A Good Friday sermon on John 19:1—30.

So they took Jesus, 17 and carrying the cross by himself he went out to what is called the Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha. 18 There they crucified him and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them. 19 Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” 20 Many of the Jews read this inscription because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek. 21 Then the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’ ” 22 Pilate answered, “What I have written I have written.” 23 When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his clothes and divided them into four parts, one for each soldier. They also took his tunic; now the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from the top. 24 So they said to one another, “Let us not tear it but cast lots for it to see who will get it.” This was to fulfill what the scripture says,

“They divided my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.”

25 And that is what the soldiers did.

Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. 26 When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” 27 Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

28 After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am thirsty.” 29 A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. 30 When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

“Only good where evil was, is evil dead…

Naomi’s Plan: Risky and Risqué

Chapter 3 of the book of Ruth is the crucial episode in the story. The plot reaches its climax. But it is also the most disputed part of the book. It’s purposely written with ambiguous language that leaves a lot to the reader’s imagination.

In Ruth 3 Naomi devises a plan. She tells Ruth to bathe, anoint herself, and then get dressed. She is to go under the cover of night to the threshing floor where Boaz will have had a good meal and a good strong drink. After Boaz has laid down for the night, Ruth is to go “uncover his feet and lie down.” After that Ruth is to do whatever Boaz tells her to do.

Naomi’s plan is pretty straightforward. It doesn’t take much to know what she is insinuating: a sexual encounter is about to happen between Ruth and Boaz.

What does Naomi hope will happen? The story does not say. But when you take everything into account the most obvious answer is that Naomi hopes Ruth will become pregnant. This is sort of a plan of entrapment.

Biblical Bed Tricks

Why all this risqué material? The story is not lewd but it is racy. The ambiguous details of this scene are meant to cause the reader to make connections to two older stories from Genesis about the ancestors of Ruth and Boaz.

Both Ruth and Boaz have ancestors in their past who were involved in very similar stories—stories that Wendy Doniger calls “bed trick” stories. A “bed trick” is a very very common literary device where one character goes to bed with someone who is mistaken for someone else. 

First, Ruth’s ancestors. In Genesis 19:30—37 we read the story of the origins of the Moabite people: Lot and his two daughters. Lot’s two daughters have been widowed (two sons have died!) and they are worried about the future of the family. The older daughter concocts a plan to get Lot, their father, drunk so that they can sleep with him and hopefully conceive sons. It’s a “bed trick.”

The oldest daughter conceives a son and names him “Moab” which means “from my father.” According to the story Israel tells the Moabites are the product of incest. These are Ruth’s ancestors.

But the second “bed trick” story is from Boaz’s past. In Genesis 38 we find that Judah, one of the twelve sons of Jacob, leaves his family and goes to Canaanite country (maybe even worse than Moabite country).

While he is there Judah marries a Canaanite woman and has three sons: Er, Onan, and Shelah. Judah’s oldest son, Er, marries a Canaanite woman named Tamar. But Er dies. Judah then gives his second son, Onan, to impregnate Tamar. But then Onan dies. So, Judah promises Tamar that he will give his third son, Shelah, to her when he is old enough so that she can have a child. But Judah never makes good on his promise.

Tamar decides to take matters into her own hands. During the time of sheep-shearing, she disguises herself as a prostitute and waits by the road for Judah. Judah sees her but thinks she is a prostitute and so he has sex with her. But Judah cannot pay her, so she insists that he leave his seal and cord with her as collateral. 

Tamar conceives and becomes pregnant. But Judah still does not know who she is. It’s a “bed trick.”

Later Judah finds out that Tamar is pregnant. He’s enraged and commands that Tamar be burned to death. But Tamar reveals that she has Judah’s seal and cord, showing that the son in her womb is actually Judah’s son.

Tamar, the Canaanite, gives birth to twins: Perez and Zerah. And as the book of Ruth will tell us, Perez is the great-great-great grandfather of Boaz.

The Healing of the Past…

The similarities between the two “bed trick” stories (Lot and his daughters and Judah and Tamar) with the story of Ruth and Boaz are crystal clear. But the meaning is not in the similarities but in the differences. The story of Ruth and Boaz is set up as a “bed trick” but at the moment where the deception should occur, Ruth does not hide her identity with a trick, but comes out into the open about who she is what she desires. And Boaz—though he has had a strong drink like Lot—has his wits about him. He immediately devises a legal plan for marriage.

Ruth is like many of Israel’s own ancestors—except she is better! (And Boaz is also better than his grandfather Judah.)

The story of Ruth is the healing not only of Ruth’s past history but also of Boaz’s. It is the healing not only of the Moabites’ past, but the healing of the Israelite’s past—which is just as stained as the gentiles. Part of the promise of the book of Ruth is that the children of wayward families can set right their own family histories. Ruth and Boaz are expunging the shame of their ancestors.

But the story testifies to even more than that. The book of Ruth teaches us that all things in the past can be set right if God is who he says he is: the Alpha and the Omega.

Jesus of Nazareth, who is the son of Judah and Tamar, is also the son of Ruth and Boaz. But this means he is also the son of Lot and his daughters. Jesus is not ashamed to make these people his kin.

And Jesus is the one who not only does the will of God so that his family’s past history is made right by the actions of his historical life, but because he is the resurrected one, he is the Lord of all time–Past, Present, and Future. And he intends to set every episode of all human history right. All time is in his hands. This includes the time of Lot and his daughters, the time of Judah and Tamar, and all the past tragedies, traumas, and evils in our own lives.

In other words, Jesus doesn’t just want to tidy up the end of the timeline (which is all Boaz and Ruth can do), he wants to heal the entire timeline—even those events that are long gone and in the past. He doesn’t simply want a happy ending to a difficult story. He is resurrecting the entire story of human history.

The promise of the gospel is that in the end, at Christ’s coming, he will unmake and then remake all past tragedies, traumas, and evils. What was untrue to God’s will shall be made true. 

We assume that because something is in our past it is over and done with. But just our past is is closed off to us does not mean it is closed off to him. He is the first and the last, the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.

We cannot access our own past, but he can. On our own we cannot make right what has happened, but he can make it so that all things are reconciled—even the traumas and tragedies of our past. And the promise of the gospel—the promise of the book of Ruth!—is that one day he will.

As Jordan Daniel Wood put it, “The scars of your past are not irreversible for him.” 

He will unmake all the evils in our past in order that his true will—his true creation—can come forth in its place.

But he will not not just erase it. Our God will unmake all evil and remake it so that his beauty, his goodness, and his perfect will shall be the truth of all past lies.

As George MacDonald elegantly put it his fairytale Lilith:

Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.

“Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

“And chance so chanced it…”

Everything just seems to fall into place in the book of Ruth. But while nothing is predetermined, neither are there any accidents. It is no accident that Ruth and Naomi arrive back in Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest. The author of Ruth knows what he’s doing. If he is going to confront a reading of the law like Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s, he’s going to have to show that he knows biblical law like the back of his hand. The beginning of the barley harvest provides him an opportunity to show how to read the law in a way that leads to life and blessing rather than death and cursing.

In ancient Israel, there were not very many ways for widows like Ruth and Naomi to make a living. So, unsurprisingly, the Hebrew prophets regularly call Israel to care for widows and orphans. The prophets simply called Israel to follow its own law. And this is what the author of the book of Ruth is doing.

Deuteronomy 24:19, 22 

19 When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the orphan and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands…22 Remember that you were slaves in Egypt. That is why I command you to do this.

Leviticus 19:9–10

9 When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10 Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.

Naomi meets two out of the four criteria listed here and Ruth meets three. And as my Dad would say, “Three outta four ain’t bad.”

“Good Gossip”

Ruth’s plan is to take advantage of these gleaning laws for the vulnerable population. But she will still need to find favor if her lawful right to glean is going to be recognized.

We should be holding our breath as Ruth leaves the safety of Naomi’s side to venture out into the fields around Bethlehem. How will she be met by the locals? If we are clued into the tension of the story between the Israelites and the Moabites, we know how risky this next scene will be. But the book of Ruth surprises us again. Where we expect to find cursing we find only blessing.

In the fields of Boaz Ruth has been met with kindness (even by his workers). Upon Boaz’s arrival to the harvest he notices a stranger gleaning with the others. Boaz questions his supervisor: “Whose is this young woman?”

The answer he receives should sweep us off our feet—not primarily because of what is said, but because of what is left unsaid. Boaz’s supervisor does not speak harshly about Ruth for gleaning and neither does he slander her for being a Moabite. On the contrary, he only has good things to report about her. Chris Green describes the scene like this:

Clearly, Bethlehem is alive with gossip. But this turns out to be good gossip. Although there is surprise, no doubt, and some uncertainty about what [Ruth’s] presence means, there is nothing biting, nothing venomous, in [the supervisor’s] description of her. He praises Ruth for the work she has done, praise sure to remind readers of the matriarch, Rebekah (Gen. 24:44—49). Even he, young as he is, can see that Ruth the Moabite is a woman of ancient, magnificent grace.

This is good gossip! Boaz hears what he should hear about Ruth and not what he shouldn’t hear about her. In a time of unthinkable violence—the time of the judges—this little community doesn’t even use words to violate others.

Let the reader understand.

Recognizing the Unrecognizable

Boaz blesses Ruth just as he blessed his workers upon his arrival. She is welcome here. But she is more than welcome. Not only is she welcome to glean behind Boaz’s workers, she is to go right up to the standing sheaves. She is welcome even to drink from Boaz’s water supply and to have a hardy lunch with him and his workers (with Tupperware to take home!).

Ruth’s response is a key to the meaning of the whole book: “Why have I found favor in your eyes for you to recognize me when I am a foreigner [an unrecognizable].” The play on words is evident. Ruth is a foreigner. She is in a place where no one recognizes her, and yet she is recognized—she is home.

At the heart of the story of Ruth is the converging of what Herbert Marks calls the two archetypical stories in the western literary tradition: 1) the going away from home and 2) the returning home. These are the two plots we like to tell. But the author of Ruth has integrated them into one story. Ruth is leaving her home to go with her mother-in-law, but the author has continually told us that Ruth is herself “returning home.”

Those who lose their home will find it.

Father Abraham, Mother Ruth

This leads to what is perhaps the most significant line in the book of Ruth. Ruth wonders why it is that she has found favor in the sight of Boaz. Boaz’s response is incredibly rich with layers of meaning: “All that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband has been fully told me, how you left your father and mother and the land of your kindred and went to a people whom you did not know before” (Ruth 2:11).

This is a blatant allusion to Father Abraham—the patriarch of Israel. Genesis 12:1, “Now YHWH said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you…’”

By leaving her kindred and her land to travel to Bethlehem with Naomi, Ruth has acted like Abraham who left Ur to travel to Canaan. Like Abraham, she is leaving home in order to come home.

The book of Ruth is filled with what Yair Zakovitch calls “inversion stories.” In “inversion stories” similarities are purposely made with another story in order to bring the two stories into conversation. But once the similarities are established between the two stories, a crucial detail of the older story is inverted. The key to reading these stories—according to Zakovitch—is this: whenever there are similarities in two stories, look for the difference. That’s where the meaning is.

Here’s Zakovitch on the inversion happening between the story of Ruth and the story of Abraham:

The inverted comparison between Ruth and Abraham testifies that this Moabite woman, who knows no selfishness, who leaves her country out of commitment to her mother-in-law with no hope to become a mother herself, is a more noble figure than the nation's father, Abraham.

This is the book of Ruth’s provocative, subversive point: We, the readers, are not only expected to say that Ruth is as great as Abraham. We are expected to say that Ruth is much greater than Abraham!

When Abraham was told by God to leave his homeland he was promised that God would bless him and make him into a great nation with too many children to count. Ruth, by contrast, was not promised anything. Naomi virtually guarantees that if Ruth leaves her homeland she will not have any children. But Ruth clings to Naomi even when there is no hope for a future.

Ruth is a more faithful Mother to Israel than Father Abraham.

Ruth and the Spirit of the Law

Ruth is clearly confronting the law. And yet—according to Jewish tradition, the book of Ruth is read each year at the Feast of Weeks. The Feast of Weeks is the Jewish festival which commemorates the giving of the law at Mt. Sinai. If Ruth does indeed confront the law, why would it be read at this time in the Jewish calendar?

Yair Zakovitch puts it like this: “The author of Ruth has to show that he knows biblical law very well, and he does this by showing that he understands the spirit of biblical law very well.”

The book of Ruth is confronting a sense of law. It is contesting a reading of the law (perhaps by characters like Ezra and Nehemiah). It is contesting a dead, dry way of reading the law. But it does this precisely by appealing to the spirit of the law.

The spirit of the law was always meant to lead to life not death, healing not harm, wholeness not fracture, to the flourishing of all humanity not the dehumanizing of human beings.

One way to think about the book of Ruth is to see it doing something like what Jesus did when the religious leaders brought the adulterous woman before him. They had a text. They had the letters of the law. The law says that she must be put to death for her adultery. But Jesus stood between their reading of the law and the vulnerable woman.  The law was (and is) on his side.

The same logic that is at work in the book of Ruth is at work in the Sabbath controversies in the Gospels. The religious leaders are upset that Jesus is healing people on the Sabbath. It is unlawful. They have a text. They have the letter of the law. But Jesus knows the spirit of the law, just as Ruth does. Jesus responds: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).

In other words, human beings were not created in order to bear the weight of burdensome laws, rather the law itself was given for humanity’s flourishing.

This is precisely what the book of Ruth bears witness to: Any reading of the law that maims, harms, or abuses is contrary to the spirit of the law because it is contrary to the Spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. The law and Jesus share the same Spirit. And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

“[Ruth is the] loveliest complete work on a small scale, handed down to us as an ethical treasure and an idyll.”

-Goethe

Subversion

Many interpreters have referred to the book of Ruth as a “subversive” story. If something is subversive, it is a quiet but powerful overturning of some other authority. It’s subtle. And if something is effectively subversive, its long-term effectiveness depends on it not being recognized for what it really is immediately.

And this, as Eugene Peterson points out, is precisely the way Jesus taught. We call them parables. His little stories seemed to be harmless. And so listeners relaxed their defenses.

And then they went home and wondered what these stories meant. The characters and plots were lodged deep in their imaginations “like a time bomb” that “would explode in their unprotected hearts…they had been invaded.”

The kingdom of God is subversive. It’s like a little seed that is planted in the ground. It doesn’t seem very powerful, but when it takes root and grows it can bust through concrete. 

The book of Ruth is one of the kingdom’s most powerful seeds. It seems completely harmless—almost like a Hallmark channel movie—sweetness verging on the edge of being saccharine. But its power is almost unmatched.

“Drama Without Conflict”

Robert Alter describes Ruth like this:

Unlike the narrative from Genesis to Kings, where even pastoral settings are riven with tensions and often punctuated by violence, the world of Ruth is a placid bucolic world, where landowner and workers greet each other decorously with blessings in the name of the LORD… The idyllic nature of the book is especially evident in its characters. In the earlier biblical narratives, character is repeatedly seen to be fraught with inner conflict and moral ambiguity. Even such presumably exemplary figures in the national history as Jacob, Joseph, David, and Solomon exhibit serious weaknesses, sometime behaving in the most morally questionable ways. In Ruth, by contrast, there are no bad people.

Riffing on Alter, Chris Green says that Ruth is “deceptively simple, strikingly peaceful. Drama without conflict.”

The key to seeing the drama is in the oft-repeated word used throughout the book of Ruth: “Moab/Moabite.”

Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Moabites

The book of Ruth is set in the “time that the judges judged.” But many scholars think that Ruth was composed at a much later date: the time after the return from exile, the time of Ezra and Nehemiah.

Ezra (a priest) and Nehemiah (a Jew serving in the court of the king of Persia) were concerned with two things: rebuilding the walls of the city and rebuilding devotion to the Torah. They were particularly concerned with purity and gentile contamination. The worst of the gentiles being the Moabites.

As Ezra/Nehemiah are reading the Torah they come to this passage in Deuteronomy 23:3-4

No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the LORD, not even in the tenth generation. For they did not come to meet you with bread and water on your way when you came out of Egypt, and they hired Balaam son of Beor from Pethor in Aram Naharaim to pronounce a curse on you.

And this was a problem. Upon their return to Judah, Ezra and Nehemiah find that many Jewish men had married Moabite women and had children with them. What should they do?

Nehemiah 13:1–3, 23-25

On that day the Book of Moses was read aloud in the hearing of the people and there it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever be admitted into the assembly of God, because they had not met the Israelites with food and water but had hired Balaam to call a curse down on them. (Our God, however, turned the curse into a blessing.) When the people heard this law, they excluded from Israel all who were of foreign descent.

Moreover, in those days I saw men of Judah who had married women from Ashdod, Ammon and Moab. Half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod or the language of one of the other peoples, and did not know how to speak the language of Judah. I rebuked them and called curses down on them. I beat some of the men and pulled out their hair.  I made them take an oath in God’s name and said: “You are not to give your daughters in marriage to their sons, nor are you to take their daughters in marriage for your sons or for yourselves.

The oath is clear: do not give your sons or your daughters in marriage to Moabites. Fine. But what about those who had already married Moabites and had children with them? What were these people supposed to do? Enter Ezra.

Ezra 10:3, 10-11, 44

“Now let us make a covenant before our God to send away all these women and their children”… Then Ezra the priest stood up and said to them, “You have been unfaithful; you have married foreign women, adding to Israel’s guilt. Now honor the Lord, the God of your ancestors, and do his will. Separate yourselves from the peoples around you and from your foreign wives.”

All these had married foreign women, and they sent them away with their children.

And it was in this tragic and contentious moment in Israel’s history that the author of the book of Ruth began to write a subversive love story about a Moabite named Ruth.

Hesed: “And Ruth clung to Naomi”

There is a long tradition in Judaism that argues that the purpose of the book of Ruth is simply to teach hesed—by showing rather than telling.

One ancient Jewish midrash puts it like this:

Rev Z’eira said: “This book contains neither [laws of] impurity or purity, nor [laws of] prohibition or permission. Why then was it written? To teach how good is the reward of those who bestow hesed on others” (Midrash Ruth Rabba).

The Hebrew word hesed is notoriously hard to translate. English translations translate it with a slew of different words. Usually hesed is rendered as “loving-kindness” or “faithfulness.”

Perhaps its best to think of hesed with an image. As Naomi had set out to return to Bethlehem, her two daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, were of a mind to go back with her. Naomi commanded them to turn back to Moab. Through tears and with a kiss Orpah obeyed. But, the text says, “Ruth clung to Naomi.”

Avivah Zornberg suggests that this is Ruth’s identity. She clings. And in this clinging she forfeits her identity. In one of the most famous speeches in Scripture, Ruth strikes a covenant with Naomi with these words:

“Do not urge me to leave you or to turn back from you.

Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.

Your people will be my people and your God my God.

Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.

May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely,

if even death separates you and me” (Ruth 1:16-17).

And here we begin to get a glimpse of the subversion at work in the book of Ruth. It is the Moabite Ruth who shows us what hesed looks like. She is the Good Samaritan of Jesus’s parable.

The Still Small Voice

Ellen Davis calls the book of Ruth the “still small voice” of the Old Testament.

Elijah, remember, is told to stand on the mount before the Lord. And the text says that the Lord passed by. But first a great and strong wind came and rent the mountains and broke the rock into pieces. But the Lord was not in the wind. Then came an earthquake. But the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake came a fire. But the Lord was not in the fire.

All these threats came as the Lord said he would pass by. But hidden inside the threats of the wind, earthquake, and the fire, was something else. The still small voice. Ruth is the still small voice of the Old Testament because it comes on the heels of the wind, earthquake, and fire of the book of Judges.

In Scripture it this is essentially a rule: hidden inside all of God’s threats there is always a promise; in every curse, there is always a blessing waiting.

Repaying Evil with Good, Curses with Blessings

The book of Ruth is surrounded by plenty of cursing. The cursing of Moab against Israel and then Israel’s curse back to Moab in return. No Moabite would be allowed into the assembly of Israel. Why? Nehemiah 13 tells us:

...because [the Moabites] had not met the Israelites with food and water but had hired Balaam to call a curse down on them. (Our God, however, turned the curse into a blessing.) When the people heard this law, they excluded from Israel all who were of foreign descent.

“They hurt us so we hurt them. They cursed us, and so we called a curse down on the Moabites.”

But, hidden right in the middle of the text is the blessing. The text says that the curse of the Moabites couldn’t succeed because “Our God turned the curse into a blessing.”

But immediately after mentioning this parenthetical statement, the Israelites go on to speak a curse against the Moabites. We should be chuckling to ourselves. The text invites us to giggle.

Moab cursed Israel. It did not succeed, but was turned into a blessing. Then Israel cursed Moab, but if we know the heart of God, Israel’s curse against Moab will not succeed either. 

God turns even Israel’s curse against Moab into a blessing.

This is just who he is. God takes all of our cursing into himself and transfigures them into blessing.

What is the cross if not the greatest possible curse. Paul quotes Deuteronomy in Galatians reminding us “cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree.”

Jesus is accursed. 

And yet hidden within the cursing of the cross is God’s greatest blessing to the world. In Jesus all curses become blessings.

Ruth as a Moabite is accursed and yet in her hesed for Naomi, in her loving-kindness, she does not repay cursing with cursing but transforms it into a blessing that will bless the entire world. Ruth will become one of the mothers of King David and, eventually, a mother to the Son of David, Jesus of Nazareth.

Ruth’s son famously put it like this: “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 6:27-28).

This is not a New Testament vs. Old Testament issue. Oftentimes we assume that the Old Testament is filled with curses and threats, but the New Testament offers mercy and blessing. No. The book of Ruth shows us that dichotomy is false. In speaking these words in Luke 6 Jesus was not overturning the Torah. He was following it. Jesus knew his Scriptures. And this is what they taught him. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you.

Or, put another way, he learned it from his Mother Ruth, the Moabite.

“Death used to be an executioner, but the gospel makes him just a gardener.”

George Herbert

Already-Not Yet?

We’ve let the explosive heart of the good news of our union with Christ radiate out in many different directions over the last couple months looking at faith, scripture, ethics, personality, and Israel.

There is one last line of questioning that I want us to tackle: If we are so deeply united with Christ in this way, why do we still sin? Why do we still suffer? Why do we still die?

One of the most popular answers given to this question is something New Testament scholars and theologians have called the “Already-Not Yet.”

This is based on a reading of the Old Testament and on a popular view among many Jews in the first century. The view has been called the “two ages” view: 1) there is the present evil age and 2) the age to come. We live now in an age of evil marked by sin, suffering, and death, but what God has promised through the prophets is a new age marked by shalom.

So how did first century Jews who started following Jesus, like Paul, think about these two ages? Many New Testament scholars have said something like this: in Jesus’ death and resurrection the “age to come” has already been inaugurated right here in the midst of the present evil age. The old age is creation “in Adam” while the new age is new creation “in Christ.” So, right now believers occupy the tension between the two ages. They live simultaneously in two ages. Hence, the overlap; or the “Already-Not Yet” as seen below:

In Christ, the age to come has arrived ahead of time in the middle of time and to be in him is to already participate in the new age, while still being here in the present evil age. I think there’s a lot to be said for this—not least that it is so pastorally helpful for understanding our current predicament.

Either/Or vs. Both/And

Now to complicate the picture. New Testament Scholar Ann Jervis has recently argued against the “Already-Not Yet” schema in her book Paul and Time. Jervis contends that Paul does not see believers as living in an overlap of the ages. Rather, for Paul the present evil age and being in Christ are mutually exclusive categories. It is an either/or not a both/and. 

I think her argument is—at the very least—worth attending to in part because the “Already-Not Yet” schema can suggest that believers are only partially united to Christ due to the unresolved tension of the “Not Yet.” Put another way, the victory Christ has won is not partial but whole.

If we take a text like Romans 5:12–21 we can see her point pretty easily. There is no hint of being both “in Adam” and “in Christ.” It’s—as Kierkegaard would have it—a stark either/or.

“Dying Is Not Fatal”

Adam and Christ are mutually exclusive categories. But how does one move from being “in Adam” to being “in Christ”? Through dying—by being baptized into Christ’s death.

Death no longer rules over those “in Christ” because Christ has trampled down death by death. Christ submits himself to the death of Adam in order to open up new creation for all those that are in union with him. Believers, then, move from being in one category (Adam) to another (Christ). But there is no overlap; the truth of our reality is not split or in tension. We do not occupy both Adam and Christ simultaneously. To be “in Christ” means that we’ve been set free from being “in Adam.”

To be freed from the power of death, though, cannot mean that believers do not physically die. Physical death remains a reality for both those “in Adam” and those “in Christ.” But because those “in Christ” have already been set free from the power of death through our baptism “death is no longer fatal.” Or as Chris Green has so memorably put it: “God saves us from death but not from dying.”

In Christ, life has swallowed up death. Christ’s life envelops, encloses, and surrounds Adam’s life. The way out of Adam and into Christ is precisely by dying (i.e. baptism).

Thus, in Christ, dying has a completely different meaning from what it previously had in the evil age. In the present evil age, our dying is caused by the powers of Sin and Death and leads to decay and destruction. But now, in Christ, dying is a transformative event. 

As Maximus the Confessor has it: Christ has transformed the use of death. It no longer leads to decay but to life. This is why—for the believer—dying just isn’t a problem for Paul’s way of thinking. A believer’s physical death is now a transformation from mortality to immortality which, Jervis explains, is not a change in their reality, but rather a publishing of what was already their reality in Christ.

Put another way, when our bodies will be raised it is not because we will be moving from being partially “in Adam” to being more fully “in Christ,” but that the resurrection of our bodies will be the revelation of the already accomplished truth of who we have been made to be.

Suffering “In Christ”

Paul understands union with Christ to involve suffering. Given what he learns on the Road to Damascus how could he think otherwise?

Paul talks about believers sharing in Christ’s ongoing suffering (Rom. 8:17). Believers do continue to suffer with Christ, but suffering is now the proof that we are in full union with him. Christ continues to suffer with us and in us!

St. Maximus the Confessor puts it in an astonishing way:

[God is] always suffering…in proportion to each person’s suffering.

Or Origen of Alexandria has it like this:

Christ confesses that whenever one of the saints is in weakness he is likewise in weakness, and that he is likewise in prison, and is imprisoned, and is naked, a stranger, and that he hungers and thirsts (Mt. 25:35–36). For who, of those acquainted with the Gospel, does not know that Christ, by taking on himself whatever should befall believers, reckons these to be his own sufferings?

Suffering no longer leads to death and decay as it did “in Adam,” because God in Christ has suffered and is suffering for you and with you, he has transformed the use of suffering to be a means of conformity to himself.

Sinning “In Christ”?

Paul writes in Romans 6:1–2, “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin;how can we live in it any longer?”

Paul does see Sin as a power that rules humanity “in Adam” (Rom. 5:21). But to be united with Christ is to be freed from the power of Sin. This doesn’t remove our capacity to sin, but it also does not mean that we are still under Sin’s pernicious rule.

To sin as someone who is “in Christ” is to refuse to act out of the freedom that you’ve been given. What it does not mean is that believers are partially “in Adam” and partially “in Christ,” partially ruled by Sin and partially ruled by Grace. Instead, as Karl Barth memorably put it, sin is the “impossible possibility” for believers. Sin is absurdity.

Jesus > Adam

Paul’s logic in both Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 is that all are in Adam. We have no problem talking about the universality of humanity being “in Adam.” Why, then, do we so quickly back-off his claim that all are also in Christ?

Clearly Paul sees that what God has done in Christ is so far superior to what he has done in Adam, that they can hardly be compared with one another (Rom. 5:12—21). Every human God has created is now “in Adam,” but “in Christ” he has reconciled all things to himself (2 Cor. 5:18—19).

Both creation and redemption are works of God. But as Paul so clearly says, the second work is vastly superior to the first (“How much more…!”).

This should give us great hope. Even, and especially, for those people who seem completely lost to us; those who have died and appear to us to have never seen the truth.

In the end, God is God and we cannot counsel him in any of his ways. But we are called by every page of Scripture to trust in this God’s unfathomable goodness.

As Ray Anderson once put it, we cannot put anyone into heaven, that is not our job. But it is our job to proclaim that Christ has gone down into the grave. And we can rest assured that anyone who is in the grave is not there alone.

This is our great hope: in Christ God has died in order to be dead with the dead.

This week we turn to a very deep question, and one that has caused terrible problems in the church throughout its history: When Saul met the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus what exactly happened for him?

Saul was zealous for the the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That zeal was leading him to persecute the church and he was doing this for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In his meeting with Christ he finds out that he was wrong. But what was wrong? Was he wrong to be zealous for the God of Abraham? No! In fact, this does not change. Paul remained zealous for this same God throughout the rest of his life.

So to come to the sharp edge of the issue, we could form the question this way: Was Saul “converted” on the road to Damascus? Before we answer too quickly, we should think about the connotations of the word “conversion.” In one sense, to “convert” is to change in some way, and of course Saul was changed. But what we usually hear in the word “conversion” is a change in the religions one follows or a change in the God one worship.

The truth is that Saul was not converted from the God of Abraham, but rather was drawn more deeply into his relationship with the God of Abraham when he met Jesus. Why? Because Jesus is the God of Abraham.

As Kendall Soulen has succinctly put it: “Converting more fully to the God of Israel and converting more fully to the triune God revealed in Christ are one and the same.”

The subject we take up this week is the thorny and tricky subject of the relationship of Christianity and Israel. 

And I think the church’s response to this question has too often been a supersessionist response. Supersessionism (or replacement theology) is the belief that the church has superseded—or replaced—Israel in God’s salvific plan. It’s a pernicious idea that has led to catastrophic results throughout history, usually at the expense of Jews (think: the Holocaust).

Most of us have inherited—explicitly or implicitly—a way of understanding the gospel that is by way of contrast. It’s deeply diseased and is at the heart of most of our problems theologically. Here are some of the usual contrasting moves most of us will have been taught:

Old Testament vs. New Testament

And very often at the core of this way of thinking is an unspoken assumption: the things on the left side of the ledger are associated with God the Father while the right side is associated with God the Son. This is not only wrongheaded, but heretical. Jesus’ very name—which means “YHWH saves” should keep us from this way of thinking, but unfortunately it hasn’t.

Untying this knot is not easy work, but I believe it is vitally necessary. This class was my attempt to offer a different way.

In all honesty, in teaching this I was “out over my skis” as the saying goes. I was trying to follow the arguments made by Robert Jenson. Reading him on the matter would certainly be more beneficial to you than listening to me. A good place to start would be the essay attached below, “Towards a Christian Theology of Israel.” I was clumsily fighting my way towards many of his conclusions in this essay, so I recommend reading it.

It’s not surprising that there is a wide range of opinions among New Testament scholars over what Paul means by the little phrase “in Christ.” Views range from the more figurative—to be “in Christ” is akin to being “in the hands of Christ” so that he cares for you—to the more literal and real (or, even spatial)—we are located in Christ like Noah and his family were in the ark.

As I see it, the difference here is the difference between ideas and persons. Is being “in Christ” an ideal membership—like being a member of Costco? Or is it a real communion of personhood—like a marriage?

Ideas and persons couldn’t be more different. Ideas are static and motionless. They can’t respond. Persons are dynamic. Persons arrive in unexpected places in time and speak.

A few years ago I attended a talk given by Bonhoffer scholar Andrew Root and he used this video to get at the difference between an idea and a person. (This is the video I showed.)

The idea of Robinson Cano is easy to boo, but when he arrives in his concrete personhood things change.

God arrives in the person of Jesus Christ. The communion that he establishes is deeply personal and intimate. It is real participation between you and the person of Jesus. He shares in your personhood and you share in his.

As Bonhoeffer put it: 

It is not written that God became an idea, a principle, a program, a universally valid proposition or a law, but that God became human.

Paul encounters the person of Jesus on the Road to Damascus and this breaks open his previous ideas about who God is and what God desires. And as Paul encounters Jesus’ person, Jesus shows Paul that he is in union with other persons.

Paul had not seen the world through the person of Jesus until this moment. His world was previously filled with ideas of people (dirty gentiles, idolaters, blasphemers, etc.) but not real persons.

After his encounter with Jesus, the rest of Paul’s life is focused on the personhood of his neighbors—especially his gentile neighbors. Paul had no problem recognizing the personhood of a low-status, female slave like Lydia or a high ranking Roman proconsul like Sergius Paulus.

Paul established what Douglas Campbell calls “strange friendships” that transgressed the barriers of race, gender, and class. Paul was able to see the people he met as persons rather than ideas or labels.

Why was he able to do this? What gave him this flexibility? It was the fact that he was “in Christ.” Campbell explains: Paul was an effective missionary because he was “in Christ” rather than under the law. And so were the people he met. They, too, were in Christ, whether they knew it or not. High status or low status, Jew or gentile, slave or free, male or female—all are in Christ and so Paul could go wherever the wind of the Spirit blew.

In short, he was all things to all people only because he was “in Christ” and “Christ is all and in all.”

Paul realized that this is what God has always been up to: making persons. Giving a face to the faceless. He desires to make us children! His own children. But to be a child of this personal God we must be made personal. And that happens only through relationship and communion.

I’ll leave you with one of my all-time favorite quotes from Hans Urs von Balthasar, which I think gets right at the heart of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ:

After a mother has smiled at her child for many days and weeks she finally receives her child’s smile in response. She has awakened love in the heart of her child…

What else could the incarnation be except the smile of God on humanity that is awakening love—and so making us personal again?

To be united with Christ is not about some static identity that you and I now “have.” Being united to Christ touches you at the very level of your being so that your life is now being formed into the very life of Christ. Our union with Christ is not just about who we are but has everything to say about how we live—our ethics.

As Irenaeus put it, “Christ became what we are in order to make us what he is.” This is transformation.

In Acts 9 we have two very different characters. Saul—who is not living into the truth of his own identity in Christ, but “kicking against the goads,” or living against the grain of who he truly is as he is persecuting Christ in the church; and Ananias—a disciple of Jesus who is living into the truth of his identity, and is called into action to let the life of Jesus happen in him in his ministry to Saul.

These are two different ethics (ethos = way of life). Saul, preventing Christ “who is his life,” from being formed in him; and Ananias, whose “Yes, Lord” comes without reflection or delay.

In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics there is a section entitled “Ethics as Formation.” Ethics for Bonhoeffer is not achieved by our efforts to imitate Christ and become like him, as if he is merely some historical and external model for us to emulate. The heart of Christian ethics for Bonhoeffer is having Christ take form in in us. Like a baby taking form in the womb. Real connection. Real union. Real participation in the same life.

According to Bonhoeffer, the way Christ takes form in us is through our taking responsibility for the world around us. Why? Because this is the very shape and form of Jesus’ life. Being-for-the-other and being-with-the-other. Jesus is radically for this world, he is for you and me, not against us. And in the incarnation we see that because he is radically for this world he is also with us. Emmanuel.

The whole content and quality of Jesus’ life is lived for others and with others. As Bonhoeffer puts it, “Jesus Christ is the man for others.”

It is this life that is to take shape and form in our lives. 

Here are some of the quotes from Ethics that we looked at:

“There is no part of the world–no matter how lost, no matter how godless–that has not been accepted by God in Jesus Christ and reconciled to God.”

***

“[Jesus] does not say ‘I have the life’ but ‘I am the life.’ Consequently life can never again be separated from…the person of Jesus…St. Paul describes this state of affairs very accurately, though also very paradoxically, in the words ‘To me to live is Christ’ (Phil. 1.21) and ‘Christ who is our life’ (Col. 3.4). My life is outside myself…My life is a stranger: Jesus Christ. This is not intended figuratively, as conveying that my life would not be worth living without this other, or that Christ invests my life with a particular quality or a particular value while allowing it to retain its own independent existence, but my life itself is Jesus Christ. That is true of my life, and it is true of all created things. ‘In all things that were made–He was the life’ (John 1.4).”

***

“Jesus Christ is our life, and so now, from the standpoint of Jesus Christ, we may say that our fellow-man is our life and that God is our life.”

It is in this mundane, boring, and everyday world that Christ wants to take shape in us. To be “in Christ” is not to be removed from the world, but to be pressed into this world in responsibility. Work/culture, family, politics—these are the relations that all of us are involved in whether we like it or not, and these are the places where Christ’s life of being-with and being-for must take form in us.

We are called to take responsibility for the world around us and share the place of our neighbors in their vulnerabilities, their sufferings, and their needs. These are the fields in which Christ must come alive in us.

This is the calling of ethics “in Christ.” Not to be conformed to some exterior standard or model laid down for us. But to make it so the presence and the peace of Jesus comes easily to those around us, just as Ananias did for Saul.

Lord, let it be so in us.

C.H. Mason, the pentecostal founder and first bishop of the Church of God in Christ, described his experience of union with Christ like this in 1907:

“As I arose from the altar and took my seat, I fixed my eyes on Jesus, and the Holy Ghost took charge of me. I surrendered perfectly to Him and consented to Him. Then I began singing a song in unknown tongues, and it was the sweetest thing to have Him sing that song through me. He had complete charge of me. I let Him have my mouth and everything. After that it seemed I was standing at the cross and heard Him as He groaned, the dying groans of Jesus, and I groaned. It was not my voice but the voice of my Beloved that I heard in me. When He got through with that, He started the singing again in unknown tongues. When the singing stopped I felt that complete death, it was my life going out, but it was a complete death to me. When He had finished this, I let Him hold my hands up, and they rested just as easily up as down. Then He turned on the joy of it. He began to lift me up. I was passive in His hands, I was not going to do a thing… He lifted me to my feet and then the light of heaven fell upon me and burst into me filling me. Then God took charge of my tongue and I went to preaching in tongues. I could not change my tongue. The glory of God filled the temple. The gestures of my hands and movements of my body were His. O it was marvelous and I thank God for giving it to me in His way. Such an indescribable peace and quietness went all through my flesh and into my very brain and has been there ever since.”

“For only in Christ is there removed not the reading of the Old Testament, which keeps hidden the strength of grace, but the veil by which it is hidden.”

-St. Augustine

On the road to Damascus Saul finds a new center for all of life. This crucified and risen Jesus is not just another part of creation. He’s the very heart of all creation. The life of Jesus flows in and through all things that exist. He is all and in all (Col. 3:11).

This new center forces Saul to reorient everything he knows around it. And this includes the Scriptures.

Think of Saul’s resume. He is trained as a pharisaical scholar in the Scriptures under the Rabbi Gamaliel. Paul knew the Law and the Prophets by heart; he knew them better than any of us could ever hope to.

And yet… Did Saul’s knowledge of Scripture lead him to Jesus? No. In fact, his deep knowledge of Scripture led him to persecute Jesus.

On the road to Damascus Paul does not leave the Scriptures behind, but he does drastically change the way he reads them. And his primary way of speaking about this is as an “apocalypse” or revelation. “Apocalypse” literally means “to unveil.”

He’s reading the same texts he’s always read, but they are now unveiled—and unveiled by the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth. Because he is the heart of the Scriptures, when they are unveiled, it is the face of Jesus that Paul sees. As Jesus tells the religious leaders in John 5:39 “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, but they testify concerning me.”

And as Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 3 the Scriptures are veiled until we turn to face the Lord Jesus. In other words, the Scriptures are cryptic in some way. They are not immediately accessible. They must be unveiled. As Paul might have put it: “The Scriptures weren’t talking about what I thought they were talking about.”

We have to let that sink in. We’ve too often been taught that the Scriptures function like an encyclopedia of free floating factoids. Look up a verse, read it, apply it, and away we go. But these texts led Paul to persecute Jesus. We can’t forget that. The Scriptures must be unveiled by the cross of Christ. He is their true meaning even when he seems not to be.

Irenaeus, in the second century, compares the scriptures to a field with a treasure buried in it:

If anyone, therefore, reads the Scriptures this way, he will find in them the Word concerning Christ, and a foreshadowing of the new calling. For Christ is the “treasure which was hidden in the field” [Matt 13:44], that is, in this world – for “the field is the world” [Matt 13:38] – [a treasure] hidden in the Scriptures, for he was indicated by means of types and parables, which could not be understood by men prior to the consummation of those things which had been predicted, that is, the advent of the Lord. And therefore it was said to Daniel the prophet, “Shut up the words, and seal the book, until the time of the consummation, until many learn and knowledge abounds…[Dan 12:4, 7]. And Jeremiah also says, “In the last days they shall understand these things” [Jer 23:20]. For every prophecy, before its fulfilment, is nothing but an enigma and ambiguity to men; but when the time has arrived, and the prediction has come to pass, then it has an exact exposition. And for this reason, when at this present time the Law is read by the Jews, it is like a myth, for they do not possess the explanation of all things which pertain to the human advent of the Son of God; but when it is read by Christians, it is a treasure, hid in a field, but brought to light by the cross of Christ, and explained, both enriching the understanding of men, and showing forth the wisdom of God.

Christ and Him crucified is the treasure hidden in the field of the Scriptures. It takes digging. This was the apocalypse Paul encountered: the buried treasure had actually come to find him. And so he confessed, “Christ is in God!” But not before he writes, “And we are in Christ.”

If we are truly united to Christ as his body, then when we find Christ in Scripture, we also find ourselves right there along with him. Because Christ is not Christ without his body.

As Hans Boersma writes, “If Christ is the subject matter [of all Scripture] and you are in him, then you are there, along with the treasure itself…Stick to the text, look for Christ—don’t stop digging, for the treasure is there. You’ll discover you’re one of its gems.”

Diagram: This diagram is from Fr. John Behr on the relationship between the Old and New Testament. The cross has always been the center—the true meaning—of the Old Testament. The New Testament does not “add” anything “new” to the Law and the Prophets. Rather it provides a clarifying “image.” It focuses our attention on the cross.

Maximus the Confessor (6th century) explains the relationship between the Old and New Testament by using the language of Hebrews 10:1: “For ‘shadow’ refers to the things of the Old Testament, ‘image’ to things of the New Testament, and ‘truth/reality’ to the future state.”

I was following arguments made by Fr. John Behr throughout this class. You can listen to one of his lectures here:

We often refer to Paul’s encounter with the risen Jesus on the Road to Damascus as a “conversion.” But it is an odd conversion. Paul does not leave behind his knowledge of the Law and the Prophets. He does not leave behind his devotion to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But he does have to reconfigure all that he knows around a new center—a new beating heart—Jesus of Nazareth.

One thing that is true for Paul both before and after his “conversion” is his zeal to be reckoned righteous. That desire for righteousness is not lost after the Road to Damascus, but he has to let this experience with the crucified and risen Jesus transform it.

New Testament scholar Michael Gorman imagines that as Paul sits blinded in a house on the Street called Straight he is running those words of Jesus over and over again in his mind: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

If the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has raised this Jesus from the dead, what does that mean for Paul’s passion for being righteous?

He knows that Habakkuk prophesied that “The Righteous One shall live by faith.” But what can faith mean now that he has met Jesus, the one whose power is made perfect in weakness; the one whose life is intimately, organically tied to his people?

Is faith something I do for God? Is it a work? Does it come from my own strength, my own capacity to decide what is right and wrong? Or is faith something deeper and more mysterious?

As Chris Green puts it, “Faith is a name for the life of Jesus happening in you.”

How could it be otherwise for Paul now? He knows that the heart of the gospel is union with Christ. Christ is in you and you are in Christ!

Is faith something Christ does for me or something I do? Yes. Faith is nothing less than the infinite life of God coming alive in you. Our salvation comes in being united with Christ like a baby in the womb is united with its mother. Where does the life of the mother stop and the life of the baby begin? It’s a deeply intimate and mysterious connection. What happens to the mother happens to the baby and vice versa.

Something like that is the truth of our union with Christ. What happens to us happens to him, and—here’s the wonder—what has happened for him will happen for us.

Here’s the poem by E.E. Cummings we ended with. I think it gets right at the heart (pun intended) of what it means to be in Christ.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in