A big department store can be bewildering. One way to shop is to wander around and see what you can see. But it can be pretty tiring even for the most determined shopper. We sampled a little of Bristol the other week … and a little of Ikea too.
But help is at hand. It’s usually by the lifts or by the staircase.
That store guide. That tells you to watch out for bad language on the second floor because that’s where you find men swear.
You want menswear you go to the second floor.
You want food, try the basement.
It’s the same in bookshops. The bigger the better – but they can be overwhelming. Waterstones have rejigged everything. Blackwells in Oxford still have the theology books down in the Norrington room, that vast basement room – and they’ve been in the same place for the forty years I have been going to Blackwell’s.
Want a biography? Go to the biographies. Want popular science? Go to the popular science section. Want a novel? Go to fiction. Want a thriller? Go to science writing.
In some ways the Bible is like a bookshop or a library of different books. It helps to know your way around the bible and to know the different sections.
It starts with the law books. Then you move on the history books, then you have the poetry books then you finish with the prophets. Then on to the NT, the Gospels, the history of the church in Acts, Paul’s letters,
There is, however, a problem.
The Old Testament especially can be a tricky read. Stuff happens, stuff goes on that can be profoundly disturbing not least in the setting of wars that touch on religion in the modern age and at this very time.
How do we read Joshua and its battles, Judges and its account of utter destruction at times?
I only recently discovered that the Miles Smith who wrote the preface to the King James Bible was the Bishop of Gloucester – a local lad. I have taken one of those wonderful sets of images he uses of translation as the inspiration for our read through of the Old Testament.
Translation it is that that “removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water."
The Old Testament has within it life-giving water – but it can be difficult to lift the lid on the old testament and come by the water!
The key for us as Christians is to come to the Old Testament and see it through Jesus – after all he claims to fulfil all the Law and the Prophets.
And there is great significance in that claim. Nowhere does he mention anything about ‘histories’. And there is a reason for that.
The Bible Jesus knew, the Hebrew Scriptures, indeed the Hebrew Scriptures Jewish people regard to this day as their Holy Book are not divided up the way the Greek translators, the Latin translators and the English translators have rearranged them. Our Bible is influenced by the kind of logical thinking of western minds, not lest in the way the Old Testament books are ordered.
The Hebrew Scriptures are arranged into Law, Prophets and Writings.
When we come to the end of the books of the Law at Deuteronomy and turn to Joshua and Judges we are in fact moving into the section of the Old Testament that in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the mind of Christ are labelled ‘Prophets’. That is interesting.
These books don’t just tell a nation’s story if history books ever just do that. These books tell the story in such a way that they pack a punch, they have a message to share.
Prophets don’t just prophesy the future – that’s quite a misunderstanding of what Biblical prophets get up to. Prophets declare God’s word into the present, often by analysing how we got into the situation we are in, and they do so in order to help shape the future that lies ahead.
Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, have a flow to them that culminates at the end of II kings at the point at which the nation Israel, has collapsed and the people are in exile. That’s an indication of the point at which the books were collected together.
It is at that time that priestly writers who had served in the temple got together in exile in order to collect all the law codes into what we would recognise as those five books of the law.
And prophetic writers who had been in the business of declaring God’s word, pored over the story of the nation to ask how they had got into such a mess and what they must do to get out of it.
Those prophetic writers compared notes with the priestly ones, and they took note of the climax to the books of the Law in Deuteronomy.
As they stood on the threshold of the promised land the people of Israel had a choice. Choose life, choose death. To choose life they must obey God. The principle can be summed up … obey God and all will go well. Disobey God and all will collapse.
As other later writers reflect in places like the book of Job that principle doesn’t always work out. But it’s a pretty good general principle.
The prophets recognised it. When they saw the rulers of the people abandoning God, ruling unjustly it is the job of the prophet to speak out and hold the rulers to account. Return to God’s ways and the people will do well again.
The prophets responsible for bringing together the story of the nation in Joshua Judgges, Samuel and Kings pore over the story of their nation and they notice a pattern that works out in their sotry. When rulers and people obey God on the whole things go well; It is when they abandon God’s law that thigns fall apart. They test out that theory of history and they work it out in the telling of the story of the nation.
Once established in the promised land, and after the death of Joshua the people of Israel are still a fairly loose collection of tribes living in a land where there are many foreign peoples some of whom some of the time are quite hostile.
The prophetic writers pore over this period of a couple of hundred years maybe and they notice a pattern.
After an initial chapter, chapter 1, that sets the scene and identifies the areas controlled by the 12 tribes of Israel and the areas not conquered by them [a very intereseting observation, that is explored further in chapter 3, the writers then go on to work out the theory of history that they see working out in this period.
You can think of it as the judges cycle and it is described in chapter 2.
For a while after the death of Joshua the people continue in the ways of God and all goes well.
Then, the memory of Joshua’s leadership fades, and ‘the people did what was evil in the sight of the Lord’ (:11). That has consequences, these ancient writers don’t speak in the language of ‘consequences’ they speak in the more vivid language of God’s anger – but it amounts to the same thing.
The consequence is that everything falls apart, society crumbles.
Then the Lord raises up a leader who brings the people to their senses and establsishes the law of the Lord once again – those charismatic leaders are called ‘judges’. That then has the opposite consequence. And the people live at peace and with plenty.
The leader dies, and the cycle starts all over again.
A leader dies.
People abandon God.
Everything falls apart.
A charismatic leader, a judge comes on the scene
People turn back to God
All is well.
Charismatic leader dies … and it starts all over again.
The stories of six judges is told at length … and each story follows exactly that pattern
Othiel, Ehud, the woman Deborah (isn’t that interesting), Gideon, Jephthah and Samson
Another six judges are simply mentioned by name: Shamgar, Tola, |Jair, Ibzan, Elon, Abdon.
There are lots of things we can take from the book of Judges and those stories. More than anything, there is so much in that insight into history to this day.
Model a society on the ways of God – particularly as Jesus summarises them and brings them together in the Sermon on the Mount and it would make a massive difference. We have practical guidelines that can help us shape society – love for neighbour, passion for justice, bias to the poor – these are all at the heart of the law, the prophets and come to fulfilment in the teachings of Jesus. This is a way of life that we need to feed into political thinking to this day.
But there is one intriguing strand that is hinted at already in the book of Judges and is going to play a much larger part when we move on to the person who is arguably the last of the line of these charismatic leaders, Samuel and the books that bear his name.
This is a longing that there should be a greater stability. Instead of just relying on a charismatic leader, couldn’t the people actually find someone who would be a King … just like the neighbouring nations had.
When Jesus came he came to usher in the Kingdom of God. So if we are reading these books through Jesus eyes, remembering that he claims to be the fulfilment of these books of the prophets, we need to be on the look out for what kingship entails, how its understood.
As the death of Gideon approaches the people are frustrated at the uncertainties attached to what happens when they have to wait for another ‘charismatic’ leader or judge to be raised up. So some suggest adopting a custom known among some of the neighbouring nations: they suggest anointing Gideon as King. He resists the temptation as it is fraught with even more uncertainty.
At his death, however, one of his seventy sons, Abimelech, born of a concubine, grabs at power, has his brothers killed and is hailed as King. One of the brothers, however, escapes. And on Mount Gerizim, the very place where in Deuteronomy the fundamental choice between life and death, between obedience of God and disobedience was put, Jotham challenges the leadesr at Shechem, and he holds Abimilech to account.
And he does that in a way that the prophets from Elijah and Elisha on are going to use. He tells a story, a parable.
It’s one of the classic things prophets do. No wonder when Jesus couched so much of his teaching in the form of stories and parables he was thought by the crowds to be a Prophet! Maybe it was no coincidence that he did exactly as the prophets before had done, describing himself as a Prophet, for he was, after all, bringing to fulfilment all the Prophets.
Jotham’s parable is a wonderful parable of the trees in the forest.
The trees once went out
to anoint a king over themselves.
So they said to the olive tree,
“Reign over us.”
The olive tree answered them,
“Shall I stop producing my rich oil
by which gods and mortals are honoured,
and go to sway over the trees?”
Then the trees said to the fig tree,
“You come and reign over us.”
But the fig tree answered them,
“Shall I stop producing my sweetness
and my delicious fruit,
and go to sway over the trees?”
Then the trees said to the vine,
“You come and reign over us.”
But the vine said to them,
“Shall I stop producing my wine
that cheers gods and mortals,
and go to sway over the trees?”
So all the trees said to the bramble,
“You come and reign over us.”
And the bramble said to the trees,
“If in good faith you are anointing me king over you,
then come and take refuge in my shade;
but if not, let fire come out of the bramble
and devour the cedars of Lebanon.”
It is the most wonderful of stories and the most powerful of parables.
So, says Jotham. What is Abimilech? Is he a righteous, just ruler … or has he killed to get to power – is he the bramble?
Powerful stuff, and as the story goes, Abimelech’s reign comes to a pretty horrible end.
Jotham’s parable is a remarkable and powerful reflection on the nature of kingship and the nature of the kingdom.
In these early prophets we are not going to hear told the story of the arrival of the kingdom in Israel … and we shall reflect a lot on the nature of that kingdom.
But this is where the story starts.
The story for us as Christians reaches its climax in the coming of Chrsit and in his teaching that it is in him that the Kingdom of God has finally come – bringing to fulfilment all the law and all these prophets.
And what is Christ’s rule as king like? The awful power of the bramble?
No …
What is the last of the trees before the bramble, in some ways the noblest of the trees in the parable, the tree that comes to signify the kingdom of the people Israel.
It is the vine.
And as Jesus comes to the crunch moment in his ministry, as he is about to enter into his kingdom, the very night before he is crucified to be raised on the third day, what does jesus say?
It’s a word picture, it’s a kind of parable.
And it echoes Jotham’s parable.
I am the bramble? No, of course not.
I am the true vine and you are the branches. Abide in me, as I abide in you.
Vine and branches are inseparable from one another
What is the kingship like that Christ exercises?
For Jesus the essence of living in that kingdom is love.
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you, abide in my love, he says.
And then he echoes the great theme that runs through the whole of Judges.
If you keep my commandments you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments. If you keep my commandments you will abide in my love.
What is the commandment of Jesus that we are to obey?
“This is my commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you.”
IF we are to read Judges, we must recall that Jesus has brought all the prophets … and that includes Judges … to fulfilment in bringing in God’s rule, God’s kingdom. And that new commandment that we are to take from Jesus is the commandment to love one another.
We cannot use Judges to justify the atrocities of war. We have to uncover the well to get at the water that’s here in this book – and we do that as we read it through the eyes of Jesus.
Sunday, 19 June 2011
Sunday, 5 June 2011
Joshua, Jesus and the New Covenant
In the couple of weeks since I preached my first sermon on Joshua much has happened, not least in Serbia and now in the Hague.
Ratko Mladic has been captured, and is now to be put on trial.
On the news we have re-lived the disturbing accounts of all that he was responsible for. We have been profoundly disturbed by those accounts of the massacre at Srebenica.
The horror of all that happened is easy to erase from the memory of those of us for whom it was simply an item on the news. It will forever be a scar on the memory of those who witnessed it.
And again there was a religious dimension as 7,000 muslims were massacred. And the fault lines in the Balkans were exposed and linked with religious affiliations, Christian and Muslim at war.
A fortnight ago I preached on Joshua 1. I had come across a commentary that was written in part by Gordon McConville of the University of Gloucestershire, and in part by Stephen Williams, a Christian theologian.
Gordon McConville supplies a verse by verse explanation of the meaning of the text as you would expect in a commentary. What is different about this Two Horizons OT commentary is that Stephen Williams then goes on to offer reflections of the text from the Christian readers’ point of view.
Hence the two horizons – of the text in itself, and the text as it is read by Christian readers.
Between chapter 1 and chapter 24 much has happened, and much that has happened disturbs the Christian reader. I suggested a fortnight ago that two things more than any other disturb. Looking at chapter 1 I reflected on the questions the Christian reader has to grapple with over land. The other thing that unsettles the Christian reader is what happens to the cities and the land that Joshua conquers. There are occasions when what Joshua does is nothing less than the ethnic cleansing that so appals us from Ratko Mladic. What do we make of the command to raze a town to the ground and to destroy all its inhabitants, men, women and children?
For some down through the ages the book of Joshua poses no problem.
This is what God commands his people to do … and therefore it must be done.
But I for one am troubled.
This is not to me the God that Jesus discloses when he commands his followers to love their enemies. It is not the God that Jesus discloses who can be addressed in the intimacy of the Lord’s prayer as abba, father. It is not the God that Jesus discloses when on the cross he says of those who have executed him Father, forgive them …
There is a problem here for me when I read Joshua that I have to grapple with.
Much has happened in the fortnight since we looked at Joshua 1.
Yesterday, I found myself in Winchester Universsity, at a day conference looking at Preaching the Gospel in a Secular World. I contributed thoughts on preaching in the context of science. But it was the other speakers that were most fascinating.
Among the partners who work with Winchester University are a number of courses linked with black-led churches. It was great to mix and to share ideas and to engage with each other. June Boyce Tillman, a couple of whose hymns we occasionally sing was one of the speakers from Winchester, but the key note speaker who got the day off to an excellent and thought provoking start was Adrian Thatcher, Professor of Theology at Exeter University.
I was taken aback, or moved to find that he was addressing the very question I had been addressing in these notes ready for this evening’s sermon. How do you cope with Joshua especially 4-11. They are chapters where whole populations of men, women and children are wiped out.
He reflected on the way the Bible has been taken by Christians to justify all sorts of horrible things down through the ages – he homed in on slavery, racism, anti-semitism, the destruction of the Jews.
The conflicts in the Balkans touch on such abuse of the Bible and the justification of ethnic cleansing.
We know slavery is wrong, racism is wrong, ethnic cleansing is wrong – but how do we handle our Bible when in parts especially of Joshua we find the very things we find so abhorrent done in the name of God?
Adrian Thatcher suggested some principles of Reading the Bible.
1) Read the Bible to learn of God’s Word. John 1 tells us what God’s Word is. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God … and the Word became flesh and dwelled amongst us and we have beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten son.
John is absolutely clear: the word of God is made flesh in Jesus Christ. Read the Bible to learn of God’s Word made flesh – to learn of Jesus Christ.
2) Read the Bible and expect moral and spiritual development within it. In Deuteronomy 23:1-2 Eunuchs are to be rejected and killed. Move on to Isaiah 56:3-5 and Eunuchs are welcome.
In Exodus 20:5 the sins of the fathers are meted out to the second, third, fourth generations. Ezeiel 18:2-3 and Jer 31:29-30 says, no each individual must bear responsible for what they have done.
3) Principle of Sublation – Jesus fulfils the Law and the Prophets – you have heard it said, but I say to you. Jesus then summarises the Law and the Prophets in the words of the Golden Rule: Do to others as you would have others do to you. He summarises the Law in the two Love Commandments. So that means we must read the Old Testament in the light of the love commandments of Jesus.
4) Read the 1st Testament through the 2nd Testament.
5) Read the Bible through the rule of faith – in the community of the church.
6) The Symphonic imperative
What if the Bible is more like the text of a Shakespeare play or the score of a Beethoven symphony where making it come alive involves corporate performance and practical enactment.
Those principles are so akin to the way I am seeking to open up the Old Testament for us as Christians.
As we looked at chapter 1 of Joshua and grappled with the problem of the land, I made the connection with that wonderful book about the Holy Land, In the Steps of Jesus, that so many of the friends on that conference on Reconciliation had signed. Two of those working in the Tantur Institute had signed their name in Arabic and transliterated it into English as Issa. I was told that could be Jesus … a name still commonly used, or Joshua. For Jesus is another form of Joshua.
I suggested we needed to read this book through the eyes of Jesus.
That is even more apparent as we come to the last chapter.
In a way for me the key to an understanding of the Book of Joshua lies in the final chapter.
Then Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem and summoned the elders, the heads, the judges and the officers of Israel and they presented themselves before God. Joshua recounts the story of the people of God so far from Abraham through Isaach, Jacob and Esau and on to Moses and Aaron the deliverance from bondage in Egypt and the journey and occupation of the promised land.
Joshua commands the people to ‘revere the Lord and serve him in sincerity.
The people said to Joshua, The Lord our God we will serve and him we will obey. So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day and made statutes and ordinances for them at Shechem. Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God; and he took a large stone, and set it up there under the oak in the sanctuary of the Lord.
Joshua establishes a covenant.
The covenant established then we read of the death of Joshua and of his burial.
Jesus introduces something new.
There is a new feel to his teaching.
There is something new in that intimate relationship with God as Abba Father he opens up for his followers.
IT is as if Jesus has taken all that is within the covenants of old and made something new of them. And like new wine it cannot be put into old wineskins.
His ministry nearly done, all that remains is for him to go to the cross.
And that is the point when he does something that goes right back to the covenant of old and the feast of the Passover, but at the same time it invests it with a whole new world of meaning
For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
What happens here is that Jesus establishes a new Covenant. No sooner is that new covenant sealed with the bread broken and the cup shared than Jesus is taken out to his death and to his burial.
But this is not simply a re-run of the covenant of old.
This is a new covenant.
Not written on stone, but engraved on the heart.
And this new covenant has about it a newness of life that is special.
A new way that is opened up for us by this Jesus.
Maybe the Christian reader reading Joshua is reminded that in the name of religion and in the name of God awful things have been done from time immemorial.
But in the new covenant Jesus opens up for us there is a new way of life to follow that must take seriously love for enemy, and the forgiveness of the God who is love, who draws us into the most intimate of relationships with him as Abba Father.
As we gather around this table we are people of a new covenant and we commit ourselves to a new way, and that way is the way of love Jesus has opened up for us to follow.
Ratko Mladic has been captured, and is now to be put on trial.
On the news we have re-lived the disturbing accounts of all that he was responsible for. We have been profoundly disturbed by those accounts of the massacre at Srebenica.
The horror of all that happened is easy to erase from the memory of those of us for whom it was simply an item on the news. It will forever be a scar on the memory of those who witnessed it.
And again there was a religious dimension as 7,000 muslims were massacred. And the fault lines in the Balkans were exposed and linked with religious affiliations, Christian and Muslim at war.
A fortnight ago I preached on Joshua 1. I had come across a commentary that was written in part by Gordon McConville of the University of Gloucestershire, and in part by Stephen Williams, a Christian theologian.
Gordon McConville supplies a verse by verse explanation of the meaning of the text as you would expect in a commentary. What is different about this Two Horizons OT commentary is that Stephen Williams then goes on to offer reflections of the text from the Christian readers’ point of view.
Hence the two horizons – of the text in itself, and the text as it is read by Christian readers.
Between chapter 1 and chapter 24 much has happened, and much that has happened disturbs the Christian reader. I suggested a fortnight ago that two things more than any other disturb. Looking at chapter 1 I reflected on the questions the Christian reader has to grapple with over land. The other thing that unsettles the Christian reader is what happens to the cities and the land that Joshua conquers. There are occasions when what Joshua does is nothing less than the ethnic cleansing that so appals us from Ratko Mladic. What do we make of the command to raze a town to the ground and to destroy all its inhabitants, men, women and children?
For some down through the ages the book of Joshua poses no problem.
This is what God commands his people to do … and therefore it must be done.
But I for one am troubled.
This is not to me the God that Jesus discloses when he commands his followers to love their enemies. It is not the God that Jesus discloses who can be addressed in the intimacy of the Lord’s prayer as abba, father. It is not the God that Jesus discloses when on the cross he says of those who have executed him Father, forgive them …
There is a problem here for me when I read Joshua that I have to grapple with.
Much has happened in the fortnight since we looked at Joshua 1.
Yesterday, I found myself in Winchester Universsity, at a day conference looking at Preaching the Gospel in a Secular World. I contributed thoughts on preaching in the context of science. But it was the other speakers that were most fascinating.
Among the partners who work with Winchester University are a number of courses linked with black-led churches. It was great to mix and to share ideas and to engage with each other. June Boyce Tillman, a couple of whose hymns we occasionally sing was one of the speakers from Winchester, but the key note speaker who got the day off to an excellent and thought provoking start was Adrian Thatcher, Professor of Theology at Exeter University.
I was taken aback, or moved to find that he was addressing the very question I had been addressing in these notes ready for this evening’s sermon. How do you cope with Joshua especially 4-11. They are chapters where whole populations of men, women and children are wiped out.
He reflected on the way the Bible has been taken by Christians to justify all sorts of horrible things down through the ages – he homed in on slavery, racism, anti-semitism, the destruction of the Jews.
The conflicts in the Balkans touch on such abuse of the Bible and the justification of ethnic cleansing.
We know slavery is wrong, racism is wrong, ethnic cleansing is wrong – but how do we handle our Bible when in parts especially of Joshua we find the very things we find so abhorrent done in the name of God?
Adrian Thatcher suggested some principles of Reading the Bible.
1) Read the Bible to learn of God’s Word. John 1 tells us what God’s Word is. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God … and the Word became flesh and dwelled amongst us and we have beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten son.
John is absolutely clear: the word of God is made flesh in Jesus Christ. Read the Bible to learn of God’s Word made flesh – to learn of Jesus Christ.
2) Read the Bible and expect moral and spiritual development within it. In Deuteronomy 23:1-2 Eunuchs are to be rejected and killed. Move on to Isaiah 56:3-5 and Eunuchs are welcome.
In Exodus 20:5 the sins of the fathers are meted out to the second, third, fourth generations. Ezeiel 18:2-3 and Jer 31:29-30 says, no each individual must bear responsible for what they have done.
3) Principle of Sublation – Jesus fulfils the Law and the Prophets – you have heard it said, but I say to you. Jesus then summarises the Law and the Prophets in the words of the Golden Rule: Do to others as you would have others do to you. He summarises the Law in the two Love Commandments. So that means we must read the Old Testament in the light of the love commandments of Jesus.
4) Read the 1st Testament through the 2nd Testament.
5) Read the Bible through the rule of faith – in the community of the church.
6) The Symphonic imperative
What if the Bible is more like the text of a Shakespeare play or the score of a Beethoven symphony where making it come alive involves corporate performance and practical enactment.
Those principles are so akin to the way I am seeking to open up the Old Testament for us as Christians.
As we looked at chapter 1 of Joshua and grappled with the problem of the land, I made the connection with that wonderful book about the Holy Land, In the Steps of Jesus, that so many of the friends on that conference on Reconciliation had signed. Two of those working in the Tantur Institute had signed their name in Arabic and transliterated it into English as Issa. I was told that could be Jesus … a name still commonly used, or Joshua. For Jesus is another form of Joshua.
I suggested we needed to read this book through the eyes of Jesus.
That is even more apparent as we come to the last chapter.
In a way for me the key to an understanding of the Book of Joshua lies in the final chapter.
Then Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem and summoned the elders, the heads, the judges and the officers of Israel and they presented themselves before God. Joshua recounts the story of the people of God so far from Abraham through Isaach, Jacob and Esau and on to Moses and Aaron the deliverance from bondage in Egypt and the journey and occupation of the promised land.
Joshua commands the people to ‘revere the Lord and serve him in sincerity.
The people said to Joshua, The Lord our God we will serve and him we will obey. So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day and made statutes and ordinances for them at Shechem. Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God; and he took a large stone, and set it up there under the oak in the sanctuary of the Lord.
Joshua establishes a covenant.
The covenant established then we read of the death of Joshua and of his burial.
Jesus introduces something new.
There is a new feel to his teaching.
There is something new in that intimate relationship with God as Abba Father he opens up for his followers.
IT is as if Jesus has taken all that is within the covenants of old and made something new of them. And like new wine it cannot be put into old wineskins.
His ministry nearly done, all that remains is for him to go to the cross.
And that is the point when he does something that goes right back to the covenant of old and the feast of the Passover, but at the same time it invests it with a whole new world of meaning
For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
What happens here is that Jesus establishes a new Covenant. No sooner is that new covenant sealed with the bread broken and the cup shared than Jesus is taken out to his death and to his burial.
But this is not simply a re-run of the covenant of old.
This is a new covenant.
Not written on stone, but engraved on the heart.
And this new covenant has about it a newness of life that is special.
A new way that is opened up for us by this Jesus.
Maybe the Christian reader reading Joshua is reminded that in the name of religion and in the name of God awful things have been done from time immemorial.
But in the new covenant Jesus opens up for us there is a new way of life to follow that must take seriously love for enemy, and the forgiveness of the God who is love, who draws us into the most intimate of relationships with him as Abba Father.
As we gather around this table we are people of a new covenant and we commit ourselves to a new way, and that way is the way of love Jesus has opened up for us to follow.
Sunday, 22 May 2011
I am with you wherever you go - Joshua 1
Some books are more precious than others. And this is one of them.
Kathleen O’Gorman had been one of the leaders of our conference on Reconciliation at the Tantur Institute in Jerusalem. She teaches New Testament at the University of London.
“What book would you suggest I could best get hold of as a memento of our time in the Holy Land?”
Without hesitation she recommended Peter Walker’s In the Steps of Jesus. It had been published only two years before. Peter Walker is a New Testament specialist they at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford. His book works not just as a wonderful pictorial guide to the Holy Land, but also as an accessible, but scholarly guide to the archaeology, history and social history that comes alive when you visit the Holy Land and brings the text alive ever afterwards, and at a third level it works as a commentary on St Luke.
I have since bought the companion volume ‘In the Steps of St Paul’ a pilgrimage I undertook 40 years ago. It serves the same purpose, but also acts as a commentary on Acts.
On the Sunday of our stay four of us had worshipped at the East Jerusalem Baptist Church with its Pastor, Alex Awad, who had also been one of the speakers at our conference. We had made our way by public transport across Jerusalem and walked from the old city to the Baptist church with every intention of visiting the Garden Tomb on the way back as it wasn’t necessarily going to be on our itinerary. We were disappointed to find it was closed on Sundays.
You can imagine our excitement when over coffee after the service in conversation with Alex Awad we found that the couple who were the resident curators of the Garden Tomb were present at the service. Quick introductions were made and we found ourselves having our own personal guided tour of the Garden Tomb when no one else was around. It was, as you can imagine, most moving.
Later in the week, on our last day in Jerusalem, we found ourselves with the whole of our group making it for a second time to the Garden Tomb, though this time it was heaving with people and not quite the same.
On the way out we had to go through the souvenir shop and book shop, as you invariably do at such tourist places anywhere in the world.
And there it was on the shelves.
I bought my copy of ‘In the Steps of Jesus’ there and then.
It was our last night in Jerusalem and on a whim, I decided to do something I am so pleased to have done.
I began to collect signatures of everyone who was there on the conference.
And so in the front inside cover is a wonderful collection of signatures of all those people, complete with greetings.
At the end of our week at the Tantur Institute we had got to know a little the staff who were at reception. And heard something of their story. I asked them to sign as well.
How glad I was that I did.
There in the endpaper are two signatures in Arabic with an anglicised form of the ‘Christian’ names.
They both had the same name.
The anglicised it as I s s a
They explained it was the name, Jesus.
In our culture that is a name not given to children. But among their Arabic, Christian community, it was as common a name now, as it had been 2000 years ago in the time not only of Jesus of Nazareth but also of Jesus Barabbas and many other Jesus’es too!
It was a common name, of course, because it comes into English in another form, a form that actually is still used in our culture as a Christian name.
Joshua.
It’s maybe no coincidence that we look to Jesus of Nazareth, who bears the same name as Joshua for Joshua is seen as the right hand man of Moses who acts as leader and maybe ‘saviour’ of the people bringing them finally to the place of safety of the land flowing with milk and honey. The name, Joshua, Jesus, means of course Saviour.
How appropriate to have two Arabic signatures bearing the name I S S A, Jesus, Joshua, in a book entitled In the Steps of Jesus.
I want to hold on to that connection and the title of that book as we turn to have a look at the Book of Joshua.
The Torah has come to an end, we now move into a set of hooks that appear in the Hebrew ordering of Scripture as Prophetic books. Known as ‘the former prophets’ they are ‘history with a message’.
Jesus lays claim to fulfilling all the Law and the Prophets. And so his claim is to fulfil ‘Joshua’ as much as the books of Moses. In some senses he is very much another ‘Joshua’.
Joshua has first occurred in the story of the people of Israel as early as Exodus 17:9 when Joshua is very much along with Moses. Now at the point at which Moses has died on the threshold of entering the Promised Land it falls to Joshua to lead the people over the river Jordan and into the Promised land.
After the death of Moses the servant of the LORD, the LORD spoke to Joshua son of Nun, Moses’ assistant, saying, ‘My servant Moses is dead. Now proceed to cross the Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the Israelites.
I deliberately chose to read from the New Testament the account of John the Baptist batizing in the Jordan. John tells us that it is Bethany by the Jordan. That is towards the south end of the river Jordan just before it enters the Dead Sea. You cannot get to that spot from the West Bank because the Israeli military regard it as a military zone. You can get to it from the East Bank of the river which is in Jordan – and there is a church in that place.
The Israelis have set apart a little stretch of the Jordan far off in the North where you can share in baptisms in the river Jordan at that point. Complete with its tourist shop. There is something very moving about that place, especially seeing people sharing in baptisms.
But some of our teachers suggested there was significance in the actual location so carefully identified as near the Judean wilderness in all the Gospels, and specifically located in John as Bethany by the Jordan.
The significane is that John took people out to be baptised in the Jordan at around the place where Joshua led the people over the Jordan. Our guide suggested that John would have led the people out of Jerusalem – and into or even over the river. Think shallow, narrow river more akin to a larger River Chelt than the Severn Estuary!!!
John is dressing as an Elijah, but also re-enacting a ‘reclaiming of the land’ as Joshua had arrived. Jesus lines himself up with John the Baptist’s movement and also recalaims the land.
The new Jesus, as the old Joshua, starts his ministry as he comes up out of the Jordan and moves into the wilderness which is the route to Jerusalem. He is going to roam all over the land until he finally reaches Jerusalem.
Joshua receives the promise of the land.
‘My servant Moses is dead. Now proceed to cross the Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the Israelites. Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you, as I promised to Moses. From the wilderness and the Lebanon as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, to the Great Sea in the west shall be your territory.
In readiness for our arrival in the Book of Joshua I got hold of a newly published commentary on Joshua.
It’s in a series called ‘The Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary’. And it is written by two authors. Gordon McConville is based here in Cheltenahm, was with us on our Good Friday walk of witness through the town, and teaches Old Testament at the University of Gloucestershire. He will be there on Tuesday evening, when the Regius Profess of Theology in the University of Cambridge, David Ford will be giving the tenth or eleventh lecture in a series on Biblical Theology and Interpretation – if anyone wants to join me say the word.
Gordon McConville does what you expect in a commentary. He gives a chapter by chapter set of comments on the text of the book of Joshua. It is a good commentary, as you would expect!!!
That is, as it were, the first horizon. It is a study of the Hebrew text of the Book of Joshua in its own right.
Then comes the twist in this particular commentary series. Stephen Williams is a Christian theologian. He then writes a sequence of essays exploring the way a Christian will read the book of Joshua. There then follows an conversation between the biblical scholar and the theologian.
Stephen Williams identifies a number of problems in the book of Joshua for a lChristian reader.
Two problems are major ones.
First the problem of ‘the land’.
This could not be more timely this week.
The sight of Netanyahu literally facing off President Obama the day after Obama gave his speech on the Middle East was remarkable, the like of which I have never seen.
Obama said the USA would insist on a two state solution with the 1967 boundaries. Netanyahu explained that ‘changing demographics made that not possible. He was referring to the proliferation of Jewish settlements accommodating in excess of 600,000 people dotted all over the West Bank, and taking over the very East Jerusalem where we had worshipped in that Baptist church.
What should we think?
If we read these verses in Joshua then it would seem that Jewish people must occupy not only the whole of this land, but even as far as the Euphrates – right up to Iraq and Iran. This is what drives many of those settlers. It is a policy espoused by many Christians in some parts of the world too.
Do we support Obama? Or Netanyahu.
Stephen Williams offers us a clue.
He observes that it is significant that Jesus does not anywhere make an issue of ‘the land’. Jesus speaks of fulfilling the prophets who later in Isaiah speak of the land reaching through the people of Israel to Gentiles. And this is significant. He opens up a Gospel for Jew and Gentile alike, where God’s love is for ‘the world’ and not rooted in a specifc piece of l and.
I want to come back to this book, In the Steps of Jesus.
We are those who follow in the steps of Jesus. I think it significant that Alex Awad, those committed to the Tantur Institue, all the great historic Christian churches of East Jersualem, the West Bank, Israel and Palestine urge us to reject the view that the land must be entirely occupied by Jewish people but to be a placed shared by Jew and Gentile alike where there is room for all.
That I believe to be the response we should make as Christians following in the steps of Jesus.
For he leads us towards a new heaven and a new earth where there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female but all are one in Christ.
And as we follow in the steps of this new Joshua, this new Jesus, the promises made to the Joshua of old apply now as ever.
No one shall be able to stand against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will not fail you or forsake you. Be strong and courageous;
But that is not narrowly of the claim to a specific piece of land, but now as we walk in the steps of Jesus in the whole world.
A year ago I was invited to preach at the welcome service of Adrian Wyatt to the pastorate at Kingswood, Wooton under Edge – he chose this passage to preach on. IT was wonderful to do so at such a service. For if we follow in the steps of Jesus, we should also rise to this command.
Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to act in accordance with all the law that my servant Moses commanded you; do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, so that you may be successful wherever you go. This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth; you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to act in accordance with all that is written in it. For then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall be successful
Joshua is thinking back to the ‘book of the law’ that in the unfolding of the sotry of the Torah had just been written – for us the Book of Deuteronomy.
That classic principle is alluded to. The need to abide by it.
As those who follow ‘in the steps of Jesus’ we look to the whole of our Bible – particularly seeing it through the eyes of Jesus – for us it is the whole of this bok that we wiust meditate on day and night, so that we act in accordance with it.
Then comes the most wonderful of promises.
It meant the world to Joshua.
It meant the world to Jesus.
It means the world to each of us.
I hereby command you: Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.’
What a wonderful command.
We face fears on a personal level.
I think at times we can feel a little fearful of what is unfolding in our world at the moment, in the Middle East, in the Holy Land.
This is the promise we hold on to.
It is the very promise Jesus not only held on to through his life, but it is the promise he shared with his followers in those very last words of his in Matthew 28 when he said, I will be with you always.
In his morning devotions in a Japanese internment camp, Eric Liddell of Chariots of Fire fame stood as it were to attention at the beginning of each day to hear the words of Jesus for that day.
It’s no bad thing to stand before Joshua-Jesus and hear these words at the start of each day.
I hereby command you: Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.’
Kathleen O’Gorman had been one of the leaders of our conference on Reconciliation at the Tantur Institute in Jerusalem. She teaches New Testament at the University of London.
“What book would you suggest I could best get hold of as a memento of our time in the Holy Land?”
Without hesitation she recommended Peter Walker’s In the Steps of Jesus. It had been published only two years before. Peter Walker is a New Testament specialist they at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford. His book works not just as a wonderful pictorial guide to the Holy Land, but also as an accessible, but scholarly guide to the archaeology, history and social history that comes alive when you visit the Holy Land and brings the text alive ever afterwards, and at a third level it works as a commentary on St Luke.
I have since bought the companion volume ‘In the Steps of St Paul’ a pilgrimage I undertook 40 years ago. It serves the same purpose, but also acts as a commentary on Acts.
On the Sunday of our stay four of us had worshipped at the East Jerusalem Baptist Church with its Pastor, Alex Awad, who had also been one of the speakers at our conference. We had made our way by public transport across Jerusalem and walked from the old city to the Baptist church with every intention of visiting the Garden Tomb on the way back as it wasn’t necessarily going to be on our itinerary. We were disappointed to find it was closed on Sundays.
You can imagine our excitement when over coffee after the service in conversation with Alex Awad we found that the couple who were the resident curators of the Garden Tomb were present at the service. Quick introductions were made and we found ourselves having our own personal guided tour of the Garden Tomb when no one else was around. It was, as you can imagine, most moving.
Later in the week, on our last day in Jerusalem, we found ourselves with the whole of our group making it for a second time to the Garden Tomb, though this time it was heaving with people and not quite the same.
On the way out we had to go through the souvenir shop and book shop, as you invariably do at such tourist places anywhere in the world.
And there it was on the shelves.
I bought my copy of ‘In the Steps of Jesus’ there and then.
It was our last night in Jerusalem and on a whim, I decided to do something I am so pleased to have done.
I began to collect signatures of everyone who was there on the conference.
And so in the front inside cover is a wonderful collection of signatures of all those people, complete with greetings.
At the end of our week at the Tantur Institute we had got to know a little the staff who were at reception. And heard something of their story. I asked them to sign as well.
How glad I was that I did.
There in the endpaper are two signatures in Arabic with an anglicised form of the ‘Christian’ names.
They both had the same name.
The anglicised it as I s s a
They explained it was the name, Jesus.
In our culture that is a name not given to children. But among their Arabic, Christian community, it was as common a name now, as it had been 2000 years ago in the time not only of Jesus of Nazareth but also of Jesus Barabbas and many other Jesus’es too!
It was a common name, of course, because it comes into English in another form, a form that actually is still used in our culture as a Christian name.
Joshua.
It’s maybe no coincidence that we look to Jesus of Nazareth, who bears the same name as Joshua for Joshua is seen as the right hand man of Moses who acts as leader and maybe ‘saviour’ of the people bringing them finally to the place of safety of the land flowing with milk and honey. The name, Joshua, Jesus, means of course Saviour.
How appropriate to have two Arabic signatures bearing the name I S S A, Jesus, Joshua, in a book entitled In the Steps of Jesus.
I want to hold on to that connection and the title of that book as we turn to have a look at the Book of Joshua.
The Torah has come to an end, we now move into a set of hooks that appear in the Hebrew ordering of Scripture as Prophetic books. Known as ‘the former prophets’ they are ‘history with a message’.
Jesus lays claim to fulfilling all the Law and the Prophets. And so his claim is to fulfil ‘Joshua’ as much as the books of Moses. In some senses he is very much another ‘Joshua’.
Joshua has first occurred in the story of the people of Israel as early as Exodus 17:9 when Joshua is very much along with Moses. Now at the point at which Moses has died on the threshold of entering the Promised Land it falls to Joshua to lead the people over the river Jordan and into the Promised land.
After the death of Moses the servant of the LORD, the LORD spoke to Joshua son of Nun, Moses’ assistant, saying, ‘My servant Moses is dead. Now proceed to cross the Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the Israelites.
I deliberately chose to read from the New Testament the account of John the Baptist batizing in the Jordan. John tells us that it is Bethany by the Jordan. That is towards the south end of the river Jordan just before it enters the Dead Sea. You cannot get to that spot from the West Bank because the Israeli military regard it as a military zone. You can get to it from the East Bank of the river which is in Jordan – and there is a church in that place.
The Israelis have set apart a little stretch of the Jordan far off in the North where you can share in baptisms in the river Jordan at that point. Complete with its tourist shop. There is something very moving about that place, especially seeing people sharing in baptisms.
But some of our teachers suggested there was significance in the actual location so carefully identified as near the Judean wilderness in all the Gospels, and specifically located in John as Bethany by the Jordan.
The significane is that John took people out to be baptised in the Jordan at around the place where Joshua led the people over the Jordan. Our guide suggested that John would have led the people out of Jerusalem – and into or even over the river. Think shallow, narrow river more akin to a larger River Chelt than the Severn Estuary!!!
John is dressing as an Elijah, but also re-enacting a ‘reclaiming of the land’ as Joshua had arrived. Jesus lines himself up with John the Baptist’s movement and also recalaims the land.
The new Jesus, as the old Joshua, starts his ministry as he comes up out of the Jordan and moves into the wilderness which is the route to Jerusalem. He is going to roam all over the land until he finally reaches Jerusalem.
Joshua receives the promise of the land.
‘My servant Moses is dead. Now proceed to cross the Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the Israelites. Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you, as I promised to Moses. From the wilderness and the Lebanon as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, to the Great Sea in the west shall be your territory.
In readiness for our arrival in the Book of Joshua I got hold of a newly published commentary on Joshua.
It’s in a series called ‘The Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary’. And it is written by two authors. Gordon McConville is based here in Cheltenahm, was with us on our Good Friday walk of witness through the town, and teaches Old Testament at the University of Gloucestershire. He will be there on Tuesday evening, when the Regius Profess of Theology in the University of Cambridge, David Ford will be giving the tenth or eleventh lecture in a series on Biblical Theology and Interpretation – if anyone wants to join me say the word.
Gordon McConville does what you expect in a commentary. He gives a chapter by chapter set of comments on the text of the book of Joshua. It is a good commentary, as you would expect!!!
That is, as it were, the first horizon. It is a study of the Hebrew text of the Book of Joshua in its own right.
Then comes the twist in this particular commentary series. Stephen Williams is a Christian theologian. He then writes a sequence of essays exploring the way a Christian will read the book of Joshua. There then follows an conversation between the biblical scholar and the theologian.
Stephen Williams identifies a number of problems in the book of Joshua for a lChristian reader.
Two problems are major ones.
First the problem of ‘the land’.
This could not be more timely this week.
The sight of Netanyahu literally facing off President Obama the day after Obama gave his speech on the Middle East was remarkable, the like of which I have never seen.
Obama said the USA would insist on a two state solution with the 1967 boundaries. Netanyahu explained that ‘changing demographics made that not possible. He was referring to the proliferation of Jewish settlements accommodating in excess of 600,000 people dotted all over the West Bank, and taking over the very East Jerusalem where we had worshipped in that Baptist church.
What should we think?
If we read these verses in Joshua then it would seem that Jewish people must occupy not only the whole of this land, but even as far as the Euphrates – right up to Iraq and Iran. This is what drives many of those settlers. It is a policy espoused by many Christians in some parts of the world too.
Do we support Obama? Or Netanyahu.
Stephen Williams offers us a clue.
He observes that it is significant that Jesus does not anywhere make an issue of ‘the land’. Jesus speaks of fulfilling the prophets who later in Isaiah speak of the land reaching through the people of Israel to Gentiles. And this is significant. He opens up a Gospel for Jew and Gentile alike, where God’s love is for ‘the world’ and not rooted in a specifc piece of l and.
I want to come back to this book, In the Steps of Jesus.
We are those who follow in the steps of Jesus. I think it significant that Alex Awad, those committed to the Tantur Institue, all the great historic Christian churches of East Jersualem, the West Bank, Israel and Palestine urge us to reject the view that the land must be entirely occupied by Jewish people but to be a placed shared by Jew and Gentile alike where there is room for all.
That I believe to be the response we should make as Christians following in the steps of Jesus.
For he leads us towards a new heaven and a new earth where there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female but all are one in Christ.
And as we follow in the steps of this new Joshua, this new Jesus, the promises made to the Joshua of old apply now as ever.
No one shall be able to stand against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will not fail you or forsake you. Be strong and courageous;
But that is not narrowly of the claim to a specific piece of land, but now as we walk in the steps of Jesus in the whole world.
A year ago I was invited to preach at the welcome service of Adrian Wyatt to the pastorate at Kingswood, Wooton under Edge – he chose this passage to preach on. IT was wonderful to do so at such a service. For if we follow in the steps of Jesus, we should also rise to this command.
Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to act in accordance with all the law that my servant Moses commanded you; do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, so that you may be successful wherever you go. This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth; you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to act in accordance with all that is written in it. For then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall be successful
Joshua is thinking back to the ‘book of the law’ that in the unfolding of the sotry of the Torah had just been written – for us the Book of Deuteronomy.
That classic principle is alluded to. The need to abide by it.
As those who follow ‘in the steps of Jesus’ we look to the whole of our Bible – particularly seeing it through the eyes of Jesus – for us it is the whole of this bok that we wiust meditate on day and night, so that we act in accordance with it.
Then comes the most wonderful of promises.
It meant the world to Joshua.
It meant the world to Jesus.
It means the world to each of us.
I hereby command you: Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.’
What a wonderful command.
We face fears on a personal level.
I think at times we can feel a little fearful of what is unfolding in our world at the moment, in the Middle East, in the Holy Land.
This is the promise we hold on to.
It is the very promise Jesus not only held on to through his life, but it is the promise he shared with his followers in those very last words of his in Matthew 28 when he said, I will be with you always.
In his morning devotions in a Japanese internment camp, Eric Liddell of Chariots of Fire fame stood as it were to attention at the beginning of each day to hear the words of Jesus for that day.
It’s no bad thing to stand before Joshua-Jesus and hear these words at the start of each day.
I hereby command you: Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.’
Sunday, 15 May 2011
Choose Life!
It’s one of the buzz words of the day.
So much depends on it.
At every turn, be it in health care, or in education, in life-style, or in television programming …
What counts is
Choice.
Choose the treatment you receive in hospital.
Choose the school your children go to.
Choice.
The snag is ‘choice’ is not as simple as that.
All sorts of things limit the choices we can make.
Circumstances we find ourselves in, our state of health.
We are free to choose – but our choices are limited.
In those last words of Moses to the people as they stand on the threshold of the Promised Land, it all boils down to choice.
But the choice is quite a stark one.
In a sense it is the greatest freedom, the greates gift God gives.
But in another sense it is a choice that is presented to us. It is not one we devise for ourselves.
It is one, however, that is realistic.
It is one that is within the grasp of each one of us.
Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. 12It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ 13Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ 14No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.
So what is the choice?
See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity.
That’s a pretty stark choice.
It is also a no-brainer.
We touch something now that rounds off the whole of the Torah, the books of the Law. But it is also something that is going to run like a strand through the next section of the Old Testament.
For the moment we will take it at it’s face value. But whole books of the Old Testament are devoted to the difficulties this choice poses to us. We’ll come to those in due course.
If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God* that I am commanding you today, by loving the LORD your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. 17But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, 18I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.
That’s it – that’s the choice.
Obey God.
That’s the key.
That way things fall into place. Things work. Things hang together.
I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, 20loving the LORD your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the LORD swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
Choose life!
That’s the key.
But what does that involve.
This is the fundamental life choice.
To follow God.
There is at this moment a link – obey God, all goes well. Disobey God all goes badly. That is the theme that’s going to run through the next few hooks. And it is as a general truth, the insight that goes to the heart of our faith.
The difficulty I spoke of is that it doesn’t always work out that way. So often it is those who disobey God who get away with it, and those who obey God have the hardest of hard times. That’s the big issue that the likes of the Book of Job grapple with.
Jesus is very aware of this fundamental choice – the command is there to Love God, Love Neighbour. He then takes that so much further. But he knows that God is there as much for the person who is facing hard times.
In fact, Jesus’ insight is that when things go really well that is the point at which corruption all sorts of things set in and things begin to fall apart.
He too sets out the blessings and the curses in no uncertain terms.
But it’s interesting that what comes first is the way God’s love reaches out through Jesus to meet the needs of those who are facing the biggest troubles, for whom that prosperity has been so elusive they have collapsed in so many ways.
He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.
Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
‘Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
‘Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
‘Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
‘But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
‘Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.
‘Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.
‘Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
The starting point is the healing.
Then the alternatives – blessing or curse.
There is something really challenging here. It’s taken on board the Choice in the Law, the grappling with it in Job … and it presents us with a remarkable insight.
And then Jesus goes to the nub of the matter, with the word that for him is ALL IMPORTANT.
‘But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.
‘If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
Yesterday marked the end of a three year partnership the Federation has developed through Christian Aid with One Respe in the Dominican Republic. What was good about that project was that it not only gave us a focus for raising more than £30,000 for a key project in the Dominican Republic, but it also enabled us to build up an understanding of Christian Aid at work and a real contact with the people involved in that project.
Yesterday saw the start of a link with the second poorest country in South America, Nicaragua. The aim is once again to raise money – but more than that, build up links. It will be interesting that way to make that contact more real.
What is interesting is the extent to which we have so much to learn – we have as much to receive by way of that very real blessing, and much that must make us think again about our priorities too.
Good that we should share that here at the start of Christian Aid Week … it is that sense of involvement we have with those in so many parts of the world, not least there in Nicaragua that is so important.
Jesus builds up to that key word in his vocabulary – Love.
And he invites us through the generosity of a love that reaches out to all to commit ourselves to Mercy and so shape the world we live in.
And it all boils down to that choice we are invited to make.
Choose life!
So much depends on it.
At every turn, be it in health care, or in education, in life-style, or in television programming …
What counts is
Choice.
Choose the treatment you receive in hospital.
Choose the school your children go to.
Choice.
The snag is ‘choice’ is not as simple as that.
All sorts of things limit the choices we can make.
Circumstances we find ourselves in, our state of health.
We are free to choose – but our choices are limited.
In those last words of Moses to the people as they stand on the threshold of the Promised Land, it all boils down to choice.
But the choice is quite a stark one.
In a sense it is the greatest freedom, the greates gift God gives.
But in another sense it is a choice that is presented to us. It is not one we devise for ourselves.
It is one, however, that is realistic.
It is one that is within the grasp of each one of us.
Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. 12It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ 13Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ 14No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.
So what is the choice?
See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity.
That’s a pretty stark choice.
It is also a no-brainer.
We touch something now that rounds off the whole of the Torah, the books of the Law. But it is also something that is going to run like a strand through the next section of the Old Testament.
For the moment we will take it at it’s face value. But whole books of the Old Testament are devoted to the difficulties this choice poses to us. We’ll come to those in due course.
If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God* that I am commanding you today, by loving the LORD your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. 17But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, 18I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.
That’s it – that’s the choice.
Obey God.
That’s the key.
That way things fall into place. Things work. Things hang together.
I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, 20loving the LORD your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the LORD swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
Choose life!
That’s the key.
But what does that involve.
This is the fundamental life choice.
To follow God.
There is at this moment a link – obey God, all goes well. Disobey God all goes badly. That is the theme that’s going to run through the next few hooks. And it is as a general truth, the insight that goes to the heart of our faith.
The difficulty I spoke of is that it doesn’t always work out that way. So often it is those who disobey God who get away with it, and those who obey God have the hardest of hard times. That’s the big issue that the likes of the Book of Job grapple with.
Jesus is very aware of this fundamental choice – the command is there to Love God, Love Neighbour. He then takes that so much further. But he knows that God is there as much for the person who is facing hard times.
In fact, Jesus’ insight is that when things go really well that is the point at which corruption all sorts of things set in and things begin to fall apart.
He too sets out the blessings and the curses in no uncertain terms.
But it’s interesting that what comes first is the way God’s love reaches out through Jesus to meet the needs of those who are facing the biggest troubles, for whom that prosperity has been so elusive they have collapsed in so many ways.
He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.
Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
‘Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
‘Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
‘Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
‘But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
‘Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.
‘Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.
‘Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
The starting point is the healing.
Then the alternatives – blessing or curse.
There is something really challenging here. It’s taken on board the Choice in the Law, the grappling with it in Job … and it presents us with a remarkable insight.
And then Jesus goes to the nub of the matter, with the word that for him is ALL IMPORTANT.
‘But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.
‘If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
Yesterday marked the end of a three year partnership the Federation has developed through Christian Aid with One Respe in the Dominican Republic. What was good about that project was that it not only gave us a focus for raising more than £30,000 for a key project in the Dominican Republic, but it also enabled us to build up an understanding of Christian Aid at work and a real contact with the people involved in that project.
Yesterday saw the start of a link with the second poorest country in South America, Nicaragua. The aim is once again to raise money – but more than that, build up links. It will be interesting that way to make that contact more real.
What is interesting is the extent to which we have so much to learn – we have as much to receive by way of that very real blessing, and much that must make us think again about our priorities too.
Good that we should share that here at the start of Christian Aid Week … it is that sense of involvement we have with those in so many parts of the world, not least there in Nicaragua that is so important.
Jesus builds up to that key word in his vocabulary – Love.
And he invites us through the generosity of a love that reaches out to all to commit ourselves to Mercy and so shape the world we live in.
And it all boils down to that choice we are invited to make.
Choose life!
Sunday, 8 May 2011
Teach them to obey everything? Jesus, the new Moses
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy stand as a great testament to the way God wants his people to live in the world. The Torah is more than a collection of rules and regulations, it is the account of a people living life to the full under God. And it offers a way of life for the people of God to fulfil.
If Leviticus focuses on the ritual of priest and tabernacle, sacrifice and atonement, Numbers returns to the story of the people wandering in the wilderness under the leadership of Moses and Deuteronomy is as the very name itself in Greek suggests the second reading of the law. It is a kind of summation Moses shares with the people as he stands on the threshold of the promised land.
Here in Deut 4.1 is what this Law, God’s way for the world is all about.
So now, Israel, give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you to observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that the LORD, the God of your ancestors, is giving you. You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the LORD your God with which I am charging you.
When Jesus breaks into the world the turning point in Matthew, Mark and Luke of his story comes at Caesarea Philippi as his followers recognise in him the long expected Messiah and then on the Mount of Transfiguration it is as if this recognition receives the seal of approval from Moses as the one who stands for all the Law, and Elijah the one who stands for all the prophets.
At his resurrection the women tell the disciples to go ahead of Jesus to Galilee where Jesus will meet with them. In Matthew 28 that is exactly what happens – and as Jesus meets with his disciples he gives them a commission to go into all the world,
It is as if Jesus is standing on the threshold of the world he has come to – it is not the promised land, but the whole world. And as he stands on the threshold of that world he has something to share with his disciples, and it is just as Moses had shared so long ago …
‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’
People are to obey everything Jesus has commanded just as long before the people of God were to obey everything Moses had laid out. Matthew recognises in Jesus a new Moses.
See, just as the LORD my God has charged me, I now teach you statutes and ordinances for you to observe in the land that you are about to enter and occupy.
Can you hear the echoes in what Jesus says in Matthew 28?
More than that, Matthew brings the commandments, the teaching of Jesus into five great discourses – an echo of the five books of the law.
In the middle of his gospel in chapter 13 is Jesus teaching in the form of parables all about God’s rule.
On either side is Jesus teaching for the mission of the twelve (in chapter 10) and the life of the church (in chapter 18). And then at the beginning in chapters 5-7 the great sermon on the mount in which Jesus works out what life in the kingdom will be like. And then at the end in chapters 23,24,25 Jesus final words of challenge.
What’s fascinating at the beginning of the sermon on the mount is that wonderful statement we think of as the Beatitudes – Blessed are … and at the beginning of the last great sermon, a set of Woes to those who are falsely religious.
It is as if the whole of all that Jesus stands for is a matter of blessing or of woe.
There are all sorts of echoes here of Deuteronomy which comes to hinge on blessing and curse and making the right choice.
Jesus has taken all the Torah is and brought it to fulfilment in himself, in his story and in his commandments. It is not that he has come to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfil them. The point is that the kingdom is coming in Christ, the moment of accomplishment when all is fulfilled is at hand … and so this new Moses has a new Torah to share entirely in keeping with, but at the same time fulfilling the old Torah, and bringing it to fulfilment – a new slant, you have heard it said, I say to you.
But there is in what Jesus stands for a new twist. He is not the all-conquering hero who carries all before him – he is the suffering servant who goes to his cross. What’s more he is the one who invites his followers to take up their cross, share in this suffering servanthood and follow him.
And there is a new twist here.
Deuteronomy is in some ways all about success and people thinking well of you …
I now teach you statutes and ordinances for you to observe in the land that you are about to enter and occupy. You must observe them diligently, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!’ For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is whenever we call to him? And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today?
Jesus too longs for people to be wise and discerning. As far as Jesus is concerned the wise man is the one who hears the words of Christ and acts on them – he is like the wise man who builds his house on the rock.
But Jesus knows full well that that will not necessarily bring praise and adulation from people out there.
Far from it, people will fail to understand for the way of love that Jesus maps out, the way of blessedness that he is about is one that people will find deeply offensive and object to massively. It is the way of love for God, love for neighbour and love for enemy that will result not in everyone saying that’s brilliant but in everyone taking offence.
David Cook, the Bible translator who spent time with us at the Ministers Conference shared with me a wonderful reading of the Sermon on the Mount.
How many beatitudes are there? He asked. Some texts, not least the NRSV, include Matthew 5:9 with the beaitutides. A ninth beatitude. But it is written quite differently from the others. It lacks the poetry. It is one too many.
No, he suggested.
It is the start of the next section of the sermon on the mount.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you
What does it take to be the people willing to be reviled and persecuted and spoken ill of?
It means you will be salt of the earth – you will be the light of the world.
Salt in a tasteless world, light in a dark world.
And you won’t be admired but persecuted for it.
Quite the opposite of the popularity envisaged in Deuteronomy 4.
How far can we take seriously the sermon on the Mount?
I was reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer this week – passionate about being a peacemaker, committed in his opposition to Nazism, he was willing to make one compromise – and so became part of the bomb plot to assassinate Hitler.
Does the assassination of Osama bin Laden have echoes of that? I wonder.
It does raise questions for us as Christians. How do we respond to terrorism. What would Jesus do? What does Jesus want us to do?
It is important to raise the question. I for one feel the Archbishop of Canterbury was right to do so … and has a right to do so as one of those who on 9/11 was only two blocks away found himself very much caught up in all that happened.
He calls in question whether justice is seen to be done in such an assassination. It is a big question. One we need to ask.
I was moved when Felicity drew my attention to something that Sharon Wallington had posted on Facebook. It made me stop and think again …
It was Sharon Wallington who posted the heart-felt response on Facebook that Felicity drew my attention to.
I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice at the death of one, not even an enemy. “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate only love can do that.
Martin Luther King Jr
That was it.
That is what had unsettled me so much.
Those scenes of jubilation that greeted the news of the death of Osama Bin Laden were as profoundly disturbing as the scenes of jubilation that had in some places greeted the news of 9/11.
That is what is in danger of making us hurtle further down the spiral of destruction terrorism unleashes on us.
Sharon went on to comment on the quotations she had posted
“... Because I can’t say it better myself and am sickened by the triumphant baying to which my kids are subjected every time they turn on the TV or radio. I read this to them this morning.
It was good to read the many responses Sharon had.
One friend commented, “I too was sickened by those of us who hated the crowing of some when the towers were attacked, now crowing because we have revenge. “Vengeance is mine says the Lord.”
What challenged me further was the quotation Sharon then posted from Romans 12
“If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Are those words of Paul, echoing as they do the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, simply pious platitudes that have nothing to do with the real world?
Or are these the words of Christ we are not only to hear but also to act on if we are to have the wisdom and the discernment of the wise man who built his house on the rock?
One thing I am pretty sure of. These are not popular responses.
But then Jesus did not want us to seek popularity, but to risk the unpopularity of following the way of God as he outlined it with its unrelenting emphasis on the way of love, even love for enemies too.
If Leviticus focuses on the ritual of priest and tabernacle, sacrifice and atonement, Numbers returns to the story of the people wandering in the wilderness under the leadership of Moses and Deuteronomy is as the very name itself in Greek suggests the second reading of the law. It is a kind of summation Moses shares with the people as he stands on the threshold of the promised land.
Here in Deut 4.1 is what this Law, God’s way for the world is all about.
So now, Israel, give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you to observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that the LORD, the God of your ancestors, is giving you. You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the LORD your God with which I am charging you.
When Jesus breaks into the world the turning point in Matthew, Mark and Luke of his story comes at Caesarea Philippi as his followers recognise in him the long expected Messiah and then on the Mount of Transfiguration it is as if this recognition receives the seal of approval from Moses as the one who stands for all the Law, and Elijah the one who stands for all the prophets.
At his resurrection the women tell the disciples to go ahead of Jesus to Galilee where Jesus will meet with them. In Matthew 28 that is exactly what happens – and as Jesus meets with his disciples he gives them a commission to go into all the world,
It is as if Jesus is standing on the threshold of the world he has come to – it is not the promised land, but the whole world. And as he stands on the threshold of that world he has something to share with his disciples, and it is just as Moses had shared so long ago …
‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’
People are to obey everything Jesus has commanded just as long before the people of God were to obey everything Moses had laid out. Matthew recognises in Jesus a new Moses.
See, just as the LORD my God has charged me, I now teach you statutes and ordinances for you to observe in the land that you are about to enter and occupy.
Can you hear the echoes in what Jesus says in Matthew 28?
More than that, Matthew brings the commandments, the teaching of Jesus into five great discourses – an echo of the five books of the law.
In the middle of his gospel in chapter 13 is Jesus teaching in the form of parables all about God’s rule.
On either side is Jesus teaching for the mission of the twelve (in chapter 10) and the life of the church (in chapter 18). And then at the beginning in chapters 5-7 the great sermon on the mount in which Jesus works out what life in the kingdom will be like. And then at the end in chapters 23,24,25 Jesus final words of challenge.
What’s fascinating at the beginning of the sermon on the mount is that wonderful statement we think of as the Beatitudes – Blessed are … and at the beginning of the last great sermon, a set of Woes to those who are falsely religious.
It is as if the whole of all that Jesus stands for is a matter of blessing or of woe.
There are all sorts of echoes here of Deuteronomy which comes to hinge on blessing and curse and making the right choice.
Jesus has taken all the Torah is and brought it to fulfilment in himself, in his story and in his commandments. It is not that he has come to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfil them. The point is that the kingdom is coming in Christ, the moment of accomplishment when all is fulfilled is at hand … and so this new Moses has a new Torah to share entirely in keeping with, but at the same time fulfilling the old Torah, and bringing it to fulfilment – a new slant, you have heard it said, I say to you.
But there is in what Jesus stands for a new twist. He is not the all-conquering hero who carries all before him – he is the suffering servant who goes to his cross. What’s more he is the one who invites his followers to take up their cross, share in this suffering servanthood and follow him.
And there is a new twist here.
Deuteronomy is in some ways all about success and people thinking well of you …
I now teach you statutes and ordinances for you to observe in the land that you are about to enter and occupy. You must observe them diligently, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!’ For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is whenever we call to him? And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today?
Jesus too longs for people to be wise and discerning. As far as Jesus is concerned the wise man is the one who hears the words of Christ and acts on them – he is like the wise man who builds his house on the rock.
But Jesus knows full well that that will not necessarily bring praise and adulation from people out there.
Far from it, people will fail to understand for the way of love that Jesus maps out, the way of blessedness that he is about is one that people will find deeply offensive and object to massively. It is the way of love for God, love for neighbour and love for enemy that will result not in everyone saying that’s brilliant but in everyone taking offence.
David Cook, the Bible translator who spent time with us at the Ministers Conference shared with me a wonderful reading of the Sermon on the Mount.
How many beatitudes are there? He asked. Some texts, not least the NRSV, include Matthew 5:9 with the beaitutides. A ninth beatitude. But it is written quite differently from the others. It lacks the poetry. It is one too many.
No, he suggested.
It is the start of the next section of the sermon on the mount.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you
What does it take to be the people willing to be reviled and persecuted and spoken ill of?
It means you will be salt of the earth – you will be the light of the world.
Salt in a tasteless world, light in a dark world.
And you won’t be admired but persecuted for it.
Quite the opposite of the popularity envisaged in Deuteronomy 4.
How far can we take seriously the sermon on the Mount?
I was reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer this week – passionate about being a peacemaker, committed in his opposition to Nazism, he was willing to make one compromise – and so became part of the bomb plot to assassinate Hitler.
Does the assassination of Osama bin Laden have echoes of that? I wonder.
It does raise questions for us as Christians. How do we respond to terrorism. What would Jesus do? What does Jesus want us to do?
It is important to raise the question. I for one feel the Archbishop of Canterbury was right to do so … and has a right to do so as one of those who on 9/11 was only two blocks away found himself very much caught up in all that happened.
He calls in question whether justice is seen to be done in such an assassination. It is a big question. One we need to ask.
I was moved when Felicity drew my attention to something that Sharon Wallington had posted on Facebook. It made me stop and think again …
It was Sharon Wallington who posted the heart-felt response on Facebook that Felicity drew my attention to.
I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice at the death of one, not even an enemy. “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate only love can do that.
Martin Luther King Jr
That was it.
That is what had unsettled me so much.
Those scenes of jubilation that greeted the news of the death of Osama Bin Laden were as profoundly disturbing as the scenes of jubilation that had in some places greeted the news of 9/11.
That is what is in danger of making us hurtle further down the spiral of destruction terrorism unleashes on us.
Sharon went on to comment on the quotations she had posted
“... Because I can’t say it better myself and am sickened by the triumphant baying to which my kids are subjected every time they turn on the TV or radio. I read this to them this morning.
It was good to read the many responses Sharon had.
One friend commented, “I too was sickened by those of us who hated the crowing of some when the towers were attacked, now crowing because we have revenge. “Vengeance is mine says the Lord.”
What challenged me further was the quotation Sharon then posted from Romans 12
“If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Are those words of Paul, echoing as they do the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, simply pious platitudes that have nothing to do with the real world?
Or are these the words of Christ we are not only to hear but also to act on if we are to have the wisdom and the discernment of the wise man who built his house on the rock?
One thing I am pretty sure of. These are not popular responses.
But then Jesus did not want us to seek popularity, but to risk the unpopularity of following the way of God as he outlined it with its unrelenting emphasis on the way of love, even love for enemies too.
Sunday, 1 May 2011
Be the person God meant you to be and set the world on fire!
John 20:19-31 and Exodus 33:12-23
Each one of us will have a special memory from this week.
What’s yours?
Was it the wedding?
Within the wedding was there a special moment?
Does sharing in something like that take you back to special moments?
What special moments are there that you look back to?
What about Easter … our celebration of Easter? Was there a special moment?
For me the special moment has to be in the quiet – playing that Mahler’s fifth symphony – and then the connections – from Livingstone Fellowship, through Daniel Harding, to the awfulness of the Japanese earthquake, to the strange experience of the ending of CF Youth as it began with a conference here at Highbury to the thought that these youngsters are doing as we did and shaping a future for youth work in our churches. And then through this week another special moment – worship at our conference led by Roberta Rominger, General Secrretary of the URC, a very special moment in itself. Through her worship she invited us to reflect on what kind of Easter people we should be.
Each morning she had a wonderful children’s story to read and to tell. And in the evening she told us of her experience of playing under Benjamin Zander, the conductor, and going to his annual master class on conducting. She read from his The Art of Possibility each evening.
And on the last evening, she spoke of an occasion when he was conducting Mahler’s 9th Symphony. Do you love Mahler, she asked? Well, I found myself nodding, not from a longstanding love, but from a warming kind of love that is discovering Mahler, thanks to having listened a number of times last week.
One of the second violinists was not engaged in the final rehearsal. Sitting back, uninterested. He went up to her aftrer and asked. Is there anything troubling you?
The response was not what he expected. But he listened.
She loved Mahler. She loved this symphony. But she found he was taking it too quickly for the bowing to work in the way she as a violinist knew it should.
He thought. A string player himself, he knew how important getting the bowing right was. He did not that afternoon do as he usually did before a concert. Have a rest, a shower, a good meal. Instead he went through the score again. He identified those passages where maybe he was inviting the orchestra to go fractionally fast and he decided how he could take into account this one player’s thoughts.
He did. She was engaged. And it was a wonderful performance.
So pleased was he with the performance that night that a few weeks later Zander rang the Violinist up, a trans-atlantic call. When she picked up the phone and he introduced himself, she was so taken aback … no conductor had rung her at home before. Neither had any conductor adjusted the tempo in response to her comment before as well.
For Roberta it said an immense amount about the nature of leadership, the understanding it calls for. Perhaps it speaks more than anything of else of the need for servant leadership.
In her worship she took us through John’s account of the Resurrection and invited us to think of ourselves as Easter people.
It was good to read through John’s account of resurrection.
I found myself going over the whole story once again … and I found myself drawn to one moment in that story that stands out for me among many.
I wonder whether any moment in the story of Resurrection and the story of Easter stands out for you?
The moment that stands out for me is that moment in the upper room when only 10 are present, Thomas the doubter is not with them and Jesus appears to them.
Peace be with you, he says.
And then he goes on to say this.
As the Father has sent me, so I send you.
When he had said this he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
Maybe it’s because I grew up with the hymn, Breathe on me, breath of God, that that moment is special for me.
Breathe on me, breath of God,
Fill me with life anew,
That I may love what thou dost love,
And do what thou wouldst do.
Maybe it’s because I grew up with the Narnia Chronicles, and that wonderful experience of being joined on the top of Earl’s Hill, Pontesbury at a dawn service when we actually saw the sun rise – a wonderful experience. And Robin returned to his studio and re-designed and re-drew the pictures for the final part of his wonderful pictorial version of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe to have a vibrant double page spread of Aslan bounding into the air with Lucy and Susan clinging to his mane. Turn the pate and he leaps over the wall of the Wicked Witch’s fortress where so many of the great beasts of Narnia have been turned to stone, and he breathes on them … and they come to life.
Breathe on me breath of God
The wonderful thing about being Easter people is not just that we can bear testimony to the resurrection of Christ, but that the very essence of Christ, the Spirit of Chist is breathed into our innermost being.
We have a new strength within us, a power from God, infused into our very being.
The risen Jesus breathes into us, each one of us and we can hear him say, Receive the Holy Spirit.
But as were those apostles long ago, so are we then sent – Easter people don’t just stay put … we are sent just as Christ is sent – into a world of need to bring something of the love of God into that world.
What is it we bring?
One thing is very special. WE can bring into people’s lives the reality of the forgiving love of God in Christ.
If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven.
It’s not just that we are to say, ‘That’s OK.” When someone says sorry to us.
It’s much more than that.
So much of the Books of the Law, the Torah, are all about bringing God’s forgiveness into people’s lives. The whole story as it unfolds is a story of people tasked with following God, who continually fall down on the job.
That’s the wonderful thing Moses did. The people have just gone their own way and abandoned God once more. This time they have made a Golden calf.
And Moses intercedes on behalf of the people to God. “Consider too that this nation is your people,” he pleads with God.
God is wonderfully gracious to Moses – Moses longs to see God.
And God responds – I will make all m y goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name ‘The Lord’.
I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious,
I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.
But you won’t actually see me. Hid in the rock as I pass by.
The story that unfolds is of that very experience, the making of new tablets for commandments, a renewal of the covenant ensues. And then there are all sorts of laws that are outlined about making the Tabernacle, appointing priests, carrying out sacrifices. And as you read on in the rest of Exodus and on into Leviticus, it is all about recognising that people fall short of what God requires, that they need forgiveness and a strength from beyond themselves, and it sets out things to help that happen.
A place – the tabernacle which was later to become the Temple, particular people, priests, a set of sacrifices the priests only can carry out in the Temple, to bring about the reality of that forgiveness that is God’s.
This is the basis of being the people of God.
But we stand the other side of Jesus. We look to the risen Christ, and Jesus breathes into us and says to each of us, Receive the Holy Spirit.
Now we, like those apostles, are sent to bring God’s love into the world. And it is our task, the task of each one of us, to declare God’s grace, to declare God’s mercy and to make real God’s forgiveness.
This is our task – this is what we are called to share.
It isn’t that we need a place to go to, priests to turn to, sacrifices to carry out. God breathes his very being deep into us, and we too receive the Holy Spirit. WE are sent by him into the world to bring God’s forgiving love into the world and into the lives of people all around. We can declare the forgiving love of God … and prompt people to start anew.
What an exciting task we are called to share. And we each have our part to play, and we are called to play it to the full.
The one part of the wedding that caught my eye was a quotation from Catherine of Sienna, whose Saint’s day yesterday was, quoted by Richard Chartres in his address.
“Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.” So said St Catherine of Siena whose festival day this is.
He was thinking of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge as they set out on marriage together.
It speaks also to each one of us … and especially to each one of us as Easter People.
Be the Easter people God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire!
It was a very personal prayer, William and Kate composed for their wedding day. But it is one we too may adapt as the Easter people God calls us to be.
God our Father, we thank you for all you have given us; for the love that we share and for the joy of Easter..
In the busyness of each day keep our eyes fixed on what is real and important in life and help us to be generous with our time and love and energy.
Strengthened by our union with you help us to serve and comfort those who suffer. We ask this in the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
[Original: God our Father, we thank you for our families; for the love that we share and for the joy of our marriage.
In the busyness of each day keep our eyes fixed on what is real and important in life and help us to be generous with our time and love and energy.
Strengthened by our union help us to serve and comfort those who suffer. We ask this in the Spirit of Jesus Christ.]
http://www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=18136
Each one of us will have a special memory from this week.
What’s yours?
Was it the wedding?
Within the wedding was there a special moment?
Does sharing in something like that take you back to special moments?
What special moments are there that you look back to?
What about Easter … our celebration of Easter? Was there a special moment?
For me the special moment has to be in the quiet – playing that Mahler’s fifth symphony – and then the connections – from Livingstone Fellowship, through Daniel Harding, to the awfulness of the Japanese earthquake, to the strange experience of the ending of CF Youth as it began with a conference here at Highbury to the thought that these youngsters are doing as we did and shaping a future for youth work in our churches. And then through this week another special moment – worship at our conference led by Roberta Rominger, General Secrretary of the URC, a very special moment in itself. Through her worship she invited us to reflect on what kind of Easter people we should be.
Each morning she had a wonderful children’s story to read and to tell. And in the evening she told us of her experience of playing under Benjamin Zander, the conductor, and going to his annual master class on conducting. She read from his The Art of Possibility each evening.
And on the last evening, she spoke of an occasion when he was conducting Mahler’s 9th Symphony. Do you love Mahler, she asked? Well, I found myself nodding, not from a longstanding love, but from a warming kind of love that is discovering Mahler, thanks to having listened a number of times last week.
One of the second violinists was not engaged in the final rehearsal. Sitting back, uninterested. He went up to her aftrer and asked. Is there anything troubling you?
The response was not what he expected. But he listened.
She loved Mahler. She loved this symphony. But she found he was taking it too quickly for the bowing to work in the way she as a violinist knew it should.
He thought. A string player himself, he knew how important getting the bowing right was. He did not that afternoon do as he usually did before a concert. Have a rest, a shower, a good meal. Instead he went through the score again. He identified those passages where maybe he was inviting the orchestra to go fractionally fast and he decided how he could take into account this one player’s thoughts.
He did. She was engaged. And it was a wonderful performance.
So pleased was he with the performance that night that a few weeks later Zander rang the Violinist up, a trans-atlantic call. When she picked up the phone and he introduced himself, she was so taken aback … no conductor had rung her at home before. Neither had any conductor adjusted the tempo in response to her comment before as well.
For Roberta it said an immense amount about the nature of leadership, the understanding it calls for. Perhaps it speaks more than anything of else of the need for servant leadership.
In her worship she took us through John’s account of the Resurrection and invited us to think of ourselves as Easter people.
It was good to read through John’s account of resurrection.
I found myself going over the whole story once again … and I found myself drawn to one moment in that story that stands out for me among many.
I wonder whether any moment in the story of Resurrection and the story of Easter stands out for you?
The moment that stands out for me is that moment in the upper room when only 10 are present, Thomas the doubter is not with them and Jesus appears to them.
Peace be with you, he says.
And then he goes on to say this.
As the Father has sent me, so I send you.
When he had said this he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
Maybe it’s because I grew up with the hymn, Breathe on me, breath of God, that that moment is special for me.
Breathe on me, breath of God,
Fill me with life anew,
That I may love what thou dost love,
And do what thou wouldst do.
Maybe it’s because I grew up with the Narnia Chronicles, and that wonderful experience of being joined on the top of Earl’s Hill, Pontesbury at a dawn service when we actually saw the sun rise – a wonderful experience. And Robin returned to his studio and re-designed and re-drew the pictures for the final part of his wonderful pictorial version of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe to have a vibrant double page spread of Aslan bounding into the air with Lucy and Susan clinging to his mane. Turn the pate and he leaps over the wall of the Wicked Witch’s fortress where so many of the great beasts of Narnia have been turned to stone, and he breathes on them … and they come to life.
Breathe on me breath of God
The wonderful thing about being Easter people is not just that we can bear testimony to the resurrection of Christ, but that the very essence of Christ, the Spirit of Chist is breathed into our innermost being.
We have a new strength within us, a power from God, infused into our very being.
The risen Jesus breathes into us, each one of us and we can hear him say, Receive the Holy Spirit.
But as were those apostles long ago, so are we then sent – Easter people don’t just stay put … we are sent just as Christ is sent – into a world of need to bring something of the love of God into that world.
What is it we bring?
One thing is very special. WE can bring into people’s lives the reality of the forgiving love of God in Christ.
If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven.
It’s not just that we are to say, ‘That’s OK.” When someone says sorry to us.
It’s much more than that.
So much of the Books of the Law, the Torah, are all about bringing God’s forgiveness into people’s lives. The whole story as it unfolds is a story of people tasked with following God, who continually fall down on the job.
That’s the wonderful thing Moses did. The people have just gone their own way and abandoned God once more. This time they have made a Golden calf.
And Moses intercedes on behalf of the people to God. “Consider too that this nation is your people,” he pleads with God.
God is wonderfully gracious to Moses – Moses longs to see God.
And God responds – I will make all m y goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name ‘The Lord’.
I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious,
I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.
But you won’t actually see me. Hid in the rock as I pass by.
The story that unfolds is of that very experience, the making of new tablets for commandments, a renewal of the covenant ensues. And then there are all sorts of laws that are outlined about making the Tabernacle, appointing priests, carrying out sacrifices. And as you read on in the rest of Exodus and on into Leviticus, it is all about recognising that people fall short of what God requires, that they need forgiveness and a strength from beyond themselves, and it sets out things to help that happen.
A place – the tabernacle which was later to become the Temple, particular people, priests, a set of sacrifices the priests only can carry out in the Temple, to bring about the reality of that forgiveness that is God’s.
This is the basis of being the people of God.
But we stand the other side of Jesus. We look to the risen Christ, and Jesus breathes into us and says to each of us, Receive the Holy Spirit.
Now we, like those apostles, are sent to bring God’s love into the world. And it is our task, the task of each one of us, to declare God’s grace, to declare God’s mercy and to make real God’s forgiveness.
This is our task – this is what we are called to share.
It isn’t that we need a place to go to, priests to turn to, sacrifices to carry out. God breathes his very being deep into us, and we too receive the Holy Spirit. WE are sent by him into the world to bring God’s forgiving love into the world and into the lives of people all around. We can declare the forgiving love of God … and prompt people to start anew.
What an exciting task we are called to share. And we each have our part to play, and we are called to play it to the full.
The one part of the wedding that caught my eye was a quotation from Catherine of Sienna, whose Saint’s day yesterday was, quoted by Richard Chartres in his address.
“Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.” So said St Catherine of Siena whose festival day this is.
He was thinking of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge as they set out on marriage together.
It speaks also to each one of us … and especially to each one of us as Easter People.
Be the Easter people God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire!
It was a very personal prayer, William and Kate composed for their wedding day. But it is one we too may adapt as the Easter people God calls us to be.
God our Father, we thank you for all you have given us; for the love that we share and for the joy of Easter..
In the busyness of each day keep our eyes fixed on what is real and important in life and help us to be generous with our time and love and energy.
Strengthened by our union with you help us to serve and comfort those who suffer. We ask this in the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
[Original: God our Father, we thank you for our families; for the love that we share and for the joy of our marriage.
In the busyness of each day keep our eyes fixed on what is real and important in life and help us to be generous with our time and love and energy.
Strengthened by our union help us to serve and comfort those who suffer. We ask this in the Spirit of Jesus Christ.]
http://www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=18136
Sunday, 3 April 2011
Principles and Practice in the Law - Exodus 20-26 through the eyes of Jesus
It is good to see the way in which churches are coming together at the moment in Cheltenham. Yesterday it was good to join with CCC church in the opening of their new home at the Pavilion in Hatherley. It has been great working with Ali Bates, their minister, whose husband had been minister of what was then the New Life Church, Bill Bates, but who died so sadly at a young age. Ali has been very involved working with churches recently and she quite deliberately made a point of asking me to say prayers for their new church home on behalf of the churches and from Highbury because it was not that long ago that their church broke away from Highbury. Clifford Small felt he carried out a healing ministry. I felt yesterday was an important moment in that healing process.
We had met together with the new Area Dean of Cheltenham Tudor Griffiths who is living round the corner from us on Thursday and reflected on working together as churches. It was good to have input from the new Principal of the Mission College, Redcliffe College in Gloucester. And then we found ourselves reflecting on the importance of building up the churches understanding of and involvement in Christians Against Poverty – maybe a significant response to the needs of the town as they are unfolding at the moment.
Then to go on to the Friday meeting reflecting on what The Big Society means for Cheltenham.
There is something very important for us to share as Christians and I believe we have something to share that is firmly rooted in the Bible …but we need to take care in the way we read our Bible.
Part of that initiative of working more closely together involves sharing in prayers for Cheltenham each day from 12-30 to 12-45. It’s in the oldest place of worship in the town, St Mary’s. On the wall are printed the Ten Commandments.
That’s no bad starting place for the needs of our society.
But we must read with care.
Read on in Exodus and I think three things emerge that we have to offer today. But care is needed in the way we read.
First a set of personal standards – in the ten commandments. Jesus offers us a great summary of them: Love God, love your neighbour.
Next the importance of having a framework for society. Notice what I am saying here. The importance of having a framework. What we go on to read in the next three chapters is a good sample of the kind of laws that were part of the framework for this ancient people.
Some would want to take them to the letter and say this is for today.
I believe we have to recognise the need for a framework – but take care in recognising that Jesus has opened up for us new ways of thinking that take seriously the need for a framework but prompt us to think through what is appropriate in the light of Jesus’ teaching and for us today.
Provision is made for the treatment of slaves – but I passionately as a Christian reject slavery and want to oppose the modern versions of it that are still around, sometimes rather too close to home here in Cheltenham in sex trafficking and the like. Slavery is wrong.
Next come laws about violent acts. Capital punishment – not just for murder but for a host of other things as well, not least cursing your parents.
I passionately oppose capital punishment for that range of things – as a Christian that is not acceptable to me.
Then come laws about the responsibilities of owners of beasts, and laws about repayment. Moral and religious laws follow.
Again they give me a glimpse of an ancient framework of law – but not one for today, something has happened with Chist to make a difference.
In chapter 23 there are more principles about justice and fairness. They ring a bell for me. I find myself saying amen when it says, Do not deny justice to a poor man at his trial.
I find myself as a Christian drawn to that principle of Justice and fairness.
Then comes the notion of the seventh year and the seventh day. A rhythm of rest where debts are written off in a jubilee year, where land lies fallow, where there is a day of rest.
There are principles there that I am drawn to as a Christian and want to affirm.
What’s going on here?
Am I picking and choosing at random in a way that demonstrates a disregard for Scripture?
No, I believe something else is going on. And in these sermons I am wanting to offer grounds for reading in a different way that still does justice to the Bible but sees it through the eyes of Christ.
By chapter 24 we see that this framework is part of a covenant that is sealed between God and his people.
First, there is a set of priniples in the Ten Commandments summarise in 2 that are for today.
Second there is a framework that shows the importance of having a framework of laws for the good of society, but has to be read with care.
The third insight is the need for a sense of something other. A sense of the reality of God.
This is something desperately needed in our day – but in a way that is true to what is described here and yet very different from it.
We begin a wonderful description of what will become the tabernacle. A tent that can travel with a journeying people, where they sense the presence of God with them in a very real way.
It’s where the commandments are to be kept, where sacrifices are to be made, where priests are to serve – and where the bread of the presence is to be kept.
A great deal of time is then spent exploring what this tabernacle means. Much later the tabernacle becomes the model for the temple.
We value the sense of the presence of God that I believe is vital to living in the world. But once again you could accuse me of picking and choosing. While I find the description of the tabernacle a fascinating glimpse of how this ancient people of God sensed the presence of God it’s not how I sense the presence of God.
Three insights – a set of principles for personal living, a framework of law for society, and a way of sensing the presence of God. And yet I appear to be picking and choosing the bits I want to follow.
I maintain that what I am seeking to do is not arbitrary. And to help explain what I mean I want to focus on one thing that held central place in the tabernacle, and interestingly it is something that holds central place for us here tonight as well. And that is bread that is placed on a table.
Bread baked from corn – bread that is the Bread of the Presence.
Inside the back cover of the Bible I took with me to the Holy Land I have a stalk with ears of corn. A modern version of pressing flowers – I put it through a laminator. It is a treasure.
It was wonderful to walk through a grainfield just as Jesus did with his disciples in Matthew 12. Jesus walking through the cornfields – it is a Sabbath – and the disciples do exactly as I was to do a couple of thousand years later. Though when I did it it was not a Sabbath. They began to pluck heads of grain and to eat.
Now this is forbidden on a Sabbath elsewhere as that principle of the seventh day of rest is worked out in the Law.
When the Pharisees saw it, they castigated him. “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do n the Sabbath.” It is against the Law, against the Torah, it against these first five books of the Bible to do this on the Sabbath.
What Jesus does is very telling. He tells a story that comes from the next part of the Bible, the prophets. It is almost as if for Jesus that story acts as a commentary on the law. He draws on the story to throw light on what is important for him in the law.
He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him or his companions to eat, but only for the priests.
Jesus recognises that The Scriptures are not simply black and white statements that as it were stand for all time. He sees in them a process of dialogue and discussion going on. It is as if from one part of the Scripture a discussion is going on.
What’s more he goes on to point out that within the Torah there are different ways of looking at things – and some of the laws regarding what priests can do break other laws about what cannot be done on the Sabbath.
To read the Bible in the spirit that Jesus reads the Bible we must read with wisdom and seek the guiding of the Spirit of Jesus in prayer.
But in this passage in Matthew 12 I believe a principle can be seen that will help us in our reading especially of the Law of the Old Testament.
Jesus goes on to say in verse 6, “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here.”
What’s important is the presence of God with us. That presence of God is made real in the Tabernacle. Later, all that was said of the tabernacle is said of the Temple. But now something greater than the Temple is here. And that is Christ. It is no longer in a place, no longer in a tabernacle, no longer with all these instructions that the presence of God is made real. But it is where Christ is, there God’s presence is.
In the breaking of bread around a table, in the gathering together in his name, in the giving of food to someone who is hungry, in the giving of water to someone who is thirsty.
For us, it is in Christ that God’s presence is felt.
Then in this passage Jesus offers us something to measure all the detailed framework of law that. For me this is one of those verses that becomes a key to unlock the words of the Old Testament, and the detail of this law.
Again, Jesus draws on the prophets, this time Hosea, to read the Law in that light.
But if you had known what this means, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”
Ono the one hand the over-riding concern that takes precedence over the detail is God’s desire for mercy and not sacrifice. That’s why through the detail of the details of the law I am on the look out for the principles of justice and mercy that underpin that law. And all of it is under Christ who in saying that he is ‘lord of the Sabbath’ shows that he is lord of the Law.
Principles for living life personally in the ten commandments as summarised by Christ Love God and love your neighbour.
A framework of law built around justice and mercy, always remembering that Christ is lord of the Sabbath, lord of the Torah.
And the presence of God with us made real not in the trappings of the tabernacle, not so much in the bread of the presence, but the presence of God made real for us in Jesus Christ himself.
We had met together with the new Area Dean of Cheltenham Tudor Griffiths who is living round the corner from us on Thursday and reflected on working together as churches. It was good to have input from the new Principal of the Mission College, Redcliffe College in Gloucester. And then we found ourselves reflecting on the importance of building up the churches understanding of and involvement in Christians Against Poverty – maybe a significant response to the needs of the town as they are unfolding at the moment.
Then to go on to the Friday meeting reflecting on what The Big Society means for Cheltenham.
There is something very important for us to share as Christians and I believe we have something to share that is firmly rooted in the Bible …but we need to take care in the way we read our Bible.
Part of that initiative of working more closely together involves sharing in prayers for Cheltenham each day from 12-30 to 12-45. It’s in the oldest place of worship in the town, St Mary’s. On the wall are printed the Ten Commandments.
That’s no bad starting place for the needs of our society.
But we must read with care.
Read on in Exodus and I think three things emerge that we have to offer today. But care is needed in the way we read.
First a set of personal standards – in the ten commandments. Jesus offers us a great summary of them: Love God, love your neighbour.
Next the importance of having a framework for society. Notice what I am saying here. The importance of having a framework. What we go on to read in the next three chapters is a good sample of the kind of laws that were part of the framework for this ancient people.
Some would want to take them to the letter and say this is for today.
I believe we have to recognise the need for a framework – but take care in recognising that Jesus has opened up for us new ways of thinking that take seriously the need for a framework but prompt us to think through what is appropriate in the light of Jesus’ teaching and for us today.
Provision is made for the treatment of slaves – but I passionately as a Christian reject slavery and want to oppose the modern versions of it that are still around, sometimes rather too close to home here in Cheltenham in sex trafficking and the like. Slavery is wrong.
Next come laws about violent acts. Capital punishment – not just for murder but for a host of other things as well, not least cursing your parents.
I passionately oppose capital punishment for that range of things – as a Christian that is not acceptable to me.
Then come laws about the responsibilities of owners of beasts, and laws about repayment. Moral and religious laws follow.
Again they give me a glimpse of an ancient framework of law – but not one for today, something has happened with Chist to make a difference.
In chapter 23 there are more principles about justice and fairness. They ring a bell for me. I find myself saying amen when it says, Do not deny justice to a poor man at his trial.
I find myself as a Christian drawn to that principle of Justice and fairness.
Then comes the notion of the seventh year and the seventh day. A rhythm of rest where debts are written off in a jubilee year, where land lies fallow, where there is a day of rest.
There are principles there that I am drawn to as a Christian and want to affirm.
What’s going on here?
Am I picking and choosing at random in a way that demonstrates a disregard for Scripture?
No, I believe something else is going on. And in these sermons I am wanting to offer grounds for reading in a different way that still does justice to the Bible but sees it through the eyes of Christ.
By chapter 24 we see that this framework is part of a covenant that is sealed between God and his people.
First, there is a set of priniples in the Ten Commandments summarise in 2 that are for today.
Second there is a framework that shows the importance of having a framework of laws for the good of society, but has to be read with care.
The third insight is the need for a sense of something other. A sense of the reality of God.
This is something desperately needed in our day – but in a way that is true to what is described here and yet very different from it.
We begin a wonderful description of what will become the tabernacle. A tent that can travel with a journeying people, where they sense the presence of God with them in a very real way.
It’s where the commandments are to be kept, where sacrifices are to be made, where priests are to serve – and where the bread of the presence is to be kept.
A great deal of time is then spent exploring what this tabernacle means. Much later the tabernacle becomes the model for the temple.
We value the sense of the presence of God that I believe is vital to living in the world. But once again you could accuse me of picking and choosing. While I find the description of the tabernacle a fascinating glimpse of how this ancient people of God sensed the presence of God it’s not how I sense the presence of God.
Three insights – a set of principles for personal living, a framework of law for society, and a way of sensing the presence of God. And yet I appear to be picking and choosing the bits I want to follow.
I maintain that what I am seeking to do is not arbitrary. And to help explain what I mean I want to focus on one thing that held central place in the tabernacle, and interestingly it is something that holds central place for us here tonight as well. And that is bread that is placed on a table.
Bread baked from corn – bread that is the Bread of the Presence.
Inside the back cover of the Bible I took with me to the Holy Land I have a stalk with ears of corn. A modern version of pressing flowers – I put it through a laminator. It is a treasure.
It was wonderful to walk through a grainfield just as Jesus did with his disciples in Matthew 12. Jesus walking through the cornfields – it is a Sabbath – and the disciples do exactly as I was to do a couple of thousand years later. Though when I did it it was not a Sabbath. They began to pluck heads of grain and to eat.
Now this is forbidden on a Sabbath elsewhere as that principle of the seventh day of rest is worked out in the Law.
When the Pharisees saw it, they castigated him. “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do n the Sabbath.” It is against the Law, against the Torah, it against these first five books of the Bible to do this on the Sabbath.
What Jesus does is very telling. He tells a story that comes from the next part of the Bible, the prophets. It is almost as if for Jesus that story acts as a commentary on the law. He draws on the story to throw light on what is important for him in the law.
He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him or his companions to eat, but only for the priests.
Jesus recognises that The Scriptures are not simply black and white statements that as it were stand for all time. He sees in them a process of dialogue and discussion going on. It is as if from one part of the Scripture a discussion is going on.
What’s more he goes on to point out that within the Torah there are different ways of looking at things – and some of the laws regarding what priests can do break other laws about what cannot be done on the Sabbath.
To read the Bible in the spirit that Jesus reads the Bible we must read with wisdom and seek the guiding of the Spirit of Jesus in prayer.
But in this passage in Matthew 12 I believe a principle can be seen that will help us in our reading especially of the Law of the Old Testament.
Jesus goes on to say in verse 6, “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here.”
What’s important is the presence of God with us. That presence of God is made real in the Tabernacle. Later, all that was said of the tabernacle is said of the Temple. But now something greater than the Temple is here. And that is Christ. It is no longer in a place, no longer in a tabernacle, no longer with all these instructions that the presence of God is made real. But it is where Christ is, there God’s presence is.
In the breaking of bread around a table, in the gathering together in his name, in the giving of food to someone who is hungry, in the giving of water to someone who is thirsty.
For us, it is in Christ that God’s presence is felt.
Then in this passage Jesus offers us something to measure all the detailed framework of law that. For me this is one of those verses that becomes a key to unlock the words of the Old Testament, and the detail of this law.
Again, Jesus draws on the prophets, this time Hosea, to read the Law in that light.
But if you had known what this means, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”
Ono the one hand the over-riding concern that takes precedence over the detail is God’s desire for mercy and not sacrifice. That’s why through the detail of the details of the law I am on the look out for the principles of justice and mercy that underpin that law. And all of it is under Christ who in saying that he is ‘lord of the Sabbath’ shows that he is lord of the Law.
Principles for living life personally in the ten commandments as summarised by Christ Love God and love your neighbour.
A framework of law built around justice and mercy, always remembering that Christ is lord of the Sabbath, lord of the Torah.
And the presence of God with us made real not in the trappings of the tabernacle, not so much in the bread of the presence, but the presence of God made real for us in Jesus Christ himself.
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