This one essentially boils down in sermonic style key theological ideas I wove into a paper that I presented at a Dorothy L. Sayers Society convention some years ago. There I spoke on an article Sayers wrote, “On Forgiveness”, during WWII. That paper wove together Sayers’s views with thoughts from Charles Williams, William Blake, C.S. Lewis and others. Oh yes, and me. My small contribution there is distilled into the sermon here.
(Read Ephesians 4:32)
The apostle Paul tells us to forgive one another just as God has forgiven us in Christ. That naturally raises the question: how has God forgiven us in Christ? The better we understand that, the better we can forgive one another like God has forgiven us! We find a very helpful clue in Matthew 26:28 (read).
So, God in Christ has forgiven us by suffering and dying, spilling His own blood for the “remission of sins”. That word “remission” means “putting away”, getting rid of them, making them gone, like they never existed to begin with.
This raises two difficult questions, and in essence my whole sermon will circle around these questions.
The first question: If we must forgive similar to how God in Christ forgave us, does this mean we must suffer and die every time we forgive?
The second question: If not, and if we forgive simply by not blaming the one who offended us, and saying, “I forgive you”, then why was God not able to forgive the same simple way? Why the cross, the suffering, the blood and death?
Two difficult questions. But in my opinion the answers to these questions happen to disclose the very essence of our faith. If we ignore these questions, we allow the very meaning of forgiveness and the sacrifice of Christ to slip out of sight.
I will discuss these two questions in reverse order, because the first one will remain unclear until we figure out the second. So again, the second question went “If we forgive simply by not blaming the one who offended us and by saying ‘I forgive you’, then how come God couldn’t forgive the same simply way, without the cross, the suffering, the spilling of blood and death?
An important question!
It will help us to look at Matthew 6:12, very familiar words in the context of the “Our Father” (read).
“Debts”. The key word is “debts”: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
What do we owe God, by rights? By rights, we owe Him our life , and all that is in it. This is love, faithfulness, holiness, truth, obedience, worship—that’s what Man owes God, since the very creation of the world! For all his belongs to God; it is all from Him and for Him.
But what is sin? Sin is the violation of this order, the order in which we freely pay our debt of life to God with joy—sin ruins that order. When Man first sinned, he stole from God what belonged to God, which is life itself and everything in it, as I already listed—love, obedience, faithfulness, etc. Here’s a paradox-question for you: Can you steal from yourself? Can you steal from your own self what belongs to you? Can I steal my glasses from myself? As a rule the answer is no. But here’s the paradox: when Man sinned, he stole his own life! His life was his but he stole it. Stole it from whom? Stole it from God, because ultimately everything belongs to God. But not only from God, because Man couldn't steal his life from God without also stealing it from himself—depriving himself of it, forfeiting it.
(Read Genesis 2:17)
From his very creation, Man was a debtor to God for his life—for the life that came from God. And interestingly, there were two ways to repay God this debt: either to live, literally live this life for God, in love and the knowledge of Him, or to die, to forfeit the life that he couldn’t properly manage for God. In any case, life belongs to God and exists only for His glory’s sake.
And so I return to the second question: Why couldn’t God simply say “I forgive” without requiring the suffering and death of Christ?
I think the answer will be easier to understand, now that we’ve talked about “debts”.
By not demanding from us the life we owed Him, God essentially relinquished the life that was owed Him, that belonged to Him. And this reality concretely materialized in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Because, you know, forgiveness doesn’t consist of words alone. Forgiveness is an act. Moreover, it is an act of forfeiture, of loss.
If you owe me five dollars and I forgive you the debt, that’s all very well and good for you, of course—but I’ve lost! What have I lost? Five dollars, of course!
Even if someone offended me in a more abstract way—let’s say it’s not money we’re talking about; let’s say someone was spreading gossip about me. If I forgive that person, what do I lose? I lose the right to expect moral compensation, to expect that he will somehow undo what was done, rewind time itself to make it so that the wrong never happened. By the way, who can pay off a debt like that? Who can rewind time? Nobody! And so it turns out that, by forgiving, I am actually liberating myself from the expectation of the impossible!
And do you know how that expectation of the impossible manifests itself in life, what it’s called? Bitterness. Or, as one lady responded in a church where I asked that question: “Torture!” That’s right. It is. It’s bitterness and torture absolutely worth getting free of, because that’s just no way to live.
And so, forgiveness is an act of forfeiture. Even if such forfeiture liberates the forgiver, all the same it's a loss. Forgiving us the life we owed Him, God Himself lost. He gave up, in the very Person of Christ, the life that was His by right, the life we owed Him. He carried Himself the full weight of the offense that no one could possibly have made up to Him.
And there’s the answer to the second question. God so loved us that He gave His own life in Christ, to make up our debt, and this is forgiveness. That's "why" the cross, the suffering, the death....
And now I think we can very briefly and simply answer the first question, which went: “If we must forgive one another similarly to how God forgave us in Christ, does it mean we also must suffer and die in order to forgive?”
The answer is... “Yes”.
Maybe not literally, and of course not to the salvation of the whole world, inasmuch as it’s not against us the whole world sinned or to us the whole world owes life itself. But, inasmuch as our Savior materialized all forgiveness and the source of forgiveness Himself, by His death, in love, and made us (as the apostle Peter says) “partakers in the divine nature by the power of His resurrection”, we have power—yes, and a debt!—to forgive in imitation of His forgiveness: by relinquishing, giving up, what’s ours by right and not expecting impossible recompense, by carrying, absorbing, the whole brunt of the offense and loss and so extinguishing it, and by trusting everything, with thankfulness and total release, into the hands of Him who is faithful.
Doing that, we liberate ourselves from the debts of our debtors; by the power of the Risen Life of Jesus Christ we die to the offense and live to God, in the freedom of forgiveness. Forgiveness frees the forgiver. That’s the great secret of forgiveness, and what a tragedy that it is a secret! Forgiveness frees the forgiver—yes, even God! God who’s forgiven us is now free to love His children without ever again recalling the sins that He has put away: “...This is my blood, shed for the remission.. the putting away... of sins....”
So let us likewise free ourselves through forgiveness from every wrong done to us, in imitation of our God and Savior.
(Read Ephesians 4:32-5:2).
Monday, June 28, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
Easter Sermon IV: Two Conundrums
In spite of this being “Easter Sermon IV”, it is actually a very old one I preached, years ago, in our church as well as our college chapel. It is, in part, an extended reflection on an observation by C.S. Lewis, that only a sinless person would be capable of incarnating the perfect “repentance” (i.e., return to God, the Hebrew “shuv”, which means “returning”) of which, paradoxically, he was in no need personally (being perfect, repentance is inapplicable to him). The evil person, on the other hand, being in desperate need of repentance, is incapable of performing this good work. That is one of the “conundrums”. The other is the odd sort of distinction Paul makes in Romans 4:25 with regard to the “parts” of Christ’s redemptive work, i.e., which parts accomplished what. Finally, an observation of my own on the Baptism of Christ, an observation that arose in the course of my teaching the Gospel of Matthew at our college—to the effect that the Baptism serves as a depiction, in symbolic form, of the entire redemptive act of God in Christ—helps me to tie these two “conundrums” together theologically and resolve them... in a way that seemed appropriate for an Easter sermon....
First conundrum: (Romans 4:25) “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”
Usually we think of salvation as one whole; we say, “Jesus died and rose to save us.” But in this verse, Paul seems to divide salvation into two parts. He says that Jesus died for our sins, but was raised to justify us. Now what can that mean? Why is the resurrection especially connected to “justification”? Paul said it, so it must mean something!
Second conundrum: How can a bad man do a good thing? What I mean is this: Repentance is a good thing; it means giving up your sins and returning to God. But who needs to do this good thing? A “bad” person, of course. And the worse he is, the more he needs to do it! But the worse he is, the less he can do it. Now, a perfect person could easily do it... but he doesn’t need to. So there’s the paradox! The worst person most needs to repent, and he can’t. The perfect person can easily repent, but he doesn’t need to! And even if the best person did, in some sense, repent, what difference would that make for the worst person? It doesn’t help him, does it?
So those are our two conundrums. And now, even though our focus today is Easter and resurrection, I want to spend a few minutes reflecting on the baptism of Jesus Christ. Why? Because there is a theological picture in this baptism. And I think the picture will help us to solve the conundrums I’ve laid out and at the same time help us more deeply celebrate Jesus Christ’s resurrection and all it means for our lives.
(Read Matthew 3:1-17)
In this baptism we can see the whole story of salvation concentrated in one moment and one person. The story is acted out symbolically, concentrating on Jesus as he embraces this “Baptism of Repentance”. Now, John the Baptist was horrified that Jesus would do such a thing. Right before this, John was announcing that the Messiah was coming to baptize with fire and the Spirit! But here Jesus appears on the scene and what do we see? Do we in fact see the terrifying Lord of hosts radiating fire on His enemies, like John’s words would lead us to expect? Not in the least. Instead we see a simple man at the riverbank, humbly waiting in line for his turn. You know, it reminds me of Revelation where the elder tells the apostle John, “Look! The Lion of the tribe of Judah!”, but when John looks, what does he see? A Lamb.
John the Baptist did his best to stop Jesus. He knew exactly what this baptism meant, and what it meant was: Jesus didn’t need it! Because it meant repentance. He seriously tried to stop Jesus from going into the water, probably several times, saying, “You mustn’t do this; it isn’t right; I can’t baptize you– you should baptize me!” (Just think about what that means....)
But Jesus says, in effect, “Come on, John, let’s get on with it! This is the way it’s meant to go. We’re supposed to do exactly this, to accomplish the total fulfillment of God’s righteousness.” And with that Jesus goes into the water and... repents.
Now you’ll tell me, of course: “Wait! Jesus didn’t repent, because he never sinned. Besides, the text doesn’t say that he repented.”
In answer to the first objection: yes, I know Jesus never sinned. We’ll talk more about that in a moment.
In answer to the second objection, the Scripture clearly says that this mass baptism John was holding out there on the Jordan River was a baptism of repentance. It was “Repentance Baptism”; in other words, if you do the baptism, you are repenting. You can’t separate them; that’s how John preached it, that’s how everybody took it. And when Jesus submitted to it, neither he nor John stopped to make a preliminary announcement: “Attention, everyone! Let’s make it perfectly clear that in this one special case this is not ‘Repentance Baptism’! There’s absolutely no connection in this case between the two ideas!” You see, to say that repentance wasn't implied when Jesus got baptized is practically the same as saying he wasn’t baptized at all. Because “Repentance Baptism” was the only kind of baptism going on out there that day. And that’s the one Jesus took.
In front of everybody and without clarification, explanation or modification, Jesus submits to exactly the same baptism as all the others. Others are going down into the water confessing their sins, “I stole from my brother! I told lies about my neighbor! I had adulterous thoughts!” And now Jesus goes into the water, too, like the rest. Perfectly natural for anybody watching to assume Jesus was a sinner like them. Why wouldn’t they? They didn’t know who he was. Maybe they noticed Jesus didn’t confess any sins before he went into the water; maybe they noticed that John didn’t want to baptize Jesus; maybe they thought that was rather odd.... Nevertheless, Jesus goes down into the water, like a repenting sinner.
Now imagine John’s total bewilderment. What in the world is going on here? It’s all upside-down, all wrong.... It makes me think of Jesus’ disciples later, when to their horror they witnessed Jesus hanging on the cross – their feeling must have been similar: “This can’t be happening; it’s all wrong.” But here’s the thing: it wasn't wrong. Precisely so Jesus was supposed to “fulfill all righteousness”. The only one who never needed to repent, the Perfect One, does a “Repentance Baptism”. But for what? For whom?
In our imagination, let’s look and watch that Baptism story again and see the story it tells: Jesus comes out of the crowd, heads for the water, goes under it, comes up, heaven opens, the Spirit descends, a voice speaks. I believe that Jesus is telling John, and us, that this very picture itself is fulfilling all righteousness. But how? In what sense? Let’s take the picture in parts....
Jesus comes out of the crowd, steps forward as one of the people, participating in their Repentance Baptism – but more than “participating”, he will actually do the perfect Repentance Baptism for them, like they can't. He steps forward as one of them; He won't stand aloof from the people. To the contrary, he will in a sense be them, for them—but on a level and dimension beyond anything they, or we, could conceive. Jesus will carry their guilt in a repentance and surrender to the Father’s will like no one else could. And why? So he might make them new, in himself. This will fulfill all righteousness. This will make righteousness real in every single person Jesus carries in his heart down to the waters of repentance.
So Jesus stepped out of the crowd, and then headed straight for the water. Nothing would stop him. This was what he came for.... “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me.” “I must do the works of my Father”; “He set his face toward Jerusalem”. Exactly like Jesus headed straight into the water, that’s how he headed straight to the cross. John couldn’t stop Jesus from getting into the river; nothing could stop Jesus from fulfilling the Father’s will. nobody could stop Jesus from going to the cross. No one ever obeyed the Father like this before. This also fulfills all righteousness; this also makes righteousness real. Real, in Jesus.
Then Jesus went down under the water. Just like God will bring Jesus’ soul down into the very depths of death, on that day when Jesus cries from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”, breathes his last breath and dies, the day he is buried in the earth. This also fulfills all righteousness.
Then, Jesus immediately came up from the water. Just as three days after his death, he came up from the earth, out of the grave in glorious resurrection. “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here. He is RISEN!” Death couldn’t hold God’s Holy One. This also fulfills all righteousness.
Then heaven opened. Just as heaven opened to receive the Son of God 40 days after the resurrection. In Jesus’ ascension, heaven and earth are united, and we have access to the Father through Him. This also fulfills all righteousness.
Then the Spirit descended. Just as the Spirit descended again on Jesus’ people, the Church, in fulfillment of Jesus’ promise: I will send another Comforter; I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you; I and the Father will make our dwelling place within you. This also fulfills all righteousness.
Then the voice spoke from heaven: “This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased.” God blessed His Son, openly announced His perfect pleasure in Him before all the people. There will be another day when the whole creation, the whole universe will recognize God’s Son. And at His Name, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. This also fulfills all righteousness.
You know, when Adam and Eve ate the fruit in the garden, righteousness died. The right relationship for which God created man— died. Ever since then, God in His grace has labored in human history to restore—yes, to fulfill—this righteousness, make it real again.
The crowning conclusion of this divine labor was righteousness’ ultimate materialization in Jesus. And in the Baptism this stunning story is portrayed in miniature—it’s acted out; it’s announced to the entire creation. It all happens and “comes true”—in Jesus’ personal identification with the people, in His self-sacrifice for them, in His resurrection, and in His renewal of them; they become a new and righteous people by Him, and this surely fulfills all righteousness.
No wonder Jesus wouldn’t let John stop him but said “We have to do this....” The heart of God couldn’t settle for less.
Romans 5:16 “Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man's sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. 17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. 18 Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.”
In verse 19, Paul talks about the obedience of the “one man”, and I can’t help picturing the one man Jesus stepping out of the crowd, to do it all, the one man Jesus on the cross, paying for all, the one man Jesus coming out of the tomb, having won it all.
It makes me think of Matthew 7, as well, where Jesus says we must “enter by the narrow gate and the straight path.” I know we usually picture a long straight path – that’s our earthly life – leading finally to a narrow gate – that’s the gate of heaven. But I truly don’t think that’s what Jesus is talking about. If you read it carefully, you’ll notice that Jesus talks about the narrow gate first. Only then comes the straight path. First we enter the narrow gate, and why is it narrow? It’s narrow because, ultimately, it all boils down to one man. The gate is Jesus, and the righteousness he fulfilled. Over all the millennia of human history, God was narrowing and narrowing this gate down to one man—through Noah, Abraham, Israel, then one tribe of Israel, then one family from that tribe, then one child from that family. God brought the whole eternal work of redemption to fulfillment, finally, in this one man—the one who stepped out of the crowd that day, and said to John the Baptist, “Let it be so, John, because this is exactly the way we must fulfill all righteousness.” We enter the kingdom only through the narrow gate, the One Man, surrendering to his will like he surrendered to the Father’s will. And then, after entering through him, we walk the long, straight path—with its sacrifices, tests, temptations, purification and sanctification. And that way, “all righteousness” continues being fulfilled, continues happening, in us.
So this finally brings us back to the two conundrums we started with: why is it the resurrection of Christ, specifically, that justifies, and how can a bad person do a good thing; i.e., how can a sinner do the right thing and repent the way he should? Perhaps you already realize that these two conundrums are really one.
And the answer should be clear now, especially if you remember that the verb “justify” means “to make righteous”. It’s only because of the resurrection that Jesus can bring the righteousness fulfilled in his life into our life. No resurrection—no justifying! Only because he is alive can Jesus’ righteousness live in us. His righteousness lives because Christ lives. In His earthly life, Jesus incarnated the truest repentance and self-surrender to God, he lived out unwavering obedience that presses forward, every step closer and closer to God, no matter the cost, through every fire and test. Which is what every sinner ought to do; which is what no sinner can do. But Jesus did it. And now He can do it, and does do it, again: in you and in me... because he lives. “Because I live, you also will live”, Jesus tells us. “Living”, for Jesus, is nothing else than living for God. That’s perfect repentance, that’s righteousness, that’s sanctification, that’s life in the risen Lord.
And when does this life, this righteousness, this sanctification happen for us? Not just on the day we become a believer, but every day of our life. The whole Christian life is a life of repentance, in the sense of return to God. It’s a continual returning, ever closer and closer, from imperfection to perfection, from darkness to light. This is the life Christ made real for us when we couldn’t. This is why Jesus stepped out of the crowd. This is why Jesus rose from the dead. This is why the Risen Lord lives in our hearts: to fulfill all righteousness.
Romans 6:8 “Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. 10 The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. 11 In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. 12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. 13 Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness. 14 For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.”
God made man to be righteous. Thanks to God’s great love and grace, man will be righteous. Because Jesus lives, you and I can live—really live. Because he returned to God, you and I can return to God, every day. He lives in us to make it happen. As the apostle writes, “the life he lives, he lives to God.” The life he lives in us, we live to God. Paul writes, “Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus”. We can do this, for Christ is risen! He lives in us to do what he has always done: the will of the Father. We show we are his when we let him fulfill that will. To save us He died, to justify us He rose. And in the power of His resurrection, He invites each of us to enter by the narrow gate, the gate of His own risen life, and walk the straight path with him, in a life of return to God, in his strength, no matter what the cost. Let us glorify the risen Lord Jesus Christ by surrendering our life to him, so that in us and with us he can go on fulfilling the righteousness that glorifies the Father.
First conundrum: (Romans 4:25) “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”
Usually we think of salvation as one whole; we say, “Jesus died and rose to save us.” But in this verse, Paul seems to divide salvation into two parts. He says that Jesus died for our sins, but was raised to justify us. Now what can that mean? Why is the resurrection especially connected to “justification”? Paul said it, so it must mean something!
Second conundrum: How can a bad man do a good thing? What I mean is this: Repentance is a good thing; it means giving up your sins and returning to God. But who needs to do this good thing? A “bad” person, of course. And the worse he is, the more he needs to do it! But the worse he is, the less he can do it. Now, a perfect person could easily do it... but he doesn’t need to. So there’s the paradox! The worst person most needs to repent, and he can’t. The perfect person can easily repent, but he doesn’t need to! And even if the best person did, in some sense, repent, what difference would that make for the worst person? It doesn’t help him, does it?
So those are our two conundrums. And now, even though our focus today is Easter and resurrection, I want to spend a few minutes reflecting on the baptism of Jesus Christ. Why? Because there is a theological picture in this baptism. And I think the picture will help us to solve the conundrums I’ve laid out and at the same time help us more deeply celebrate Jesus Christ’s resurrection and all it means for our lives.
(Read Matthew 3:1-17)
In this baptism we can see the whole story of salvation concentrated in one moment and one person. The story is acted out symbolically, concentrating on Jesus as he embraces this “Baptism of Repentance”. Now, John the Baptist was horrified that Jesus would do such a thing. Right before this, John was announcing that the Messiah was coming to baptize with fire and the Spirit! But here Jesus appears on the scene and what do we see? Do we in fact see the terrifying Lord of hosts radiating fire on His enemies, like John’s words would lead us to expect? Not in the least. Instead we see a simple man at the riverbank, humbly waiting in line for his turn. You know, it reminds me of Revelation where the elder tells the apostle John, “Look! The Lion of the tribe of Judah!”, but when John looks, what does he see? A Lamb.
John the Baptist did his best to stop Jesus. He knew exactly what this baptism meant, and what it meant was: Jesus didn’t need it! Because it meant repentance. He seriously tried to stop Jesus from going into the water, probably several times, saying, “You mustn’t do this; it isn’t right; I can’t baptize you– you should baptize me!” (Just think about what that means....)
But Jesus says, in effect, “Come on, John, let’s get on with it! This is the way it’s meant to go. We’re supposed to do exactly this, to accomplish the total fulfillment of God’s righteousness.” And with that Jesus goes into the water and... repents.
Now you’ll tell me, of course: “Wait! Jesus didn’t repent, because he never sinned. Besides, the text doesn’t say that he repented.”
In answer to the first objection: yes, I know Jesus never sinned. We’ll talk more about that in a moment.
In answer to the second objection, the Scripture clearly says that this mass baptism John was holding out there on the Jordan River was a baptism of repentance. It was “Repentance Baptism”; in other words, if you do the baptism, you are repenting. You can’t separate them; that’s how John preached it, that’s how everybody took it. And when Jesus submitted to it, neither he nor John stopped to make a preliminary announcement: “Attention, everyone! Let’s make it perfectly clear that in this one special case this is not ‘Repentance Baptism’! There’s absolutely no connection in this case between the two ideas!” You see, to say that repentance wasn't implied when Jesus got baptized is practically the same as saying he wasn’t baptized at all. Because “Repentance Baptism” was the only kind of baptism going on out there that day. And that’s the one Jesus took.
In front of everybody and without clarification, explanation or modification, Jesus submits to exactly the same baptism as all the others. Others are going down into the water confessing their sins, “I stole from my brother! I told lies about my neighbor! I had adulterous thoughts!” And now Jesus goes into the water, too, like the rest. Perfectly natural for anybody watching to assume Jesus was a sinner like them. Why wouldn’t they? They didn’t know who he was. Maybe they noticed Jesus didn’t confess any sins before he went into the water; maybe they noticed that John didn’t want to baptize Jesus; maybe they thought that was rather odd.... Nevertheless, Jesus goes down into the water, like a repenting sinner.
Now imagine John’s total bewilderment. What in the world is going on here? It’s all upside-down, all wrong.... It makes me think of Jesus’ disciples later, when to their horror they witnessed Jesus hanging on the cross – their feeling must have been similar: “This can’t be happening; it’s all wrong.” But here’s the thing: it wasn't wrong. Precisely so Jesus was supposed to “fulfill all righteousness”. The only one who never needed to repent, the Perfect One, does a “Repentance Baptism”. But for what? For whom?
In our imagination, let’s look and watch that Baptism story again and see the story it tells: Jesus comes out of the crowd, heads for the water, goes under it, comes up, heaven opens, the Spirit descends, a voice speaks. I believe that Jesus is telling John, and us, that this very picture itself is fulfilling all righteousness. But how? In what sense? Let’s take the picture in parts....
Jesus comes out of the crowd, steps forward as one of the people, participating in their Repentance Baptism – but more than “participating”, he will actually do the perfect Repentance Baptism for them, like they can't. He steps forward as one of them; He won't stand aloof from the people. To the contrary, he will in a sense be them, for them—but on a level and dimension beyond anything they, or we, could conceive. Jesus will carry their guilt in a repentance and surrender to the Father’s will like no one else could. And why? So he might make them new, in himself. This will fulfill all righteousness. This will make righteousness real in every single person Jesus carries in his heart down to the waters of repentance.
So Jesus stepped out of the crowd, and then headed straight for the water. Nothing would stop him. This was what he came for.... “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me.” “I must do the works of my Father”; “He set his face toward Jerusalem”. Exactly like Jesus headed straight into the water, that’s how he headed straight to the cross. John couldn’t stop Jesus from getting into the river; nothing could stop Jesus from fulfilling the Father’s will. nobody could stop Jesus from going to the cross. No one ever obeyed the Father like this before. This also fulfills all righteousness; this also makes righteousness real. Real, in Jesus.
Then Jesus went down under the water. Just like God will bring Jesus’ soul down into the very depths of death, on that day when Jesus cries from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”, breathes his last breath and dies, the day he is buried in the earth. This also fulfills all righteousness.
Then, Jesus immediately came up from the water. Just as three days after his death, he came up from the earth, out of the grave in glorious resurrection. “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here. He is RISEN!” Death couldn’t hold God’s Holy One. This also fulfills all righteousness.
Then heaven opened. Just as heaven opened to receive the Son of God 40 days after the resurrection. In Jesus’ ascension, heaven and earth are united, and we have access to the Father through Him. This also fulfills all righteousness.
Then the Spirit descended. Just as the Spirit descended again on Jesus’ people, the Church, in fulfillment of Jesus’ promise: I will send another Comforter; I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you; I and the Father will make our dwelling place within you. This also fulfills all righteousness.
Then the voice spoke from heaven: “This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased.” God blessed His Son, openly announced His perfect pleasure in Him before all the people. There will be another day when the whole creation, the whole universe will recognize God’s Son. And at His Name, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. This also fulfills all righteousness.
You know, when Adam and Eve ate the fruit in the garden, righteousness died. The right relationship for which God created man— died. Ever since then, God in His grace has labored in human history to restore—yes, to fulfill—this righteousness, make it real again.
The crowning conclusion of this divine labor was righteousness’ ultimate materialization in Jesus. And in the Baptism this stunning story is portrayed in miniature—it’s acted out; it’s announced to the entire creation. It all happens and “comes true”—in Jesus’ personal identification with the people, in His self-sacrifice for them, in His resurrection, and in His renewal of them; they become a new and righteous people by Him, and this surely fulfills all righteousness.
No wonder Jesus wouldn’t let John stop him but said “We have to do this....” The heart of God couldn’t settle for less.
Romans 5:16 “Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man's sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. 17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. 18 Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.”
In verse 19, Paul talks about the obedience of the “one man”, and I can’t help picturing the one man Jesus stepping out of the crowd, to do it all, the one man Jesus on the cross, paying for all, the one man Jesus coming out of the tomb, having won it all.
It makes me think of Matthew 7, as well, where Jesus says we must “enter by the narrow gate and the straight path.” I know we usually picture a long straight path – that’s our earthly life – leading finally to a narrow gate – that’s the gate of heaven. But I truly don’t think that’s what Jesus is talking about. If you read it carefully, you’ll notice that Jesus talks about the narrow gate first. Only then comes the straight path. First we enter the narrow gate, and why is it narrow? It’s narrow because, ultimately, it all boils down to one man. The gate is Jesus, and the righteousness he fulfilled. Over all the millennia of human history, God was narrowing and narrowing this gate down to one man—through Noah, Abraham, Israel, then one tribe of Israel, then one family from that tribe, then one child from that family. God brought the whole eternal work of redemption to fulfillment, finally, in this one man—the one who stepped out of the crowd that day, and said to John the Baptist, “Let it be so, John, because this is exactly the way we must fulfill all righteousness.” We enter the kingdom only through the narrow gate, the One Man, surrendering to his will like he surrendered to the Father’s will. And then, after entering through him, we walk the long, straight path—with its sacrifices, tests, temptations, purification and sanctification. And that way, “all righteousness” continues being fulfilled, continues happening, in us.
So this finally brings us back to the two conundrums we started with: why is it the resurrection of Christ, specifically, that justifies, and how can a bad person do a good thing; i.e., how can a sinner do the right thing and repent the way he should? Perhaps you already realize that these two conundrums are really one.
And the answer should be clear now, especially if you remember that the verb “justify” means “to make righteous”. It’s only because of the resurrection that Jesus can bring the righteousness fulfilled in his life into our life. No resurrection—no justifying! Only because he is alive can Jesus’ righteousness live in us. His righteousness lives because Christ lives. In His earthly life, Jesus incarnated the truest repentance and self-surrender to God, he lived out unwavering obedience that presses forward, every step closer and closer to God, no matter the cost, through every fire and test. Which is what every sinner ought to do; which is what no sinner can do. But Jesus did it. And now He can do it, and does do it, again: in you and in me... because he lives. “Because I live, you also will live”, Jesus tells us. “Living”, for Jesus, is nothing else than living for God. That’s perfect repentance, that’s righteousness, that’s sanctification, that’s life in the risen Lord.
And when does this life, this righteousness, this sanctification happen for us? Not just on the day we become a believer, but every day of our life. The whole Christian life is a life of repentance, in the sense of return to God. It’s a continual returning, ever closer and closer, from imperfection to perfection, from darkness to light. This is the life Christ made real for us when we couldn’t. This is why Jesus stepped out of the crowd. This is why Jesus rose from the dead. This is why the Risen Lord lives in our hearts: to fulfill all righteousness.
Romans 6:8 “Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. 10 The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. 11 In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. 12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. 13 Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness. 14 For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.”
God made man to be righteous. Thanks to God’s great love and grace, man will be righteous. Because Jesus lives, you and I can live—really live. Because he returned to God, you and I can return to God, every day. He lives in us to make it happen. As the apostle writes, “the life he lives, he lives to God.” The life he lives in us, we live to God. Paul writes, “Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus”. We can do this, for Christ is risen! He lives in us to do what he has always done: the will of the Father. We show we are his when we let him fulfill that will. To save us He died, to justify us He rose. And in the power of His resurrection, He invites each of us to enter by the narrow gate, the gate of His own risen life, and walk the straight path with him, in a life of return to God, in his strength, no matter what the cost. Let us glorify the risen Lord Jesus Christ by surrendering our life to him, so that in us and with us he can go on fulfilling the righteousness that glorifies the Father.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Easter III (2010)
Yet another Easter sermon! This sermon was, oddly enough, prompted by my “leisure reading”—a book called “Hope Against Hope”; the author: Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam who died in a Soviet prison camp in 1938. The book made me think... about a lonely, “anonymous” death in a prison camp; about the untold suffering of the countless “unknown” in this world who never “got [or get] a break”; unhappy lives that end in unhappy deaths, lives that are as fully and richly known to themselves as mine is to me but seem to go unrecognized, unshared... or even if shared and cherished, as Mandelstam’s was with his wife and friends, to be coldly, criminally dispensed with by such an evil as Stalin. The intense and intensely personal passage of death, the question of its meaning, and what it means to whom, and how all of that played out in the death of Jesus Christ as much as any other human being... and how that continued to “play out” right into resurrection... that’s the train of thought, more or less, that yielded the following sermon, which I delivered in my church during the Easter season (not on Easter itself, as I was home sick that day).
[A language note: several times in the sermon I refer to Jesus’ “final word” on the cross, but that doesn’t quite work in English, of course, where it’s three words: “It is finished”. In Russian (and, if memory serves, in the original Greek of the scriptures) it really is expressed with just one word. The Russian word is “sovershilos”, the past tense of a verb meaning (much as the Greek verb it translates) to perfect, bring to completion, commit (e.g., a crime), carry out, perform (e.g., like a duty). The final “s” in “sovershilos” is a suffix that makes the word reflexive (or “passive” if that makes more sense); thus, “it” is completed/finished. Finally, there’s no need in Russian (or the Greek) to literally express “it” here, so a result the whole thought is expressed in just one word. I will continue to refer to Jesus’ “final word” in this sermon, even though it is actually three words in English. But now you know why.]
Also, I am quite aware that the following phrase, “...poorest, last remaining inhabitant of a deserted village” is loaded with contradiction/tautology: if you’re the only person in a village then you’re obviously the poorest, not to mention the richest, one there, and if you're still there, then the village is manifestly not “deserted”, at least not entirely. So be it. Cut me a break and take the sentence on the level of what it means to say rather than the “mathematical” exactitude of its logic – thanks! “Poorest” means “very poor”, as in “poorest person imaginable”, and “deserted” here implies, of course, “by everybody except you”.
Finally, for an Easter sermon, it may seem to focus a lot on death, but then... what would resurrection be without death?
“I was dead and, behold, I am alive forever and ever!” (Rev. 1:18)
The psalmist says, “I lift up my eyes to the hills— where does my help come from?” (Ps. 121:1) That’s fine, but what if you can no longer lift your eyes to the hills, or to heaven, because death has closed your eyes? What then? Moreover, what if you died rejected, abandoned, cursed by this world? What does it mean then to “lift your eyes to the hills”?
One day the eyes of a man known as Jesus of Nazareth closed in death. There was no life left in them; they were lifeless matter, just like stone. In this, Jesus was the same as every other descendant of Adam who ever died. He left his body utterly dead... and the word “dead” doesn’t mean “almost alive”; it doesn’t mean “potentially alive”; the word “dead” signifies non-living matter, no different in that sense from stones, or air, or the paper the pages of my Bible are made from. Jesus died, and the body he left was cold matter; those eyes were no more organs of sight then than the hair on our heads of the pebbles on the seashore.
But what happened? Jesus opened those eyes. Imagine. Eyes that had been dead—no longer eyes, even—opened at the instant of glorious resurrection power. And everything in Jesus—his body, his hands, his heart, his mind, his spirit, his eyes—all was Life. And I think... could it be, maybe at the moment, those lips that had been dead and now were become Life, pronounced anew that final word: “It is finished”?
Who knows? It’s possible! Because “It is finished” doesn’t only mean “It’s over”; it can also mean “all is begun”. When all your preparations for a dinner, for example, are finished, that's when everything can begin! Life itself testifies that when all it finished, then all is begun; there is no ending without a new beginning. Only when the earthly life of Christ ended on the cross—“It is finished!”—only then could the resurrection of Christ also be “finished”—carried out and done. And only then did everything begin for you and me: (read 1 Peter 1:3).
Christ’s resurrection is the source of a new birth for us all. Only that life which had never been before—the life of the resurrected Christ, the life shining through eyes that once closed in death—only that life gives new birth. For a new birth must come from a new source.
“And in God’s great mercy, he has given us new birth into a living hope”—‘living’ because Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ and Son of God, is now alive forever—“through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”
“From the dead.” All was lost, and all in this world on which it was possible to hope, was dead. And then, and only then, God gave birth to living hope in Jesus, who was dead but now is alive forever and ever. The resurrected Christ is the source, the eternally new source, of eternally new life.
Jesus’ resurrection is the birth of a new birth for us all. Without that resurrection our new birth would never have been born in Him. But there would never have been a resurrection if not for that death. Before those eyes could open anew in glory, they had to close in the universal loss of death.
I say “universal loss of death” because, having become Man, God embraced the death that belongs to all people, the death that awaits each of us from the moment of birth, the death that, for each of us, exists uniquely and separately and makes each of us solitary before God. There’s a paradox for you: death is the ultimately personal experience that is everbody's experience. That’s the paradox: each of us has to go through what no one can go through... except “me”—in this case, each of us being a “Me”. Though all people die, only one person can die his own death, and as far as that goes we’re all equal. No matter who you are: an emperor or the poorest, last remaining inhabitant of a deserted village dying in utter obscurity; no matter who you are, how you lived, who’s nearby—if anyone at all!—the very last experience of life you experience alone, alone before God. At the moment, the moment of departure, no labels, no roles in life define you. You aren’t Mom or Dad, you’re not a boss, you’re not a doctor, not a friend or enemy, not rich or poor, not a husband, not a wife—you’re just you, the “you” you were from the very moment of your birth: you, departing, not on the shoulders of your friends but by yourself, alone. And no matter how much those around you may love you, just as those last faithful few who stood by the cross to the very end loved Jesus, all the same the ultimate moment of departure, the moment of passage, belongs to you alone. And in that we are all the same; you could be a concentration camp prisoner or the most powerful dictator, but in that we are all the same. Death is the personal, singular instance of meeting eternity. It closes the eyes of each one separately, singularly, and God knows the death of each one singularly.
In order to fully embrace what we all go through, Christ had to embrace what only He alone could go through, that is, the personal, unique, singular death of one human being—His. He had to close his eyes, too, in death’s ultimate alienation from this world. When Christ took his final breath on the cross, he tasted to the absolute last drop what it means to be a human being come to life’s end.
There’s the depths of divine love for you. Dying his own human death, which no one else could die, God became like all humans who must die their own human death, including the most anonymous, friendless, forgotten child of Adam there is right now somewhere on the Earth—and at any time, I think, there is someone somewhere on Earth who fits that description. And now the death of such a so-called “nobody” shakes the entire universe because, now, that death, precisely in its uniqueness, is like the death of the Only-Begotten Son of God, like the death of God Become Man. And so Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus God’s Son, Jesus Christ, made the personal death of each of us an occasion for hope. Why? Because He opened His eyes again.
(Read 1 Peter 1:3 again.)
“I was dead, but am alive forevermore....”
Very long ago, a man named Abraham left his house, his country, his motherland, his heritage, his gods, his past and, yes, his future as he had always understood it. He left all this at the summons of the one living God, for whose sake he was ready to be a wanderer and alien in this world. And at just an age—75 years old—when a person has every right to expect that life’s tempo will decelerate, that the time for new adventures has passed, it so happens that at just that age God calls him out—literally, out of everything familiar to him, to go who-knew-where.
In the 13th chapter of Genesis, starting from verse 8, we read (read 8-13).
Abraham had already left his country and come to the land where the Canaanites and Perizzites lived, where there were plenty of dangers and threats. Here he is, already at a rather advanced age. He has no son to leave an inheritance to, and now he’s even conceded to his nephew, who took for himself the best part of the land. So here stands Abraham, in essence with no future. We could understand it if he said to himself, “How did I wind up here? What am I doing here? Why did I come here? What sense is there at all in my life now? What was it all for? Did God really need me to come and close my eyes in death here instead of Haran? What’s the difference? In any case, this is the end of my story.”
But Abraham had faith. One day he accepted God’s revelation, in which the promise was spoken: (read Genesis 12:1-3).
And here at last it is done, finished. Abraham stands on the promised land. But he’s still an alien, foreign, nobody in this land, and to all appearances his life is approaching its conclusion; it seems to be the end, over, finished. Yes, he did once accept God’s promise, but it’s totally unimaginable at this point where that promise could take him further. And precisely at that moment the Lord God speaks to Abraham: (read 13:14-18).
“Lift up your eyes... and rise. Walk through the length and width of the land, for I will give it to you.”
That’s the power of a new birth into a living hope. That’s the power of the divine might of resurrection: Lift up your eyes, Abraham. Lift up your eyes, Son of God. Lift up your eyes, every child of God redeemed by the holy blood of the Lamb. Lift up your eyes and rise. Walk through the length and width of the land, for I am giving it to you.
That is hope reborn, when all earthly hope has failed you: “I was dead but now I am alive forevermore”, says the One who took our mortality upon Himself, Jesus Christ.
“All authority in heaven and earth are given to me,” says the One who was rejected and killed, Jesus Christ, Whom God the Father exalted, giving Him the Name that is above every other Name.
“I am coming soon!”, says the Glorified One, the eternal Son of God who once cried out in the tortures of the cross, “It is finished!”
“I lift my eyes to the hills: where will my help come from?”, asks the psalmist. “My help is from the Lord who made heaven and earth.” And the One sitting on the throne said, “Behold, I am creating all things new.”
Blessed be God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in his great mercy has given us birth into a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. “Into a living hope!” “Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory?”
It is finished.
[A language note: several times in the sermon I refer to Jesus’ “final word” on the cross, but that doesn’t quite work in English, of course, where it’s three words: “It is finished”. In Russian (and, if memory serves, in the original Greek of the scriptures) it really is expressed with just one word. The Russian word is “sovershilos”, the past tense of a verb meaning (much as the Greek verb it translates) to perfect, bring to completion, commit (e.g., a crime), carry out, perform (e.g., like a duty). The final “s” in “sovershilos” is a suffix that makes the word reflexive (or “passive” if that makes more sense); thus, “it” is completed/finished. Finally, there’s no need in Russian (or the Greek) to literally express “it” here, so a result the whole thought is expressed in just one word. I will continue to refer to Jesus’ “final word” in this sermon, even though it is actually three words in English. But now you know why.]
Also, I am quite aware that the following phrase, “...poorest, last remaining inhabitant of a deserted village” is loaded with contradiction/tautology: if you’re the only person in a village then you’re obviously the poorest, not to mention the richest, one there, and if you're still there, then the village is manifestly not “deserted”, at least not entirely. So be it. Cut me a break and take the sentence on the level of what it means to say rather than the “mathematical” exactitude of its logic – thanks! “Poorest” means “very poor”, as in “poorest person imaginable”, and “deserted” here implies, of course, “by everybody except you”.
Finally, for an Easter sermon, it may seem to focus a lot on death, but then... what would resurrection be without death?
“I was dead and, behold, I am alive forever and ever!” (Rev. 1:18)
The psalmist says, “I lift up my eyes to the hills— where does my help come from?” (Ps. 121:1) That’s fine, but what if you can no longer lift your eyes to the hills, or to heaven, because death has closed your eyes? What then? Moreover, what if you died rejected, abandoned, cursed by this world? What does it mean then to “lift your eyes to the hills”?
One day the eyes of a man known as Jesus of Nazareth closed in death. There was no life left in them; they were lifeless matter, just like stone. In this, Jesus was the same as every other descendant of Adam who ever died. He left his body utterly dead... and the word “dead” doesn’t mean “almost alive”; it doesn’t mean “potentially alive”; the word “dead” signifies non-living matter, no different in that sense from stones, or air, or the paper the pages of my Bible are made from. Jesus died, and the body he left was cold matter; those eyes were no more organs of sight then than the hair on our heads of the pebbles on the seashore.
But what happened? Jesus opened those eyes. Imagine. Eyes that had been dead—no longer eyes, even—opened at the instant of glorious resurrection power. And everything in Jesus—his body, his hands, his heart, his mind, his spirit, his eyes—all was Life. And I think... could it be, maybe at the moment, those lips that had been dead and now were become Life, pronounced anew that final word: “It is finished”?
Who knows? It’s possible! Because “It is finished” doesn’t only mean “It’s over”; it can also mean “all is begun”. When all your preparations for a dinner, for example, are finished, that's when everything can begin! Life itself testifies that when all it finished, then all is begun; there is no ending without a new beginning. Only when the earthly life of Christ ended on the cross—“It is finished!”—only then could the resurrection of Christ also be “finished”—carried out and done. And only then did everything begin for you and me: (read 1 Peter 1:3).
Christ’s resurrection is the source of a new birth for us all. Only that life which had never been before—the life of the resurrected Christ, the life shining through eyes that once closed in death—only that life gives new birth. For a new birth must come from a new source.
“And in God’s great mercy, he has given us new birth into a living hope”—‘living’ because Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ and Son of God, is now alive forever—“through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”
“From the dead.” All was lost, and all in this world on which it was possible to hope, was dead. And then, and only then, God gave birth to living hope in Jesus, who was dead but now is alive forever and ever. The resurrected Christ is the source, the eternally new source, of eternally new life.
Jesus’ resurrection is the birth of a new birth for us all. Without that resurrection our new birth would never have been born in Him. But there would never have been a resurrection if not for that death. Before those eyes could open anew in glory, they had to close in the universal loss of death.
I say “universal loss of death” because, having become Man, God embraced the death that belongs to all people, the death that awaits each of us from the moment of birth, the death that, for each of us, exists uniquely and separately and makes each of us solitary before God. There’s a paradox for you: death is the ultimately personal experience that is everbody's experience. That’s the paradox: each of us has to go through what no one can go through... except “me”—in this case, each of us being a “Me”. Though all people die, only one person can die his own death, and as far as that goes we’re all equal. No matter who you are: an emperor or the poorest, last remaining inhabitant of a deserted village dying in utter obscurity; no matter who you are, how you lived, who’s nearby—if anyone at all!—the very last experience of life you experience alone, alone before God. At the moment, the moment of departure, no labels, no roles in life define you. You aren’t Mom or Dad, you’re not a boss, you’re not a doctor, not a friend or enemy, not rich or poor, not a husband, not a wife—you’re just you, the “you” you were from the very moment of your birth: you, departing, not on the shoulders of your friends but by yourself, alone. And no matter how much those around you may love you, just as those last faithful few who stood by the cross to the very end loved Jesus, all the same the ultimate moment of departure, the moment of passage, belongs to you alone. And in that we are all the same; you could be a concentration camp prisoner or the most powerful dictator, but in that we are all the same. Death is the personal, singular instance of meeting eternity. It closes the eyes of each one separately, singularly, and God knows the death of each one singularly.
In order to fully embrace what we all go through, Christ had to embrace what only He alone could go through, that is, the personal, unique, singular death of one human being—His. He had to close his eyes, too, in death’s ultimate alienation from this world. When Christ took his final breath on the cross, he tasted to the absolute last drop what it means to be a human being come to life’s end.
There’s the depths of divine love for you. Dying his own human death, which no one else could die, God became like all humans who must die their own human death, including the most anonymous, friendless, forgotten child of Adam there is right now somewhere on the Earth—and at any time, I think, there is someone somewhere on Earth who fits that description. And now the death of such a so-called “nobody” shakes the entire universe because, now, that death, precisely in its uniqueness, is like the death of the Only-Begotten Son of God, like the death of God Become Man. And so Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus God’s Son, Jesus Christ, made the personal death of each of us an occasion for hope. Why? Because He opened His eyes again.
(Read 1 Peter 1:3 again.)
“I was dead, but am alive forevermore....”
Very long ago, a man named Abraham left his house, his country, his motherland, his heritage, his gods, his past and, yes, his future as he had always understood it. He left all this at the summons of the one living God, for whose sake he was ready to be a wanderer and alien in this world. And at just an age—75 years old—when a person has every right to expect that life’s tempo will decelerate, that the time for new adventures has passed, it so happens that at just that age God calls him out—literally, out of everything familiar to him, to go who-knew-where.
In the 13th chapter of Genesis, starting from verse 8, we read (read 8-13).
Abraham had already left his country and come to the land where the Canaanites and Perizzites lived, where there were plenty of dangers and threats. Here he is, already at a rather advanced age. He has no son to leave an inheritance to, and now he’s even conceded to his nephew, who took for himself the best part of the land. So here stands Abraham, in essence with no future. We could understand it if he said to himself, “How did I wind up here? What am I doing here? Why did I come here? What sense is there at all in my life now? What was it all for? Did God really need me to come and close my eyes in death here instead of Haran? What’s the difference? In any case, this is the end of my story.”
But Abraham had faith. One day he accepted God’s revelation, in which the promise was spoken: (read Genesis 12:1-3).
And here at last it is done, finished. Abraham stands on the promised land. But he’s still an alien, foreign, nobody in this land, and to all appearances his life is approaching its conclusion; it seems to be the end, over, finished. Yes, he did once accept God’s promise, but it’s totally unimaginable at this point where that promise could take him further. And precisely at that moment the Lord God speaks to Abraham: (read 13:14-18).
“Lift up your eyes... and rise. Walk through the length and width of the land, for I will give it to you.”
That’s the power of a new birth into a living hope. That’s the power of the divine might of resurrection: Lift up your eyes, Abraham. Lift up your eyes, Son of God. Lift up your eyes, every child of God redeemed by the holy blood of the Lamb. Lift up your eyes and rise. Walk through the length and width of the land, for I am giving it to you.
That is hope reborn, when all earthly hope has failed you: “I was dead but now I am alive forevermore”, says the One who took our mortality upon Himself, Jesus Christ.
“All authority in heaven and earth are given to me,” says the One who was rejected and killed, Jesus Christ, Whom God the Father exalted, giving Him the Name that is above every other Name.
“I am coming soon!”, says the Glorified One, the eternal Son of God who once cried out in the tortures of the cross, “It is finished!”
“I lift my eyes to the hills: where will my help come from?”, asks the psalmist. “My help is from the Lord who made heaven and earth.” And the One sitting on the throne said, “Behold, I am creating all things new.”
Blessed be God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in his great mercy has given us birth into a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. “Into a living hope!” “Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory?”
It is finished.
Monday, October 19, 2009
The Peace That Is Always Now (Isaiah 26 and Colossians 1) [The Spacey Sermon?]
Finally I’m back! (The blog still shows the original date of this post, back in Oct. 2009, but as I write this, it's actually May 13, 2010!) I left this site, and this specific post, “on hold” for five or six months, during which I was doing... well, a lot of other things. Including teaching courses and overseeing our school’s accreditation process.
The last thing I left here was the introduction to this sermon... without the sermon. Not very nice of me. Sorry! It’s time at last to post this thing, for better or worse. Now, here’s the introduction as I posted it back in the fall:
This sermon was, let’s say, experimental. I quite blatantly took two passages that hardly sounded similar and “forced” them to talk about more or less the same thing. That may seem like a mishandling of scripture, but in my own defense: 1) if you’re at all honest (as I hope I am) you can only “force” scripture to “say” something if in fact it does say it in some way, however between-the-lines or under the (historical-theological) surface that may be, and if the text really doesn't say, by even the remotest stretch of the imagination, anything like what you’re getting at, then all the “forcing” in the world isn’t going to yield results – again, assuming you’re honest; 2) there is a certain, general “safe zone” within which it’s not terribly difficult to posit conceptual intersections between different parts of Scripture, inasmuch as all Scripture pretty much talks about God, man and their relationship (entailing, of course, sin, salvation and sanctification). Granted, there is a spectrum of plausibility. On the one end, it’s quite easy to explicate the spiritual principles which, say, Isaiah 40:1-5 and 2 Corinthians 1:3-8 present virtually in unison. On the other end of the spectrum, it would be quite a clever trick to do a sermon on the “one idea” contained in Philippians 2:19-24 and Numbers 26:52-56 (and if I hear someone do it, I owe them a cake)! I am certainly not into clever tricks for the sake of clever tricks. But the two passages examined in this sermon spoke, for me, sufficiently powerfully about a single reality and a single attitude (faith) that they warranted such “forcing” (I hope you’ll find that the passages themselves don’t object too loudly to my handling). I’d say, then, that the following comparison falls somewhere around the middle of that “spectrum of plausibility”.
Let me just add now that this sermon is probably one of my more... mm, esoteric ones (one might offer the term “spacey”), but I’ll leave that to your judgment. I have radically re-worked it from its original Russian version, more than any other sermon on this blog. It is essentially a “non-Russian” sermon now. And, to tell you the truth, I probably would not venture to deliver it, in its reworked form, in one of our Ukrainian churches. I was tempted to just toss this sermon out, because it was getting perhaps too weird, but for some reason I really wanted to stay in the saddle and let it gallop to wherever it ultimately wanted to go. And I did... and it did.
You judge.
Let’s begin by reading Isaiah 26:1-3 (read).
“In that day....” The prophet says a day is coming, no matter what. No matter what the present reality looks like, that day is approaching. It’s a “future fact”, one of the “facts of life”!
And what will that day be like? It says God’s people will be singing: “We have a strong city....” So why strong? The city is strong because God has made salvation its walls and ramparts. The city’s strength actually consists of God’s salvation!
And that's why the future promises to bring joy: “Open the gates!” It’s a time of openness, when nothing negative remains. It’s a time of welcome. Welcome for whom? “Open the gates... so the righteous nation may enter, the nation that keeps faith.” Welcome to the righteous nation, the people of faith! Under the inspiration of God’s Spirit, Isaiah foresees a time when God possesses a totally faithful and righteous nation, a people all His own, who love and glorify Him forever. The greatest family reunion ever. This is glory, triumph, everlasting peace.
But then verse 3 suddenly shifts focus and the whole thing gets very personal. You could say we “zoom in”. We’re no longer talking about a nation, not even about a family, but about one person—in fact about each person whose “mind is steadfast”, who trusts in the Lord. Instead of a city or gates or walls or ramparts, the prophet hammers on the personal meaning of what he just said—because, while it’s wonderful to talk about a glorious far-off future, the question must be asked: “But what does it mean to me, right here, right now?”
And so the prophet Isaiah expresses God’s personal promise: God will keep each one whose mind is fixed on Him in perfect peace. Why? “Because he (that’s you and me, the believer) trusts in you (that’s God)”. The cause and effect is totally clear: if you’re trusting, then you’re already not worrying. It’s “ipso facto”: when you’re trusting God, He’s already keeping you in perfect peace. That’s how it works. Trusting Him, we find the peace and confidence we need to face whatever life throws at us.
Trust is essentially the same thing as faith, and our faith is essentially the same thing as the peace of knowing what God has done and will do. And what will God do? He will fulfill His perfect plan.
“Fulfill”—that means “complete”, “carry out”, “finish”, “totally realize”-- you might even say "commit", like the way we say a person has "commited" a crime; God's plan is going to be totally "committed"! And what that all finally looks like, the ultimate and forever-reality, will be 100% what God Himself is absolutely and totally delighted with. (Do you need a lift today? Just think about that...)
Now when we remind ourselves of the time in history when Isaiah pronounced these words to Israel, we see why Israel needed this reminder in advance. Because destruction and exile still lay ahead for Israel. The time was coming when such words would sound like “The Impossible Dream” – a time when the Jewish people were banished from their homeland, prisoners in another country, with their great city and temple left behind lying in ruins. At such a time, words like, “We have a strong city... Open the gates, that the nation may enter” would sound like wild fantasy.
But just like when Jesus said to his disciples, “See, I have told you all these things beforehand”, Isaiah’s prophetic words must have been—should have been—a bedrock of comfort and hope to the nation in exile. With all the confidence of divine inspiration, the prophet audaciously proclaims the impossible-yet-certain future God has sent him to proclaim: “This will happen, Israel. It is going to be. And the only way for you to endure what’s coming is to be certain of it, with total trust and peace in God.” And that's what’s called “faith”: faith in God’s facts.
In a particular and very real way, the future—God's future—is already a fact right now, just as much as past historical events we read about in our schoolbooks. Why? Because the powerful reality of God’s future defines the present. And since the present is clearly a “fact”, then we can't call the future that defines it anything other than a fact, too!
Now, we can’t see it yet, but in fact, what God’s doing now is directly linked to what He will do in the future: the two work together like gears in a machine. One turns only because the other does. And in this case, it’s not just the present turning the future, but vice versa, too.
For example, when Abraham willingly offered up Isaac as a sacrifice, what that event meant already came directly out of the fact that God also gave His Son as a sacrifice and didn't spare him the way He spared Abraham’s son. The lesson, the parallel, but most of all the meaning, were always there—why? Precisely because both events were always there, in the total picture, in God’s absolute knowledge. In that sense, both events were already “now”, fully in play, operating together like two gears engaged in motion.
It’s in just this way that Isaiah offers the Israelites of his time God’s perfect peace in the fact of a strong city whose walls and ramparts are made of God’s salvation. Yes, even though destruction and exile haven’t even come yet. Even though the nation’s return from a future exile isn’t even conceivable yet! And yes, let me add, even though to this very day we can’t say that there has ever been a totally righteous nation, nor have we seen with our own eyes a city made of salvation. This prophecy still hasn’t fully been fulfilled. In spite of all that, the prophet Isaiah audaciously, without apology, says to his people... all those many, many years ago... speaking in the present tense: “We have a strong city; God makes salvation its walls and ramparts; open the gates...!”
This is the present tense of faith. It brings all times – past, present and future – together into one perfect fullness, a totality. This is the faith that knows God’s “big picture” is unfolding right now. This big picture encompasses all the past and all the future. And where, precisely, does it encompass all the past and future? Where else but now? It’s always right now, “at the moment”, where the past and future are unfolding, in the coming-into-being of God’s eternal purpose. Right here in the right-here-and-now the meaning and significance and power of the Red Sea parting and the falling walls of Jericho and the birth of Christ and the Cross and the Resurrection and Pentecost and the Tribulation and the Second Coming and the New Heaven and New Earth are all God’s present, immediate action, the unfolding of His design in the right-here-and-now.
Yes, some of these events are past, some are future, but the only place where any of them are actually dynamically, generatively operative, in immediate, productive power and meaning, happens to be right now. Because there is no other place than right now. “Right now” is the real moment, when the real God really brings the real meaning of all these events continually into being.
That’s what I mean by present tense of faith. If I may offer a couple of illustrations....
I’ve heard (I hope it’s accurate, but I don’t really understand these things!)—I’ve heard that in a hologram (you know, those 3-D images you can see in a little field of light, like a figurine, except there’s nothing solid there)--in a hologram, each part that makes up the image also contains in itself the whole image. Well, there you go, that’s what I’m saying about the “present tense of faith,” about all God’s past and future being here in the right-here-and-now.
Another illustration.... When you’re stopped at a train crossing and you watch the train go by, you see only a few of the train cars at any moment – maybe four or five, maybe a dozen or more if there’s not much around to obstruct your view. But if it’s a re-e-ally long train, there could be a hundred cars attached that you don’t see yet. They’re moving, they’re on their way, they’re actually moving together with the cars in front of you—it’s all one activity, one motion—but you don’t see them yet . And the cars that have already passed out of sight, they too are still moving, still part of this one single event, but you don’t see them anymore. Some cars have already passed, some haven’t come yet, but the who-o-le thing is a-a-all happening right now. The past, present and future of this train are all “in motion”... right now. And if any one of those three weren’t directly in motion right now, then none of them would be.
God’s work is like that, and our future – the future in Christ that God has already settled – is moving, it’s working, it’s speeding on its way, connected to the past and present: it’s all one train and you can’t disconnect the cars! God’s future is guaranteed – you know why? Now get ready, because here comes the strangest statement in this sermon: God’s future is guaranteed because there could be no past in God’s plan unless there were a future. If God weren’t going to do all the things He’s going to do, He wouldn’t have done all the things He has done. If there were no future in God’s plan, there would be no past in God’s plan—the “train” wouldn’t exist to begin with.
So the only way there could be no Second Coming of Christ, no New Heaven and Earth, no Marriage Supper of the Lamb, would be if there had never been an Ascension, or a Resurrection, or a Calvary, or the feeding of the five thousand, the wedding in Cana and water turned into wine, the first Christmas Day and the angel announcing to the young girl Mary that she would be the mother of God’s Son. But there was. So-o-o... there will be. Because the whole train is moving. The gears are engaged and you can’t disconnect them. It’s too late to disconnect them. And where can we see that moving train? The only place we can ever see anything: right now in front of us. We see it through the eyes of “present-tense-faith”.
(No, not a faith that believes only in the present, but a faith to which all of God’s plan is immediately and powerfully present!)
The “perfect peace” that the Scripture speaks of, the peace “that keeps our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus”—what is that? I believe that that’s the peace that comes from living inside of a story that is perfect, inside of a “now” that wondrously encloses, enfolds, encases the glory of God’s future, like that hologram where every part contains the whole thing. If God’s future climaxes in glorious triumph and everlasting peace, then that glorious triumph and everlasting peace are the ingredients of our present-tense-faith, right now. Because now is when it’s all moving, on the move, happening: “We have a strong city whose walls are salvation....”
More than seven hundred years after Isaiah proclaimed his prophecies, a different man in a very different set of circumstances wrote to a group of people from a radically different background than Old Testament Israel’s. This was Paul, writing to the Christians in the city of Corinth. And where we now begin reading, Paul is speaking in very different terms than the prophet Isaiah. But I think if we listen closely, with the heart, we’ll find that Paul is ultimately writing about the same thing (read Colossians 1:15).
Here we don’t read about a city which God has built, a city whose walls are salvation. Instead, we read about the One who is God’s firstborn, the very image of the invisible God. And we read further (read verses 16 and 17). We have moved beyond the city and are looking at the whole creation, at everything that exists, physical and spiritual, in all times, from the beginning of the world. And its entire structure depends on Him, the Firstborn of God and Firstborn from the dead, “in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins”. He is the foundation, the beginning and end of everything.
This is the very God to whom Isaiah directed the eyes of Israel, saying, “Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is the eternal Rock” (26:4). And here in the epistle, Paul directs the Colossians’ eyes – and ours – to the same Lord who is the eternal Rock. And again like Isaiah, Paul directs our attention to a certain city, whose walls are salvation, whose gates open wide to all who believe—only this time the “city” is called a body (read v. 18). The body is the Church, and Jesus Christ himself is Her Beginning.
Catch what that means: Jesus, the firstborn from the dead, is the Church's beginning. Paul is conveying something stunning here, don’t miss it! The picture he’s drawing is this: the Church originates in resurrection. Jesus Christ is the firstborn from the dead, and the firstborn from the dead is the Church’s beginning– the Greek word is “arkhe”, which is the “start” and “source” for everything else. In modern talk we might say that Jesus is the “go-ahead”... and why is He the “go-ahead” for everything else? Because He is the firstborn from the dead. Only starting with Jesus do you have a life that has dealt with death, once and for all, and says, Alright, let's go, let's begin!
A whole new dimension of life—glorious, unconquerable, resurrected, bursting through the bonds of death—is the Church’s own bursting into being. The Church originates in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
A whole new dimension of life—glorious, unconquerable, resurrected, bursting through the bonds of death—is the Church’s own bursting into being. The Church originates in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Do we have a city whose walls are salvation? And right now? Oh, yes. For we are the Church, whose very Origin is Living Salvation Himself, the Resurrected Son of God Jesus Christ. He was born from the dead first, so that we would be born in Resurrection-life. If we can expect resurrection, it’s only because He is risen; if we have life, it’s only because He lives; if we have the hope of seeing God’s face, it’s only because God’s face has appeared in our world in the face of Jesus, the image of the invisible God. And if we anticipate ultimately being God’s perfect children, it is only because Jesus became the perfect Man. Do you catch what Paul is getting at? In everything the supremacy—the “first-ness”, the “beginning-ness” and “source-ness”—is Christ's.
To “present-tense-faith”, the past that God has committed in Jesus guarantees the future which God is also committing, right now, in Jesus. And Jesus is forever. So we are "forever", in him. Yes, we have a strong city whose walls are salvation....
In the days of Isaiah, when the prophet predicted tribulation and exile but also redemption and return to a city of salvation, it sounded like something fantastic, impossible. And again in the time of the apostles, and in our time, all of this can sound fantastic, like an impossible dream. But the resurrection of Jesus Christ proves it isn't impossible. On the contrary, it’s the Rock and Foundation of our past, present and future; it’s the Gospel on which we stand: the Gospel of salvation by faith in the resurrected Son of God: (read verses 19 and 20).
All things... all things. Beyond the barriers of time and history, beyond the seeming unchangeableness of the past, beyond the mysterious darkness of the future, He reconciles all things through the death of the very One in whom all things have their beginning and source. It sounds fantastic, impossible, but He has done It.
In Isaiah 26:12, the prophet says, “Lord, you establish peace for us; all that we have accomplished you have done for us.”
In Colossians 1:21-22, the apostle says, “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now He has reconciled you, by Christ’s physical body through death”.
He has done it all—and why? “To present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation...”. “Lord, you establish peace for us; all that we have accomplished...”—yes, even a new life out of death, and freedom from accusation —“you have done for us.”
“To present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation (v. 23) if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel....” If. If. “Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter, the nation that keeps faith. You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord, the Lord is the Rock eternal.” (Is. 26:2-4)
“If you continue in your faith”... “for the nation that keeps faith”... “for the one who trusts... “trust forever”... “established and firm, not moved from the hope”....
If we just keep faith, the future promises joy: the joy of Christ, the joy of God; the future promises a day—a day that is coming, no matter what; the future promises open gates and a welcome; the future promises to usher you right into God’s presence, absolutely perfect and delightful to Him; the future promises reconciliation of all things in heaven and earth—including all your pasts, presents and futures, and the healing of all their wounds. To sum it up, the future promises us a future and promises it to us now, if we just keep faith.
God is on the move and He will not be stopped. Because of Jesus, God’s future is your future and your present is God’s growing story—a story of ultimate glory, triumph and everlasting peace. And because that’s what it will be, that’s what it is, right now. Isaiah saw it, Paul saw it; with the eyes of present-tense faith, we see it too: We have a strong city now; God makes salvation its walls and ramparts now, and God will keep in perfect peace, now, whoever continues in faith, established and firm, not moved from the true hope revealed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Life the Food of Life, or, The Rise and Fall of a Paradox
This one is more of a “meditation” (the fancy word for “light, short sermon”). I delivered it at our church on Harvest Holiday (in Russian, “prazdnik zhatvy”). Usually the Americans call it “Harvest Festival”, but “holiday” is actually closer to the meaning of the Russian, not to mention the fact that the conservative Ukrainian Baptists would hardly take a shine to some of the historical nuances of “festival”.... This is not a state holiday in Ukraine but a Baptist church tradition. (There is no Ukrainian “Thanksgiving Day” yet, though the way western influence has flooded in, I do not doubt that there will be, eventually. Even if only for an excuse to eat turkey.) Each church chooses a Sunday somewhere between late August and early October on which they will celebrate the harvest, with a big, beautiful display of the fruits of the earth, along with a huge loaf of bread and an equally huge Bible, in front of the pulpit. Traditionally, especially in the villages, the service is followed by a great big lunch, though in the city churches this is not quite as common. I have vivid memories of the cauldron being hauled out into the yard, after the service out in a village church, and loaded up with all the fixings for borsch, stirred over the fire. Great fun! Finally, on a more “technical” level, I admit ahead of time that my language here, regarding eternity and, in particular, my use of the past tense of the verb “to be”, is quite casual and inexact (it was a holiday, after all...). I say, for instance, that there “was a time” when God “was” simply life, i.e., before Creation. Of course, God is life now, not just “then” – and more to the point, before Creation there wasn't “a time” to speak of, anyway. But I chose for the purpose of this sermon simply to speak on a you-know-what-I-mean level. Therefore, I will trust that you know what I mean.
(Read Genesis 1:11, 12, then Genesis 1: 29-31)
God gave man the fruits of the earth for food. Now there’s two of the many things which didn’t exist before Creation: man, and food! We don’t think of that very often: not only was man non-existent before the Creation but so, obviously, was food! God didn’t need food, after all. Life existed perfectly in God with no need of support or sustenance. God is life, the source of His own life. But when God created living beings in a material creation, then there was need for food. Physical creatures needed physical support and sustenance. God is the source of His own life, but man is not the source of his own life. Man needed food.
But wait! Be careful! We will make a mistake if we think food is the source of our life. Life doesn’t come from the food we eat. Life uses the food we eat, but the life is already there in us. “Where?”, somebody asks. Ah, that’s a very good question. Where is “life”? The answer is, we don’t know! We see the outward effects of life, just as we see the leaves of the trees flutter in the wind, but we don’t see life itself, just as we don’t see the air that moves the leaves. And life is even more intangible than air, because we know that air is a mix of physical gasses, even if we can’t see them. We can feel air, we can put air into a bottle, we can examine it in a laboratory. Even air is matter. But life can’t be poured into a bottle or examined under a microscope. Yes, you can examine a living thing, like a spider or a person, but you can’t put life under a microscope. You can’t take life out of an animal, run your experiments on it, and then when you’re done with it put it back into the animal and say, “Thank you very much; you can run along and play now.” You can’t say what color life is, or what it smells like or what shape it is. You can’t go to the drugstore and say, “Give me a vial of life, please!” (though there are some companies that would like you to think so!). We can find stars and planets in the most distant corners of the universe, but we can’t find the life that exists inside each one of us.
As for food, it helps life, but it isn't life, not even the source of life. When Scripture says that God gave Adam life, it doesn’t say God gave him a spoonful of honey or a big glass of milk. No. God breathed life into Adam out of His very self; the essence of what makes God God, His life, became the essence of the creature made in God’s image. The source of our life is God. So, really, we can say that the source of our life is... Life! Because God is life. Just like the source of love is Love, because God is love.
Food is a wonderful and delightful gift from God, and He has given us many, many varieties of it. Most of us have favorite kinds of food. Some of us love carrots, some of us can’t stand carrots. But there is something we all have in common: we need food; we even “love” food. You know how people commonly talk: “I love pizza”, “I love ice cream”. We don’t all “love” the same foods, but each of “loves” some foods.
Now here’s an amazing paradox: on the one hand, our bodies cannot live without food; on the other hand, food isn't the source of our life! It’s almost illogical, but it’s true: we can’t live without food, but food doesn’t give us life. How do you explain that? Well, I think we might say that food helps our bodies to keep up with the life that’s in us. Adam had life before he had food, so obviously the food didn’t give him life. But food allowed Adam’s body to continue holding that life inside, and grow with that life. The life, though, came directly from God. There’s only one source of life.
This leads us to the following conclusion: life cannot life without life. I’ll say it again: life cannot live without life. There was life in Adam without food, but there was never life in Adam without God, who is life. That’s why I said “life cannot live without life.” It’s the same thing as saying “life cannot be without God”.
Now, for God, this is not a problem. He has always been the source of His own life. But for man this is a problem. We are not the source of our own life! And on the day when man sinned against God, God said, “You will die”. Death came in and interrupted the connection of life to life. Man cut himself off from the source.
Only if we understand this can we begin to grasp the magnificence in the words of Jesus Christ in John 6:32-40 (read).
These words make me think of four “times”. There was a time when God simply was life. Then there was a time when God gave life – to Adam. Then there was a time when God gave food to the living Adam and his children. But then, there was a time when the living God became “the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” This is JESUS.
All the parts of this amazing story come together in Jesus Christ because he is the Bread of Life. Why is he the Bread of Life? He is the Bread of Life because he is God, the very source of life. He is the Bread of Life because he became man, so that our humanity might be saved by his humanity. He is the Bread of Life because he dwells in the hearts of his people, nourishes and sustains them with his own self. He is the Bread of Life because he satisfies the deepest need of the soul: our hunger for the love of God. Jesus says, “No one who comes to me will I cast away.” God’s perfect love radiates through these words. The love that filled the life of God in eternity expresses itself on the lips of Jesus: “I will not cast away anyone who comes to me.”
Jesus is the Bread of Life because true life can exist only in perfect harmony with God’s will. Remember, death came in the Garden when man rejected God’s will. But the Bread of Life says, “I came down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of the Father who sent me.” Perfect harmony. And what is this will? “The will of the Father who sent me is that I lose nothing of what He has given me but raise it up on the last day. The will of the one who sent me is that whoever sees the Son and believes in him, will have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
Jesus Christ is the Bread of Life because he gave something physical, something earthly and material in order to save us: he gave his body, his life: “I am the living bread come down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. The bread I give is my flesh, which I will surrender for the life of the world. (6:51)” He gave physical “food” for our spiritual life. Jesus’ body and blood became the saving food of life. As Jesus says further: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. (vv.54-55)”
At the beginning I pointed out an interesting paradox, that our life depends on food but food doesn’t give us life! But now, when we speak about the Bread of Life, the paradox evaporates like mist in the sun. There’s no more paradox, because now the source and the food are one. The living Bread is both the food of our life and the source of our life. This is Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life – who has life in himself because he is from the Father who has life in himself. And Jesus promises that whoever takes this life, this bread, this food for the human soul, will have life forever, in God and God’s love.
For God loved the world so much that He gave His only-begotten Son, so that whoever believes in him might not perish but have everlasting life.
(Read Genesis 1:11, 12, then Genesis 1: 29-31)
God gave man the fruits of the earth for food. Now there’s two of the many things which didn’t exist before Creation: man, and food! We don’t think of that very often: not only was man non-existent before the Creation but so, obviously, was food! God didn’t need food, after all. Life existed perfectly in God with no need of support or sustenance. God is life, the source of His own life. But when God created living beings in a material creation, then there was need for food. Physical creatures needed physical support and sustenance. God is the source of His own life, but man is not the source of his own life. Man needed food.
But wait! Be careful! We will make a mistake if we think food is the source of our life. Life doesn’t come from the food we eat. Life uses the food we eat, but the life is already there in us. “Where?”, somebody asks. Ah, that’s a very good question. Where is “life”? The answer is, we don’t know! We see the outward effects of life, just as we see the leaves of the trees flutter in the wind, but we don’t see life itself, just as we don’t see the air that moves the leaves. And life is even more intangible than air, because we know that air is a mix of physical gasses, even if we can’t see them. We can feel air, we can put air into a bottle, we can examine it in a laboratory. Even air is matter. But life can’t be poured into a bottle or examined under a microscope. Yes, you can examine a living thing, like a spider or a person, but you can’t put life under a microscope. You can’t take life out of an animal, run your experiments on it, and then when you’re done with it put it back into the animal and say, “Thank you very much; you can run along and play now.” You can’t say what color life is, or what it smells like or what shape it is. You can’t go to the drugstore and say, “Give me a vial of life, please!” (though there are some companies that would like you to think so!). We can find stars and planets in the most distant corners of the universe, but we can’t find the life that exists inside each one of us.
As for food, it helps life, but it isn't life, not even the source of life. When Scripture says that God gave Adam life, it doesn’t say God gave him a spoonful of honey or a big glass of milk. No. God breathed life into Adam out of His very self; the essence of what makes God God, His life, became the essence of the creature made in God’s image. The source of our life is God. So, really, we can say that the source of our life is... Life! Because God is life. Just like the source of love is Love, because God is love.
Food is a wonderful and delightful gift from God, and He has given us many, many varieties of it. Most of us have favorite kinds of food. Some of us love carrots, some of us can’t stand carrots. But there is something we all have in common: we need food; we even “love” food. You know how people commonly talk: “I love pizza”, “I love ice cream”. We don’t all “love” the same foods, but each of “loves” some foods.
Now here’s an amazing paradox: on the one hand, our bodies cannot live without food; on the other hand, food isn't the source of our life! It’s almost illogical, but it’s true: we can’t live without food, but food doesn’t give us life. How do you explain that? Well, I think we might say that food helps our bodies to keep up with the life that’s in us. Adam had life before he had food, so obviously the food didn’t give him life. But food allowed Adam’s body to continue holding that life inside, and grow with that life. The life, though, came directly from God. There’s only one source of life.
This leads us to the following conclusion: life cannot life without life. I’ll say it again: life cannot live without life. There was life in Adam without food, but there was never life in Adam without God, who is life. That’s why I said “life cannot live without life.” It’s the same thing as saying “life cannot be without God”.
Now, for God, this is not a problem. He has always been the source of His own life. But for man this is a problem. We are not the source of our own life! And on the day when man sinned against God, God said, “You will die”. Death came in and interrupted the connection of life to life. Man cut himself off from the source.
Only if we understand this can we begin to grasp the magnificence in the words of Jesus Christ in John 6:32-40 (read).
These words make me think of four “times”. There was a time when God simply was life. Then there was a time when God gave life – to Adam. Then there was a time when God gave food to the living Adam and his children. But then, there was a time when the living God became “the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” This is JESUS.
All the parts of this amazing story come together in Jesus Christ because he is the Bread of Life. Why is he the Bread of Life? He is the Bread of Life because he is God, the very source of life. He is the Bread of Life because he became man, so that our humanity might be saved by his humanity. He is the Bread of Life because he dwells in the hearts of his people, nourishes and sustains them with his own self. He is the Bread of Life because he satisfies the deepest need of the soul: our hunger for the love of God. Jesus says, “No one who comes to me will I cast away.” God’s perfect love radiates through these words. The love that filled the life of God in eternity expresses itself on the lips of Jesus: “I will not cast away anyone who comes to me.”
Jesus is the Bread of Life because true life can exist only in perfect harmony with God’s will. Remember, death came in the Garden when man rejected God’s will. But the Bread of Life says, “I came down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of the Father who sent me.” Perfect harmony. And what is this will? “The will of the Father who sent me is that I lose nothing of what He has given me but raise it up on the last day. The will of the one who sent me is that whoever sees the Son and believes in him, will have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
Jesus Christ is the Bread of Life because he gave something physical, something earthly and material in order to save us: he gave his body, his life: “I am the living bread come down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. The bread I give is my flesh, which I will surrender for the life of the world. (6:51)” He gave physical “food” for our spiritual life. Jesus’ body and blood became the saving food of life. As Jesus says further: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. (vv.54-55)”
At the beginning I pointed out an interesting paradox, that our life depends on food but food doesn’t give us life! But now, when we speak about the Bread of Life, the paradox evaporates like mist in the sun. There’s no more paradox, because now the source and the food are one. The living Bread is both the food of our life and the source of our life. This is Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life – who has life in himself because he is from the Father who has life in himself. And Jesus promises that whoever takes this life, this bread, this food for the human soul, will have life forever, in God and God’s love.
For God loved the world so much that He gave His only-begotten Son, so that whoever believes in him might not perish but have everlasting life.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Titus: Three Mountain Peaks
This sermon started out as a valiant attempt to cover the whole epistle at once. I quickly realized that was too tall an order. In the process, however, I was deeply impressed by three glorious “peaks” in the epistle, where Paul zooms out to view the whole marvelous picture, and it was quite a curious thing how the same word showed up on each “peak”....
Today I want us to look together at three glorious “mountaintops” or “peaks” in Paul’s epistle to Titus. These three peaks open up to us the heart of the apostle. They describe his understanding of all reality, they tell us what he understands as the central significance of everything that exists. Everything else that Paul writes in this epistle flows out of this central understanding. Let’s look at each of these peaks individually.
(Read 1:1-4)
To me, the central word in this part is “hope”, and the central phrase is “the hope of eternal life”. If you took out that phrase, then this whole part would lose its sense.
As Paul puts it, the hope of eternal life serves as the base for faith and knowledge. Paul says we have knowledge of the truth. Of what truth, exactly? Of the truth that eternal life is found in our Savior Jesus. Paul says that we have faith. What kind of faith, exactly? Faith in the Savior Jesus; we believe in him as Savior, as Redeemer of our souls, as the Lord of life. Both this knowledge and this faith rest on the hope of eternal life. Hope is our expectation, and all our expectation is completely wrapped in what we know and believe about Jesus. We entrust all our expectation to him because we know who he is.
This hope of eternal life is the gift of God, the greatest gift which changes everything. This gift changes our past, our present and our future. Therefore, this gift has to be announced, as Paul says in verses two and three: God promised this hope, and at the right time revealed it, and appointed Paul, and many others, to announce it to the world. It has to be announced precisely so that it can change everything for as many people as possible. This gift of hope is the meaning of life, and people who don’t know about the gift don’t know the meaning of life. This is why Paul talks about how God has now brought His word to light and made Paul a proclaimer of it.
And so, the key word in this first part is “hope”, the key phrase is “the hope of eternal life”, and this hope undergirds our faith and knowledge. This hope is the news which the apostle proclaims. For the apostle, the destiny of the world is defined by this hope. And, yes, the spiritual maturity of the Christian is also defined by this hope – why? Because, as Paul explains, this hope undergirds knowledge of truth, and knowledge of truth leads to – what? To godliness. If I lose hope, then I stop knowing the truth, and if I stop knowing the truth, I cannot live in a godly way.
So you see, these thoughts are not abstract or “philosophical”. They’re terribly practical. Our hope will define our behavior. If our hope is true, then we’ll have a deep desire to live in correspondence to it. And to know more and more about it. We will love that hope, because we love the Source of that hope, our Lord Jesus Christ. These are the principles of reality. They lead to many practical issues and applications, in the areas of behavior, of church leadership, of doctrine and order in the church. And this epistle is a very practical epistle with concrete instructions on order, on how to appoint leaders, on teaching, on family life, on relations with government and society, etc. But– all those things means absolutely nothing if you take away that hope. And when Paul writes his many instructions, it’s all aimed at one goal: that the hope of eternal life might continually grow greater and deeper and more glorious and spread to more and more people until the day of Jesus Christ’s appearing. This is the light in which in we can understand this epistle to Titus.
The next mountaintop I want to look at is found in 2:11-14 (read).
Well, you know what? The central word in this part is... hope! And the central phrase is “while we wait for the blessed hope”. But we can't understand what it means to wait for this blessed hope unless we really understand what the first statement in this part means: “For the grace of God has appeared to all men.” Paul is underlining the fact that this great event in history is directly relevant for literally every person in the whole world. The central question of life for every person can be put this way: “Do you know what happened?” That is, have you heard the news? Do you know what your life means? You can know what your life means only if you know what happened. Because what happened, at a concrete moment in history, precisely with this Person Jesus Christ, and in him, this reveals what your life means: “The grace of God has appeared to all.” The life of Jesus Christ, the feat accomplished by Jesus Christ, the word of Jesus Christ, the power of Jesus Christ, this is the “grace of God appearing to all” people in world history – concretely, personally.
People everywhere worry about who the next president will be, or what will happen to the economy, or who’ll win the World Cup. But the answers to any of these questions don’t change the fabric of the soul. They don’t transform you. But the “grace of God appearing to all” changes concretely the fabric of the soul, it bears life where there was no life. This grace gives, together with life, a hope that is totally intertwined with that life. This is a life lived in the blessed hope of His appearing.
Because this new life strives towards reunion with Christ, strives in sanctification, strives in expectation, strives in hope. This new life, born of grace, strives towards the fulfillment of Jesus Christ’s own desire: (v.14) “...to purify for himself a people for his own possession, zealous for good deeds.”
This desire, this goal, this hope of God, is inseparable from our hope. By God's mercy, His hope has become our hope. His hope is incarnated in our lives, through our behavior, in spiritual growth, in the revelation of the character of God’s Son in us. Yes, I know: these are intimidating words, because each of us realizes how far we still are from perfect Christ-likeness. But I want to say words of encouragement and comfort today: Hope, God’s hope, our hope in Christ, can’t do anything else but spur us on. It reminds us that there’s only one direction: forward, in Jesus. Forward to the fulfillment of “that blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Christ Jesus”.
And then we come to the third peak, in 3:4-7 (read).
It won’t surprise you that I find the central concept of this part in the last sentence: “...having the hope of eternal life”. This part talks about how each of us in Christ can testify from personal experience. Paul tells Titus, “You and I were just like all the others in the world who haven’t come to know Christ. You and I know, Titus, from personal experience what it means to be saved– saved by love, by God’s kindness. We know what it means to receive a gift that we could never even have dreamed of, that transcends comprehension.” (v. 3...) “For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another.” But... God saved us. This is what we were, but God saved us. We were foolish and hateful, but: “God saved us.” Astounding words. I trust that you have noticed the stark, dramatic absence of any transitional state or condition. The apostle doesn't say, “Yes, Titus, when you and I finally woke up and realized what wretches we were and decided to clean up our lives in a major reformation project, then God was finally happy enough with us to save us.” No. We were disobedient and deceived, but God saved us. No transitional stage, no merit, nothing earned. There's the richness of God’s mercy and kindness. He took our whole pathetic state in hand and resolved the issue Himself. We never had anything to offer by way of help in the matter, and correspondingly God didn’t wait around for it. He saved, He cleansed, He poured out His Spirit and made us new. Salvation is God’s glory, God’s praise, God’s credit.
And for our part, knowing that salvation is God’s accomplishment, we can hope to the very end. We can anticipate the ultimate accomplishment of God’s glorious work. The hope of the glorious conclusion of redemption is as strong as the perfection of God’s salvation is full. Now there’s a rather complicated idea, so let’s hear it again: the hope of the glorious conclusion of redemption is as strong as the perfection of God’s salvation is full.
Actually, we can say that in a much simpler way: God has done, God will do. And in this, as Paul writes to dear Titus, is all our hope of eternal life. The very same divine love that compelled Jesus to the cross in complete self-sacrifice is the love that now strives and strains forward to reunion with the redeemed. To the extent our spirits respond to what God has done, to that same extent our spirits thirst, in hope, for what God will do. And we’ll be able to deal with the multitude of issues in life in the power of the glorious gift, the hope of eternal life in the Lord, our Savior Jesus Christ.
Today I want us to look together at three glorious “mountaintops” or “peaks” in Paul’s epistle to Titus. These three peaks open up to us the heart of the apostle. They describe his understanding of all reality, they tell us what he understands as the central significance of everything that exists. Everything else that Paul writes in this epistle flows out of this central understanding. Let’s look at each of these peaks individually.
(Read 1:1-4)
To me, the central word in this part is “hope”, and the central phrase is “the hope of eternal life”. If you took out that phrase, then this whole part would lose its sense.
As Paul puts it, the hope of eternal life serves as the base for faith and knowledge. Paul says we have knowledge of the truth. Of what truth, exactly? Of the truth that eternal life is found in our Savior Jesus. Paul says that we have faith. What kind of faith, exactly? Faith in the Savior Jesus; we believe in him as Savior, as Redeemer of our souls, as the Lord of life. Both this knowledge and this faith rest on the hope of eternal life. Hope is our expectation, and all our expectation is completely wrapped in what we know and believe about Jesus. We entrust all our expectation to him because we know who he is.
This hope of eternal life is the gift of God, the greatest gift which changes everything. This gift changes our past, our present and our future. Therefore, this gift has to be announced, as Paul says in verses two and three: God promised this hope, and at the right time revealed it, and appointed Paul, and many others, to announce it to the world. It has to be announced precisely so that it can change everything for as many people as possible. This gift of hope is the meaning of life, and people who don’t know about the gift don’t know the meaning of life. This is why Paul talks about how God has now brought His word to light and made Paul a proclaimer of it.
And so, the key word in this first part is “hope”, the key phrase is “the hope of eternal life”, and this hope undergirds our faith and knowledge. This hope is the news which the apostle proclaims. For the apostle, the destiny of the world is defined by this hope. And, yes, the spiritual maturity of the Christian is also defined by this hope – why? Because, as Paul explains, this hope undergirds knowledge of truth, and knowledge of truth leads to – what? To godliness. If I lose hope, then I stop knowing the truth, and if I stop knowing the truth, I cannot live in a godly way.
So you see, these thoughts are not abstract or “philosophical”. They’re terribly practical. Our hope will define our behavior. If our hope is true, then we’ll have a deep desire to live in correspondence to it. And to know more and more about it. We will love that hope, because we love the Source of that hope, our Lord Jesus Christ. These are the principles of reality. They lead to many practical issues and applications, in the areas of behavior, of church leadership, of doctrine and order in the church. And this epistle is a very practical epistle with concrete instructions on order, on how to appoint leaders, on teaching, on family life, on relations with government and society, etc. But– all those things means absolutely nothing if you take away that hope. And when Paul writes his many instructions, it’s all aimed at one goal: that the hope of eternal life might continually grow greater and deeper and more glorious and spread to more and more people until the day of Jesus Christ’s appearing. This is the light in which in we can understand this epistle to Titus.
The next mountaintop I want to look at is found in 2:11-14 (read).
Well, you know what? The central word in this part is... hope! And the central phrase is “while we wait for the blessed hope”. But we can't understand what it means to wait for this blessed hope unless we really understand what the first statement in this part means: “For the grace of God has appeared to all men.” Paul is underlining the fact that this great event in history is directly relevant for literally every person in the whole world. The central question of life for every person can be put this way: “Do you know what happened?” That is, have you heard the news? Do you know what your life means? You can know what your life means only if you know what happened. Because what happened, at a concrete moment in history, precisely with this Person Jesus Christ, and in him, this reveals what your life means: “The grace of God has appeared to all.” The life of Jesus Christ, the feat accomplished by Jesus Christ, the word of Jesus Christ, the power of Jesus Christ, this is the “grace of God appearing to all” people in world history – concretely, personally.
People everywhere worry about who the next president will be, or what will happen to the economy, or who’ll win the World Cup. But the answers to any of these questions don’t change the fabric of the soul. They don’t transform you. But the “grace of God appearing to all” changes concretely the fabric of the soul, it bears life where there was no life. This grace gives, together with life, a hope that is totally intertwined with that life. This is a life lived in the blessed hope of His appearing.
Because this new life strives towards reunion with Christ, strives in sanctification, strives in expectation, strives in hope. This new life, born of grace, strives towards the fulfillment of Jesus Christ’s own desire: (v.14) “...to purify for himself a people for his own possession, zealous for good deeds.”
This desire, this goal, this hope of God, is inseparable from our hope. By God's mercy, His hope has become our hope. His hope is incarnated in our lives, through our behavior, in spiritual growth, in the revelation of the character of God’s Son in us. Yes, I know: these are intimidating words, because each of us realizes how far we still are from perfect Christ-likeness. But I want to say words of encouragement and comfort today: Hope, God’s hope, our hope in Christ, can’t do anything else but spur us on. It reminds us that there’s only one direction: forward, in Jesus. Forward to the fulfillment of “that blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Christ Jesus”.
And then we come to the third peak, in 3:4-7 (read).
It won’t surprise you that I find the central concept of this part in the last sentence: “...having the hope of eternal life”. This part talks about how each of us in Christ can testify from personal experience. Paul tells Titus, “You and I were just like all the others in the world who haven’t come to know Christ. You and I know, Titus, from personal experience what it means to be saved– saved by love, by God’s kindness. We know what it means to receive a gift that we could never even have dreamed of, that transcends comprehension.” (v. 3...) “For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another.” But... God saved us. This is what we were, but God saved us. We were foolish and hateful, but: “God saved us.” Astounding words. I trust that you have noticed the stark, dramatic absence of any transitional state or condition. The apostle doesn't say, “Yes, Titus, when you and I finally woke up and realized what wretches we were and decided to clean up our lives in a major reformation project, then God was finally happy enough with us to save us.” No. We were disobedient and deceived, but God saved us. No transitional stage, no merit, nothing earned. There's the richness of God’s mercy and kindness. He took our whole pathetic state in hand and resolved the issue Himself. We never had anything to offer by way of help in the matter, and correspondingly God didn’t wait around for it. He saved, He cleansed, He poured out His Spirit and made us new. Salvation is God’s glory, God’s praise, God’s credit.
And for our part, knowing that salvation is God’s accomplishment, we can hope to the very end. We can anticipate the ultimate accomplishment of God’s glorious work. The hope of the glorious conclusion of redemption is as strong as the perfection of God’s salvation is full. Now there’s a rather complicated idea, so let’s hear it again: the hope of the glorious conclusion of redemption is as strong as the perfection of God’s salvation is full.
Actually, we can say that in a much simpler way: God has done, God will do. And in this, as Paul writes to dear Titus, is all our hope of eternal life. The very same divine love that compelled Jesus to the cross in complete self-sacrifice is the love that now strives and strains forward to reunion with the redeemed. To the extent our spirits respond to what God has done, to that same extent our spirits thirst, in hope, for what God will do. And we’ll be able to deal with the multitude of issues in life in the power of the glorious gift, the hope of eternal life in the Lord, our Savior Jesus Christ.
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