priority. They have learned to look at the world through Jesus’ eyes, and share his breadth of vision. They have already learned from Jesus that they have a task – to carry on what Jesus started with them. Only now, they move from being learners to centre stage. The next scene is theirs! They understand that. There is a widespread Christian spirituality that finds it incredibly difficult to move from the comfort and celebration of a personal relationship with Jesus to a shared passion for the world. It’s the “me and Jesus” theology of a great deal of evangelical piety. “Me and Jesus” is not a problem – in fact, it’s vital! One of the difficulties I have with a great deal of liberal theology and piety that is strong on involvement in the world is that it is woefully short on individual relating to God in Jesus Christ. God is embarrassingly intimate! That’s no clearer than in John’s gospel. While we might find it inappropriate to imagine that God would want to get as up close and personal as being concerned about each of us as individuals is concerned, the God revealed by Jesus has no such qualms. I find myself getting incredibly impatient and frustrated with the “either/or” choices forced on us by the classic liberal/evangelical divide. Why should it be that passion for the world should be separable from passionate relationship with God? And how can it be that passionate relating to God slips so easily into a privatised, individualised selfishness that shuts out the world and its crying out for salvation and transformation? Paul echoes the cry of the universe in Romans 8: 22: “The whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now”. He plays with two images: creation in bondage to decay, and as a mother in labour, straining to give birth to a new creation that is all God intends for it. God’s saving grace is a response to the world’s need. The scope of salvation is as great as creation – it is global! Just as the slaves “groaned” in the brick-pits of Egypt and their cry reached Yahweh’s ears, creation “groans” and God hears and responds. There is an aching at the heart of the universe for God, even when that aching finds no echo in rebellious human hearts. There are those lines in one of the hymns that are both true but dangerously open to misinterpretation: “Was it the nails, O Saviour/that bound Thee to the Tree?/Nay, ‘twas Thy love – Thy wondrous love/Thy love for me … for me!” That is true. Jesus loves each of us with that same passionate commitment. Karl Barth was asked near the end of his life what the greatest truth he had discovered was. The interviewer was expecting some typically Barthian profound piece of theology – and he got it! Barth answered, “Jesus loves me, this I know/for the Bible tells me so”! But Barth would never have bought into the notion that the whole scope and plan of salvation could be reduced to “me”. Jesus loves “me” because he loves the world. I am saved because salvation is for the whole world. And, Barth says, “I” am saved, not for my own personal enjoyment of salvation (important and wonderful though that is), but in order to become part of God’s mission of transforming all of created reality into the kingdom. That is why Jesus is able to say what he does to the disciples here in John’s gospel. The disciples have work to do, and they cannot do it without the Spirit. He knows that, and so do they. If they are to move from being disciples into their new role as apostles (cf John 15: 27, 16: 8-11). Unlike me, the disciples do not carp, complain or cajole. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ The triumph of the kingdom The second reason for Jesus saying that it is better if he goes and sends the Spirit has to do with the importance of the kingdom. This is not a category used by John, although it was undoubtedly Jesus’ primary category. In John, the Kingdom is transposed into something identical in meaning: the Reign of God. He doesn’t do this by talking about the Reign of God, but via the purpose of the cross. John, you remember, portrays the crucifixion as Jesus’ coronation and enthronement. His “lifting up” (complete with crown of thorns and declaration, “This is the King of the Jews” in all the known languages of the world) is the means by which Jesus “will draw all people to himself”. The crucified Christ is the visible sign of what Timothy Rees captures so beautifully eloquently in his hymn: “God is Love, so Love forever/o’er the universe must reign”! If Love is to reign over the universe, then the present powers and order must be defeated and destroyed. Jesus tells us what that order is: sin, righteousness and judgement (16: 8-11). The world is disordered because of sin. Human beings were created as children of the Light. The true Light has come into the world in Jesus, but “people love the darkness rather than the Light”. Sin cuts us off from our nature and heritage as children of God. The role of the Spirit is to bring the Light that exposes darkness for what it is, and to win and woo people into the Light where Life is to be found. The present order – the world as we have made it – is an order of retribution and deserts. There is no room for grace in it. The extravagant love of God that is shown in giving the Son for the world is seen through distorted eyes. Instead of being received joyfully as a gift, Jesus is crucified. In this sense, Jesus can define sin as “They did not believe in me” (v9). It is not a point about Christianity vs Islam (for example): it is about the wilful inability of sinful human beings to recognise God when God walks among us. Sin likewise distorts notions of righteousness. In a world of retribution and just deserts, grace is a major stumbling block – “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence”, as Paul puts it. On a “just deserts” reading, Jesus cannot be righteous. “Righteous” in John’s theological lexicon means “from God/God-like”. John presents Jesus as the one who makes God known because he has come from the Father. Look again at John’s programmatic 1:18: “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known”. In other words, Jesus here is making a similar point about righteousness as he does about sin. If it is true that “whoever has seen me has seen the Father”, the challenge of Jesus is to look at him and to recognise, “God’s like that!” Or, as David Jenkins puts it, “God is. He is as he is in Jesus; therefore there is hope”. And how is God portrayed in Jesus? As grace! As Love! But the eyes distorted by sin see him on the cross as “stricken by God and accursed”. This cannot be righteousness! This cannot be what God is like! Hence Jesus says, “I am going to the Father” – in other words, God is vindicating Jesus’ claim to be the manifestation of God on earth. Jesus’ ascension is God’s testimony: “I am who I am in this man!” It is the work of the Spirit to cure blindness: to open people’s eyes to look at Jesus and see God as Love and Life. The sentence of death by crucifixion was judgement upon the so-called King of the Universe. However, it wasn’t the judgement that people thought they were passing! They thought they were passing judgement on Jesus. Ironically, they were lifting up the King of the Universe for all to see, and in so doing, passing judgement on the Pretender to the throne. The cross was Jesus’ coronation, and therefore the condemnation of the ruler of the world – the one to whom human beings have handed control. Here is John’s equivalent of Mark’s Jesus as the one who plunders the house of the Strong Man (Satan). The things that we put in place of God do not free us – they bind us. These are the things of darkness and death. The Spirit is the Spirit of resurrection – the power of God over death itself. She is the Spirit of Life. The condemnation of the ruler of the world makes possible the freedom to be found in the reign of the risen and glorified Jesus – Life in all its fullness. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ The first fruits of the new creation (Acts 2: 1-21/Romans 8: 22-27) The Spirit-fired apostles burst on the Jerusalem scene that first Pentecost with the startling announcement that the Good News is not just good news for the Jews. Their messianic hopes are exposed by the resurrection as hopelessly parochial and self-centred. The announcement is to be heard everywhere and by everyone. And they all hear it – in their own languages! The resurrection is a gigantic stone heaved by God into the world, and its ripples are beginning to spread “from Jerusalem, through Judea, Samaria and to the uttermost ends of the earth”. God isn’t just interested in sorting out the Jewish people’s problems – God is in the business of transforming the world! God is not the tribal God of a small, insignificant nation, but is God of all the nations. The God who broke the power of Pharaoh is the God who will smash all systems that enslave, oppress and kill. And how should we know this? Because the Spirit is being poured out … on all flesh. These are the Last Days. This is salvation time! Look at how the Spirit smashes boundaries. Sons, daughters, young people, old people, slaves, men and women: these are all ancient categories of divisions in society. Each had different worth in a hierarchical structure, with men at the top and female slaves at the very bottom. Resurrection is about a new world order. That’s the content of the “dreams and visions”! I’ve often heard it said that young men see visions because they look ahead to the future, whereas old men dream dreams because they look back to the past. Not so! Dreams and visions here are synonymous. Joel goes on to talk about “portents and signs” – apocalyptic language denoting an event of cosmic significance. “Turning the sun into darkness and the moon into blood” are symbolic of the death of the old order, which gives way to a new order of salvation in which “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Acts 2: 21). The pouring out of the Spirit is a sign of the universal salvation that God has brought about in Jesus. This is the Good News – the new creation! The Spirit is described by Paul as “the first fruits” of the new creation – creation liberated from bondage to decay and death (to futility). That is the content of hope and of “the glory that is about to be revealed to us” (v18). The Christian hope is not about escape from earth to “heaven”, but of a transformed earth – heaven on earth. Salvation is life for a world of death. Resurrection, personal salvation and a transformed creation all belong here together in Paul’s thinking, and the key is the Spirit. Look at vv 9-11. Whoever has the Spirit dwelling in them, says Paul, belongs to Christ, because the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ. Furthermore, it is by the Spirit that God raised Jesus from the dead. Therefore be assured, says Paul: if this is the Spirit of Life who raised Christ from the dead, then you will have the very life of God in your mortal bodies! It is through the Spirit of Christ that we share in Jesus’ relationship to God as adopted children (vv 14ff). Our experience of the global order of sin and death is a personal reality. We experience it in our bodies. Resurrection and salvation are equally to be personal realities, experienced through our mortal bodies. Yet our experience, however personal and individual, is not unique. It is the experience of the whole of creation (19ff). The presence of the Spirit, therefore, is a sign – a “down-payment” or “first-fruit” of the promise that this world is to be transformed. That is important. It gives us reason to hope. It prevents the proclamation of a new world from being merely a utopian pipe-dream. The Good News of the salvation for the world that God has effected in Jesus is not just optimistic nonsense. God has started something in Jesus that God intends to bring to completion. But life’s a bitch! If we are honest, the evidence for a new world is not in our favour. It’s been 2,000 years since Paul wrote. We have never had global poverty, starvation and despair on the scale that we do today. Money, unaccountable power, sophisticated means of mass-slaughter and oppression have probably seldom been stronger. The shocking truth is that, for most people on this planet, life is a living hell, and we need to recognise that if it isn’t so for us, that has more to do with accidents of birth and geography than it has to do with the saving power of God! In the face of these kinds of odds and intractable realities, we are called to have faith and keep faith. Faith is different from certainty. We believe against the odds. We are called to have hope in the face of apparent hopelessness – not because Christians are meant to be incurable optimists, but because God raised Jesus from the dead by the Spirit, and the Spirit is afoot! __________________________________________________________________________________________________ New life for dead, dry bones (Ezekiel 37: 1-14/Psalm 104: 24-34, 35b) The Spirit is the breath of God’s life, breathed into all creation. Everything that lives does so because of God’s Spirit. That is what the psalmist says in this psalm of praise to God as creator and provider : “When you send forth your Spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground” (Psalm 104: 30). The link between the Spirit and renewed life for dead things is made in Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. The historical context is that of Judah’s exile and this is a vision in startling language of homecoming. It is a beautiful Old Testament parallel to Pentecost with its resonances of wind (breath), new life and resurrection, isn’t it? Yet I want to focus on its historical context, rather than to make it into an Old Testament version of a New Testament theme. Although the image is of resurrected bodies, it is about the promise of return from exile, not a passage about resurrection! Perhaps surprisingly, most Old Testament scholars agree that the belief in resurrection came very late in the Old Testament period, and that only two passages in the entire Old Testament speak explicitly about resurrection: Isaiah 26:19 and Daniel 12:2! Why focus on this difference, you night ask? The point here is that this is a passage that speaks not about life that endures beyond death, but about life that resumes in the midst of death. Exile was experienced as a living death. The prophetic promise here is that the exile has a time limit: the people’s destiny is to return to the land. That will feel like being dead and living again. And that is an important emphasis for the Church in our postmodern world. Commentators like Brueggemann have accurately cast the Church situation today in terms of exile. We’re a shrinking, aging community whose best years are in the past. We’re no longer at “home” in the world – and that’s not meant positively! We feel lost. The things we once knew have disappeared. The old answers do not work any more. Vibrancy and confidence are ebbing away. The Church is alive – but it feels as though we are living in an alien land and, in many ways, as though we’re the “living dead”. Ask most young people today what they think of the Church and they’ll describe it in precisely those same terms: “the living dead”. We’re seen as an institution past its sell-by date, inhabited by people equally past their sell-by date. Our buildings, hymns and practices are monuments to a past that has long gone: we just haven’t realised it! Pentecost is a word of prophecy and promise to the Church in a postmodern age. The Church lives by the Spirit, and the Spirit is irrepressibly the source of Life and renewal. If we are in exile, that exile has a time limit. It is time actively to reconnect with God’s Spirit. The message of hope – the Good News of what God has done in Jesus to save the world – still needs to be heard. It has no sell-by date! The message of a world that needs transforming is as fresh and needed as ever it was – perhaps more so than at any time in living or recent memory. There is still a missionary task to be completed, and that means that God still has need of a faithful community of witnesses. Yet to be effective, we need to let go of the past and find new ways. Just as the exile forced the people to rethink their faith from the ground up, so our own exile requires a similar, courageous and faithful act of re-imagination. That sort of re-imagination is impossible without the Spirit. And it is exceedingly possible through the Spirit! It is time to heed God’s words to Ezekiel: these dead, dry bones can live! We are the people into whom the Spirit can breathe new life. We can live again – now! We need to ask ourselves, though, what our dreams and visions are about. If they are simply a hankering after the past, and dreams about a Church “restored to former glory”, we can forget it! The world has changed, and we are in exile because we have not changed along with it. We are an irrelevance at present – and deservedly so. The world has got the measure of the powerful possibilities of change and of a new future (however much we might want to criticise the content of that vision). The Church, meanwhile, behaves as all venerable human institutions do: it changes only by being dragged kicking and screaming into a new reality, and always remains reactionary and several years out of date. Perhaps the greatest challenge we still face is of finding the courage and resources to let go of our obsession with making the world in our own image. When our “visions” and “dreams” become something other than “getting in large crowds to make them like us”, then we will have begun dreaming God’s dreams! We are not creaking and dying on our feet for lack of people: we have fewer and fewer people because we are dead and dry. Exile didn’t create the dead dryness: exile happened because of it! It’s time we faced up to our situation as God’s judgement on what we had become long before we started declining and decaying. God’s judgement, however, isn’t meant as a sentence of death. It’s a time of preparation – of pruning, and paring down to the point where we are prepared to take the risk of calling on the Spirit to come and breathe new life into us – however scary, unfamiliar and uncomfortable that might be. But that’s where Life is to be found. That’s our Pentecost. Amen.
23:25 Posted in Acts , Ezekiel , John , Psalms , Romans , Year A | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: Pentecost Year B, Ezekiel 37: 1-14, Psalm 104: 24-34; 35b, Romans 8: 22-27, Acts 2: 1-21, John 15: 26-27; 16:4b-15, the Advocate
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
Monday, 19 September 2005
Pentecost 19
Ezekiel 18: 1-4, 25-32 NRSV text
Philippians 2: 1-13 NRSV text
Matthew 21: 23-32 NRSV text
“Get with the programme!” That is the burden of the texts this week. God is doing something new and unexpected – something that undermines the comfortable notions we have inherited from the past. There is enormous tension in these three texts – a tension that throws into question the authority of the past. The new thing that God is doing challenges us to discern God in the unexpected and to have the courage to put away inherited understandings. In so doing, we will be freed to respond to God in new, life-giving ways. Yet if we fail to discern the activity of God, or fail to muster the necessary courage to revise what we might always have held to be self-evidently true, we will miss God’s kairos and find ourselves paralysed by the past.
Israel is in exile. The proverb of Ezekiel 18: 2-4 (cf Jeremiah 31:29-30) sounds like a tribal saying, asserting the solidarity of the community of Israel over the generations. Decisions made by one generation affect subsequent ones. This is the wisdom of ages. Yet the exile undermines the truth of the proverb. The proverb is a recipe for inaction and helpless quietism. If it is true that the exile is punishment of the present generation for the sins of their forebears, then there is nothing to be done other than patiently to endure it. There is no creative space for new responses and new possibilities. Both exilic prophets (Ezekiel and Jeremiah) want to assert that the present is the arena for new, creative and life-giving responses to a God who wills Life. In order for that to happen, the authority of the old proverbial wisdom must be defeated.
Walter Brueggemann makes the point that the crisis of received wisdom is characteristic of any society undergoing rapid change. New experience throws into question accepted wisdom. This is particularly difficult to handle when the received wisdom leans close to biblical wisdom. These apparently self-evident truths are deeply-rooted social coping mechanisms. They give us an interpretive grid for “reading” society and “keeping intact a known, manageable, social world” (Brueggemann).
We in the Church are living through a time of enormous upheaval. The old answers don’t deliver any more. The social fabric is changing beyond recognition and we are adrift. It is, for many, a terrifying time. There are no guarantees because old formulae simply don’t apply, or don’t work. While many of us talk about “new ways of being church” and the church of the future being unrecognisable from the way it is now, we fear the open-endedness of what we proclaim and feel lost in the unknown. Many more of us, like Israel in the exile, cling ever more tenaciously to the old wisdom and the old ways in order to have a compass bearing and sense of control. But, the prophet warns, this won’t work.
The problem is that our God is the God of new wine! And new wine cannot be contained in old wineskins. The old wineskins burst at the seams. Jahweh asserts through the prophet that it is this generation that is called to faithful response. This is our hour! God is doing something new that breaks our previous categories. We are called to a new paradigm of living and believing that renders the old as obsolete as Copernicus’ discovery that the earth orbits the sun and not vice-versa. But what are the Israelites supposed to discover? They are supposed to discover that they have not been taken into exile to die as punishment for the sins of their forebears, but to respond to God and live! “Why will you die, o house of Israel? Turn then, and live” says God.
The Parable of the Two Sons has a similar theme. I have always read this parable as Jesus asserting the importance of orthopraxis (right action) over orthodoxy (good theology!). That is certainly one of the implications of the parable. But read in context, there is another, different emphasis. What sparks the parable is a debate about Jesus’ authority for doing what he does. God is doing something new in Jesus that began with John the Baptist. This new thing is happening outside the religious structures and wisdom of the past. This is what is behind the question about authority. For the chief priests and elders, Jesus’ ministry provokes a crisis. If he is from God, then God is not acting as they suppose God ought to act! Received wisdom doesn’t give them a structure for making sense of Jesus or responding to God. The reason for Jesus’ apparent hard-heartedness and refusal to explain is made clear. In posing the question of whether John’s baptism is from God or of human origin, he is asking, “Are you prepared to see God in new and unexpected ways? Have you the courage to throw over your safe, accepted notions of truth?” When they will not commit themselves to an answer, Jesus refuses to discuss it on their terms, but instead poses the question in the form of the parable.
Jesus is not unsympathetic to their difficulty. When the faith and wisdom of the ages is challenged, it is right to be suspicious! But we must not allow faithful caution to paralyse us from new response and understanding. The key to the parable is the reaction of the first son. His initial reaction is to refuse his father, but “later he changed his mind and went” (v29). This becomes the accusation against the religious leaders: “even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him”. In other words, initial scepticism is not condemned, but a refusal to be open to change is evidence of a hard-heartedness and resistance to God that ends in death, not life.
The humility of Christ in the Philippians hymn is yet one further instance of the challenge to discern God acting in totally unexpected, new and offensive ways. If Jesus is the eternal Son of God, then the journey of humility that ends in the scandalous death on the cross is profoundly un-godlike! It is beneath divine dignity! And yet it is the profoundest moment of God’s self-revelation, grace and salvation, for those who have eyes to see. For those who will not, it is “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence”.
It is grace that makes God so startlingly unpredictable and dangerous. God is dangerous because God continually confounds our expectations. Grace destroys the boxes in which we place God. Just when we think we have God taped, God floods our wineskins with new wine, demanding that we throw over our old valuations, our old theology, our old way of being church. This is not to say that God is capricious! It is to understand what Jesus tells us in John’s gospel: “God is Love!” God has a passion for this world that will not be thwarted. When God acts in grace, we rush to control the unexpected. We assume that “This is it! We’ve understood! God cannot surprise us again!” Why else do we find the battles of the Reformation still being fought and re-fought?
What these passages challenge us so strongly to recognise is that God is sovereignly free in grace to change the rules! If we refuse the grace of one method of working, God simply changes the rules and acts anew to woo and win us. God did it in Ezekiel’s day. God did it in Jesus and God is doing the same in our post-modern, post-Christian world. We are called to a more fearless faith and challenged to discern God’s acting for our living and flourishing. God’s call is the same to us in the present exile of the Church today as it is to Ezekiel’s hearers: “Why will you die? I have no pleasure in the death of anyone. Turn, then, and live!”
Amen.
23:50 Posted in Ezekiel , Matthew , Philippians , Year A | Permalink | Comments (3) | Email this