BIBLICAL THEMES
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This
section of the Website includes essays on important themes in our text. Instead
of writing on each one each time we approach it in one of the texts, I will
suggest in my exposition that you turn to the theme under “Biblical Theses.” In
this section, I will list the themes alphabetically. The following themes are
included in this section at the present time. Click on the ones you would like
to read.
Justification by FaithPalm Sunday
Four thousand
years ago — in the valleys of the Tigris-Euphrates, Jordan, and Nile Rivers,
where our modern civilization had been cradled centuries before this –
migrations began to take place that were to change the population patterns of
this area that we call the Fertile Crescent. It takes that name because in this
desert region these rivers form a crescent – starting with the Nile in the
Ethiopian mountains, extending through the Jordan in the area of Palestine, and
then circling across to the Persian Gulf as it winds down the valleys of the
Tigris and Euphrates – and this is the most fertile land in the arid area,
hence the name, “Fertile Crescent.”
It is easy from
the perspective of our day to picture these migratory peoples as little more
than aborigines, landless, rootless, tent-dwelling nomads. That picture is
false. Their culture had religion, law, accepted forms of writing, commerce
that depended not only upon barter but upon extension of credit, and great
buildings to house their governments and religions. People of that day had
highly developed armies and innovative techniques of warfare; they had medicine,
outdoor and indoor plumbing, quasi-scientific methods of farming and husbandry,
and effective methods of communication.
Among these last
were the trade routes that stretched through the whole Fertile Crescent.
Starting from Ur and moving up the Fertile Crescent to Haran (the name means
“Caravan City”) and Nahor in northwestern Mesopotamia, the routes then turned
south into Syria, Canaan, and finally to Egypt. Dotted daily along these trade
routes were large caravans of donkeys, sometimes as many as 600 donkeys in a
train, each carrying goods between cities along the route. These were dropped
off and picked up at the various exchange points. This donkey trade reached its
apex in the 19th and 18th centuries before Christ.
Among the
caravaneers was a man whose name has come down to us. We know the name
primarily from its consonants: BRM. How you pronounced the name depended on the
dialect you spoke and what kind of vowels you added to these consonants. Some
called him Abiram, some Abram, some Abraham. Abram had moved his family from Ur
of the Chaldees near Haran (not to be confused with Sumerian Ur, which was at
the mouth of the two great rivers, many miles east) to Syria and then to
Canaan. He settled his family in the city of Gerar (see Genesis 20) just north
of the Negev desert. The site was well chosen. It was almost half way between
Syria to the north and Egypt to the south. With his family secure there, Abram
and his men moved up and down the trade routes leading caravans. From the
evidence of the biblical record, he must have been highly successful in his
work.
But there was
something different about this man that set him apart from the other
caravaneers. He seemed to be moving in response to a vision. He wanted to be a
blessing to all humankind. He also stood out from others because he saw to the
elevation of the dignity of the women of his family. Such women as Sarah,
Rebekah, and Rachel, wives of clan members, present themselves in the Bible as
heroines of valor, courage, and wit. “Endowed with superior talents,” wrote
Samuel Terrien (Till the Heart Sings, 30) these women “commanded the full
respect of the men who surrounded them. The intimacy that bound them to their
husbands and their husbands to them transcended the juridical aspects of the
(current) institution of marriage.” Abram seemed set on a vision and a mission.
Where did it come
from? Certainly not from his forebears. Abram had descended from the
generations who had tried to secure the future by building a tower known as
Babel in the city of Shinar. “Let us make a name for ourselves,” they had said,
“by building this tower that will reach into the heavens.” It did not work, of
course. God uttered a thunderous “No” to the project. But out of the wreckage
of this sullen and sorrowful attempt came Abram, who said that God had spoken
to him and that God had said that he, God, would bless all the nations of the
earth through him. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s
house to the land that I will show you,” said the Lord. And do you know? Abram
did it. He trusted the Lord that the promise the Lord had given him was true.
So he left his father’s house, took his family to Canaan, and followed the
voice of the Lord.
We do not know
whether the voice by which God spoke came to Abram as a long process of thought
and prayer, or whether it broke through the heavens like a thunderclap.
Whichever it was, it caused a watershed in human life. To serve God Abram had
to leave all the securities he had known – house, family, kindred, friends, all
those things that made ancient life worthwhile – to go to a land. What land it
was, God did not say. All God said was that Abram had to move out of his
present world to live in God’s coming world. And Abram did it. The Letter to
the Hebrews provides the clearest commentary on his act: “By faith Abraham
obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an
inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed
for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in
tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For
he looked forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is
God.” (11:8-11)
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This, of course,
is the great mystery of the Christian faith, and I think the mystery has two
aspects to it. One is the mystery of why Jesus went to the cross at all. The
other is the mystery of how this event continues to affect us all. While there
are others ways of approaching these questions, I will look at them from the
point of view of the Gospel of John. John’s account of the cross is found in
chapters 18 and 19 of his gospel.
Scene One: the
arrest of Jesus. Jesus led his disciples from the city of Jerusalem where they
had met for a meal across the Kidron Valley to the Mount of Olives, to a garden
(unnamed in John’s Gospel) somewhere on the Mount. Judas, who had already
determined to betray him, led a contingent of soldiers to the spot. He knew
where it was; it was probably the place where the Twelve slept while they were
in Jerusalem for the Passover. Jesus immediately stepped forward, asking, “Whom
do you seek?” Peter attempted a defense. He had a sword, and he swung it so
that he cut off a man’s right ear. But Jesus instructed him to put up his
sword, and the soldiers seized Jesus.
Scene Two: The
Hearing before Annas. The family of Annas was one of the powers in Jerusalem.
His family held the high priesthood for years. This year the high priest was
his son-in-law Caiaphas. Simon Peter followed Jesus and was admitted to the
courtyard of the house. Inside the house, Jesus began a spirited defense of
himself; this contrasts sharply with the account in Matthew, Mark, and Luke,
where Jesus says hardly anything in his own behalf. Outside, Simon Peter was in
trouble. First a serving girl, then some bystanders, and finally a servant of
the high priest asked him if he was with Jesus? The questions were put in a way
that it was easy for Peter to say “No”: “You are not one of this man’s disciples,
are you?” Peter agreed. He said he was not. The betrayal and the denial were
both under way, and both played a part in Jesus’ death.
Scene Three: The
Hearing before Pilate. Pontius Pilate was the Roman appointed governor of the
province of Judea. Judea had become so volatile with rumors of rebellion
against Rome that Rome had deposed the family of Herod from rulership in Judea
and had appointed their own procurators or prefects. The seat of Roman
government was in the sea-coast city of Caesarea, but Pilate had come to
Jerusalem for the Passover to deal with
possible trouble
during the feast. Now he had his trouble: Jesus had been brought before him as
a potential trouble-maker. He asked the Jewish leadership to make a judgement
on him, but they refused.
So Pilate
conducted his own hearing, and again Jesus defended himself vigorously. Pilate
tried again to shift judgement. He asked the crowd which prisoner he should
release to them as a merciful act during the Passover. They called for
Barabbas. (The name, by the way, signifies very little. “Bar” means “son of”
and “Abbas” means “father.” He was called simply, “The son of his father.”)
Before he passed sentence on Jesus, Pilate took the first steps of crucifixion.
He ordered Jesus scourged, struck over the back with a whip of leather thongs
that sometimes had nails and pieces of glass embedded in it; in addition, as a
taunting gesture against one charged with being a king, the soldiers threw an
old purple robe around his shoulders and pressed a crown of thorns on his head.
Still Jesus defended himself, this time challenging the authority that Pilate
had to make a judgement upon him. Pilate tried once more to release Jesus, but
the crowd demanded Jesus’ death. So Pilate came to the place of judgement, an open
courtroom called “The Pavement,” and there this dialogue took place:
Pilate: “Here is
your king.”
The crowd: “Away
with him, crucify him.”
Pilate: “Shall I
crucify your king?”
The crowd: “We
have no king but Caesar.”
So Pilate handed
him over to be crucified.
Scene Four: The
Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. In each gospel, the act of the crucifixion of
Jesus is compressed into a subordinate cause. It may be because the people of
the Roman Empire knew what crucifixion was. It may also be that it was such a
terrible way to die that they did not want to emphasize it. Crucifixion often
began with a scourging, as it did with Jesus. Then the person to be crucified
had to carry the crossbar to the place of execution; what they carried was not
a whole cross but simply the cross beam of the cross. It was heavy, of course,
especially for a person who had been weakened by the scourging. When the
procession arrived at the place of execution, the beam was laid on the ground,
and the prisoner was bound to it by ropes or nailed to it or both. Then the
beam was lifted up, with the doomed man on it, and dropped into its place,
perhaps into the notch of a tree denuded of leaves and branches or upon some
scaffold where prisoners were regularly hanged, perhaps in groups of more than
one as was the instance when Jesus was hanged. Jesus was dropped roughly into
place, to hang on the cross, until he died. Death came in one of three ways.
The shock from loss of blood could kill, as could strangulation, shutting off
the flow of air into the lungs as the head fell lower and lower on the chest;
or death could come because of the strain on the arms, as the weight of the
body grew more and more onerous.
Above the
crucified one there was always placed a “titulum,” a placard that contained the
charge against him. Pilate had inscribed on the titulum the words, “The King of
the Jews”; because Jesus was understood by some to have made that claim in his
own behalf. The charge was written in three languages: Hebrew, the language of
the Jewish religion, Latin, the official language of government, and Greek, the
language of culture. There was great irony in this. The Jewish people were the
possessors of the finest religion in the world, the Roman government was
considered the most just the world had seen, and the Greek language was the
language of the finest philosophers, poets, and playwrights that the world
knew. In the crucifixion of Jesus, the world’s finest religion joined hands
with the world’s most just government and the world’s most productive culture
to kill a single man, Jesus of Nazareth.
Two notable events
occurred while Jesus was on the cross. The soldiers divided his garments among
themselves as Roman law provided. In Christian eyes, this also fulfilled the
words of Psalm 22, “They parted my garments among them, and for my clothing
they cast lots.”(22:18) Then Jesus awarded care of his mother to the beloved
disciple. Both were standing before the cross, said this Gospel. Jesus said to
the mother, “Woman, behold your son,” and to the disciple he said, “Behold your
mother.” These were words of adoption. From this point on the beloved disciple
was the mother’s son and protector, and the beloved disciple was the son who in
his mother’s eyes would take Jesus’ place. The adoption took place in that
moment. “From that hour the disciple took her to his own home.”
These were the
first of the words Jesus spoke from the cross. Together the four gospels list
seven different instances of words Jesus spoke, and John’s gospel contains
three of these. In addition to the words of adoption Jesus also said, “I
thirst,” and when vinegar was brought to him, he said, “It is finished.” And he
died.
That he was truly
dead is attested in different ways. The soldiers attested to it. They saw that
he was already dead and so did not break his legs, as was the custom if the
crucified one was not yet dead when the guard went off duty; breaking the legs
would guarantee death. The death was also attested to by his burial. Joseph of
Arimathea, and Nicodemus, stepped forward to provide a grave. They also
provided everything prescribed for burial: a mixture of myrrh and aloes, along
with linen clothes. Then he was placed in a grave in which no one had ever been
laid. The final irony: every Jewish person wanted to be buried in the graves of
the family. Jesus was placed “in a new tome where no one had ever been laid.”
(19:41)
Why has this story
attracted the attention of persons for generations since it occurred? Three
reasons, I believe.
First, there is
the sheer horror of it. We watch with terror as the forces around him close in
on him and propel Jesus to the most brutal of deaths that one person has ever
devised to kill another. The act of crucifixion was so dreadful that the orator
Cicero rose in the Senate some decades before the crucifixion of Jesus to ask
the Senate that it never be used by Rome again; it was only centuries later, in
337 AD, that the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, banned crucifixion as a
means of carrying out a death sentence.
Beyond that, we
are drawn to the crucifixion as we begin to recognize that we too have a share
in his death. What put Jesus on the cross, after all? It was betrayal, as
represented by Judas. It was denial, made by Peter; it was brutality, as seen
in the acts of the soldiers; it was the callousness of Pilate; the enmity of
the priests; the insensitivity to suffering of the crowds. When we talk about
these – betrayal, denial, brutality, callousness, insensitivity – we observe
that the same kinds of actions mark our world today. What the Bible says about
the death of Jesus is indeed true: Jesus did not die because of his own sins.
He died for ours.
But if this were
the end of the story of the cross, it would be nothing more than an unmitigated
tragedy. But this is not the end. From the chaos of the cross Jesus cried out,
“Father, forgive them, for the know not what they do.” He addressed those words
to the Judases and Peters who stood before him, to the soldiers and the crowds
and the priests. Their denials and betrayals, their brutality and callousness
and enmity and insensitivity, great as it was, could not rip from his heart the
forgiveness that God had placed in it. Instead, he extended that forgiveness to
them, and to all of us, and we can receive it still. All the sins that human
flesh is heir to conspired to put Jesus on his cross, but they were not enough
to break his heart of love. Sin meets grace on the cross of Christ, and once
and for all time, grace shines forth in victory. The victory still reaches those
who bask in Christ’s love.
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Resurrection -- as
the Apostles’ Creed says, “He was crucified, dead, and buried; on the third day
he rose again” -- remains the greatest mystery of the Christian faith. To
understand it at all we have to see it contrasted to other ways of viewing life
after death. I have stated these other possibilities in the section on
Transfiguration, but let me review them now.
One way is to say
that there is no life after death. Death is death, the end of all, and there is
no future at all for the deceased. A second way is resuscitation, the dead body
itself coming back to life again. Another way is to envision life as continuing
in some Hades, a life that lingers but is less than human. Yet another is to
speak of reincarnation, the soul inhabiting different bodies in different
levels of life in the course of its seeking to be reabsorbed into the ocean of
divinity from which it came. Immortality is another vehicle of hope for life
after death; while the physical body disintegrates in death, the human mind is
not material and is indestructible. The final way of viewing life after death
is seeing it in terms of resurrection.
It is the Gospel
of John that describes what resurrection means as he relates the accounts of
Jesus’ appearances.
Christ in the
resurrected body is identifiable. He came to Mary Magdalene in the garden of
the tomb, she did not at first recognize him. But when he spoke to her, then
she knew who he was. It was not John the Baptist who had come to her, not
Elijah or Moses who had appeared to Jesus in the transfiguration. It was
clearly Jesus himself.
Christ in the
resurrected body is no longer bound to the limitations of human life. He could
pass through closed doors, he could come and go as he desired. “The doors were
shut where the disciples were, but Jesus came and stood among them”; Thomas was
not with them, but when he was “Jesus came and stood among them.” No human
being on this side of death could do this.
Christ in the
resurrected body still bears the scars of his human life. In the upper room,
Jesus “showed (his disciples) his hands and his side.” The hands bore the scars
of the nails and his side the scars of the spear. One hesitates to move
immediately from the first to the twentieth century. Yet if we do so, we would
have to say that, after two thousand years of the same kind of denials and
betrayals, brutality, callousness, insensitivity, the resurrected Jesus Christ
bears many additional scars today.
The resurrected
Jesus Christ extends the spirit of Christ to his followers. “Peace to you,”
said Jesus, and then “he breathed upon them.” The phrase carries innumerable
nuances. The word in Hebrew and the word in Greek for “breath” also means
“spirit”; the meanings are interchangeable. “Spirit” takes us back to Genesis
one, where the “spirit” brooded over the face of the waters, and the creation
came forth. It also goes to Genesis two, when God breathed into Adam, and he
became a living soul. The spirit worked through Moses and Elijah, Isaiah and Jeremiah.
The same spirit also worked through Jesus. Now the resurrected Jesus breathes
upon his disciples, and his spirit infused their lives.
The resurrected
Jesus Christ sends his disciples out on a mission to carry out his ministry in
all the world. “Peace be to you all,” he said to his disciples, and then he
said, “As the father has sent me, even so I send you.” To teach, to heal, to
make disciples, to challenge the ruling powers: this was Jesus’ ministry, and
it is also the ministry of his followers. No less an authority than the
resurrected Christ gives us this charge.
The resurrected
Christ also offers eternal life to those who believe in him. Lying behind the
words 'eternal life" is a phrase that properly translated means 'life of
the eons, life of the ages." It denotes both quantity and quality:
quantity in that it is never-ending and quality in that it is the kind of life
that God lives in the ages beyond ages, where life is not despoiled by human
sin. In Christ, the life eternal enters the sphere of human life. Jesus' prayer
in Jn 17:2-3 laid the matter before us: "Just as you, Father, have given
to the son authority over all flesh, so to everyone whom you have given to him
he shall give to them life eternal. And this is the life eternal, that they know
you, the only true God, and him whom you have sent, Jesus Christ." The
equation is an exact one: "This is life eternal, to know God and Jesus
Christ. To have this quality of life, one must commit oneself to Christ.
Whoever makes an irrevocable commitment of himself or herself to God as
revealed in Christ has eternal life.
Has it already:
the present tense needs to be stressed. Eternal life is not introduced into
human life at the moment of death; it enters at the moment of full and complete
commitment to Christ. To be committed to Christ means to make him central in
life; seek his approval at all times; find in him our strength and support;
construct life with him as its model; serve the causes he serves and love the
people he loves. It means no longer responding to the alienation of life, its
confusion, lonesomeness, lostness -- all of which belong to the sphere of sin
-- but responding beyond these to the love of God in Jesus Christ. This is
John's affirmation to men and women who fear mortality and guilt: to respond
fully in all conscious ways to Jesus Christ is to have eternal life, in this
life and in the life to come. This is the gift of the resurrected Christ to his
own.
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In Matthew’s
Gospel (the reading assigned by the Lectionary}, the account goes like this:
“After six days
Jesus took with him Peter and James and John his brother, and led them up a
high mountain apart.” We have to go deep into the life of the people of Israel
to see the context for this verse. Twelve centuries before, Moses had taken one
man, Joshua, and gone up into a mountain. (Exodus 24:13; this is the Old
Testament text for Transfiguration Sunday.) That mountain had been covered by a
cloud, the same cloud that had led God's people out from their slavery in Egypt
and brought them into the wilderness of Sinai; this cloud had covered the
mountain for six days. On that mountain Moses had met God. Now Jesus takes
Peter and James and John, as close to him as Joshua was to Moses, up into the
mountain to meet God.
“And Jesus was
transfigured before them, and his face shone as the sun, and his garments
became white as light.” Transfigured - - the word in Greek is metamorphosis,
and there is an interesting historical footnote that attaches to it. The word
had been brought into prominent use just fifteen years before the time of Jesus
by the Roman poet Ovid. He had used the word to describe people who had
completely changed from one thing into another. I can see the Christians
struggling to find a word to describe what they had seen on the mountain that
day, trying out one word and then another, finally settling on this --
metamorphosis, transfiguration. But when the Christians used it, it was not a
change from a woman to a tree or flower, as Ovid had described. It was the
greatest change of all: from the human to the divine. At this moment Peter and
James and John saw Jesus in a whole new way. They saw Jesus no longer in his
earthly body which was Jesus of Nazareth, but in his heavenly body, the body
with which Jesus now inhabits the realm of God. At this moment they saw in
Jesus the very personhood of God.
“His garments
became white as light.” To what can we compare this? Jesus' garments were as
white as those worn by the great rulers of the world on festive occasions of
state. Even more, they were like the garments of angels, those beings that were
exalted above the earth into a heavenly place. Even more, it was like the
shining face of Moses when God had spoken to Moses face to face. Even more, it
was like the sun shining over the Mount of Olives into the entrance of the
Temple of Jerusalem and gleaming off the golden walls inside the sanctuary of
the Temple. It did this just once a year, when the spring sun peeped for the
first time over the crest of the mountain on the first day of spring, and for
the first and only time in the year the glorious light occurred. It was so
important to the Jewish people that they called it, "The Lord suddenly
appearing in his temple." Rulers -- angels -- Moses -- the sun shining
into the temple -- these are the images that come to mind when we read of Jesus
being transfigured before us. Except that this new experience is greater than
all its predecessors. For the light in Jesus does not come from the outside and
reflect upon his figure, face, and garments. It comes from inside Jesus
himself, as the divinity within him shines forth upon Peter and James and John
and into all the world.
“There appeared to
them Elijah with Moses, talking with Jesus.” As if the blinding light were not
enough, Jesus' transfiguration involves something more. Moses and Elijah -- the
two greatest persons of Old Testament times -- are present and speaking with
Jesus.
Moses -- it was he
whom God chose to lead the Hebrew people from slavery into the land of promise.
Born to a Hebrew woman, he was about to be killed as other male Hebrew boys
were being killed by the ruling powers (and as Jesus was in jeopardy of being
killed by Herod in Bethlehem). But his mother placed the infant Moses into a
basket of reeds and floated it onto an eddy of the Nile River. There the child
was found by the daughter of Pharaoh and raised in the great house where
Pharaoh lived. As a young man, Moses was exiled into the mountainous wilderness
to the east of Egypt, where one day God met him and called him to free his
people. Confrontations with Pharaoh followed: plagues; the fearsome night of
death in Egypt when the Hebrews slipped away from their captors; running to
escape them and coming to the sea, which blocked their path, only to have a way
through the waters opened to them; the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of
fire by night; then on into the wilderness where few people lived, there to be
met by God and to be declared God's own people. "I am the Lord, your God,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You
shall have no other gods before me."
That was Moses. We
may not know Elijah quite so well. He lived about three centuries after Moses,
and it fell to Elijah to restore the people of Israel to the covenant God had
made with them three hundred years before. Elijah's name indicated his loyalty.
It could be translated "My God is Yahweh." "El" means God,
"i" means my and "jah" means Yahweh, the Old Testament name
for God. Or it could mean, "Yahweh is my God." Either way, it meant
that the man who bore the name was a man who gave absolute loyalty to the God
who had met Moses on the mountain and who had brought the people into their
land of promise -- absolute loyalty to this God.
It was this
absolute loyalty that brought Elijah into the troubles he had. First he met the
priests of Baal, and you remember the contest he had with them. They built an
altar, and Elijah built an altar, and the first God who destroyed the altar
with fire would be declared God. The priests of Baal, the name given to
Canaanite gods, howled and screamed and danced and cut themselves with knives,
but no fire from baal in heaven came. So Elijah put water on his altar to make
it less flammable and called on Yahweh to come in fire and destroy it, and
Yahweh sent the fire that consumed the altar. Then Elijah had a contest with
King Ahab. A drought hit the land for three, four, five years, and it stayed
until Ahab gave his loyalty again to Yahweh, the God of Israel. Then Elijah
prayed for rain, prostrated himself in his prayers, and soon a little cloud,
smaller than a man's hand, appeared on the horizon, and it grew and grew until
rain pelted down and refreshed all the earth -- Yahweh was God not only of the
nation but of nature itself. There is more to Elijah's story, but this is
enough. Elijah was the great prophet, whose God was Yahweh, and Elijah gave
absolute loyalty to his God. These were the two seen talking with Jesus in the
transfiguration, these greatest of all Israelites before Jesus.
But then, "a
bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came from the cloud, ?This is my
beloved Son, my son, the beloved.’" This is the voice that spoke to Jesus
in baptism, and the voice is using some of the same words now as then.
"Listen to him." This command means more than the words themselves
can bear. Throughout Deuteronomy, Jesus' favorite Biblical book, Moses speaking
for God says, "Hear, O Israel, hear the statutes and ordinances I speak in
your hearing this day, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and you
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and
with all your might." At this point, God says, "Hear Jesus, listen to
him." Hear, as you would hear the voice of God, listen to him, obey him,
follow him. The voice of Jesus becomes the voice of God.
And suddenly
looking around they no longer saw any one with them but Jesus only. Moses had
come, the one who first forged the agreement between God and God's people, the
agreement we call a covenant. Now Moses is gone, a greater than Moses is here.
Elijah had returned, the one who was desperately loyal to the God of Moses'
covenant, but now Elijah is gone. A greater than Elijah is here. The greatest
persons of Israel's past had come, and they had conversed with Jesus. Now they
have departed from sight, and Jesus stands alone. In the moment of his
transfiguration, the covenant of Moses and the loyalty of Elijah are fulfilled.
No one stands between us and God but Jesus Christ alone.
But the greatest
significance of the transfiguration story was not apparent until the end of the
life of Jesus. Then it was clear to his disciples that through his
transfiguration Jesus was preparing them for his coming resurrection. The body
of Jesus in its glowing brightness on the mount of transfiguration was the very
body that Peter and James and John and the others would see when Jesus had been
crucified and then raised from the dead. Because they had seen him in his
transfiguration, they were able to recognize him in his resurrection. Resurrection
is different from anything else we can imagine. Resurrection is nor
resuscitation, a body that was dead given life once more, as in the stories we
have heard so many times of return to life after apparent death. Resurrection
is not re-incarnation, the person taking one body and then another body and
then another body, until the person has been sufficiently purified to live with
God. Resurrection is not immortality, even, the soul leaving the lifeless body
behind to live with the immortal ones. Resurrection has to do with a body that
has died and a soul that has died, the whole person dead, placed into its
grave, about to decay, no longer responsive, no longer useful. But then, as God
once created us whole persons through the life of our mothers and fathers,
through the life of Jesus Christ God re-creates us into whole persons who can
live forever with God, our souls and bodies reborn, transformed, transfigured,
as was the soul and body of Jesus Christ, a resurrected person.
But we, whose
faith in the power of God wavers and whose trust in the love of God is weak,
how can we comprehend the resurrection, how could those disciples of old? Well,
apart from the transfiguration, I doubt that they would have grasped it. The
transfiguration points backward to Jesus' baptism, when the same voice from
heaven called him, "My son, my beloved." It points forward to his
cross, his death, his resurrection, his continued presence with us. The heart
of the matter is well stated by the Apostle Paul in Corinthians 15: "Some
one will ask, 'How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?'
You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. . . . What
is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor,
it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is
sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. . . . I tell you this,
brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, but the trumpet
will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.
Then shall come to pass the saying that is written: "Death is swallowed up
in victory. O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?"
But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus
Christ." Jesus' resurrected body was a glorious body, a powerful body, an
imperishable body, a spiritual body, and on the mount of transfiguration the
disciples had seen that changed body displayed before them. The transfiguration
prepared his disciples for his resurrection. Those who had seen Jesus when he
was transfigured before them could receive him when they saw him in his
resurrection.
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Martin Luther was
one of the great reformers of the Christian Church in the 16th century, and the
most notable thing about him is that he found forgiveness in Jesus Christ.
Luther had a
spiritual problem of vast dimensions. It seemed that no matter what he tried or
how hard he tried, he simply could not get right with God. Luther tried
everything he could possibly think of in order to do that, especially those
things suggested by his church. He entered a monastery and became a monk; that
was supposed to bring him peace with God, but it did not. He made a pilgrimage
to Rome, and he was shocked with the ignorance and irreverence of the priests
he met in Rome. Pilate's judgement seat had been transported from Jerusalem to
the Vatican, so they said, and they also said that if you climbed the
twenty-eight steps Jesus had climbed, and on your knees, you could release
souls from purgatory. Luther climbed to the top and sighed, "Who knows if
it is true?"
Back at the
monastery in Germany, he spent hours and full days in confession. He reminded
himself of the seven deadly sins and the ten commandments, and he confessed all
he could recall of his sins -- but there must have been others he could not
recall, and so confession did not make him right with God, either. He was
ordained a priest, and then he nearly died from fright when he performed his
first mass: how could he, a poor and sinful human being, speak words that would
transform the bread into the body of Christ and the wine into his blood? He had
tried everything the church had offered him to get right with God -- the monastery,
the pilgrimage, the confessional, the priesthood. None of it had worked.
However irreproachable his life may have been in the sight of others, in the
sight of God he was simply a sinner with a troubled conscience.
Relief came to him
only as he read the Scriptures. For two years, 1513 to 1515, Luther lectured to
his students in the University of Wittenberg on the Book of Psalms. He read in
the 22nd Psalm, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Why should Jesus
say this, Luther asked himself? Was it that he too, like Luther, felt himself
forsaken, abandoned by God, deserted, Christ, the son of God? Surely there must
be a reason for this. Laboring painfully through all possible solutions, Luther
finally came upon a suggestion. Was it that Christ suffered not for his own
sins but for ours, that Christ had, as Isaiah had foreseen, taken on the
iniquities of us all? Was it that the God of Jesus Christ was not the All
Terrible Judge as Luther had been taught that He was but was also the All
Merciful Father? The thought amazed Luther, and with his usual seriousness he
pondered it deeply.
For the next two
years, 1515 to 1517, Luther lectured on Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and his
spiritual conflict continued. At last, in reading the first chapter of Romans once
more, Luther began to see the way through his dilemma. His new pathway had to
do with the Greek word, dikaios, which requires three English words to
translate it.
Dikaios is
"justice," and it is "justification," and it is
"righteousness." Justice speaks of strict enforcement of the law, as
when a judge pronounces the appropriate sentence upon a criminal. Justification
is also related to court proceedings, but it ensues in a different result. In
this instance the judge believes that justice is better served if the guilty
one is given a suspended sentence, or if he paroles the prisoner, or even
acquits him when all the evidence seems to point to his guilt. In other words,
justification means that God acquits the person, even though all the evidence
seems to require a judgement of condemnation. "Righteousness" has a
different meaning yet. It means being on right terms with, with others and with
God. Dikaios is "justice," and it is "justification," and
it is "righteousness."
All three of these
aspects of the one word are part of the process of forgiveness of sins, and
this was Luther's great contribution to the understanding of forgiveness. In a
moral universe, sin has to be dealt with appropriately. It is not enough to
have people do anything they want to do. There are rules that have to be
observed, laws that have to be upheld, limitations to our actions, there are
acts that are so heinous that they simply must be punished. Life without
justice would be pure anarchy; we have to pay for what we do. That is the
justice part of the word. But there is also equity that is involved, mercy,
restoring some balance to lives that have been harmed by sin's way; that is the
justification part of it. Then can come the "righteousness" part, the
restoration part, being brought back into right terms with God. Luther saw all
those ideas and experiences contained in that one word, dikaios.
But he saw more
than that in it, and this is the truly amazing part. This
justice-justification-righteousness takes place because God desires it. God
knows that sin must be punished and that equity, balance, must be established
and that relationships can be restored, and God exerts total effort to doing
just that. Our part in it is not much compared with God's part. Our part of the
process is what Luther called "faith," that is, believing that God in
Christ is seeking to save us, trusting that God will keep his promises to us,
and committing ourselves to God's will and ways. "How right, how true, how
sweet, how lovely, how mighty, how comforting God's Word is" in Jesus
Christ, said Luther, (quoted in Hendrix, 1983:236) because through Christ, his
life but especially his death, Christ brings us God's forgiveness of our sins.
This was the
original meaning of "Justification by Faith." The meaning was refined
through the life of the church, so that it took on many meaning beyond this. To
see this process at work, I would refer you to Alister McGrath's thorough study
of justification entitled, “Justitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine
of Justification.” (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994,1996) The
key to all these interpretations, I believe, is the intensity of the
consciousness of sin that a person has. Without intense consciousness of sin,
justification is at best an academic study. For the person with a deep sense of
his or her sin, however, justification by faith, God's justification of us that
requires only that we trust God's mercy, is the sinner's salvation.
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In the event which
we call “The Triumphal Entry,” Jesus approached Jerusalem from Jericho via a
long climb from the lowest point on earth to the heights of the Holy City. Just
before the road reached the crest of the Mount of Olives, a side road turned
off to the left. It led to the small village of Bethpage and after that to
Bethany. Bethpage was at the very limits of the city of Jerusalem. According to
the Talmud, a Jew may not work on the Sabbath, and that included carrying
anything outside a closed area. Since Bethpage was inside the closed area,
Jesus went there to pick up the donkey.
Jesus had friends
in this area, namely Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Through them, or others, Jesus
may have arranged to secure a mount in Bethpage in order to ride it into
Jerusalem. “The Lord has need of them,” was the key phrase. The animals would
be turned over to the person who said those words. Jesus’ disciples came to the
town, spoke the words, and they brought the donkey and its colt to Jesus. The
disciples spread their own garments upon it, and Jesus sat upon it.
Matthew alone of
the gospel writers says that the donkey was accompanied by its colt. As the
story of Jesus’ passion was recounted time and again, it was seen as fulfilling
the prophecy of Zechariah quoted in Matthew: “Behold, your king comes to you,
humble, and mounted on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass.” Matthew
understood this passage to mean that the king of the prophecy was to ride on
two animals, an ass and its foal, and so he wrote it.
“Humble” is the
operative word in the prophecy. The king of Zech 9: 9-10 is a man of peace.
Jesus was coming into Jerusalem as its king, but he was redefining kingship.
Riding into the city, as he did, on a donkey and not on a warhorse, Jesus made
clear to all beholders that he had come for peace and had no intention of
exercising force.
Not all who saw
Jesus enter Jerusalem shared his vision of peace. The palm branches used at his
entrance may have been a conscious symbol of Jewish nationalism and resistance
to Roman occupation. Some coins coming from Galilee have recently been found.
They originally bore the face of Tiberius, the Roman ruler. Such coins
affronted Jewish laws against graven images, and the Jews insisted that the
coins be changed. They were. After AD 24 the coins were re-struck. An image of
a palm branch was imprinted over that of Caesar's face. Hence the palm branches
at the time of Jesus' entry could have indicated that many of his fellow Jews
believed he was, or should be, an armed Messiah. To them Jesus was not
primarily a spiritual figure but a political one instead. (Jim Fleming,
director of Biblical Resources Study Center in Jerusalem. Akron Beacon Journal,
March 31, 1996 A23)
On the other hand,
the palm branches may have been those used in processions at the festival of
Tabernacles. This celebration took place a few weeks before passover, and Jesus
and his disciples could have come for the one celebration and stayed for the
other.
As Jesus entered,
the crowds shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed be he who comes in
the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest.” “Hosanna” was used in the psalm
we considered earlier, Ps 118:25-26. There it is a prayer for deliverance
("Save now!") and not a cry of praise. What we have here, therefore,
is an ancient liturgical text, a cry to the anointed king for deliverance.
Matthew adds the words “the son of David" to the text of the psalm. This
is Matthew’s favorite title for Jesus, and he makes certain that this note is
sounded in his celebration of the coming of the king.
Donald Baillie,
Scots minister and teacher, has our last word on this text: “What does Palm
Sunday mean for us? It is God visiting and redeeming his people. But let us not
make the mistake the first people made, and miss the meaning of his coming: to
surround his name with our praises and to be blind to the obedience he demands
in the life of the Christian citizen in this hour. He comes today, to bring us
to repentance, to offer forgiveness, to call us to new obedience, to recall us
to the service of his kingdom, to set his cross in our hearts and lives and,
amid all the challenges of our day, to make us kings and priests to God.” (To Whom
Shall We Go? 143)
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“The Paraclete.”
While the name does not appear in our English translations, it is prominent in
the original Greek text. It is hidden behind the word “Advocate” in the New
Revised Standard Version, behind the word “Counselor” in the Revised Standard
Version, and behind the word “Comforter” in the King James Version. These
varied translations are an attempt to understand this odd word “Paraclete.”
“Paraclete” in Greek is a combination of two words: kletos, which means “called,”
and “para” which means “to” or “beside.” The Paraclete therefore is one who is
called to stand beside us. He, she, or it, – we cannot give this figure a
gender - stands beside us in a number of the relationships of life.
The Paraclete is
called to stand beside us when we are in trouble because of our commitment to
the Christian message. In this relationship the Paraclete is our Advocate.
Picture a courtroom scene. Picture yourself as a Christian standing before the
court on trial for your Christian activities. Picture the whole courtroom
hostile to what you are doing. Who will defend you in the face of the charges
the prosecuting attorney for the world will press upon you? The Paraclete will.
The Paraclete is our Advocate to lay out the case for our defense. Stephen
experienced this. In our lesson last week he was called to make a defense
against the charges that his opponents laid against him, and “he saw the
heavens opened and the Son of Humankind standing at the right hand of God.”
“Standing” means “making a vigorous defense”: The “Son of Humankind” acts as
defense attorney in our behalf when charges are laid against us in human courts
and in the highest court of all. We are not defenseless in these situations.
Jesus will send another, a Paraclete, to act as our advocate.
The Paraclete is
called to stand beside us when we need guidance in the affairs of life. In this
relationship the Paraclete is our Counselor. The “Counselor” is one who teaches
us, guides us, instructs us. The Counselor is one who calls to our memory every
thing that Christ has said and done and selects for us those words and acts of
Jesus that are most meaningful to our present life. Have you lost your way?
Christ is the way, and the Paraclete points the way for us. Are we bogged down
in the confusions of the present world? Christ is the truth, and the Paraclete
will whisper that truth in our ear. Have we lost our vitality, our enthusiasm
for living, all is vanity and darkness? Christ is our life, and the Paraclete
will fill our wilting life with the vivacity of Jesus Christ. The Paraclete is
our Counselor to nurture us through life’s bewilderment.
The Paraclete is
our Comforter, who brings us consolation in the midst of life’s pandemonium.
“Comforter” may be too light a word for what the Scripture has in mind. John
Wyclif, who made the first translation of the Bible into English, used the word
“strengthener,” one who makes us brave and strong by being brave and strong
beside us, who brings bracing consolation and not relaxing sympathy. Wyclif
caught the exact meaning of the word: comforter comes from two Latin words, cum
and fortis. “Fortis” means “strength,” and “cum” is “with.” The Comforter is
the one with us to strengthen us to face up to the adversities we confront.
The Paraclete is
the one, therefore, who continues to present Christ to us, the successor to
Jesus who continues his ministry among us. In the Old Testament, Joshua was the
successor to Moses and carried on the ministry that Moses had begun; Elisha was
the successor to Elijah and continued Elijah’s work of prophecy. In the New
Testament, Jesus passes on his spirit to us through his successor, the
Paraclete, to fulfill the ministry that he had begun in Judea and Galilee. The
Paraclete is the continuing presence of Jesus in his church.
If the Paraclete
has such an important function as this, why is the word so little known to us
today? The reason, I suspect, is that the Paraclete became completely
identified with the Holy Spirit. Both Paraclete and Spirit were described in
the same terms, and both had the same work to do. But in the next three hundred
years of church life, the term “Holy Spirit” came to replace the name
“Paraclete” until the former was the designation used in the Apostles and
Nicene Creeds. When “Holy Spirit” was sanctified by use in those creeds, it
became the common language of the church, and the term “Paraclete” went into
decline.
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Pentecost
originally referred to the Jewish “Feast of Weeks,” called Shavuoth. The Feast
of Weeks was originally an agricultural festival, celebrated fifty days after
the first day of Passover. The name itself comes from the Greek word meaning
“fiftieth.” During the festival the first fruits of the harvest were offered,
and every male Israelite was expected to “appear before the Lord” in Jerusalem,
as it said in Deuteronomy 16:16.
When the Temple in
Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD, the meaning of the festival was changed into
a commemoration of the giving of the Law to Israel by Moses.
On the first
Pentecost after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the followers of Jesus met in a
house to celebrate this feast. Something occurred that day that later
Christians never forgot. “Suddenly a sound came like the rush of a mighty wind,
and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them
tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each of them. . . . At this
sound the multitude, ?certain devout men,’ Jews living in Jerusalem who had
originally come from regions through all the mid-east, came together, and they
were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking his own language.” Peter
stood up to preach and asked all gathered there to commit themselves to Christ.
Five thousand men were joined to the church that day.
Not only that. The
word went out to the areas where the “men of Jerusalem” had their homelands. So
through them the Word of Jesus Christ spread to Parthia and Mesopotamia, Judea,
Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and Cyrene. A start
was made to Christian mission. It was indeed a Pentecost to remember.
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The Protestant
reformer John Calvin lived and worked about a generation after the beginning of
the ministry of Martin Luther. If Luther gave us the doctrine of
"justification by faith," Calvin was responsible for giving us the
doctrine of "predestination" or "eternal election." Because
this doctrine, like all the reformation doctrines, have undergone great changes
of understanding since they were first put forth, it is best to see this one in
its original meaning.
Calvin's
understanding of predestination is found in Book Three of his Institutes of the
Christian faith. Calvin placed it in the context of justification and the grace
of God, and it is in such a context that we can understand it best.
Calvin began his
study of predestination by stating the reason he introduced the doctrine:
"to make it clear that our salvation comes about solely from God's mere
generosity." But Calvin also found this doctrine in Scripture, and this
led to his definition of it. "Predestination is God's eternal decree, by
which he determined within himself what he willed to become of each person. . .
. Eternal life is fore-ordained for some, eternal damnation for others. . . .
We are predestined,” said Calvin, “either to life or to death." Calvin
then pointed out that election is recognized in Christ alone: the purpose of
election is "that we, adopted as sons by our Heavenly Father, may obtain
salvation and immortality by his favor. . . (and) that Christ is the mirror
wherein we must . . . contemplate our own election.”
By a simple
definition Calvin then tried to determine who are of the elect. They are
"those whom Christ has illumined with the knowledge of his name and has
introduced into the bosom of his church." In other words, whoever responds
to the Word of God, takes the sacraments, and leads an upright and holy life is
probably of the elect. I say "probably" because the identity of the
elect is God's own secret, knowledge not revealed to us, because (in accordance
with Calvin's Scriptural principle) it has not been told to us directly in
Scripture.
This statement
saved the doctrine of predestination from a grave danger, that of identifying
the non-elect. Instead of attempting to identify them, said Calvin, we should
treat each person as if he or she is one of the elect. He quoted Augustine
(from whom he had derived much of his thinking about predestination) with
favor: "For as we do not know who belongs to the number of the predestined
or who does not belong, we ought to be so minded as to wish that all men (sic)
be saved. So shall it come about that we try to make everyone we meet a sharer
in our peace." In other words, since God alone knows who is of the elect,
we are to treat everyone as if he is, rather than as if he or she is not, of
God's elect.
Finally, the deep
psychological reasons for the doctrine emerged: it is fundamental to the
emotional security of the Christian. “Predestination rightly understood,” wrote
Calvin, “brings no shaking of the faith but its best confirmation.” By this
statement Calvin calls his followers not to spend all their time in
introspection, trying to determine whether God loved them, had forgiven them,
or accepts them. So long as they were members of the Christ’s church, that
certainty is the premise of their faith. Consequently, they were free to spend
their energies not in internal introspection but in working in the world. The
historic activism of the Reformed faith has stemmed from the doctrine of
predestination: the one who does not worry about his election is free to
challenge the world in the name of Christ.
Yet at the end
Calvin again indicated that the doctrine and the things contained in it are a
mystery to him. He simply could not understand why God had poured his grace so
freely on anyone. This is the marvel: not that some are damned, but that some
are saved! So he said with Paul, “Let us tremble at so deep a mystery,” and
with the church in all ages to give God thanks and praise for eternal
salvation.
I want to add a
postscript of my own. "Predestination" should never be confused with
"predetermination." "Predetermination means that everything we
do, or that happens to us, has been determined beforehand. The determiner could
be God, or fate, or one's genetic code, or the social situation into which one
is born -- any of these things. Predetermination is a behavioral concept: our
behavior, the way we carry out our lives, has been determined by forces beyond
our control, whatever these forces are.
Predestination, on
the other hand, is a theological doctrine. That is, it is telling us something
about God. When you break the word into its two parts, it comes out “pre"
and "destination." Our "destiny" is where we are headed in
life. For the Christian this destiny is to be loved by God and to love God. That
is our destiny. And this destiny has been set for us "beforehand."
Before we love God, God loves us. Before we know God, God knows us. Before we
commit sins, God has put in place a process by which our sins are forgiven.
Before we become a Christian, God had given us Christ as our savior and our
Lord. Before we seek out a church in which to nurture our faith, God has
already given us the Church of Jesus Christ. God has done all this for us, and
God has done this "beforehand." None of it depends on the way that we
respond to God and Christ. That's why Calvin and his followers looked upon
"predestination" as the emotional anchor of the Christian life. God
does all. Our part is only to look to God in faith, and we are saved.
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Genesis 2:15-17,
3:1-7 narrates the familiar yet tragic story of the first temptation and the
failure of humankind to measure up to it.
This story is set
in the midst of the world’s first love story, the story of God’s love for us.
God, like a sculptor, reached down into the dust of life, and molded that dust
into clay, a human figure, and then did what no human sculptor can ever do: God
breathed into this human figure the breath of life, the breath of God's own
life.
The love story of
Genesis continues as God created a woman also and gave woman to man and man to
woman. In God's creation women are not subordinate to men nor men to women, but
they are to live together and love each other in full mutuality and unbreakable
trust.
The love story
continues to express itself in terms of all creation. God placed the man and
the woman in a garden and charged them to care for and to use its fruits. God
asked the human beings to name all the beasts, birds, plants. God creates; in
response to that, we create, too.
But the world's
first love story moved rapidly to tragedy: we decided, we human beings, that we
wanted to be "like God," that is, to center our world around
ourselves. Then and now we want complete power over our own future, our own
present, our own life. In creation God is to be the center of our life;
everything we do is centered around this loving, caring, creating God. But sin
enters -- and sin is nothing more than pushing God out of the center of our
lives and elbowing our own way in. This is the sin of origins, the sin that
comes with our very origin, the original sin of which we have heard so much:
elbowing God out of the center of our lives, inserting ourselves there. Instead
of being concerned about God’s plans, God's purposes, God's creation, God's will
for our lives, God's goodwill for other people, we substitute our plans, our
purposes, our will, and we expend our goodwill primarily on ourselves.
Note other things
about the story.
When God gave the
single divine command to the man, the woman was not there. She had not yet been
created. Adam alone heard God’s admonition. Yet when the serpent came to the
woman, she confidently repeated the very words that God had said. How did she
know? Clearly, Adam had told her. Clearly Adam knew what God had said, clearly
when he ate the fruit he knew not only that his wife had given it to him but
that God had commanded that they not touch it, Clearly he, like she, was
knowingly guilty for what he had done.
“Knowledge of good
and evil”: they would learn this, God said, if they ate of the fruit, and this
phrase stands as an enigma. Samuel Terrien, Old Testament scholar, writes that
to “know good and evil” refers to the entire field of potential knowledge. It
means "from the best to the worst." (Till the Heart Sings, 24) Another
commentator called it “the Ultimate Explanation of all things.” God had spread
out the whole creation before Adam and Eve like a blanket and invited them to
participate in it fully. They were to eat, drink, multiply, that is, to live
passionately. But instead of immersing themselves in life, they turned rather
to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the symbol of that which
belonged to God alone, and they lusted after it. Before they lived, they wanted
to know all the answers, whereas God has ordained that knowledge had to come by
and after experience.
“In the day that
you eat of this fruit, you shall die.” God puts it to us clearly. Disobedience
and death go hand in hand. If you have the first, you also have the second.
“Now the serpent
was more crafty than any other wild animal which the Lord had made.” “Serpents”
were symbols of fertility. They were worshiped in all kinds of erotic settings.
But here none of this is taken into account. The serpent is just one of many
creatures that God has made.
Also note, as
Samuel Terrien has written (Heart, 22-23), that the woman in the garden is
presented in a sympathetic and admiring manner. Not the man but the woman is
endowed with intellectual perceptiveness, esthetic flair, and mystical
propensities. She sees that the fruit is good for food, and that it was a
delight to the eyes, and that it was desired to make one wise, and that,
contrary to what God had said, it would not harm her. The serpent had made a
point of telling her that death was a only remote possibility, not deserving of
serious consideration. She inquires, hesitates, argues, ponders, before she
finally and reluctantly yields. Finally after this long examination of the
possibilities, she ate it. The man, on the other hand, acted without protest
and succumbed at once. He was silent, passive, brutish. The man's action is
given in a single phrase: “he ate.”
The act of
disobedience, of course, ended in death. But before death took place, in panic
the man and woman tried to clothe their nakedness. So they made themselves
loincloths of fig leaves. Fig leaves played a part in mideastern fertility
rites, and this may be the reference here. More than likely, this is a comic
attribute in the story. Fig leaves were notoriously rough and scratchy. They
were not meant to be worn as underwear! God knew that. So, in a grace note at
the end of the account, God replaces the fig leaf clothing with garments made
of leather. So man and woman go out into the world together.
The enormity of
what happened can never be understated. Augustine, a great leader of the church
in North Africa at a time his world of the Roman Empire was falling apart,
tells of the terrible meaning of this sin of origins. Augustine looked deep
into the heart of his world and into his own heart.
"The soul
rejoiced at its own freedom to act perversely and disdained to be God's
servant; and so it was deprived of the obedient service which its body had at
first rendered. {Augustine, City of God, 522) . . .The result of this was not
that he was in every way under his own control, but that he was at odds with
himself, and lived a life of harsh and pitiable slavery, instead of the freedom
he so ardently desired. . . . To put it briefly, in the punishment of that sins
the retribution for disobedience is simply disobedience itself . . . so that
because he would not do what he could, he now wills to do what he cannot.” (575)
Then Augustine
prayed, “Look into my heart, O God. . . . Let my heart now tell you what
prompted me to do wrong for no purpose, and why it was only my own love of
mischief that made me do it. The evil in me was foul, but I loved it. I loved
my own perdition and my own faults, not the things for which I committed wrong
but the wrong itself. My soul was vicious and broke away from your safe keeping
to seek its own destruction, looking for no profit in disgrace but only for the
disgrace itself. (Confessions, 47-48)
Sin entered, and
with it came confusion, despair, death itself. This is the penultimate ending
of the world’s first love story.
Matthew 4:1-11:
Reinhold Niebuhr used to say that there are only two kinds of temptation
possible for us. One is the temptation to weakness, and the other is the
temptation to power. Both temptations have one thing in common. In neither
instance is God taken into account. In the temptation to weakness, we are
saying that our situation is so bad that not even God can help us. In the
temptation to power, we are saying that we are so strong that we do not need
God.
Jesus faced, and
overcame, both kinds of temptation. At the end of his ministry, Jesus knelt in
the Garden of Gethsemane and said, “My God, why has thou forsaken me?” – the
temptation to weakness. At the beginning of his ministry, in the wilderness,
Jesus faced the temptation to power.
As the story
opens, Jesus in the wilderness had not eaten for forty days and nights, and he
was hungry. The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command
this stone to become bread." Note the power issue: the devil is suggesting
that Jesus do what only God had formerly been able to do: by a miraculous act
turn the inert stone of the desert into living food for the hungry. God had
provided food to the Hebrews in the wilderness, suggested the tempter. Did not
Jesus, being the Son of God, have this same power? Jesus answered, "It is
written, `Man shall not live by bread alone.'"
The passage Jesus
quoted comes from Deuteronomy 8:3. Deuteronomy speaks of remembering that God
had led these people forty years in another wilderness. And God "humbled
you" Deuteronomy said, "and let you hunger and fed you with manna,
which you did not know, nor did your fathers know; that God might make you know
that man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of
the mouth of the Lord." And the point of it? Hear Deuteronomy again:
"Lest, when you have eaten and are full, and have built goodly houses and
live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply, and your silver and gold
is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted
up, and you forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of bondage, . . . who fed you in the wilderness, . . . to do
you good in the end. Beware," adds Deuteronomy, "lest you say in your
heart, `My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.'"
This context in
Deuteronomy turns Jesus' reply completely around. When I first read it, I
thought, "Man does not live by bread alone." Well, that means that we
do not have to worry about people who are hungry or ill-clothed or ill-housed;
Jesus gives us a spiritual gospel, "We do not live by bread alone."
But that totally misses Jesus' point to the tempter. In quoting this passage
from Deuteronomy, Jesus is saying to us that the real issue is whether we think
what we have is of our own making or whether it is the gift of God to be shared
with others. Beware, says Deuteronomy, "lest you say in your heart, `My
power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.'" This is the
question before us today: when we in contemporary America build goodly houses
and live in them, and our silver and gold is multiplied, in our power and our wealth
do we forget the Lord, or do we remember that we and our forebears were once
ill-clothed and ill-housed and ill-fed, and God supplied our need, as God wants
us to supply the needs of those who lack those things? Said Jesus, Do not lift
up your heart against God, but remember it is the Lord your God who has given
you these things.
The second
temptation is the temptation to sensationalism. The devil took Jesus to
Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple. "If you are the Son
of God, throw yourself down from here; for it is written, `He will give his
angels charge of you, to guard you,' and `On their hands they will bear you up,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.'" These two quotations came
from Psalm 91, and they seemed to fit the situation. The crowds would ooh and
aah, when they saw Jesus floating down from the high point of the temple, with
the angels of God themselves bearing him up and keeping him from crashing
against the stones below. Again Jesus went to Deuteronomy. "It is said,
`You shall not tempt the Lord your God.'" Do not provoke this God by
asking him to do signs and wonders in our behalf, said Jesus. Instead, worship
him, fear him, in the crucibles of life obey God and do not follow some false
path that will take us from doing what we know to be the will of God. God may
test us, but we can never test God. To God, we can only be obedient.
The third
temptation concerns usurping power. The devil took Jesus up onto a high
mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and
said to him, "To you I will give all this authority and their glory; for
it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will
worship me, it shall all be yours." How could a little peasant boy like Jesus,
I have said to myself, have such delusions of grandeur, that all the world
would one day be his? But it was not a fatuous dream. Would-be messiahs and
posturing warlords were presenting themselves all over Galilee and Judea as
world- leaders-in-waiting (see Horsley, Messiahs and Bandits). Writings found
at Qumran suggested that people in that community actually believed that God
was soon going to give them mastery over all the world. For someone with an
awareness of the inner power and charisma that Jesus knew he possessed, this
promise of world reign was no idle dream. But Jesus refused it. Jesus will be
king, but he will not be king as the Roman Empire defined kingship. He will
worship the Lord his God, and God only shall he serve.
Why was this
passage placed into Scripture at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry? I believe
the answer is this: Scripture is showing us that from the beginning of his
ministry Jesus had conquered temptation. The age-old curse that had blighted
humankind from the moment of our beginnings had been broken. We are now free
again to enter into full relations with God and all God’s people. In that
dramatic moment of victory over temptation, the situation of all humankind was
transformed.
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The Christian
doctrine of Trinity can be expressed in a single phrase: “The God of the
Christians is one God in three persons.” This doctrine has a scriptural base,
but the phrase was not finally formulated until the time of the Council of
Nicaea.
Matthew’s Gospel
articulates it clearest. In the final climactic scene of Jesus on the mountain
with his disciples, Jesus instructs them to go into all the world and make
disciples, baptizing them “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit.” (28:19) These words surprise even the most careful reader of the
Bible; nothing quite like them was ever said in any part of the New Testament
before or after. But when we reflect upon Scripture as a whole, we can see
where they might have come from.
The Old Testament
shows God’s great work of creation, not only of the natural world but of the
human life within it. God has a hand, says Scripture, in everything that
occurs. The New Testament shows us two things that contributed to the idea of
Trinity. One is that God was in Jesus Christ, as Paul said, reconciling the
world to Himself, that is, putting back together again that which had been
broken, with no parts left over. That is the meaning of reconciliation, and
that is what God did in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ: he
redeemed, renewed, and restored all creation to Himself. The other is that this
redeeming, reconciling, restoring spirit of God in Christ was not withdrawn
from the world at the death of Christ. Instead, the power of this spirit
continued and spread and grew until it reached into all parts of the world and
into the deepest reaches of the human soul. These three facts were indisputable
to the Christians: God’s work in creation, God’s act of redemption, and God’s
reach through the spirit.
How to put these
together into a single idea? This is the puzzle that faced those early
Christian thinkers. They lived in a society that recognized many gods. Pagans
would not have minded if the Christians had said they worshiped three gods,
each of whom did something different; they would have been comfortable with
that. But Christians also had a heritage from Judaism that insisted that God is
one: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord,” said the hallowed Book of
Deuteronomy (6:4), and therefore you shall bend each and every effort of heart
and soul and mind in loving this one Lord. The Christians’ struggle with this
puzzle took three hundred years to resolve. Finally they said, “Our God is one
God in three persons.”
What they meant by
this can be seen in an analogy drawn from the drama of the day. In contemporary
drama there were many characters in a play, but the plays were written so that
only two actors were needed to play all the parts. (This was probably so for
both economic and artistic reasons. Putting on a play is an expensive
proposition at best, and the fewer actors you have, the more expenses can be
controlled. Furthermore, there were not many great actors, so letting two of
them play all the parts made artistic sense.) But how could you tell that it
was Zeus on the stage and not Athena? Very simple. You designed a “Zeus mask”
and an “Athena mask,” and when the actor appeared with one mask he was Zeus,
and with the other mask he was Athena.
The masks were
named in Latin a “persona.” The name had come from the construction of the
mask. Built into the mask was a megaphone that permitted the actor’s voice to
be heard in the far parts of the theater, something necessary when the theater
was as large as the one, say, in Ephesus that seated 25,000 people, with the
most important people -- priests, government officials, the very rich -- seated
farthest from the stage! The word “persona” itself is instructive. “Sona,”
related to our “sonar,” simply means “to sound.” “Per” means “through.” So the
mask was that through which the sound of the actor’s voice traveled. And since
the mask was so closely identified with the part being played, that part became
“the persona,” the character being played.
Applied to our
doctrine of trinity, what we now have is this: “One God in three persons” means
“one actor playing three characters.” God is one, but God comes wearing three
masks as God acts upon the scenes of God’s creation. Sometimes this one God is
perceived most clearly in the work of creation. Sometimes God is seen most
clearly in the act of redemption. Sometimes God is seen most clearly in the
reach of the Spirit of God in Christ. But always it is the one God at work, one
actor in three char- actors.
But in our present
day another approach to understanding the doctrine of the Trinity is being
made. It is called “the social theory of Trinity.” It sees relatedness as being
the heart of trinitarian doctrine, the father related to the son and the
spirit, the son related to the father and the spirit, the spirit related to the
father and the son. It is saying to us that “relatedness,” being integral to
God is also integral to our own lives; indeed, as it is most important to God,
it is therefore most important to us. Out of this comes new understandings of
the church as community, marriage as mutuality, leadership as consensual,
liberation as the logical outgrowth of the mutuality in the Godhead. Much
remains to be written and studied in this understanding of Trinity, but it is a
promising manner of approach to the age-old conundrum of the Christian faith:
what after all is the nature of God?
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