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There’s something fishy about Jonah!

The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, 2“Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” 3So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. 4Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”

5And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth. 6When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 7Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh: “By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. 8Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. 9Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.” 10When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.

When I decided that this week I’d preach on the book of Jonah I immediately started to think of fish stories that I could introduce my reflection with, and the only one I could think of is one I fear I’ve already mentioned.

It concerns a guy going fishing at his favourite spot by the river, but when he gets there he realises that he’s forgotten his bait, but he notices a lovely fat looking tree frog sunning himself on a lily pad, so he decides to stalk the frog and capture it and use it for bait. And he’s just about to grab the frog when he realises that there’s a brown snake alongside him who also has his eyes on the frog, and before he can do anything else, the snake has leapt forward and swallowed the frog whole!

Not thinking about what he was doing, but angry as hell at the snake, the guy leaps forward and grabs the snake around the throat and yanks the frog out of its mouth and drops the frog in his bait box. It’s then that it really strikes him that he has an angry, snapping venomous snake in his hand that he can’t simply pat on the head and let go.

Thinking quickly, he grabs his hip-flask with his free hand (which is full of whiskey), opens it, and pours a goodly amount into the open mouth of the snake. The snake goes limp and the fisherman places it on the ground and walks away to get on with his day’s fishing.

About twenty minutes later he feels a tapping at his shoe. He looks down and sees it’s the snake, with two more frogs!

It’s not really a brilliant joke, but what was less brilliant really was my knee-jerk reaction to the mention of Jonah – thinking that I needed to come up with a fish story. I hear the word ‘Jonah’ I think ‘fish’, which really only reflects my historic failure to really grasp what the book is about!

For the fish in the book of Jonah is only mentioned in three of the forty-seven verses of the book, which is in itself a solid indication of the fact that the fish is a minor character in the drama, and hardly the central theme of the book!

I’m not going to beat myself up about this, as Jonah’s under-water antics are indeed the only part of the prophet’s career that are generally remembered in our culture.

I still remember being introduced to the story of the prophet as a child by means of a picture book that had an image of Jonah and his fishy friend on the front cover – a book that I seem to remember was entitled, “Jonah and the Great Big Fish!”

Moreover, the association of Jonah with his scaly friend has so penetrated Western history that the pair long ago became a part of a distinctively maritime lingua-franca! I have read, at least, that the term used by sailors of the under-water grave, “Davey Jones’ Locker” does in fact go back to the book of Jonah!

Apparently there never was any famous underwater character named ‘Davey Jones’ (the lead singer of The Monkeys included). The name is rather a bastardisation of the Western Indian words, ‘Duffy Jonah’ (meaning ‘prophet Jonah’), which means that ‘Davey Jones’ Locker’ is in fact another reference to the fish!

Even so, as I say, the Book of Jonah is not really a book about fish (nor about whales for that matter [for those who feel a need to point out that if Jonah had been swallowed by a whale, a whale is not actually a fish, technically speaking]).

Let’s just clear the deck (so to speak) of fish and whales – neither of which are really significant themes in the book of Jonah. But if the maritime adventure of Jonah is not the key theme of the book, what is it all about? That is the question!

Personally, I stopped seeing Jonah as a fish story once I gave my life to Christ as a teenager and joined a youth group, for it was there that I learned that the book of Jonah was not really a book about fish but was rather a book about priorities and about obedience, and about the importance of submitting ourselves to the will of God, even when God’s plans for our lives conflict with our own personal agendas.

God had a plan for Jonah’s life. Jonah had other plans. Jonah had to learn that in the end it is God’s will that has to be done rather than your own. The book of Jonah, when seen from this perspective, is a challenge to each of us to submit ourselves to the will of God, lest we find ourselves thrown off a boat, drowning in the water, swallowed by a great fish, and spat out in the direction that submission to the will of God would have originally taken us anyway.

We might refer to this interpretation of the Book of Jonah as the pious interpretation, and there’s obviously a lot of value in this ‘Thy will be done’ application of this book, but in my view now, as an adult now, the pious interpretation of Jonah is as far removed from the central message of the book as is the maritime adventure theme!

In truth, I think it is very hard for us Sydney-siders of the 21st Century to grasp the central message of the Book of Jonah for one very simple reason: we just don’t harbor any real hatred towards the Assyrians!

The Book of Jonah was written a long time ago in a culture far removed from our own, and the issue that upsets Jonah in the book and the issue that would have upset most of the original readers of the book was not simply that God had a plan for Jonah’s life (in some a general sort of way) but that God called Jonah to prophesy in Nineveh, which was the capital of Assyria, and both Jonah and the Book of Jonah’s original readers hated Assyrians!

And the Jews didn’t just hate the Assyrians because they looked different either. They hated the Assyrians because the Assyrians had a history of killing them!

Assyria was once the world’s most fearsome superpower! From the middle of the tenth century B.C. right through to the end of the seventh, the Neo-Assyrian Empire dominated the Middle East, and, during the 8th century reign of Tiglath-Pileaser III most especially, their empire was vast – covering all of what is modern-day Iraq and Syria, and covering enormous chunks of what is today Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, and, of course, it covered all of Israel and Palestine!

And it was an Empire built on violence! That in itself is in no way unique, of course, as indeed all the world’s empires have been built on violence, and yet the stories of the savagery of the Assyrian armies do seem particularly horrible.

Nineveh’s military machine was renowned for being sadistic. If enemies resisted surrender during the siege of their city, once defeated, the whole population would be horribly mutilated and slaughtered. Their houses and towns would be torn down and burned, and the flayed skins of their corpses prominently displayed on stakes as a warning to others who might have been considering resistance.

After their battles, public amusement would be provided for the people of Nineveh via a victory procession wherein enemy survivors were led down the city streets by leashes attached to rings inserted through their lips, with the vanquished nobles wearing the decapitated heads of their princes hanging around their necks. And all of this fun was accompanied by music from bands of minstrels playing merry tunes! Oh, the people of Nineveh knew how to enjoy themselves!

And they enjoyed themselves like this for more than 300 years! It must have seemed as if the arrogant might of Nineveh would never fade and that their power-hungry god, Assur, was unbeatable. The Assyrian war-machine enjoyed so many bloody victories over their enemies in those 300 plus years between the 934 and 609 B.C., but none was remembered in the Bible more clearly and more bitterly than the sacking of Samaria and the destruction of Northern Israel in 721.

The Jews did not hate the Assyrians because they looked funny or ate strange foods or just didn’t make an effort to mix in with the locals. They hated the Assyrians for far more obvious (and surely far more valid) reasons.

They hated them because the Assyrians had destroyed more than half of their country. They hated them because of the countless number of their kinsfolk who had been slaughtered, imprisoned, enslaved and/or humiliated by the Assyrians. And they hated the Assyrians because in 721 B.C. it seemed that their god, Assur, had been victorious over the God of Israel.

That day in 721 B.C. would forever be remembered by the people of Israel, not just as a day of mourning, but as a day of national humiliation. Their people had been butchered, half their country destroyed, and their temples desecrated.

It was all done by the Ninevites, and so Jonah hated the Ninevites as the readers of Jonah hated the Ninevites. And now God asks Jonah to go to Ninevah to preach to the people there, and call on them to repent! And Jonah did not want to go there. Why would he? The only Jews that went to Ninevah were dragged there in chains!

And yet it’s not only because he hates their city and might well fear for his life in such a place, but most of all because he feared that if he went to Ninevah, God might use him to do something good for the people of Ninevah, and in as much as Jonah might have feared that the people of Nineveh might do him some evil, his far greater fear was that he (Jonah) might be for the people of Nineveh the instrument of some good!

National hatred of an enemy race is a terrible thing, but something we are all familiar with.

I remember being told of a Jewish man and a Chinese man who, amongst others, are sitting at a bar, slowly drinking away the night. There were plenty of others perched between these two at the bar but the Jewish guy kept looking over at the Chinese guy with a surly expression on his face and was mumbling curses at him that got increasingly louder with each beer he consumed!

Eventually the Jewish guy gets up and walks over to the Chinese guy and pours his beer over the poor guy’s head! The Chinese guy says, “What’s that for?” The Jewish guy says, “That’s for Pearl Harbour! My uncle was killed at Pearl Harbour!” The Chinese guy says, “I’m Chinese. That was the Japanese, you fool!” The Jewish guy says, “Chinese, Japanese … what’s the difference?” and he returns to his stool.

Two minutes later the Chinese guy walks over to the Jewish guy and pours the contents of his beer over the Jewish guy’s head. “What’s that for?” asks the Jewish guy. The Chinese guy says, “That’s for the Titanic! My grandfather died on the Titanic!” The Jewish guy says, “What’s that got to do with me?” The Chinese guy says, “Steinberg, Goldberg, iceberg … what’s the difference?”

Humour can be an effective way of confronting racial prejudice. So can stories such as we find in the Book of Jonah.

The Book of Jonah is a book that is written with a purpose, and it’s purpose is not to encourage us to submit ourselves to the will of God (as important as that is) any more than it is to chronicle an ancient yarn concerning ‘the one that got away!’ It’s purpose is in fact summed up very succinctly in the final verse of the book of Jonah (chapter 4, verse 11) which I will read to you, but not just yet!

Before I do read it, I want to raise the question with you, very briefly, as to who might have been the original audience that the Book of Jonah was addressed to?

For the book is set in the 8th century B.C., but most Biblical scholars assume that the book wasn’t actually written till a great deal later – most probably in the post-exilic period, late in the 6th century.

If so, it is quite possible that it was published at around the same time that Ezra and Nehemiah were active in trying to rebuild the ancient city of Jerusalem – a city that had been lying in ruins since the Babylonians had destroyed it 50 years earlier.

And if you are familiar with the history of that time you will know that it was a time of great nationalistic fervour.

The Jews were returning to their homeland and they were rebuilding their ancient city and they were rebuilding their temple, and all of a sudden, for the first time in a great many years, it felt good to be a Jew again!

And leaders like Ezra and Nehemiah did a great deal to encourage the patriotic fervour of the returning Jews and to get them excited again about their city, about their religion and about their God.

And in the process of doing that the issue of racial purity became a sticking point for a lot of people, and indeed both those leaders – Ezra and Nehemiah – became very upset over the issue of inter-marriage between Jews and non-Jews.

Ezra indeed accused the men of mixing their ‘holy seed’ with the people of the lands (Ezra 9:2) and he encouraged large numbers of Jewish men to divorce their foreign wives and to send them away, along with the children of their mixed marriages!

And I’m not saying that the Book of Jonah was written specifically as a response to the nationalistic ‘reforms’ of Ezra (though a lot of scholars have suggested exactly that) but I am suggesting that at around the same time all that was happening, a little tract was certainly circulating that told a story of how God had called one of His prophets to minister in the land of the Assyrians, because the God of Israel loved and respected foreigners too – even the people of Nineveh!

In Jonah 4:11 – the final verse of the Book of Jonah – God says to Jonah “And should I not spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons that cannot discern their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”

Jonah is a remarkable book. Indeed, perhaps the only thing more remarkable than the book itself is the fact that our Jewish fathers and mothers, when it came time to put together the collection of books that have become known as our ‘Old Testament’ recognised that this book – the Book of Jonah – deserved to be included too, as one of the inspired works of God!

It is a book that strikes at the heart of every manifestation of religious nationalism, as indeed it is a book that confronts religious arrogance in all its forms, for it a book that reminds us that the God of Israel, the God of the faithful and the God of the upright, is also the God of the Assyrian, of the unfaithful and of the not-so-upright too!

And that’s why the Book of Jonah is a book our world needs to hear right now.
As our political leaders and media beaver away at dehumanising Arabs and Iranians and Muslim people in general, to prepare us for further bloodshed.
When being Christian has somehow once again become associated with being white!
And when refugees of all kinds are being treated with suspicion and contempt because of their strange foreign habits and strange foreign gods.

It’s time to once again hear the message of the Book of Jonah.

“And should I not spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” (Jonah 4:11)

‘Fighting Father’ Dave – Parish Priest, Community Worker, Professional boxer, Martial Arts master, Father of three. Dave’s goal is to offer an alternative culture for young people, based on values of courage, integrity, self-discipline and teamwork. Visit http://www.fatherdave.org for more information.

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The Mystery of Christ

“In reading this, then, you will be able to understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to men in other generations as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets. This mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.

I became a servant of this gospel by the gift of God’s grace given me through the working of his power. Although I am less than the least of all God’s people, this grace was given me: to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make plain to everyone the administration of this mystery, which for ages past was kept hidden in God, who created all things. His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Ephesians 3:4-11)

It’s my privilege today to preach on Ephesians chapter 3 – our Epistle reading.

‘Oh great’ somebody says. ‘Finally somebody is preaching on Ephesians 3!’

Well, … somebody might say that. I’ve been here almost 13 years and no one yet, so far as I remember, has ever preached on Ephesians 3 during that time. It’s probably about time someone preached on it. Perhaps someone has been waiting anxiously for this to happen? It’s not likely of course. No one is likely to say ‘Great, Ephesians!’ You’re more likely to ask me to spell the word for you, and this despite the fact that we read from the book only a few minutes ago.

This is always the problem with the Epistle reading I think. And I’ve noticed that those who determine our weekly readings keep trimming the length of the Epistle reading down. And this makes sense to me, for unless you’re a bit of an enthusiast it seems to be pretty hard to keep the Epistle reading in your head for too long.

Oh, we remember the Old Testament reading, which was about David and Bathsheeba. And we can probably remember the gospel reading. But we have trouble remembering the Epistle reading, and perhaps especially this Epistle reading. It seems to be particularly forgettable.
Does anyone remember what it was about?

In Ephesians 3 Paul talks about the ‘mystery of Christ’.

“When you read this” Paul says, “you will perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ”.

This is one of Paul’s last letters. This is a letter written from prison. This is the sort of letter you write to people who you know you are probably never going to see again. It’s the sort of letter where, if you’ve got something important to say, this is the time to say it, because you don’t know how much more time you’ve got left. And for Paul, the important thing he wanted to talk about was the ‘mystery of Christ.’

“You will perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ” Paul says. It is a mysterious truth, he says, “that was not made known to the sons of men in other generations”, but that has been revealed to him and to his Christian contemporaries by the Holy Spirit! And what is this mysterious truth kept secret for so long but finally revealed in Christ?

1.#That Jesus is the Son of God?

2.#That He was crucified, died and was buried, but rose again on the 3rd day?

3.#That Jesus reconciled the world to Himself on the cross?

No. None of the above. The mystery of Christ, now made know, Paul says is … “that the Gentiles are fellow heirs” – that Jews and non-Jews are members of the same body, equally partakers of the promises of God, brothers and sisters in the same church!

This is not the climactic answer we might have expected from Paul. What’s so mysterious about the equality of the races? But listen to him eulogize further:

“Now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace.”

Is Paul talking about the mystical ‘peace’ between humanity and God? No, he’s talking about the peace that Christ brings between people of different races.

“For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility … that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end.”
And so he continues.

This is the heart of Paul’s theology in Ephesians. Does it surprise you? Didn’t Jesus come into the world to save sinners? The death of Jesus on the cross spells for us forgiveness and the possibility of a new beginning. Isn’t that what it’s all about? Well, according to the book of Ephesians, the climactic work of Christ on the cross is that by his blood he broke down the dividing wall of racial hostility between Jew and Greek!

That may seem to trivialise the significance of the death of Christ for us. Of coursed this may be related to the fact that we don’t live in Israel!

It’s easy for us to preach the equality of all races when we live in a situation that is relatively tolerant of different cultures. Put yourself in Israel and start preaching that all Jews and Palestinians are sisters and brothers. See how popular you are. And don’t just preach it quietly over coffee to your friends. Preach it the way Paul did – setting up churches made up of Jews and Greeks and Palestinians and Arabs – all publicly worshipping together in the middle of the hostility.

If Paul were alive today, I believe I know exactly where he’d be right now on a Sunday morning. He’d be in the middle of the Gaza strip, leading a magnificent service of joint worship between Jewish and Palestinian Christians. He’d be doing it in the open air, with tanks visible in the background, and people looking on through cracks in the wall out of their bombed-out homes. And he’d be preaching ‘Peace to those who are far off and peace to those who are near, for Christ has made one new man out of two and has brought our hostility to an end.’ The message of reconciliation takes on a different feel altogether when you relocate yourself a bit.

Some of us have just returned from a historical tour of the US. One of the places we visited there was the John Brown wax museum in Harpers Ferry. John Brown was a fiery preacher in the mid nineteenth century who preached the equality of blacks and whites, and who tried to start an armed rebellion amongst the slaves, beginning at Harpers Ferry. Whether you agree with Brown’s methods or not, no one could doubt the integrity of his zeal, nor the fact that his convictions grew out of a fundamentally Biblical mandate that through the death of Christ all the races have been made one!

John Brown was hanged in Harpers Ferry. In the years that followed his death many thousands and tens of thousands went off to war because they believed that they had to fight in order to make that proclaimed equality a physical reality by ending slavery.

Preaching genuine equality is dangerous business. It cost Paul his life too.

The details of Paul’s ultimate end have always been a little hazy, but we know that the prison letters were the last letters he wrote, and we believe that he was executed by the government – probably beheaded -not long after writing this letter to the Ephesians.

Why did Paul have so many enemies? How is it that he stirred up so much trouble such that the authorities had to keep stepping in to silence him, and eventually felt the need to silence him altogether? Was it because he went around telling people to be nice to each other and to live good middle-class lives? I don’t think so. It was because he challenged what was at the heart of the religion and culture of his own people – the idea that his people (the Jews) were God’s special people, and that the rest of the world were not.

In my understanding, there are some things that are essential to being Jewish in this world and there are other areas where there is a great degree of flexibility.

As to how you envision God and His relationship with the world, I understand that there’s plenty of room for discussion within the Jewish community. As to your beliefs about the Messiah, again, traditional Judaism, I’m told, takes a fairly liberal attitude in terms of allowing different people to believe different things. You might think Jesus is the Messiah. I might disagree. This in itself would not necessarily mean that we can’t worship happily together in the same synagogue.

But there’s one point of dogma in Jewish understanding where there is really very little room for maneuver. That’s the understanding that the Jews are God’s chosen people. That’s the fundamental basis of the faith. The Jews are God’s chosen people and for that reason they are different, and so much of what we associate with traditional Jewish religious practice was developed to reinforce exactly that point.
As a Jewish parent you would teach this to your children – that we dress differently and eat differently and live differently because we are different. We are God’s special people – chosen at the beginning of history to be the guardians of God’s law and the messengers of God’s truth to the rest of the world. We are a holy people, a separate people, and that’s why we don’t associate with people who are not of our race.
Paul comes along and says ‘Well, that was yesterday. But now that Christ has come, that wall of hostility has been broken down, and these two people have become one!’

Paul started out on the other side of the fence of course. He was brought up as a strict Jew and trained as a Pharisee. And we know that he spent much of his early career trying to wipe out the church for exactly this reason, because he saw the threat that the inclusive attitude of the Christians posed to his own community. But Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus, and so he came to say that all that good breeding and upbringing that had once made him feel so self-important and unique he ‘counted as crap’ for the sake of knowing Christ and making him known.

In Paul’s understanding, whatever distinctive role the Jewish people had to play in the historic plan of God for the world – whatever role they had as guardians of the law and messengers of the truth – was now over. The time of separateness was finished. Through Christ all people were being reconciled and brought together. The hostility had to come to and end! This was the stand that would ultimately get Paul killed.

They say that Martin Luther King Jr. was a very shy and retiring man who probably would not have upset anybody too much if he’d kept his radical preaching and ideas about equality squarely inside the walls of his own church. The problem was that he started doing those marches, and thrusting the whole thing into everybody’s faces.

Paul, likewise, was a guy who pushed the issue of racial equality into everybody’s faces. He had a public showdown over the issue with the apostle Peter early on (you can read about that in his letter to the Galatians). He organised a worldwide aid fund at the end of his life, designed both to relieve the poverty in Jerusalem and also to bring together the churches of the different cultures. And throughout his ministry Paul deliberately fashioned the churches he was involved in to be living testimonies to the rest of the society of the new reality of racial integration and harmony that Christ made possible.

This brings us back to what I think is the climax of Ephesians chapter 3:

Paul says that it is his mission in life ‘to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places.’

Let me unpack that for you a little. Paul’s mission is to make known the mystery, which, as we have seen, was the mysterious coming together of the different peoples of the world through Christ. Paul now goes further and says now that the wonderful consequence of this mysterious coming together is that through the church the manifold wisdom of God is made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places.’

Here is one of the few times that I, as a preacher, am glad that I know a little Greek (the original language in which this letter was written) for I can tell you that the word ‘manifold’ here (the ‘manifold wisdom of God’) can more be literally translated as ‘multicoloured’.

The church proclaims, Paul says, the ‘multicoloured’ wisdom of God around the world – and not only around the world but even beyond the world and into the heavenly realms, so that even the principalities and powers in the heavenly places can see the wondrous mystery of Christ made known! And they see it through the church, not simply because we’re talking about it, but because, as a multicoloured community, we proclaim the wisdom of God just by being who we are!

•#Think about that friends! We proclaim the coming of a new Kingdom:
•#A world where every tear will be wiped away
•#Where lions and lambs lie down side by side
•#Where war is no more because people can genuinely get on with one another
•#Where black and white, rich and poor, male and female, slave and free are all equal.

We proclaim the coming of Christ’s kingdom, but we must admit that there are very few indications in this world that this Kingdom is really on its way.

Someone said to me only the other day “I’ll bet you all I’ve got that this Kingdom of yours ain’t coming”. I said “I’ll take that bet”, but I know full well that as you look around the world you don’t see people coming together everywhere. You see more and more people and nations splitting further apart!

But this is where St Paul says to us, ‘But wait. Look at the church! In the church you see people living in genuine community. In the church you see black and white, slave and free, rich and poor, male and female all living together as one! In the church we see a living sign of the world to come, for in the church the multicoloured wisdom of God is being proclaimed to the very principalities and powers in the heavenly places!’

Of course the church doesn’t always look quite that good. Often the church is just as divided as the rest of the world.

Even here, we have not been immune from the natural phenomenon that ‘birds of a feather tend to flock together’. OK. We don’t have a huge issue with Jewish people not being treated as equals in our midst, and I’m sure that we would state very dogmatically that nobody is consciously excluded from our community. And yet, like any group of human beings, we’ll tend to mix with people we feel natural with. We’ll tend to gravitate towards people who have a similar cultural background to what we do and a similar educational level to what we have, because those are the people who are likely to understand us best and so those are the sort of people we are most likely to enjoy.

What would St Paul say? I think he would simply urge us ‘people, be the church!’ You are the church of God, called to be a sign to the rest of the world of the Kingdom coming, called to be a living example of true community, assigned the privilege of proclaiming to the world, and to the worlds beyond our own, the multicoloured wisdom of God through the very multicoloured beauty of your own congregation!

Let’s not forget! It’s too easy to forget the Epistle reading, to easy to forget what Paul was talking about in Ephesians 3, and to easy to forget who we are supposed to be as the church.

Around the world I think much of the church has forgotten who we are supposed to be, and it is quite possible that we will let this go in one ear and out the other, just as we did with the Epistle reading when it was first read to us today.

Let’s not let that happen. Let’s not forget who we are and who we are called to be. We are the church of God. We are the people who, in our very communal life, make known the mystery of Christ to the rest of the world. We are the people who proclaim to the principalities and powers in the Heavenly places the multicoloured wisdom of God. And we do this just by being the church, and by living together in love as Christ taught us to.

‘Fighting Father’ Dave – Parish Priest, Community Worker, Professional boxer, Martial Arts master, Father of three. Dave’s goal is to offer an alternative culture for young people, based on values of courage, integrity, self-discipline and teamwork. He is available to help work your corner as you fight the good fight. Visit http://www.fatherdave.org for more information.

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I Had A Dream

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. … I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. … I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

In Acts chapter 11 we are told that Peter had a dream, and the thrust of these two dreams is remarkably similar!

In a bar in New York there are two guys sitting at opposite ends of the bar eyeing out each other as they sink a few beers. One guy is a Jewish American. The other guy is a Chinese American. After his third beer the Jewish guy takes what’s left of his glass, walks over to the Chinese guy, and pours it over his head saying “That’s for Pearl Harbour. My grandfather was killed at Pearl Harbour.” “Pearl Harbour!” the Chinese guy says. “I’m Chinese. It was the Japanese that bombed Pearl Harbour.” “Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese – all the same to me!” the Jewish guy says. The Chinese guy then takes his beer and pours it over the Jewish guy’s head, saying, “That’s for the Titanic. My great Uncle was killed when the Titanic went down.” “The Titanic” says the Jewish guy, “what have I got to do with the sinking of the Titanic?” “Goldberg, Steinberg, Iceberg – all the same to me!” the man replies.

“Prejudice is the child of Ignorance” said William Hazlitt a couple of centuries ago. For the most part he is surely right, but not in some situations. Having just emerged from two weeks in Israel, I’d have to say that the prejudices that vibrate across that country are deep and complex – not a matter of simple ignorance. When I look at the way battle lines were drawn between different ethnic groups in New Testament times, the situation there is also complex.

The Jews of 1st century Palestine did not mix with the Greeks and the Romans. Why not? Partly because they (the Romans) were an unfriendly foreign power that had invaded their land. Partly because they represented a style of life that the Jews saw as idolatrous and self-seeking and that threatened to corrupt their youth. Partly because Biblical piety demanded that the Jews remain a separate people – distinct in appearance and in lifestyle from their neighbours. And partly, I suppose, because they just looked different.

Visit Israel today and you will likewise find a situation that is complex, yet the reality of prejudicial hatred and violence is everywhere. It was a good learning experience for me – being on the wrong end of prejudice. Being male, middle-class and white, I’m normally well ensconced on the comfortable side of racial tensions. Not so when I went to Israel. It was a first for me to feel looked down upon, to be threatened, kicked and spat upon, though I was always conscious of the fact that I was just a tourist. Others had to live with this every day.

If we had met the Apostle Paul before his conversion – when he was still known as ‘Saul’ – we would have found him hard to get on with. Well … I suppose he would have had no dealings with us. Even so, if we caught a glance from him as he was passing by we would have felt him looking down his nose at us. He wouldn’t have deemed us worthy of his conversation, let along his presence at a meal.

I imagine Peter to be naturally warmer than that. My guess is that Peter would have managed a smile for just about anyone – from his fellow Jews to Samaritan women! Even so, the early Peter would never have consented to sit down to have a meal with us, as he would not stain himself by coming under the same roof as us.

And it’s not a case of simple prejudice based on ignorance. God Himself had given the people of Israel a variety of rituals with which they circumscribed their lives, and the whole point of those rituals was to make themselves different as a people.

To be ‘holy’ always meant to be ‘separate’ or ‘different’. The Jews were self-consciously different. And they wanted to remain different because God wanted them to be different!

It was written: ‘every male among you shall be circumcised’. That made them different.

It was written: you don’t eat pork (Leviticus 11). That made them different too.

Indeed there were lots of things written that were designed to remind you that you, as a child of God, were different from the rest of the world – holy, pious, focused on God.

Of course this sense of thinking that you were different from others easily lends itself to thinking that you were better than others, which is where the critique of Jesus upon the whole system begins. According to the dream in Acts 10 and 11 though it appears that the entire system is to be abandoned! The actions runs as follows:

1. Peter has a dream of a great picnic where God is telling him to have a bite of all the things that he isn’t supposed to eat. Peter has this dream three times!

2. As he finishes dreaming, representatives of Cornelius the Roman centurion come to his house and ask him to accompany them to meet Cornelius.

3. Peter goes with them, enters Cornelius’ house, starts talking, and everybody starts speaking in tongues, reminiscent of the day of Pentecost!

4. Peter says, “These people have received the Holy Spirit just as we have”, and so everybody gets baptised.

This is my summary of Acts 11, and Acts 11 is actually just a summary of Acts 10. This is a story that gets repeated over again in the book of Acts, presumably because it is important.

I think I’m right in saying that there is only one other story in the book of Acts that gets this sort of treatment. It’s the story of Saul’s experience on the road to Damascus – where he’s thrown of his horse and blinded and where he hears Jesus speaking to him.

Ironically, in both cases, the truth that God brings to the men is roughly the same – that God does have a place in His heart and in His Kingdom for non-Jews.

What we need to understand is that this was the big issue in the first century church. This was why the early Paul (or ‘Saul’) and so many of his pious contemporaries hated the Christians.

It wasn’t just because the Christians thought that Jesus was the Messiah. That might have been a sticking point for some, but within the Jewish faith there were then (as there are now) different beliefs about who was the Messiah.

It wasn’t just about who the Messiah was. It was most fundamentally about the fact that the Christians were dissolving the dividing wall between Jew and non-Jew, and this was seen as a threat to the entire fabric of their faith and their society!

There might well have been room within Jewish society to accept different beliefs about different Messiahs. Look at the literature of 1st century Israel and you will see that different groups had different Messianic expectations. Most people were waiting for a warrior leader. Some were waiting for a priest. If you look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, it seems that the Qumran community, who were a group of Jewish monks, were expecting both!

1st century Judaism might well have been able to absorb within its ranks any number of godly Jews who recognised Jesus as the Messiah, and had not God given Peter this dream, and had not God struck down Saul and turned him into Paul, and had not God very deliberately forced the church to burst the bounds of any narrow ethnic exclusivism, then we might still be a small sect within the larger body of Judaism.

But it was not the will of God that his people should remained defined by any one ethnic group, just as it is not the will of God that we remain defined by any one social group, just as it is not the will of God that we be defined by any homogeneous unit that separates us from our fellow men and women.

On the contrary, as we read about God building the church in the book of Acts what we see is that He was very deliberately building a multi-coloured community where in Christ there was ‘no Jew nor Greek nor Palestinian nor Arab, no rich or poor, no slave or free, no male or female, but where all are one, for all are in Christ as Christ is in all.’

Peter had a dream. Martin Luther King had a dream. Some of us find that this dream continues.

It took us some 2000 odd years, and it is taking the church longer than most, but we seem to be finally discovering that there is indeed no male nor female in Christ, but that women are in fact equally capable of ministry and service as are men. It turns out that “These people have received the Holy Spirit just as we did”. By the grace of the Spirit of God some of us have discovered that, and so the dream continues.

For me the biggest personal spiritual breakthrough in the last ten years has been a realisation concerning my brothers and sisters who share a different sexual orientation to mine. By the grace of the Spirit of God I came to see that “many of these people had received the Holy Spirit just as I had”. And so the dream continues.

For many of us here the Spirit of God is still at work expanding our vision and enlarging our hearts, helping us to realise that young people as well as old, uneducated as well as educated, working class as well as middle class, people of all types and colours and backgrounds are all one in Christ Jesus, indeed, that “these people have received the Holy Spirit just as we have”.

It is a dangerous thing to dream. And it is certainly unsettling for the church leadership. Things would be so much easier if God restricted Himself to communicating with us only through the direct study of the Scriptures. Such a God would be a lot easier to contain and to predict. But it seems to be built in to the package, that if we are going to worship a living God, then we are going to have to put up with ongoing surprises.

And the surprises, I believe, keep coming in this same area – that God is continuing to open us up as a community to become the truly multi-coloured family that He always intended us to be. They tend to keep being in the area of pushing us beyond our comfort zones and moving us from ‘me’ to ‘we’ and from ‘us and them’ to just ‘us’.

I must admit that spending a couple of weeks in Israel has deepened my perspective on these matters. I’ve now had the experience of being kicked and spat upon because I am different. This is not the way things are supposed to be. This is not the way that things one day will be. And God has very deliberately constructed the church so that it might be a sign to the world now of the fact that things don’t have to be this way.

We are not there yet, but we can keep building and we can keep praying and we can keep dreaming, of that great feast when all peoples will come together and share together in the good things that God has given us, of that day when former slaves and former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at a table of fellowship, of that day when every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

‘Fighting Father’ Dave – Parish Priest, Community Worker, Professional boxer, Martial Arts master, Father of three. Dave’s goal is to offer an alternative culture for young people, based on values of courage, integrity, self-discipline and teamwork. He is available to help work your corner as you fight the good fight. Visit http://www.fatherdave.org for more information.

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Faith is Passion

I am telling the truth in union with Christ-I am not lying, for my conscience, confirms it in the Holy Spirit. I have deep sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart, for I could wish that I myself were condemned and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my relatives according to the flesh. They are Israelites. To them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, Christ descended, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.
(Rom 9:1-5)

“Faith is passion!” It was Soren Kierkegaard who said it first, or if he didn’t actually say it first he certainly made the statement famous. Either way it makes for a fitting heading to this short soliloquy from the Apostle Paul, who himself was a very passionate man.

Some of us have been brought up steeped in the teachings of St Paul, though the passages I was read from my youth tended to be the more long and dry passages that begin with a ‘therefore’ and developed into a tangled argument about law and faith, along the lines of the often obscure logic of the Rabbinical system that St Paul had been educated in.

This short outburst from the Apostle actually comes in the middle of one such long and complex argument, and indeed it is found in the middle of St Paul’s longest and most complex letter – his letter to the Romans.

This is the letter where St Paul laid out his mature conclusions about God and Christ more systematically than in anything else he ever published – the letter that went on to become the key focus of so much academic theological speculation – most notably perhaps in the writings of Martin Luther, who attempted to use Paul’s letter to the Romans to reform the theology of the Medieval church!

And yet here in the middle of this complex and often esoteric work we find this passionate outburst from the Apostle, who speaks of the “deep sorrow and unceasing anguish” that he feels in his heart, and who goes so far as to say, “I could wish that I myself were condemned and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my relatives according to the flesh.” (Romans 9:3)

This is a passionate outburst, and, interestingly, it’s not simply an outburst of passionate faith on Paul’s part but equally one of passionate patriotism, and that’s what I find really confronting in this passage, for I must confess that patriotism is generally something that makes me feel rather nervous!

I’ve just come back from the USA, as you know, and that’s a land where patriotism takes on a dimension that we are just totally unfamiliar with Down Under.

To some people there patriotism seems to mean that you don’t criticise your government, or at least that you don’t tell your government which countries they can invade and which people they should choose to target as enemies (and be warned that this is particularly off limits if you’re a foreigner)!

I read a disturbing article by an American while I was there that resonated with me, where the author noted the way military personnel were given an elevated status in the community. He noted the way in which servicemen and servicewomen were given preferential treatment by shop-owners and even at the post office where he watched a clerk falling all over himself to attend to the needs of a man in uniform.

‘Why should we honour this profession above others?’ the author asked, especially when we are aware that so many of the actions carried out by the military in recent times have been morally dubious at best? It’s as if it doesn’t matter who they kill or why they kill them so long as they kill in our name, because that’s what patriotism is!

Of course there’s supposed to be a distinction between patriotism, nationalism and tribalism, isn’t there, but those lines very quickly become blurred.

As I understand it, the proper point of distinction is that patriotism means taking pride in the good things we have accomplished as a nation, rather than pretending that all the things we have done as a nation have been good things. And it means taking pride specifically in those achievements, rather than simply taking pride in the fact that we are powerful or that we have a certain superior skin colour or anything ridiculous like that.

At any rate, if this is a decent definition of patriotism then St Paul was a true patriot, for his pride in his people was entirely based on the wonderful history they had enjoyed as special recipients of the benevolence of God:

To them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, Christ descended, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen. (Romans 9:5)

Paul is a Jew and he is proud to be a Jew. He takes great pride in all the good things that have happened in the history of his people – from the promises made to Abraham to the handing down of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai to coming of Christ, Himself a Jew.

But all that pride has now simply become a source of pain for Paul as he grieves over a failure on the part of his people that threatens to eclipse all of their achievements – the failure of the greater Jewish community to embrace Christ. “I could wish,” Paul says, “that I myself were condemned and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers” .

Clearly St Paul was not one of those who considered all religions to be the same! Is that right? Perhaps that’s not a very good way to put it, for I’m not at all sure that St Paul at that stage would have considered ‘Christianity’ to be an alternate religion at all.

When you read the larger letter of Paul to the Romans or any number of his other writings it is clear that St Paul saw faith in Christ as being the natural extension of the faith of his forefathers and not as an alternative to it. Moreover, I don’t think Paul for a moment foresaw faith in Christ as being something that would evolve into the massive monolithic institution soon to become the institution of the church!

Did St Paul think of faith in Christ as a religion at all in the traditional sense? That’s a question that is worth addressing, I think, but not within the confines of a Sunday sermon being delivered by a rather jet-lagged preacher. Let it suffice this morning simply to probe a little more deeply into the nature of Paul’s grief.

It’s because he believed all his fellow Jews were going to burn in hell!

That’s a knee-jerk response that might come immediately to minds of any number of us? It’s not what St Paul says of course. Indeed, St Paul never uses the word ‘hell’ in this passage (nor anywhere else in his writings for that matter) so that’s probably not the best way to describe his anguish.

It’s because his fellow Jews were labouring under the law, rather than celebrating the life of freedom and grace experienced in Christ!

That’s a far more Biblical response, I think, and one that far more accurately reflects Paul’s own broader teaching. It is indeed one of the key themes of this letter to the Romans that any attempt to get close to God through the path of legal obedience is one that is doomed to failure.

It’s not that we don’t want to do the right thing, and it’s not that we don’t try to do the right thing, but the truth is that we don’t do the right thing. This, sadly, seems to be our nature and our destiny. We are hence the fellowship of sinners that live by the Grace of God in the cross of Christ, and that fellowship includes us semi-righteous along with the thoroughly unrighteous, though there remains something of a question mark over the self-righteous.

The bottom line though is that God loves us all the same, and we’ve got to keep reminding ourselves of that as it is very religiously counter-intuitive. Our religious intuitions keep telling us that God has a special place set aside for good people, whereas the Gospel tells us that God has a special place for the poor, for the weak, for those who struggle, and for those who know they are struggling.

Was that what distressed Paul so deeply – thinking about his countrymen slavishly trying to please God through a rigid obedience to the Torah rather than through a living relationship with God through Christ? That has to be a significant part of Paul’s pain, I think, though we make a mistake if we try to separate the issue of legalism from the issue of race which it was intricately bound in with.

What was it that first turned the young Saul (before he became ‘Paul’) against the Christians? Was it their apparent neglect of the law, as demonstrated in their openness to those who were ethnically outside of God’s chosen community, or was it the other way around? Was it initially just a gut-reaction to the presence of non-Jews that got Paul all riled up, and the issue of law was really only introduced secondarily so that he could rationalise his prejudices?

Either way, this was the point at which Paul experienced liberation through Christ. Christ both freed him from the law and freed him to embrace his non-Jewish neighbours – people he would have previously despised because of their pagan ways and religious insensitivity, let alone their primitive culture, bad manners and revolting eating habits!

Christ liberated Paul from his narrow ethnic enclave so that he could enter a bigger world made up of many different sorts of people from a variety of different cultures and social strata. And no doubt it must have irked Paul considerably to think of his relatives and boyhood friends still slaving away in their tiny ethnically-monochrome communities.

This all has to be an essential part of the equation, I think. Even so, when you read the rest of this chapter in Paul’s letter to the Romans, and when you read not only this letter but the surrounding letters as well, I think you see clearly enough what was the fundamental source of the pain for St Paul, and it’s not just the legalism and it’s not just the racism, and it’s not just the two combined together either. It’s the fact that since Paul’s Jewish sisters and brothers could not accept Christ this meant they were no longer ‘God’s people’ in the way they once were!

God had chosen the Jews for a special work in the world – Paul was abundantly clear about that – and God had acted through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and through Moses and through those who came after him – through Jewish monarchs, priests and prophets over many generations, and yet in Paul’s own time God had moved in a new way and was now reconciling the whole world to Himself through Christ. And if the majority of the children of Israel (ethnically speaking) were not moving with God in this regard they were no longer the people of God.

If you read the rest of Romans 9 you’ll see how Paul develops his argument. He says that membership of God’s chosen people had never been an issue of simple ethnicity. Abraham and Isaac had had lots of children, but not all of them had been the ‘children of the promise’. It was never just a blood connection that made you a part of the people of God. It was inheriting the faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that counted, and in failing to embrace Christ Paul’s people had failed to be true Jews where it counted

Does this mean that we should therefore disrespect Jewish people because their role in the historic plan of God seems to have come to an end? By no means! Indeed …

To them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, Christ descended, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.

There are plenty of reasons to respect the Jews for their role in the history of the People of God. There is no excuse whatsoever for anti-Semitism of any sort. Even so, it is the community that gathers around Christ that continues the work of the people of God, and hence Paul refers to the church elsewhere literally as the ‘Israel of God’ (Galatian 6:16).

Should this then make us proud – that we, the church, have got it right where God’s historic people got it wrong? On the contrary, says St Paul, instead of getting arrogant we should take all this as a warning. For if the historic people of God are capable of getting it fundamentally wrong we are all capable of getting it fundamentally wrong.

And this is where the rubber hits the road for us in this passage, I believe, for we all know full well that just as God’s historic people lost the plot at various points in their history, we, the church, have likewise repeatedly lost the plot – forgetting the Gospel of grace and losing track completely of what God is doing in the world.

I don’t know whether any of us have read Desmond Tutu’s latest book, provocatively entitled, “God is not a Christian”. And yet even a cursory reading of history shows us that the former Archbishop of Capetown is entirely correct. God is not a Christian any more than God is a Jew. The church with its history of power-struggle and institutionalised violence has failed God just as radically as God’s people of old ever did. And just as Paul grieved over his people so we too should grieve over the church.

Part of the privilege of travelling is that you do get to see the church in action in a variety of different contexts, and Ange and Jim and I have indeed had the privilege over the last two weeks of being part of three different worshipping communities, as well as meeting with numerous other church people from a variety of different cultures and contexts.

And while indeed we did experience the unmistakeable presence of the Spirit of God in the beautiful Catholic community of St Thomas More in San Francisco, for example (certainly the most ethnically inclusive church I’ve ever had the privilege of worshipping with). And while I did indeed experience the unmistakeable presence of the Spirit of God in the small meeting of Protestant pastors in Orlando, Florida, that I joined in on – pastors who were meeting to see how they could best work together to address the needs of the extraordinarily large number of homeless people in their area. And while we did indeed see God at work in individuals and faith communities wherever we went, it has to be said that the big picture for the church is pretty dismal.

Like the people of God of old we have failed to keep up with where God is moving in the world. We have got all caught up in being people who don’t smoke, drink or chew or go with girls who do and we have forgotten the Gospel of grace. We have once again formed ourselves into exclusive communities and used our faith pedigree as a basis for arrogance rather than humility. We have indeed failed in all the same ways that our spiritual fore-fathers and fore-mothers did, and sometimes it’s hard to know what to do about that, except to grieve.

But that’s not a bad place to start. It’s ok to grieve, and to grieve passionately, as St Paul grieved passionately, but to grieve in faith – believing that God has not finished with His people yet. Amen.

Rev. David B. Smith (the ‘Fighting Father’)

Parish priest, community worker,
martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of four
http://www.fatherdave.org/

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The Secular Jesus

One Sabbath, when he went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully. And behold, there was a man before him who had dropsy. And Jesus responded to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?” But they remained silent. Then he took him and healed him and sent him away. And he said to them, “Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?” And they could not reply to these things.

It’s the Sabbath again and Jesus is doing what he does best – teaching, healing, and getting Himself into trouble!

It’s a marvelous story that contains all the elements that we love in the Gospel stories. Jesus is spreading joy and causing controversy while the fumbling Pharisees scurry about in the background, dumbfounded and exasperated. And yet I hear you say, “didn’t we cover all this last week?”

Of course I don’t hear all of you say that, as some of you weren’t here last week, and some of you who were here last week aren’t here this week, so you’ll be forgiven for wondering what I’m talking about, and yet the point is well made, for the Gospel story from Luke chapter 13, that we dealt with last week, has some very obvious points of similarity with this week’s story from Luke chapter 14 (the next chapter).

Both are stories of Jesus healing people and both healings took place on the Sabbath. In both cases the healings led to a confrontation with the religious authorities over whether it was legitimate to heal people on the Sabbath, and in both cases the religious folk ended up with egg on their faces (so to speak).

Of course the stories are not identical. Last week’s story took place in a synagogue, and the confrontation was with the ruler of the synagogue, who I assumed to be a Pharisee. This week’s story takes place in the house of a Pharisee, who may or may not have been the ruler of a synagogue.

In the chapter 13 story, it was a crippled woman that Jesus healed – a woman who couldn’t straighten up. In the chapter 14 story it is a man with ‘dropsy’, which means that his limbs were swollen up. He may have looked something like the elephant man, in which case his problem may have been, in one sense, the opposite of the woman. She couldn’t straighten up. The elephant man, if you remember, couldn’t lie down.

Either way, Jesus heals them both. The woman is straightened, the man’s swollen limbs are somehow mysteriously deflated, and there is much rejoicing on the part of everybody, except these religious persons who just can’t come to terms with the way Jesus – a supposedly righteous Rabbi and a popular teacher of religion amongst the people – could so radically flout the law of God by disobeying on the fundamental divine commandments as given to Moses on the stone tablets – ie. remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.

As I say, there are some differences between the two stories, in chapters 13 and 14 respectively, but the basic point of issue between Jesus and his antagonists is identical in both cases. It’s an issue of law.

Jesus is disobeying the law of God. That’s the charge, and it’s a serious charge, and it’s the sort of thing Jesus was charged with all the time, which is extraordinary when you stand back and think about it for a moment!

Whatever people think of Jesus, they generally acknowledge him to be (at least one of) the greatest religious figures of all time. Yet the charge laid against him throughout his earthly life was that He was consistently irreligious! He was labeled as a glutton and a drunkard and a friend of society’s low-life – exactly the sort of characteristics we associate with irreligious persons. And He was seen as having scant concern for the law of God!

Of course Jesus would say that He came “not to abolish God’s law but to fulfill it” (Matthew 5:17) and yet that very statement is a tacit acknowledgement of the fact that Jesus did not deal with the divine law in the way in which religious folk normally did.

There was a divine law regarding what you could and could not do on a Sabbath and Jesus seemed to have very little regard for it. He seemed to be happy to re-interpret the law to suit Himself, and, significantly, He seemed to show little interest in giving any theological argument in support of His re-interpretation!

Indeed, as I compare the two stories that lie (more or less) side-by-side in Luke’s Gospel narrative, the thing that strikes me most in both instances is the complete lack of serious theological argument taking place between Jesus and the religious professionals!

This is what we religious people do: we argue theologically. And when a religious person re-interprets a divine law in some way such that they seem to be disregarding one of the ten commandments, the pattern we would expect is that they give some sort of theological justification for what they are doing.

I want to focus on this today as I think it is really important, as I think it illustrates that Jesus not only had a different ideas about God from His religious contemporaries. He evidently thought about God in an entirely different way. It wasn’t just Jesus’ conclusions that differentiated him from his religious contemporaries. It was the way He reached those conclusions. He not only spoke differently about God. He spoke an entirely different language!

I was reading a report recently on a fascinating conference that took place in Melbourne recently – a theological conference on the subject of “Trinity with tiers” (that indeed I think some of our community may have attended).

The main subject under discussion was obviously the doctrine of the Trinity, but behind the discussion about the nature of God and the relationship between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit was a more clearly tangible debate about the nature and the role of women in the church!

Those in the church who argue that women should always be placed in positions of subordination to men have been known to do so by appealing the way in which the pattern of eternal subordination is reflected in the nature of God, who is Father, Son and Spirit, where the three persons of God are equal and yet the Son is always subordinate to the Father. This then gives us a model (so the argument goes) that maintains both a nominal equality between persons while justifying a system that always gives the Son (or the woman) the lower place.

The key address in the Melbourne conference, I read, challenged this concept of eternal subordination which, it said was inconsistent with the Athanasian Creed, and suggested rather a concept of ‘economic subordination’, wherein the subservience of the Son to the Father is seen as taking place only for a limited time and in a particular context.

Now, if you don’t understand a word of what I’ve just said it really doesn’t matter, for my whole point is that this type of esoteric theological debate is entirely absent from the Gospel narratives.

We take this for granted but we should not. If it had been any other Rabbi or religious teacher and not Jesus who went around doing what He did on the Sabbath this would surely have been exactly what we would have expected. We would have expected some sort of lengthy theological defense of his actions, such that He could show how healing people on the Sabbath was in fact consistent with the Sabbath law as written, or why the law as written needed to be re-interpreted or discarded.

I’m not saying that we should have expected dialogues about the eternally subordinate nature of any of the members of the Trinity, but we would have expected the citing of other pieces of Scripture, illustrations of the way in which Biblical authorities themselves had, at certain times, re-interpreted the Divine Law in ways that were consistent with Jesus’ actions. We would have expected some dialogue, perhaps, that took us back to the creation stories in Genesis and showed us how the basic concept of rest, as exhibited by God on the seventh day, was not inconsistent with creative acts of healing.

We might have expected some argument about the nature of God or the nature of rest or the nature of the commandments, showing that obedience to them should at certain points be made secondary to the immediate obligation placed on us by the needs of our neighbors’. We might have expected something clever and complex and worthy of a Rabbi of Jesus’ standing. Instead, all we get from Jesus is what seems more like an off-handed comment than any serious argument. “If your ox falls into a well on the Sabbath, you pull it out, don’t you?” (14:5)

This was basically identical to the equally off-handed question He asked in the previous story, “you give your donkey a drink on the Sabbath, don’t you” (13:15). In neither of these cases is Jesus making any clever appeal to ways in which the Sabbath law can be extended to injured or thirsty animals under special circumstances. Rather, He is simply appealing to His hearers’ compassion. His attitude to their law is, in a word, dismissive!

I remember we had a visitor to our worship service here once from a certain area of the United States, and he asked me how I justified allowing woman to speak during the service. I responded by pointing out that there were churches in the area where he was from where snake-handling was a key component of their worship life. It wasn’t a particularly gracious response but I think it was consistent with the sort of response Jesus gave to so many of those who questioned Him. He just didn’t get into a debate with them!

Indeed, it is remarkable when you think about it, how rarely we see Jesus enter into any serious theological discussion with anyone in the New Testament. And when we do see this happen (such as in His dialogues with Nicodemus [John 3] or the woman at the well [John 4]) we very quickly see enormous misunderstandings occurring, as Jesus and his partners in dialogue seem to speak on entirely different levels!

It’s as if Jesus just didn’t speak the same language as His religious contemporaries. Perhaps we could go so far as to say that Jesus didn’t seem to speak a religious language at all, for certainly His dialogues in these two stories in Luke seem to be at an entirely secular level. Jesus’ opponents are talking about the law of God and their religious obligations. Jesus is focused on the women and men around him, and His dialogue is not about things mysterious and overtly religious but about helping needy oxen and donkeys!

Indeed there is something secular and irreligious about Jesus, just as there is something awfully secular and irreligious about the whole idea that God should choose to give Himself to us in the flesh and blood of this single human being! Jesus is irreligious. The whole concept of the incarnation is entirely irreligious! No wonder Judaism and Islam can’t accept it!

There remains one question from today’s Gospel that still concerns me, and it is this. Even if Jesus did two consecutive healings on two consecutive Sabbaths where he received exactly the same response from his religious contemporaries and then made an almost identical response to each of them, why did the Gospel writer, Luke, bother to record both incidents? Would not one have been enough? I’m sure there were plenty of other stories about Jesus that he could have included that he chose to leave out. Why include both of these when the two stories are, for all intents and purposes, identical?

The only answer I can come up with to this question is that Luke must have figured that we needed to hear all this twice (and maybe a few more times, as there are other stories of an entirely similar nature again in Luke and throughout the Gospels). Why do we need to keep hearing about this? I think it’s because we just don’t get it. We keep looking for something more spectacular, more obviously transcendent, and more overtly religious. What Luke seems to be trying to get through our heads is the fact that living the life of Jesus is not about being religious? It’s about compassion.

For it’s not obedience to the law that brings us to God. It is Christ. And Christ’s work in us is not to bind us to any code, but to live His life through us and show his compassion through us, and so bring healing and wholeness to our sick and broken world. Amen.

Rev. David B. Smith
(The ‘Fighting Father’)

Parish priest, community worker,
Martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of three
www.fatherdave.org

Fighting Father Dave
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