Tuesday, 16 May 2006
Easter 6 Year B
Acts 10: 44-48 NRSV text
Psalm 98 NRSV text
Genesis 35: 9-15 NRSV text
1 John 5: 1-6 NRSV text
John 15: 9-17 NRSV text
There are all sorts of interesting pairings in the lectionary passages: love and obedience, abiding and joy, self-sacrifice and friendship, being chosen and bearing fruit, faith and the Holy Spirit, parents and children, belief and birth, name and nation-building. The common factor is the “if this, … then that …” dynamic. It’s about consequences. Matters of faith and theology – belief and spirituality – are not meant to be confined to the head and heart, to the interior, psychological life of believers. They are to make a difference here and now, otherwise they are empty and not “true”. I have said it before, but it needs saying time and time again: it needs to make a difference because salvation is for this world! It needs saying because we inhabit a tradition that has spiritualised and individualised salvation, focussing on “If you died, where would you be tonight?” It’s as though the only interesting and important question is what happens to us after this life, when we have escaped from this world. Then this life is nothing but preparation for death and beyond, and this world an unfortunate waiting place where we have to kick our heels until real life and reality kick in. That is an easy response from people who have an easy life and little to fear from this world: poverty, despair, oppression and starvation. But it is also a temptation for those whose life is a living hell and who have given up hoping that God’s promises of life in Jesus Christ are Good News to the world in which they struggle desperately to live to see another day. Both are faithless in the same way, albeit for different reasons.
John’s gospel, more than the others, has lent itself to this sort of dualistic, world- and body-denying interpretation. The problem is that it is the most explicitly “theological” of the gospels. That is not to say that the other gospels are in any way less theological: it is just that theology comes even more to the fore in John’s gospel than in the others. If there is a “Messianic Secret” in the synoptic gospels, for example, John is at pains to leave the readers in no doubt as to who Jesus is! But that has meant that generations of exegetes have been able to ignore John’s dynamic connection between theology and practice at the expense of theology. To “believe” thus becomes a matter of “getting your head around doctrine”, rather than to trust. It becomes enough to talk at length about the inner relations of the Godhead, without recognising that John intends these “truths” to become incarnate – to take flesh in the world in Jesus-like actions.
Theology and Jesus-shaped living
For John, good theology results in more faithful living. That is as it should be. Look at what he says in vv 10-11, for instance: obedience (a thoroughly Jewish concept) is good an proper – but if we understand that Jesus is God incarnate (the concrete manifestation of divine love), we will begin to realise – and experience – obedience as love and joy, rather than cold duty. And that results in a very different sort of spirituality and experience of God! It means, furthermore, that we begin to understand faithful living differently: our Christ-like actions are not just about “doing the right thing”, but disclose God, because they are instances of God’s “love in action” (just as Jesus was). Obedience is “lived love” – and it is joyful!
John wants us to discover the abundance of life that God has for us in Jesus. Joy is a vital part of that. Isn’t it ironic that the picture most ordinary people have of Christians is of dour, joyless, duty-urgers, whose first words always seem to be “Thou shalt not …”? We are still plagued by a Puritanism that stifles abundant life. Someone once characterised a Puritan as “a person haunted by the suspicion that someone, somewhere, is happy!” That could well describe so many church-goers today.
Love, says John, is Jesus-shaped (v12). It is self-sacrificial. It is seen in laying one’s life down for one’s friends (v13). Jesus here points back to the foot washing (chapter 13) and forward to the crucifixion. John hammers the point home again: Jesus laid his life down. It was voluntary self-sacrifice. He didn’t have to do it and wasn’t forced to do so.
This leads on to the new relationship with the disciples that the resurrection has made possible. The disciples move from being servants to friends. There’s something deeper in John’s gospel about friendship, though. “I call you my friends,” says Jesus, “because I have made known everything I have heard from my Father” (v15). Friendship in this case means being drawn into the family life of God. The “our Father”, in John’s gospel, is Jesus saying, “Your Father and mine”. As Jesus’ friends, we move from being followers and learners to friends and family. We are to be Jesus in the world. And we share in Jesus’ intimate access to God: in the task of saving the world (3:17), we, like Jesus, can ask God for what we need in the confidence that God hears us obedient children. God delights in us, and gives us delight.
Parents and children (1 John 5: 1-6)
John closes the previous chapter by reminding us: if love is about concrete actions, we cannot claim to love God if we hate our brothers and sisters. If we accept less in life for them than we do for ourselves, we do not love them. They are not “them” – they are “us” (brothers and sisters). Now he swings the equation round. If you love God, you will love others. If God is the parent, we will love God’s children. Further, we know we are children because we are obedient – we obey God’s commandments. And God’s commandments are summarised in love.
Conquering the world
This is dangerous language! Human beings are always up for conquering the world and imposing themselves on others, and Christians are no exception! But John means something different from world dictatorship by the Church! “Conquering the world” is about overcoming all that is ranged against God. In his gospel, John refers to that as “darkness”. Jesus is Light. The Light has come into the world, and the darkness has never been able to put it out/defeat it. Note that this form of “conquest” is not about annihilation! It is about transformation. Jesus has come not to condemn the world, but to save (transform) it. The transformative power of God – the power that death cannot vanquish – is the power of love. Jesus on the cross in John’s gospel is King of all the world. The power by which he reigns is the power of love. That is the conquest – the triumph of Life, Light and Love.
But that only happens, says John, because Jesus is the Word made flesh. Jesus was truly human. He didn’t only appear to be human (as though he was actually God and not human at all): he was a real person. This is what John is driving at in the rather mysterious verse 6. Some in John’s church were denying that Jesus was a human being whose entire life was that of a fully human being. There were two different mistakes being made, both of which had profound consequences for salvation and life in the world.
The first was what came to be known as adoptionism. Jesus was an ordinary human who, at his baptism, received the Spirit and was adopted as God’s Son (as Paul says we are). They would say that Jesus “came by water only”. However, for these believers, it was inconceivable that Jesus on the cross was divine. The Spirit left him at the crucifixion, and Jesus died as an ordinary human being. This isn’t just some quaint theological tiff from the second century. The significance is that these people denied that God could be involved in death and darkness. The Spirit’s leaving Jesus was a divine “escape plan” from human sinfulness. But then salvation is something radically different. This world isn’t saved by Jesus – it is abandoned by God! Darkness does overcome the Light! Jesus is not ruler of the world – the powers that enslave are! And while we might be rescued from this world and the powers at death, salvation is for somewhere else.
The other, opposite error is docetism (from dokeo, meaning “to seem”). Here Jesus only seems human, but is in fact divine and not subject to human error and weakness. Then the cross is about God triumphing – but salvation can’t have anything to do with transformed human living! It is meaningless to urge people to “live like Jesus” if that is impossible for humans to do! It is pointless and cruel enjoining us to “obey God’s commandments” if human beings, filled with the Spirit, are unable to do so. It is because Jesus was human that he shows us what abundant life means for human beings – life we are meant to experience here and now.
No, says John, neither of these will do. Jesus is God incarnate as a human being. The Spirit doesn’t make us “superhuman” but truly human – able to live as Jesus did and relate to both God and the world as Jesus did. It also means that human destiny is to be children of God.
Names and mission (Genesis 35: 9-15)
We need to read the incident of the renaming of Jacob in this light. Jacob the individual is to be Israel, father of nations. This personal blessing from Yahweh is not just for Jacob to enjoy personally here and now. What Yahweh is doing for Jacob is in order to bless the whole earth. Symbolically, Jacob is representative of a nation under Yahweh and thus of the whole earth under Yahweh. The blessing is not exhausted in Jacob’s lifetime, but will be fulfilled over millennia.
How often do we take the long term view in our instant world of today? Our consumerist society tells us the key question to ask is, “What’s in it for me?” Yet when God calls us – chooses us, as John reminds us – God’s purposes are global. Our salvation is part of the wider picture of the salvation of all creation. We are either obsessed with the here-and-now (by which we mean “today, and maybe as far head as next week”) or the hereafter. Neither of these is Christian. The images of mustard seeds and huge trees, and parables of growth encompass huge lengths of time. God’s long-term is long! After all, if we think in terms of days, the bible reminds us, God thinks in terms of 10,000 year increments!
What does this mean? It means we ought to be encouraged when we see very little effect from our actions in the world. Jesus didn’t, after all! We ought not to be discouraged or depressed, but to keep the faith. But more significantly, it means that we ought to be concerned with the world as it will be long after we’re gone! There is no place in faithful living for the short-termism that exhausts our natural resources now and leaves nothing for our great-grandchildren. Global warming, as the adverts tell us, is not a problem for this generation, but for our children and grandchildren. When we squander the earth’s resources, we squander our children’s salvation!
It’s the Spirit … (Acts 10: 44-48)
Salvation for the world. The whole world! We talk about it, and make it sound wonderful. And in the back of our minds, we usually have the unspoken assumption that it means everyone becoming like us. It’s comfortable. The reality is different. The world is not just “us and ours” writ large – it encompasses people radically unlike us. Those differences are differences of culture, “race”, political persuasion, sexual orientation, gender … all the things that cut us off from sections of humanity. Salvation is uncomfortable, because God doesn’t accommodate God’s saving purposes to us. Salvation does not mean that the things we find offensive, scary, foreign, alien and incomprehensible about other people and places will be done away with.
That was the very thing that the Jewish Christians found so utterly impossible to comprehend when Gentiles received the Spirit. Their assumption was that the Gentiles first had to become good Jews – or at least, Jewish imitators! They were looking for converts who would gradually become more and more like them. After all, surely God didn’t value all those foreigners as much as God valued them? This couldn’t be happening!
But it was! And it changed the face of Christianity. Instead of being a form of Jewish messianism, it became an international phenomenon – particularly with Paul’s ministry. There were radical differences in its forms, too. The Church in Corinth was as unlike the Jerusalem Church as it was possible to be. The gospel became incarnate in other places and cultures – and faith took on those same different hues.
We want people to join our churches. What is it that we expect to happen? Do we expect them to become “assimilated” into our ways, and become like us? Or are we open to the work of the Spirit, so that we might become more like them? We hear the same sorts of protests about “foreigners” in the UK: “We wouldn’t mind if they behaved and thought like the British, but they don’t! They expect to be allowed to dress differently in schools, and demand we take account of their customs!” A world faith celebrates diversity and difference. It wrenches us out of the comfort of the familiar and the assurance that what we have known is how things ought to be.
But does God intend these differences? It is the question of difference that has so agonised Christians over the centuries. The issue of slavery is rooted in racial difference, as was Apartheid and the Civil Rights struggle. The Cold War was about competing socio-political differences. The issue of the ordination of women is a question rooted in gender difference. And the hot potato of our time – the sexuality debate – is about differences of sexual preference. How are we to find our way to discovering the mind of God? We ought to take a leaf out of Peter’s book, and the debate over the place of Gentiles in the Church. It’s the same test that ahs proved so decisive in the struggles over difference down through the centuries, and is devastatingly simple: to whom does God give the Spirit? And if God pours out the Spirit upon black people, poor people, people of other cultures and on homosexuals, who can withhold the recognition that these all are our brothers and sisters in Christ – equal participants in a salvation that encompasses the world?
Amen.
23:22 Posted in 1 John , Acts , Genesis , John , Psalms , Year B | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this | Tags: Bible Study
Monday, 06 March 2006
Lent 2 Year B
Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16 NRSV text
Romans 4: 13-25 NRSV text
Mark 8: 31-38 NRSV text
Mark brings us to the midpoint of his narrative at a key moment in the structure of his gospel. It is a deeply significant transition point. The key is not in this week’s passage, but in the immediately preceding pericope. The narrative, like Jesus, changes direction. From a series of “journeys” in the Galilee with narrative sites of sea, boat and wilderness, centred upon his home in Capernaum, Jesus begins a new journey. It is a journey from the margins of Palestine to its centre. Starting in the far north of Mark’s narrative “world” (Caesarea Philippi), he slowly winds his way south, back down through Galilee (making one last stop at Capernaum, 9:33) and on into Judea (10:1). Yet it is not until the third cycle of the book that Mark reveals the destination: Jerusalem (10:32).
Why bother with geography? The answer is because Mark doesn’t just give us an outline of Jesus’ missionary itinerary! Mark’s gospel is a story about discipleship – about following Jesus. Like Luke, he uses the artificial narrative construction of a journey. Places and journeys are important because they indicate direction and purpose. The first half of the story is set around the Galilee – on the margins. Here we find an eager receptiveness to Jesus and his message (albeit with opposition, but this comes from the “outside” – particularly from Jerusalem and the Temple). Now Jesus is changing direction and focus. He is beginning a new journey whose destination is Jerusalem. The journey towards Jerusalem is the narrative symbol for the new emphasis – the way of the cross. In 8:27b Mark tells us that they were “on the way” (en te hodo) – the way to Jerusalem and the way of the cross.
The phrase introduces an “edge” to the narrative. This narrative journey will disclose increasingly who Jesus is (the one who must suffer) and intensifying conflict and direct confrontation with the powers ranged against him. Yet the focus is on the disciples. How will they react to “the way”? Will they understand? Will they “see” and “hear” what Jesus is telling them? Most importantly, will they follow, or will the way of the cross prove (literally) a step too far?
There is a clear narrative pattern to “the way”. It occurs again in 9:31 and 10: 32-34, and in each case – as here – the pattern is repeated: Jesus tells the disciples that “the way” is the way of suffering and death; the disciples resist this; Jesus then teaches them further about discipleship and what it means to follow him.
That is why the change of direction results immediately in Jesus’ question: “Who do you say that I am?” This is not only the midpoint of the story, but also the narrative fulcrum around which the whole gospel pivots. Who do you believe Jesus is? Which Jesus will you follow – the Jesus who travels the way of the cross, or the glorious, triumphant Jesus the disciples desperately want him to be? Or will it be a Jesus of your own making?
If you want to become my followers …
Peter’s confession – “You are the Messiah” – is followed immediately by the first of the passion predictions. “It is necessary (dei) for the Son of Man to undergo great suffering … etc”, says Jesus. The stress here is on the inevitability of what will happen. Jesus is not talking here about predestination. This is not a story about Jesus following a divine “script”, in which he, the Romans and the Jewish authorities are actors whose lines are already mapped out for them. It is a divine script only on the sense that the message of God’s kingdom must provoke the opposition of the powers – those whose final ability to coerce and maintain privilege resides in their power to kill. Jesus is saying, “I want you to have your eyes wide open. This is not about a messianic gravy train for which you have special seats! This is going to end in blood and tears – mine and yours (if you choose to take this particular ride)”.
This is not what the disciples want to hear! Peter’s immediate reaction is to rebuke Jesus. He’s saying, in effect, “Listen, Jesus, when I said ‘Messiah’, this is not what I meant! Being the Messiah has nothing to do with failure, suffering and death! It’s about being the king – about success and power and sovereignty. So let’s have no more of this talk about suffering and death. Stick with us, Jesus – we’ll show you the way!”
Now it’s Jesus’ turn to rebuke Peter. And he could not be more shockingly harsh. “Get behind me, Satan!” We’re immediately back in the wilderness of temptation, where Jesus has wrestled with Satan and the wild beasts. Although Mark does not detail the temptations, it is clear from this exchange that their substance has always been the same: to abandon the way of the kingdom that is good news for the poor and bad news for the powerful, and follow another “way” – a way that will bring glory to Jesus and one which the powers can absorb, contain and control. That this alternative exercised the strongest pull on Jesus, and had to be resisted with every ounce of his strength, becomes clear in the Gethsemane narrative.
Mark makes one thing absolutely clear in his gospel: Jesus has a deep, abiding horror of the way of the cross. There is a dangerous tendency in Christian theology and spirituality to think that it was somehow less horrific than it really was. After all (the reasoning goes), if Jesus was divine, well, it must have been a lot easier for him than for us mere human beings! Mark tells us the opposite. Jesus’ relationship to his Father was not a comfort to him as far as the cross was concerned. It made things worse. It threatened his whole sense of identity as Son. That is why he pleads with his Father as a child in Gethsemane for another Way, and dies screaming in bewildered despair to the God he believed had abandoned him.
Nor was resurrection any comfort. Although he tells the disciples “openly” and repeatedly that the Son of Man must suffer, die and on the third day rise again, there is no sense that Jesus drew sustenance from that. In fact, the clear implication seems to be that Jesus did not himself understand quite what rising from the dead might mean – because if he did, he would not have experienced the cross as abandonment by God, but as a necessary step along the “way” to resurrection.
Jesus goes on to spell out what the way of the cross means for any would-be followers. It requires three things: denying self, taking up the cross, and following. There is no other way. If the Lenten journey means anything, it means discovering what this entails – just as it did for the disciples. It is not about giving something that we like up, or coping with a difficult situation at work, home or at church. That is to spiritualise and trivialise Jesus’ call. The gospel was written for a community that understood at first hand what persecution meant. It meant being hauled up before the courts and, like Peter, being asked, “Aren’t you one of his disciples?” The temptation is to deny Jesus in order to save our own lives. Jesus tells the disciples, “If you confess me, you deny yourself – because you will be put to death for it! And yet that is actually the way to find (save) your life!”
To “take up the cross” means literally that! The journey Jesus has just begun is the journey of political confrontation. Ched Meyers suggests that the phrase “Take up your cross!” was in all likelihood a recruitment slogan for revolutionary groups – effectively “suicide squads” who were being asked to risk almost certain capture and crucifixion. There is nothing spiritualised or trivialised about Jesus’ call to discipleship here. The message of the kingdom that he proclaims is necessarily the way of the cross because it is the promise and announcement and enactment of a new world order – God’s.
Note that this is a new call. In 1:16ff Jesus calls the first disciples, saying simply, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people”. In other words, there are people who want to hear Jesus’ message, and he invites them to follow and be part of spreading good news that is eagerly received. Now the direction changes. This is a new journey – a journey of confrontation. It bears a deadly cost. And as Jesus enters this new phase of his ministry, he does not say, “Follow me”, but warns the disciples about what is entailed and gives them the opportunity to back out . Lent is about facing the seriousness of discipleship, and wrestling seriously with the question about whether or not we are “up for it”.
The disciples, of course, don’t back out. Instead they decide to keep going – not to discover the way of the cross, not to deny themselves, take up their crosses and follow, but to manipulate Jesus! They reckon that sheer weight of numbers (apart from anything else) and good sense will prevail: there is another way, and they will make sure Jesus follows their way – not vice versa!
Abraham – the example of faith (Genesis 17: 1-7/Romans 4: 13-25)
Romans 4 is Paul’s midrash on the Abraham story. He reflects on the narrative in Genesis 17 when God promised Abraham descendants. He does so in the context of defending himself against the charge by Jewish Christian opponents that his success among Gentiles is that he has made it too easy for them to become Christians, because he does not insist on them becoming Jews and obeying the Law. His doctrine of justification by faith, rather than through covenantal faithfulness, is cheap grace.
Not so, says Paul. It has always been about faith! And to make his point, he goes back to Abraham – Abraham, the towering figure who, in Judaism, was traditionally venerated for his mighty deeds and endurance when tested. Paul offers a different reading about the significance of Abraham. What is fundamental, he says, is that Abraham was the one to whom God made promises – promises which were unconditional and which Abraham believed. Abraham believed God, says Paul – and that was reckoned to him as righteousness (4:3).
In other words, faith as response to the unconditional promises of God precedes covenant. Grace precedes Law. It is faith that lies at the heart of the response to God, rather than covenantal conditional obedience. Furthermore, argues Paul, Abraham was to be the father of many nations – a promise Paul saw fulfilled in the universalising of the gospel message and the inclusion of the Gentiles.
Now, if faith, which justifies, precedes law-keeping, it also deconstructs what is meant by terms like “righteousness” and “justification”. These terms belong in the context – the semantic range – of Law. They are legal terms. Paul’s opponents understand by “righteousness” a legal status, either achieved through covenantal faithfulness (“works of the Law”) or imputed by God to the unrighteous. That is also how much Christian exegesis of this key Pauline term has proceeded. But Paul is doing something very subtle here. If free promise precedes Law, and faith is the appropriate response, then the “righteousness” of God must be something different from something akin to the legal system! The New Testament scholar Ernst Kasemann argues that Paul understands “righteousness” in a new way – as “the triumphant saving faithfulness of God”. This is what it has always meant if Abraham was “justified” by faith! The “righteousness” of God is actually the Spirit-life – the saving Life – of God in Jesus Christ.
"This makes it possible for Paul to put both Jews and non-Jews on the same level. Ultimately what matters for both is this faith. In our passage he links it to belief that God can do what seems impossible. In Abraham's case it was about whether his aged wife could become pregnant. In the case of Gentiles it is whether people who are not part of Israel can be elevated to become God's people. In the case of Jesus it is whether a dead Jesus can be raised to life. In the case of creation it whether something can be created out of nothing. By linking all these together as he does in our passage Paul is making the claim that the basis of faith is the belief that God can do the seeming impossible. God the creator makes all these things possible. In relation to the issue at hand for Paul: God can elevate Gentiles to become the people of God - as long as they have this kind of faith. It is a way of speaking of God's love. God can love the seeming unlovable and love them back to life." (William Loader)
So much for Paul’s argument in Romans. How are we to read this and the story of Abraham in the context of this week’s lectionary readings? Firstly, we need to note that “faith in the God who can do impossible things” is not the same as saying, “I believe in miracles”! Fundamentalists will insist that literal belief in miracles is essential for true faith. That is not what Paul is arguing. In each case, the “impossible” works of God are about bringing life where no life is possible! In the case of Abraham and Sarah, this is emphasises by the fact that Abraham twice falls on his face – once in worship, and the second time in hysterical laughter at the ridiculousness of the promise (Genesis 17:3, 17)! In other words, the promises, covenant and miracles are all linked to Yahweh’s passionate will to bring life and blessing.
We ought also to recognise the promise that is inherent in the call to discipleship. We stand on the resurrection side of Easter. Jesus, like Abraham, stood on the “not yet” side of God’s promises. Abraham is a pioneer of faith for us because he believed God when he could neither see nor imagine how the promises might be fulfilled! Jesus is the pioneer for our faith because he went through with the cross, without the comfort and assurance that God was with him! Despite the horror and the terror, Jesus did not look for another Way.
And we ought to note that, just as for Jesus – his identity (being Son) would be defined by the way of the cross, so Abram and Sarai have their identities changed by God’s promises – and are given new names to symbolise this. We, too, are encouraged to find our identities – our “lives” – in embracing the way of the cross.
As we stand poised on the first steps of the way of the cross this Lent, we are challenged to take Jesus on his terms, and to resist the determination and temptation to remake Jesus into what we want him to be – to plan another Way for him that we find acceptable and controllable and which does not put our identity on the line. We are challenged to confront our own deep resistance to the way of the cross – and to the Jesus whom we profess to serve. We are faced with the awful possibility that the Jesus whom we follow is none other than a Jesus of our own construction and our own choosing – one who is comfortable, and who blesses out hopes and endeavours, our projects and our prejudices. This is the Jesus who follows after us – who has to deny who he is.
The Jesus we meet in Lent is the Jesus who refuses any way other than the cross. John 14 is John’s meditation upon these same events. Thomas asks the right question, which the disciples fail to see in Mark’s account: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” And Jesus replies, “I am the Way – and the Truth and the Life!” (john 14:6)
Amen.
15:56 Posted in Genesis , Mark , Romans , Year B | Permalink | Comments (3) | Email this | Tags: Bible Study
Tuesday, 28 February 2006
Lent 1 Year B
Genesis 9: 8-17 NRSV text
Psalm 25: 1-10 NRSV text
1 Peter 3: 18-22 NRSV text
Mark 1: 9-15 NRSV text
We’re back into the opening scenes of Mark’s gospel at the beginning of Lent: Jesus’ baptism, temptation and the beginning of his ministry in Galilee. You might like to go back and read the post on Jesus’ baptism (here) and the beginning of the ministry (here). But let’s look at today’s passages through Lenten eyes. There are some important points to note.
Jesus’ baptism (Mark 1: 9-1)
There is a deep ambiguity to water baptism in the account of Jesus’ baptism that isn’t there for the crowds coming to John to be baptised in the immediately preceding passage. For these people, baptism is straightforwardly about repentance and its primary symbolism is about washing. There is nothing threatening about the water.
Jesus is baptised for another reason, however. He doesn’t need to repent. His baptism marks the onset of his ministry – his mission – and is also confirmed in his sonship. In Mark’s gospel, the voice is for Jesus alone to hear, and it is not until the Transfiguration that the heavenly voice is heard by others. There is nothing cosy about being God’s Son, the Beloved, however. This is not a divine pat on the head and fond ruffling of the hair – the “soppy moment” in which the parent hugs the child and saying, “Oh, I do love you!” God reassures Jesus that he is the beloved Son because Jesus is going to have to hang on to that and draw strength from it. This is armour and weapons for the forthcoming struggle – that begins immediately with the temptation. The point (as Mark’s story tells us) is that to be Son means the cross. To be Jesus, with his mission, the affirmation of the heavenly voice is simultaneously the pronouncement of a sentence to suffering and death.
It is through Jesus’ death and resurrection that God is going to effect salvation. Christian baptism (as opposed to John’s baptism) is not only a symbol of being washed clean: it is a symbol of dying and rising (as Paul reminds us). The picture of the person going down into the water is a symbol of dying – of drowning – and resurrection to new life is symbolised by the rising up out of the water. Jesus hears the voice as he rises because Mark is trying to tell us that it functions as symbolic promise: there is resurrection for Jesus, but the cross is unavoidable. And it is because he goes through suffering and death that Jesus is the beloved Son.
The water, then, has less to do with washing than drowning. The picture that baptism in the context of Easter evokes is not the waters of purification but of the Flood. Peter picks this theme up in his letter. And here is the ambivalence of the water: the water saves (just as the 8 people in the ark were saved – 1 Peter 3: 20) but it also destroys. Salvation is resurrection – but only the dead can be resurrected!
There is another important association with the water. “Water” is symbolic of the primeval chaos out of which God “wrests” creation in the Genesis story. The Flood story is the story of the waters of chaos being let loose to destroy once again and to extinguish life. Jesus, in Mark’s gospel, is set in his mission for a conflict against the powers of darkness and death that threaten and destroy. They will finally overwhelm him. He will die drowning in despair. That is his destiny. Out of that despair will come resurrection and new beginning.
So Lent is the time for looking again at our baptism. Baptism commits us – as it did Jesus – to living in the shadow of the cross. If Christian faith and being God’s children guarantees anything, it guarantees suffering! And to the extent that we are able significantly to avoid suffering, we must ask questions about how faithfully we are actually following Jesus.
Jesus’ temptation (Mark 1: 12-13)
Like water, the wilderness has a deep ambivalence. It is the place of deliverance, where Yahweh takes the liberated Hebrew slaves and makes them into a people. It is traditionally the place where God is to be found. Moses discovers the burning bush in the wilderness. Abraham takes Isaac into the wilderness and Isaac is saved. It was the place where prophets went to commune with God and where refugees went for safety. It is the place where John is baptising – the Jordan wilderness near Jerusalem. And now Jesus is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. A place where God is – but also a place of danger and horror. This is also where Satan and the wild beasts are to be faced.
Most hero stories begin with a lone, titanic struggle. The wilderness is Jesus’ proving ground. Note the immediacy: there is no time to enjoy the baptismal experience! It’s straight from the water to the wilderness, for an immediate confrontation with the Strong Man. This is the one who holds sway over the earth that Jesus has come to wrest from him and to establish as God’s kingdom. This is the one who holds people captive through illness, religious fanaticism and demon possession whom Jesus has come to liberate. And Satan is not alone: there are the wild beasts – important in the apocalyptic literature that Mark evokes so centrally. In the background, for Mark, lurks Daniel chapter 7, with the great trial of the earth’s kingdoms and the heavenly Son of Man. It is no accident that the earth’s kingdoms are symbolised by wild beasts. Jesus has come to take on the powers of Imperial Rome, too – one of the mythic wild beasts. And while Round One goes to Jesus, it is Satan and Rome who will have the final word.
Jesus’ ministry (Mark 1: 14-15)
It is against this background of struggle and death that we must understand Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom of God. This is good news! The world will not be left to its own devices, prisoners of the very structures that human beings have created and of powers far greater than they to whom they have handed the world on a plate. Jesus announces, “This is a kairos – the hour of God’s visitation! It is the climax of history! And this is its content: the kingdom of God!”
Jesus’ announcement functions on several levels. It is an announcement of victory – the earth is being liberated! At the same time, it is a declaration of war – the powers are being served notice! It is a promise – this earth will become the kingdom. It is a gift – this is something only God can achieve and will achieve it. And it is a task – this is what Jesus is committing himself to (and by extension, committing his disciples to also).
1 Peter 3: 18-22
Baptism, struggle and mission – the three are intertwined and belong inextricably together. Christian faith is no “holiday from reality”, despite the fact that much Christian preaching seems to offer congregations Jesus as “the ultimate buzz”. Being a child of God does not mean being protected from bad things – from suffering and hardship. And mission will not always be well received! These are things that Peter’s community is discovering in spades – and wishes they weren’t! They are suffering – and that suffering is really trying them. Some are holding on to faith by a fingernail. Suffering has that power. Prolonged suffering, especially, is a costly war of attrition – so costly that even winning it feels like losing.
And so Peter writes to encourage them. He reminds them that this is the sort of world that kills messiahs. That is what happened to Jesus. If people live like Jesus did, chances are they’ll die like he did. And while we might wish that God did things differently, the pattern of Jesus’ life, pictured in baptism not only as a once-for-all thing but as a daily pattern, reminds us of the truth that is as old as the Flood: you don’t get to escape the bad bits! Resurrection lies on the other side of death. Baptism and Christian faith is about participation in that dynamic of suffering, dying and rising.
Jesus, Peter reminds us, suffers for sins “once for all” (v18). He died as a result of his confrontation with “unrighteousness” in solidarity with its victims and those who are “unrighteous” according to the purity system. This is what makes his death a sacrifice rather than simply martyrdom – a sacrifice that brings life. His death is the entry point into resurrection. It is a once-for-all sacrifice because God has raised Jesus from the dead, never to die again. So, says Peter, if you’re suffering for doing right – if you’re suffering for living as Jesus did, involved in the struggle for the kingdom to take shape in the world – then you’re on the right track! You’re being faithful to your baptism.
Genesis 9: 8-17
Suffering. Death. Judgement. Divine wrath. These are not easy or pleasant things to consider. And re-reading the story of the Flood, I am struck forcibly by the awfulness of what the story contains. It is a story of Noah and his family – Noah’s faithfulness to Yahweh and Yahweh’s deliverance. But it is also a story of appalling death and destruction – the utter, inexorable eradication of all life on earth under the heaving waters – and at Yahweh’s hand! This is the reversal of the creation story. Yahweh is undoing what has been done – unmaking what has been made, and killing all that lives.
Here, again, is the dynamic of suffering, death and salvation. Yet it really “bites” in this narrative. The narrative of the rising water, cutting off life in 7:17ff is horrifyingly evocative.
The lectionary passage concerns the re-establishment of the love affair between Yahweh and the world. It is the covenant with Noah, his family and all of creation, with the rainbow as a sign. It is the salvation “bit”; the equivalent of resurrection. But do you notice how you’re left feeling, “It isn’t quite enough – not enough, at least, to blot out the awfulness of what has happened? The guarantee that it won’t happen again is hardly any comfort to the people and animals that have died! That is why it is intriguing that Peter speaks about Christ descending to the dead and proclaiming the good news to the people of Noah’s day. That is one of the things about suffering: it’s good when things change and suffering is stopped, but never enough. It’s always too late for some. And we want to protest! But the story here and the Old Testament remind us about two things:
- We need to recognise the reality and depth of human resistance to God. That is seen in killing Jesus. What we call “sin” is not just the naughty things we do that make the tabloid headlines. Sin can be deadly and destructive. It has consequences. And it offends Yahweh.
- Sin offends Yahweh, but also grieves Yahweh. Yahweh is Judge in the Old Testament, but also the great Lover and the one eager to forgive. So why this wholesale destruction in the Flood (the covenant with Noah notwithstanding?). Why doesn’t God simply forgive? Why all the complicated sacrificial stuff? The Bible confronts us with truths that are at times unpalatable. Judgement and cost: these are inextricable aspects of the story of God’s salvation. There is a deep seriousness to human wrong-doing – sin – that means that consequences cannot simply be bypassed. We can either turn away from them, or we can wrestle with them. God’s anger and judgement could be indicators of a divine, cosmic-sized ego that must be flattered and appeased. Certainly much preaching suggests that this is what God is like. Or they are indicators of God’s grief and refusal to be marginalised. God will not abandon us to the world we create for ourselves. God does not withdraw to a contamination-free zone and leave us to get on with it, but enters into the darkness, seriousness and consequences of human wrong-doing … in order to save.
Both Jewish theology of sacrifice and Christian theology of Easter have always, at their best and most insightful, recognised that it is ultimately God who bears the cost and consequences and loss that sin involves. The Flood is not so much a story of Yahweh’s obliteration of the earth and life as it about the loss Yahweh has to bear of the objects of divine love. Grief frequently manifests as anger – indeed, anger is part of the process of coping with bereavement. There is always loss involved because there is somehow a necessary connection between sin and death. If God is the God of Life, and sin is human refusal to live in communion with God, then sin involves the voluntary cutting off from the source of Life.
This is not a statement about some sort of heavenly legal system. The notion of divine Law can be misleading, because it suggests the context of a court room, with God as the heavenly Law-giver, divine police force and cosmic judge. Instead, we must learn to read the language of sin and salvation as statements about the deep and dark reality of life without God – of the refusal of Life and Love and Spirit. Salvation is not about some sort of forensic tidiness, but about God’s struggle for our liberation from the prison of darkness, despair and death which we have built for ourselves.
This is the story of Mark’s Jesus. And it is the story of the God whom Jesus called Father. That is why the story of salvation is the story of sacrifice – of the loss God suffers as the cost of salvation. Of course, there remains always the question of why God chooses to do it this way. We long for easier, less costly and less bloody ways of achieving the same end. We bridle at sacrifice. Yet the biblical story of salvation is this is the way of Love. It is part of the mystery of God that God is this kind of God and chooses to do it in this way.
Salvation changes God. It involves God in suffering and loss. It is a process – that is the biblical story. And the story of Jesus – particularly of Easter – is that his sacrificial death enables God to do things differently. The powers ranged against Jesus will have their day. They will be allowed to do their damnedest. But God will have the last word – the word of Resurrection. And because of that, Jesus’ death is not just one more sacrifice but the sacrifice, once and for all, as Peter reminds us. If there is no more need for sacrifice – if the consequences of sin have been dealt with once and for all – there remains no need or space for sacrifice – only the free forgiveness of God. This is our faith. The end of the Lenten road is resurrection and Life. This is the Good News.
Amen.
23:50 Posted in 1 Peter , Genesis , Mark , Psalms , Year B | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this | Tags: Bible Study, Reflections on the RCL, Lent 1 Year B, Mark 1: 9-15, 1 Peter 3: 18-22, Psalm 25: 1-10, Genesis 9: 8-17, baptism, temptation
Tuesday, 03 January 2006
The Baptism of Jesus Year B
Genesis 1: 1-5 NRSV text
Psalm 29 NRSV text
Acts 19: 1-7 NRSV text
Mark 1: 4-11 NRSV text
Imagine Mark’s gospel as a great, dramatic play about the meaning and significance of all of creation and human history. It’s opening night, and we are the audience. The play opens with the narrator’s announcement: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God!” Bang! Just like that! No preparations or birth stories. Simply a narrator, who tells us that we are about to witness the Lord himself appearing on stage, preceded only by his herald, or messenger. The narrator leaves the stage, the curtains open, and this marvellously striking and bizarre figure “appears” (v4) – looms up out of nowhere! This is the Baptist. We are into Scene 1 – the wilderness area of the river Jordan. Suddenly, the stage is filled with crowds of people from Jerusalem. People fearful, guilty, excited, full of expectation. Calling out their sins, they are baptised by John in preparation for the appearance of the Lord himself.
What Mark wants to convey to us is the air of feverish expectation. These are people who have come to repent and be baptised, yes, but even more important is the person for whose arrival the baptism is repentance. We can imagine the new arrivals to the bustling scene, looking down at John and all the frenetic activity, and asking, “So is that him? Is that the One?” And in answer to their question, John gives an emphatic “No!” The One who is coming is “more powerful” (a reference to the forthcoming war between Jesus and The Strong Man). Not only is he so far above John importance that the latter is not even worthy to untie the thong of his sandals, but he will baptise with the Holy Spirit!
Then the second actor “appears” on stage. He’s come from the Galilee. In v14, he will return to the Galilee. Just for these few moments, Jesus is here, in the Jordan, among the Jerusalem crowds, within reach of the city (but importantly not there, because what God is doing in Jesus is happening on the edges, away from the temple). He is here, in the shadow of Jerusalem, to be baptised. And at the moment of his baptism, Jesus’ identity and messianic vocation are revealed, not to the crowd, or indeed, to us (we already know who he is), but to himself! Here in Mark’s gospel, Jesus alone hears the voice. This is the moment of his appearing and the beginning of his public ministry. His baptism becomes the place of vocation, commitment and mission. It is characterised by 4 things: sonship, the Holy Sprit, struggle and the shadow of death.
Look how Mark suffuses the scene with impending confrontation. The Baptist’s ministry is taking place out in the wilderness – the place of refuge, flight, rebellion, sedition and faithful remnants. We already know that this is the culmination of what God has been doing in the past because of the echoes of Isaiah’s voice. And God is doing it, not in Jerusalem and in the temple, but on the margins. There are no representatives of the temple and the priestly ruling class. They are still in Jerusalem, locked away in disapproving, antiseptic ritual purity. They are unaware of the momentous happenings, safe in their conviction that whatever is going down in the Jordan wilderness, it obviously cannot be something of God or that will threaten them. Little do they know!
Then there is John’s witness to the coming of the One who is powerful enough to take on the Strong Man. All the elements of the forthcoming conflicts in Jesus’ ministry are in place.
It is Mark’s use of place that charges the atmosphere with impending death. Jesus goes into two places in this week’s passage. The first is the water, and the second is the wilderness. Water and wilderness. Both are highly ambivalent. Water gives life and, in baptism, new life. The wilderness is traditionally the place where God is present and where God purifies God’s chosen people. Yet water is also the place of chaos and death. This is echoed in today’s Psalm 29. In the opening chapter of the bible, God’s Spirit broods over the waters of primeval chaos and darkness (Genesis 1: 1-5). Creation is wrested out of the grip of chaos and darkness. God’s presence brings light and life. Yet the brooding forces of chaos and death are never far from the waters. The creation is destroyed by a great flood. The seas are peopled with monsters and demons (so that Jesus, in stilling the storm later in the narrative, will use the exorcistic formula, “Be muzzled!”). Water drowns and kills as well as giving life. Indeed, baptism explicitly pictures water as a place of death first of all – dying to the old life. Resurrection is the rising up out of the water to new life in the Spirit – recreation, in other words, picturing the original creation. Baptism is shot through with images of death and judgement, as well as with life.
The wilderness is similarly a deadly place. It is filled with wild beasts. God may indeed be there, but the Satan is also there and it is Satan that Jesus encounters in the wilderness. Satan and the wild beasts – the forces of chaos and darkness. Jesus is led from the water straight into the wilderness. The man of power is led into a confrontation with the Strong Man.
Mark’s narrative is multi-layered. It is soaked in biblical imagery. In moving directly from the water into a 40 day period, Mark recalls both the Flood and the forty years of wanderings in the wilderness. Both are times of lostness. The Flood is the destruction of creation and the starting over. The 40 years of wanderings are also the time of starting over – of waiting for the deaths of the generation who left Egypt in the Exodus. Those incidents are, if you like, the times when God (shockingly) abandons creation to the forces of chaos, darkness and destruction. Jesus, in Mark’s gospel, will die with the cry of abandonment on his lips.
The “wild beasts”, too, have extra significance. They recall the godless rulers of Daniel 7: 3, 7. These are the political leaders of the alliance against God. They are the demonic powers incarnated in human beings. Jesus, similarly, will confront the political powers of his day and be executed for sedition. Crucially, in Mark’s gospel, Jesus will be presented as the heavenly Son of Man from the same chapter of Daniel (Daniel 7: 13ff).
Mark charges the single sentence forming 1:13 with incredible symbolic power, significance, dread and hope. This encounter in the desert with the wild beasts and Satan is an apocalyptic struggle for human history. The gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God is Good News because it is a story of redemption. Mark presents the world – creation – in the grip of the primeval forces of chaos, darkness and death. These are the powers that hold sway. They are incarnated in the religious and political power holders of Jesus’ day, and Jesus will do battle with them. Yet Jesus’ messianic vocation will take him into conflict with Satan, the one ranged against God’s intentions for the world. His proclamation and enactment of the Kingdom of God is the defeat and binding of this Strong Man.
In entering the water and the wilderness, Jesus enters the strongholds of these powers. He goes to the places which are presently godforsaken. He identifies with the lost – the lost of Noah’s day and of the wilderness wanderings. This is where Mark is in dramatic overdrive. We, the audience, are on the very edges of our seats. Is it possible that what Mark appears to be suggesting might be true? Could Jesus indeed intend to rescue all of creation from the powers of chaos, darkness and death? Is the Good News good enough to include the hope that those whom we assume lost and cast away by God are not going to be lost? Is this Jesus so powerful that he will be able to plunder even the deepest realms of the Satan’s strongholds?
This is precisely what Jesus is going to do. And for this reason, water and wilderness become places of redemption, resurrection and new life. Jesus will invite precisely those whom we imagine to be cut off from and judged by God to be members of God’s kingdom. Yet remember: this short scene, in which Jesus appears and disappears, happens in the shadow of Jerusalem. His journey from Galilee to the Jordan at the outset of his public ministry prefigures the journey of confrontation with the powers ranged against God – political, religious and demonic – that he will take, and which will lead to his death.
It is from the ashes of the complete annihilation of all that Jesus worked for, stood for and proclaimed in the power of the Holy Spirit that God will bring forth ultimate victory through resurrection. And it is because we, the audience, live this side of the resurrection that our baptism is a sharing in Jesus’ relationship as child of God, and baptism in the Holy Spirit. Yet we are called and baptised not for our own benefit as though faith were the ultimate Christmas present to delight and spoil us, but so that we might join in God’s mission of transforming the world into the kingdom of God in the name of Jesus and through the power of the Spirit. Baptism is the call to join the Struggle!
Amen.
16:10 Posted in Acts , Genesis , Mark , Psalms , Year B | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: Bible Study, baptism of Jesus Year B, Mark 1: 4-11, Genesis 1: 1-5, John the Baptist, Jordan, redemption, baptism, Holy Spirit