Christus ist auferstanden!

This is an Easter reflection I did for our church a year ago. Re-posting it this Easter day. A ‘Coronavirus year’ has passed. The resurrection of Jesus continues to proclaim the victory of God over the powers of Sin and Death.

If we were physically in church this morning, retired German teacher Ian Stanton, with a mischievous smile on his face, would likely come my way and say “Christus ist auferstanden!” (Christ is risen!). I say ‘mischievous’ because he knows I will be panicking trying to remember the few words of German that he expects me to know one day a year. For the record they are “Er ist wahrhaftig auferstanden!” (He is risen indeed!).

These are days of deep uncertainty and loss. Walking around Maynooth it’s heart-breaking to read sign after sign of businesses closed. Behind those notices are stories of lost jobs, debt and fear for the future. One talks honestly about the owner’s ‘trepidation’ over the ‘big and scary’ decision to shut. I find myself praying for her and make a promise that, hopefully, when that café reopens, I’ll go and give her some business.

Walking along the canal parallel to the railway, empty trains go past. I wonder how long this is going to go on, aware there is no easy fix and multiple lockdowns could come and go for over a year or more. I think of health-care workers in MCC like Andy and Susanne on the front-line. I think of friends who have suddenly no work and no income. I wonder how many in MCC are in a similar situation. I think of other friends at high risk and pray they can stay free of infection. I think of my dad in his 90s and living at home alone and find myself strangely grateful that my mother died over a year ago and is not now stuck in a nursing home, confused, with no-one able to visit her. And if I’m honest, I also wonder about my own job.

And yet, as I enjoy the Spring air and blue sky, I know I’m deeply privileged. I have health, family, a home to live in, access to technology and food to eat. I wonder if this pandemic has caused such angst because it has hit the rich West. It has shown us to be far less safe and in control than we thought. It has made us face the possibility of sudden death. Yet millions of people in the world are only all too familiar with disease, famine and war. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone there are over 400,000 deaths annually of malaria and over 2 million new infections.

And so I think of countless Christians in the past and today who have never known the safety nets of stable employment, fair pay, a home, access to health care, physical security, food and clean water or the expectation of a long life.

And I start to wonder if this pandemic, awful as it is, is bringing more sharply into focus just how relevant and important it is that Christus ist auferstanden.

For if Christ is raised, then we can trust that our futures are in the hands of the risen Lord.

If Christ is raised, then, those in Christ through faith already have resurrection life.

If Christ is raised, then God has already won the victory over death and evil powers and that therefore Christians can rest assured that

“… neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39).

And if Christ is raised, we can have a sure and certain hope that, regardless of when we die, we will share one day in Christ’s resurrection to a new life within a renewed world – one that will be gloriously free of viruses, disease and death itself.

Lent 2021: Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion. Justice and Judgement

15/03/2019PatrickM1 Comment

We continue our Lenten series on Fleming Rutledge’s outstanding book, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (2015).

In this post we begin chapter 3 on ‘The Question of Justice’.

The issue in view here is the relationship between the righteousness of God (justice, justification) and judgement (condemnation, destruction).

To anticipate a possible objection:

All this talk of judgement and righteousness sounds like a heavy-duty abstract theological discussion – let’s just focus on more spiritually important things like loving one another.

To which I would say at least four things:

i. What could be better than some important theology?! My tongue is not in my cheek here. God himself seems to see fit to give his people plenty to profound theology to wrestle over in the Bible. When it comes to understanding justice and judgement, he has given the book of Romans let alone the whole Old Testament to his people. Dare we say, actually, can we have something else please?

ii. The hypothetical objection above also assumes a disconnect between theology and ‘real life’. Few things are more disheartening to a Bible teacher than this false antithesis. Everything a Christian does and thinks and says is ‘theological’. To say ‘theology’ is optional or for professionals only is to say God’s Word and God’s truth does not matter, we can figure things out ourselves thanks. It’s a form of passive arrogance, not a sign of ‘spirituality’.

iii. Disinterest in theological issues like justice and judgement is actually symptomatic of a faith that is becoming irrelevant, not staying relevant. It will be so shaped by the world and its beliefs and values, that it will have noting distinct to say to ‘real life’. Understanding justice and judgement takes us to the heartbeat of Christianity because it takes us to the cross.

iv. Few things are less ‘abstract’ or ‘theoretical’ than thinking Christianly about issues of justice and judgement.

Are you concerned about injustice?

Do you ask at times ‘Where you are God?

Are you concerned about the mess the world is in?’

How do you respond when someone treats you unfairly?

What do you get angry about when you listen to the news?

These are the sort of everyday issues that a theology of justice addresses.

OK, that mini-rant come introduction over, let’s get back to Rutledge and see where the conversation goes.

It starts off with an important reminder – those that suffer most from injustice are the ones least likely to be reading Rutledge’s book (or a theological blog for that matter).

It is the poor, the marginalised and least educated who suffer most from injustice and have least resources to do something about it. Therefore,

Trying to understand someone else’s predicament lies at the very heart of what it means to be a Christian (107)

How would you describe God? With what adjectives?  What lies at the ‘essence’ of God’s character?

Rutledge suggests this is how the average churchgoing American might answer.

he or she will almost certainly call God “loving”. God is also commonly described as compassionate, merciful, welcoming, accepting, and inclusive. Very few white Americans will volunteer that God is just. (107)

Yet the justice of God dominates the Old Testament. Rutledge unpacks this story in detail and we can only touch on it here.

As God is just – and ‘holy’ and ‘righteous’ are virtually synonyms for just – so Israel is to be a community of justice. Injustice is the powerful or rich exploiting the poor – in Israel there were to be no poor. Where injustice exists, so God’s judgment follows.

Justice on earth is a foretaste of the future Day of the Lord which will usher in a realm of perfect justice.

Take Psalm 146 – look for how realism about the temporary nature of human justice leads to a future-orientated hope in the perfect justice of God.

1 Praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord, my soul.
2 I will praise the  Lord all my life;
I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.
3 Do not put your trust in princes,
in human beings, who cannot save.
4 When their spirit departs, they return to the ground;
on that very day their plans come to nothing.
5 Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the  Lord their God.
6 He is the Maker of heaven and earth,
the sea, and everything in them –
he remains faithful for ever.
7 He upholds the cause of the oppressed
and gives food to the hungry.
The Lord sets prisoners free,
8 the Lord gives sight to the blind,
the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down,
the Lord loves the righteous.
9 The Lord watches over the foreigner
and sustains the fatherless and the widow,
but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.
10 The Lord reigns for ever,
your God, O Zion, for all generations.

And so the OT leads to the Messianic hopes of a coming kingdom of justice – we return to this in the next post.

[Note: This is a re-post from a daily series I ran during Lent a couple of years ago on Rutledge’s book. This Lent I will do some re-posts from that series].

Lent 2021: Fleming Rutledge. The accursed death of Christ

We continue our Lenten series on Fleming Rutledge’s outstanding book, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (2015).

This post relates to chapter 2 on ‘The Godlessness of the Cross’.

We are into some serious theology here – serious both in terms of depth and also subject matter.

What is so refreshing about Rutledge is this seriousness – Christianity is a serious faith about big issues the answers to which will shape our lives.

Questions arising out of this post for me are these:

How seriously is a theology of the cross taught, talked about and understood in the church today do you think? Especially during Lent and climaxing at Easter? How seriously is theology taken in general do you think?

The final section of chapter 2 focuses on Galatians 3:10-14 along with two or three other texts which, take together, Rutledge argues represent ‘the accursed death of Christ’.

Galatians 3:10-14

• Everyone is living under the power of God’s curse, because the Law (Torah) pronounces that curse on all lawbreakers
• Rectification (which is Rutledge’s rendering of ‘justification’ – to be ‘set right’) by the Law is impossible since the Law does not give life, only faith can.
• Only God can do the rectifying and has done so through his Son who took the full curse of the Law onto himself at the cross.
• A Christian’s identity is not found in the observance of the Law but from the gift of the Spirit through faith in Christ. (99-100)

Rutledge comments on popular caricatures and misunderstandings here. To the objection that it would be a monstrous sort of Father who allows his Son to be abandoned and cursed on the cross, she rightly shapes a reply around the Trinity – Jesus takes the accursedness that is ours on himself by his own decree.

2 Corinthians 5:21

A second text Rutledge turns to is a famous one – probably the strongest text in the NT for some sort of imputation (exchange) of Christ’s righteousness to believers and our sin to him.

For our sake he [God] made him [Christ] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Much ink has been spilt over this verse. [N T Wright famously and controversially rejects imputation here and elsewhere in the NT, as if we are ‘given’ the righteousness of Christ].

Rutledge says no-one can say for sure what it means that Jesus is ‘made sin’. Wisely, things are framed around Sin with a capital ‘S’ – in Paul sin is a power that is in league with death, opposed to the good work of God. It is much more than merely ‘missing the mark’, but a hostile spiritual force that, in effect, uses the Law to condemn us to death.

Coming back to Galatians 3, Paul’s quotation of Deuteronomy 21:23 is in effect saying Jesus is condemned by the curse of the Law.

In his death, Paul declares, Jesus was giving himself over to the enemy – to Sin, to its ally the Law, and to its wage, Death (Rom. 6:23; 7:8-11). This was his warfare. That is one of the most important reasons – perhaps the most important – that Jesus was crucified, for no other mode of execution would have been commensurate with the extremity of humanity’s condition under Sin.  (102)

This is where Rutledge is so good, she gets beyond one-dimensional theologies of the cross to how, in Paul, it is a rich kaleidoscope of images and themes converging to form a complex, powerful and beautiful portrait of the love of God in Christ.

By one-dimensional, I mean reducing the cross down to a mere individual transaction – ‘my sin problem resolved’. Yes, the atonement includes this, but there is much more going on, particularly in terms of who the enemy is and the scope of the victory won.

Rutledge draws a creative and memorable parallel here: Jesus’ treatment under Rome is similar to humanity’s condition under Sin. Jesus is:

• Condemned
• Rendered helpless and powerless
• Stripped of his humanity
• Reduced to the status of a slave
• Declared unfit to live and deserving of death

So, at one level Jesus takes the literal form of a slave on the cross, but ‘behind the scenes’ the cross is ‘an apocalyptic battlefield where the Lord of Hosts goes to war with the forces of the Enemy’. (103).  [Rutledge returns to the atonement as a battlefield in chapter 9 – Christus Victor].

This is what happened at the cross. The Son of God gave himself up to be enslaved by Sin, condemned by the Law, and subject to Death … Linking all these passages together then, we see that Jesus exchanged God for Godlessness …

… What we see happening on the cross is that Jesus, who dies the death of a slave, “was made to be sin”. Does this mean that Jesus become his own Enemy? It would seem so. Just as his own human body turned against him on the cross, smothering and killing him, so his human nature absorbed the curse of the Law, the sentence that deals death to the human being (Rom. 7:11). By making himself “to be sin”, he allied himself with us in our farthest extremity … Thus he entered our desperate condition. No wonder he cried on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (103)

[Note: This is a re-post from a daily series I ran during Lent a couple of years ago on Rutledge’s book. This Lent I will do some re-posts from that series].

Lenten Reflection – Alison King

This week leading up to Easter I am posting with permission a series of Lenten Reflections written by members of our church in Maynooth.

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1 Corinithians 13:12 and Unmet Expectations

¹² For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

I love this verse. It’s an often go to verse of mine. Why? Because it reminds me that because I don’t have God’s “whole picture” perspective, there are always going to be things this side of heaven I simply won’t understand. However, honestly, within my not understanding I can all too easily get caught in an endless cycle of over thinking, especially when expectations are not met.

I wonder this Lent what might be some of your unmet expectations? Perhaps you expected to be married by now, or have a better job, even any job, or you didn’t expect to be walking in and through so many hard spaces, or perhaps like me you’ve been given a medical diagnosis which you didn’t expect? And within those unmet expectation places I am certain that people, including family and friends, haven’t always behaved as you expected them to. You thought others would understand better, be more supportive, spend more time listening to your side of the story, and so you end up feeling let down.

And what has all this got to do with Lent you might ask? Well it’s simply this: as I think of Jesus being tempted, I’ve come to believe, that these unmet expectations can be a destructive tool of Satan as he tempts me with his insidious whispers: “If they really cared, or if you “did” enough, or if only you had more faith?”

What then do we do with these feelings? Firstly, recognise them for what they are, just that, feelings, which our sometimes muddied thinking minds, often don’t allow space, or indeed grace, for the whole picture to be considered. Then I need to bring my hurts firstly and fore-mostly to God, and to then try to leave them there. The Psalms are full of laments. However, as you read them you will find that most often they are written from the perspective of being spoken to God rather than other people. Philip in a sermon to his class recently wrote of how when the cloud descends over us, when we can’t see God in our situation, (when expectations are un-met) that is the very time we most need to lean into Him to ask Him to transform us. I both like and am challenged by the idea of allowing God to mould me in ways I may not understand. I also need to remember, that God as El-Roi sees and knows the whole, including the finish of our stories! And therein surely lies our very hope during this waiting for Easter Sunday season.

Having read this now I invite you to perhaps firstly to pause and be real with God about some of your unmet expectations. Then I’d ask you to see Him coming alongside you and hear Him say to you, “child of my heart all that is not known or understood by you, is seen and fully known by me and I can assure you that I’m going nowhere, until, together we cross the finish line.”

Amen. 

 

 

 

Lenten Reflection – Paul Burke

This week coming up to Easter I am posting with permission some Lenten Reflections written by members of our church in Maynooth. Some were written pre COVID-19.

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As I write this, Storm Jorge has arrived, the fire is lit, ‘Agus anois an Aimsear’ plays in the background and I sit. The crackle of the fire is echoed outside by the rain on the pavement and the green tarpaulin that flaps and slaps the table it covers.

One could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, but Spring has arrived. Since the solstice, and ever so slowly, the sun rises higher over the horizon and we emerge from the dark days of winter once more. The clay pots outside my door display nature’s capacity to begin again; snow drops hang like pearl earrings, a pale yellow crocus opens itself as if in worship, the first cherry blossoms are born on bare branches and much is yet to come.

It is in this changing of the seasons, the movement from darkness into light that I consider my own shadow, the ways in which I miss the mark, the ways in which I don’t reflect the light and love of the Divine. The hatred I sometimes feel towards those who make my life difficult. The anger that simmers just below the surface and then is misdirected at those I care most for. The empty places I seek comfort from the pain of living in a broken and often dark world.

In these moments I take comfort in a God of change, a God of renewal.

“Forget the former things: do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland” (Isaiah 43:18-19).

Jesus invites us to change when he says ‘repent and believe the good news’(Mark 1v15). The word repent refers to a changing of attitude or mind; to turn in a new direction and to go a different way.

Padraig O Tuama writes on repentance in his book In the Shelter.

To be open to the possibility of repentance is a sign of the goodness of humanity. To consider one self immune from the need for such changing of tune, of mind, of direction or idea is to alienate oneself from the argument of being human. Hello to the gift of being wrong. Hello to the gift of repentance. Hello to change.

Change is often like an unwanted visitor; I’d rather just be left alone. Change requires humility and humility is hard. Change is also slow.

But what if, as I lay to rest the attitudes and actions that are unreflective of the God of Love, something else was born? What if out of the darkness something life giving emerged? What if from beneath the dead and decaying leaves on the forest floor pushed primroses, snowdrops, bluebells, trilliums, anemones and erythroniums? A woodland in spring is a beautiful thing, a tapestry of colours and textures a long time in the making.

We have a God who since ancient times has been weaving threads of love, grace and beauty into the fabric of this world and into the fabric of our lives. Hello to the God of resurrection and hello to the God who is making all things new!

Peace Prayer of Saint Francis

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not
so much seek to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

 

Lenten Reflection – Lorraine Neill

This week leading up to Easter I am posting with permission a series of Lenten Reflections written by members of our church in Maynooth. Some are written pre-COVID-19.

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Where are you?

“Adam? Eve? Where are you?”

I wonder what it felt like to hear God ask that?  Probably less like the excited anticipation of being discovered in a game of hide and seek and more like the dreaded anticipation of someone walking in on your thoughts.  They were hiding.  Hiding among the many trees that the Lord had made for them to enjoy.  Trees that were ‘pleasing to the eye and good for food’.  Hiding because even though they were given more than they needed and free to eat of any tree but one, they couldn’t resist the one.

“You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.’

Knowledge here means to experience.  God wanted to protect us from experiencing evil, but then evil stood there and looked so good…
And so she ate.
And so he ate.
And so we ate.

And when they ate their eyes were opened.  They saw. They saw what they wished they hadn’t seen. And that seeing ‘brought loss and a darkness that none of us could hold’. They had unleashed evil into creation.  Hell was set loose.  And they couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle.  And so they do what we all do, when we’ve done as we shouldn’t have done… we hide.  Hoping not to be found, and yet part of us knowing that being found is our only hope.

Even when we are found by God we still squirm trying to justify and defend ourselves “…he made me, she made me, it’s my enneagram number…!”

But eventually, like Adam and Eve, we are faced with our mistrust, faced with our desire to be our own God.  Reminded that He alone is the source of all life and we are his creations.  We are reminded that ‘we are dust and to dust we will return’. Fleming Rutledge writes

“in a mysterious way, the saying that we are dust points us to the good news, because it re-orients us to our proper relationship with the creator God, who formed us out of the earth.”

Where are you?  He asks us as we hide. How gracious of him to ask, how gracious of Him to come looking for us even after we’ve mistrusted and disobeyed him. How gracious of him to come looking for us when we thought we didn’t want to be found.  How kind.  How loving. How hopeful.

“This is the God who comes to man and woman when we can no longer come to him, when we can only run away and hide.”

God is always searching for us. God’s first response to this catastrophic event is to search for us in our fall, to invite us out of hiding and most astoundingly to clothe and protect us.

“The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them…”

This Lent, as everyday, there is an invitation for us to remember that we are dust so that we may again fall on the knowledge that He made us, that He knows us better than we know ourselves, that He knows what we need and that He desires abundant life for us.

This Lent there is an invitation to hear him calling our name and asking “where are you?”  There is an invitation to come out of hiding and there is an invitation to be clothed by Him.

[Refs: The Undoing of Death by Fleming Rutledge and poem by David Whyte ‘No one told me’.

Lent 2019: Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion (19) The Passover and the Exodus

We continue our Lenten series on Fleming Rutledge’s outstanding book, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (2015).

In this post, we begin looking at the major images and themes of how the Bible talks about the cross. First is The Passover and the Exodus.

Rutledge’s main stated concern in these chapters is ‘Will it preach?’ Will it help and guide Christians who wish to deepen their understanding, teaching, social action and personal faith.

As discussed earlier, Rutledge is operating with two broad categories for understanding what the cross achieves:

1. There is sin and guilt for which atonement needs to be made
2. There is slavery, bondage and oppression from which humanity needs deliverance

And it is the second of these most in view when it comes to The Passover and Exodus.

I think one of the first essays I wrote at Bible College many years ago was on how the Exodus was remembered throughout the Old Testament. I am sure it was terrible but I remember learning how foundational that event was for Israel’s identity and worship.

Rutledge talks of the Exodus as a ‘living event’ – an old story that becomes a new story for every generation (217).  The Passover memorial meal is far more than mere ‘remembering’ – it is ‘an appropriation of that same saving power in the present.’ (218)

Passover and Lord’s Supper

Similarly, when we come to the Lord’s Supper, Christians are not merely ‘remembering’ Jesus but believe that he is actively present in power (218).

All the four gospels – with John doing it slightly differently – place the passion narrative in a Passover setting.

Paul talks of Jesus as

‘Christ, our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth’ (1 Cor. 5:7-8).

Rutledge draws out a number of parallels but also stresses that, in the death of Christ, God has done something radically new. The cross as a ‘novum’ is the dividing line between Old and New Testaments, it marks the distinguishing event between Judaism and Christianity.

Exodus: God intervenes from ‘on high’.

Cross: God intervenes ‘from within God’s own life, in the form of his Son’s self-offering’.

Exodus: Israel is delivered physically from bondage under Pharaoh to (eventual) freedom in their own land.

Cross: Jesus delivers believers from bondage into freedom, from sin into righteousness.

Passover / Exodus: deliverance from death.

Cross: in John’s Gospel Jesus is the ‘Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29). But he is also the Passover lamb whose blood saves from death (p.220).

In 1 Peter, the Passover lamb is linked with the Suffering Servant is Isaiah 53;

²³ When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. ²⁴ “He himself bore our sins” in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; “by his wounds you have been healed.” (1 Peter 2:23-24).

We should not miss how utterly remarkable this is. The first Christians are reinterpreting the foundational event of Israel’s election and salvation by the one true God and seeing in Jesus’ death and resurrection a new exodus, a new liberation, a new act of God’s mighty love and saving power.

This is not at all to invalidate the Old Testament. We will come back to this and how the Exodus acts as an Easter Liturgy in the next post.

Resurrection Hope

 Christ is Risen!

Monasterboice High Cross

This is the message of Easter. These three words speak of another reality breaking in upon our world and transforming it forever. Death is overcome in God’s raising of Jesus Christ. Resurrection generates hope. At the most basic level, hope is that somehow the future will be better than the present. But Christian hope has a specific character.

The foundation of Christian hope is God himself.

God is utterly good. He is committed to his created world in a way we can barely grasp. The triune God – Father, Son and Spirit – act out of immeasurable love in history to effect its ultimate redemption. God is the “God of hope” (Rom 15:13). Christians dare not hope in anything or anyone else. Christian faith is trust and hope in God alone.

The future has stormed the gates of death

The incarnation, life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ reveals the true nature of reality itself. That reality is apocalyptic – one in which God has broken into this world, disrupting it forever.  Easter tells us that God is God and we are not! The future has stormed the gates of death and smashed them down. The Spirit is the presence of God within his people. Those “in Christ” share in his resurrection life in the here and now. History is in God’s hands – it is moving towards a time when that future will become present – when God’s will will indeed be done on earth. This means that Christian hope

is a stance towards our future, which regards the incompleteness and imperfection and bleakness of history not with terror or resignation but with trust that, because God has made himself known as creator and reconciler, he will also demonstrate himself to be consummator. (John Webster)

The Character of Hope

How does hope shape the Christian believer? What difference does hope make? I love what John Webster says here

The Christian who hopes is not engaged in an act of self-formation; he or she makes history only because in a deep sense history has already been made, and because only on that basis is it possible to be a hopeful person and agent.

Because of Easter Sunday, Christians are to be the most hopeful people in the world. They are set free from the past, and look forward with joy to the future, and so are to be people who transform the present.

The transforming power of hope

Christians live in the “in between time” – the “now” is a reminder of mortality, sin, suffering and death. Christian hope is not naive optimism nor it is triumphalism. The “not yet” is a present experience of what can and will be. The Spirit is a deposit guaranteeing in the here and now that future.

Such hope is life-changing. Because of Easter Sunday, Christian hope is not resignation and a desire to escape creation. Nor is it despair at the reality of immeasurable suffering in this world. Authentic Christian hope will motivate and inspire and guide action in the present that anticipates the future.

Such action may be creation care; it may be pastoral care; it may be resisting evil and injustice; it may be empowering and liberating others. Whatever it is – it is somehow to foreshadow the kingdom come.

Faith, hope and Love

Above all, hopeful action in the world is to be characterised by love – for love transcends faith and hope. Love is eternal in a way that they are not. Love of God, love of others, love of God’s world – this is the greatest way that God’s people can demonstrate the power of the future to transform the present.

With best wishes for a hopeful and joyful Easter!

 

Good Friday: what does it mean to follow a crucified Messiah?

A reflection on Mark 10:32-45 this Good Friday

Monasterboice High Cross

As the disciples follow Jesus towards Jerusalem, he takes them aside once more to prepare them for what is ahead. The language and imagery is brutal.

“We are going up to Jerusalem,” he said, “and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles, who will mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him. Three days later he will rise.”

Condemned by Jewish authorities. Handed over to ruthless pagans. Public shame, humiliation and undeserved violent death. This is what lies ahead.

Yes, these images are followed with a promise of resurrection from the dead, but the flow of the story suggests that pretty well none of this entire sequence was understood by the disciples. This is illustrated by James’ and John’s request “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.”

I have considerable sympathy for James and John! What Jesus predicts is inconceivable. If he is the anointed Messiah of God, shame, death and humiliation cannot be his fate. Rather, it should be glory and exaltation – hence the brothers’ request.

The other disciples’ indignation is not at James and John’s utter misunderstanding of Jesus’ imminent fate, but at their grab at glory for themselves. Like James and John, they have little idea what Jesus’ promise that “You will drink the cup I drink and be baptised with the baptism I am baptised with“ would mean in practice.

So Jesus seeks to clarify, again, what it means to follow the Son of Man. He calls them together and says

“You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Discipleship within the kingdom of God means following Jesus. On the surface that sounds simple, but he leads his followers to take on a new and strange identity:

– Slave (doulos): become a slave of others rather than seeking a position of power, status or respect

– Servant (diakonos): become a servant of others, rather than be served by others.

This an uncompromising call to a difficult and demanding way of life. Jesus, as is his style as a terrible salesman, offers no possible evasions for his followers. There are no soft options. The norm for discipleship is the cross. Death is what it means to be a disciple – regardless of who we are.

The pattern for this other-focused service is Jesus’ willingness to give up his very life for others. A ransom liberates captives. His is a self-giving death so that many are set free. It is life lived for others, not the self.

Following Jesus is absolutely not the path by which to achieve glory, honour, respect and status. So if we hope to achieve those things in Christian life and ministry, like James and John we have completely missed what following Jesus is all about.

Among the Gentiles in the ancient world (the Roman Empire is probably in view here) the world worked according to strict hierarchies of status, prestige, position, wealth and political patronage. Those in power lorded it over their inferiors. This simply is the way reality was constructed. No other world could be imagined,

Until now.

Jesus’ death on a cross opens up a new way to imagine the world we live in. It calls Christians to belong to a different reality, a different kingdom, to follow a king like no other. A king who freely and courageously gives his life for others; who surrenders power without resorting to violence; who refuses to defend himself or his own rights before his enemies.

Good Friday is a day to reflect on the wonder and beauty of this king. And then to reflect on our lives.

How we are living them and who we are living them for?

If we are honest and realistic (or, to put it another way, if you are anything like me!) we will be reminded that we continually fail to live self-giving lives of service to others. We don’t want to be servants and slaves. At the very least it is inconvenient; at the very most it means suffering and death. Most of the time it is somewhere inbetween – a daily calling to an other-focused way of life.

And then, in our weakness, failure and sin, to come to the foot of that cross and to give our lives afresh to our crucified Lord.

Always remembering in hope his words, “Three days later he will rise.”

Comments, as ever, welcome

An Easter Reflection: 1 John 4, love, life, wrath and the cross

In 1 John 4: 7-10, the apostle writes this:

7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9. This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

That is 9 occurences of the noun or verb for love of [agapē (love) and agapaō (to love)] in 4 verses. I John is easily the most ‘love saturated’ book in the Bible and these verses represent the most ‘love saturated’ section of the epistle.

Famously – and uniquely in Scripture – John states that ‘God is love’. Love ‘comes from God’ because God, in himself, in his essential being, is love. This means everything that he does is loving – whether creating, sustaining, redeeming or judging.

For John, love is never abstract; it is always concrete and practical. God’s love takes the visible and tangible form of sending his one and only Son into the world – in John a realm of sin, death, rebellion and hate. If love is the motive, the result is that we might have life through him.

John thinks in big picture theology rather than systematic details. The ‘sending’ of the Son is shorthand for the whole story of Jesus – his incarnation, life, ministry, death and resurrection. His focus here is on the cross as verse 10 makes clear.

The Son is sent in love to give us life. But how does this work?

1. Somehow the death of the beloved Son is an ‘atoning sacrifice’ (hilasmos) for our sins – yours and mine. Despite some attempts to evade this, hilasmos has the sense of propitiation – turning away divine wrath against sin and sinners via an acceptable sacrifice. The love of God sits right alongside his anger and judgement against sin. It is at the cross that the love and judgement of God meet. To see Easter and the cross only as a supreme example of divine love and to airbrush atonement for sin out of the picture is to depart from the apostolic gospel.

2. In atoning for our sins, the death of the Son gives believers life. This implies a doctrine of regeneration. To be in the world is to be in a realm of death. Through God’s loving initiative, we are given the gift of eternal life. We no longer are to belong to the realm of the world.

3. Easter is solely dependent on God’s love and is God’s initiative alone – we are utterly unable to deal with our sin or be reborn into new life. It is only God who can  atone for sin and give us life. He does so at supreme cost to himself.

4. If the whole point of Easter is to give us life – what does this life look like? Quite simply it is a life of love. John’s focus is our love for each other. If we do not love, it reveals that we do not actually know the God who is love. Love is the ‘proof’ that we have received new life and our sins have been atoned for in the death of the Son. As we enter this Easter weekend, let’s first and foremost remember that both the motive and the ultimate purpose of the cross is love.

Easter is therefore a good time to reflect on our ‘love lives’ – how well are we loving?

Easter is an appropriate time to pray, repent and ask God to help us love – to be the people that the atoning death of Christ is designed to make us be. Perhaps there is someone we need to act to be reconciled with this Easter.

Easter is most of all a time to rejoice and worship the God who is love and who acts in love so that we might have the privilege and joy to know him.

Comments, as ever, welcome.