Extra Credit Podcast

I.

Fleming Rutledge says that “Advent begins in the dark.” She writes,

We live in a world where the season of Advent is simply relegated to the “frenzy of holiday” time in which the commercial Christmas music insists that “it’s the most wonderful time of the year” and Starbucks invites everyone to “feel the merry.” The disappointment, brokenness, suffering, and pain that characterize life in this present world is held in dynamic tension with the promise of future glory that is yet to come. In that Advent tension, the church lives its life.

Advent is the season in which we take the darkness of the world seriously. In one of his letters from prison Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggests that Advent and a prison cell have a lot in common:

By the way, a prison cell like this is a good analogy for Advent; one waits, hopes, does this or that—ultimately negligible things—the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that we find the central figure of Advent, John the Baptist, in prison in Matthew 11. John has been thrown in prison by King Herod and as he awaits his execution he sends two of his disciples to Jesus to ask him a question: “Are you the one who is to come are should we look for another?” (Matt. 11:3).

This is most commonly read today as a moment of doubt for John. It makes easy sense to us. He is suffering in prison for unjust reasons. He is about to be put to death. How could this be happening to him as Jesus is so close by?

II.

It’s surprising, then, that hardly any of the early church fathers read Matthew 11 like we do. Some (like Tertullian and Justin Martyr) read this passage thinking of John like Peter. Peter confessed that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the Living God, but then is immediately rebuked by Jesus because he doesn’t think Jesus should suffer in Jerusalem. Peter made the right confession, but didn’t fully understand how Jesus was to be the Messiah. So, some fathers said, John was a pious prophet and acknowledged Jesus and preached the remission of sin, but he could not believe that Christ would have to die and suffer.

But that’s the minority report. Most of the fathers saw it differently. They said: What happened to Peter couldn’t have been what happened to John because John was a prophet—yes, even more than a prophet! Jesus couldn’t be clearer when he said that all the prophets testify that he must suffer, be put to death, and rise on the third day. This is the heart of the prophets. John was a prophet and Peter wasn’t. (In fact, Peter didn’t understand any of the prophets until after the resurrection.)

John bore witness to Jesus saying, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Clearly John knew that Jesus was not going to become the Messiah by military might, but that he would die as a sacrificial lamb.

So, why does he send his disciples to ask if Jesus is really the coming one? Is this not a moment of weakness? Church fathers like Gregory the Great, Jerome, and John Chrysostom insist that he was not asking out of his own doubt or ignorance, but because he already knew the answer to the question. Jerome says that John is asking this question in the way Jesus asked the question, “Where is Lazarus buried?” He did not ask because he was ignorant but in order that those who were with him “might be prepared for faith” and believe.

In the same way, John asks his question in order that he might prepare the way for his disciples to come to faith in Jesus, the Lamb of God. This is an astounding reading, and one that does not occur to most of us as we read Matthew 11 today. It sounds a bit hard to believe. On this reading, John doesn’t think of his imprisonment as something he must be delivered from, but he sees this as an opportunity for his disciples to come to faith.

It sounds absurd until you keep reading the passage. As John’s disciples head back to John, Jesus speaks to the gathered crowd about John. He asks the crowd:

“What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What, then, did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. What, then, did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.

(Matt. 11:7—9)

If John was a reed shaken by the wind he would be someone who was wavering because of his circumstances. But that’s not John. And, Jesus says, John does not wear soft clothing but camel’s skin, he doesn’t dwell in the king’s house but in the wilderness. John is quite at home in discomfort and suffering.

And if John is not only a prophet but more than a prophet, then of course he knows that Jesus is the promised messiah and that he must suffer in order to bring salvation to the world. All the prophets testify to this.

John is not sending word to Jesus to ask, “Are you really the one coming one? Are you coming to this prison to set me free or not?” Rather, John’s imprisonment has become the occasion for him to prepare the way for the Advent of Christ into the hearts of his own disciples and for those who hear his question today.

I wonder if this reading (which is easily supported by the text) sounds outlandish to us today simply because our faith is not as mature. Put another way, I think very often our readings of scripture tell more about us and our own character than anything else. Perhaps most of us don’t see this possibility in the text because we can’t imagine being this faithful ourselves. As Gregory the Great says, “The sacred scriptures grow with the one who reads them.”

(Both Gregory and Jerome actually go on to give an even deeper reading of John the Baptist’s question. They suggest that his question was not only for the sake of his disciples and their faith, but that John was actually asking for another commission from Jesus. Gregory says that John knew at the waters of the Jordan that Jesus was the Redeemer of the world, but now that he is about to die in prison and go into sheol John was asking if he could be the first one to tell the spirits in prison that Jesus is coming. In other words, both Jerome and Gregory suggest that John is saying, “After I die can I be the first one to share the good news in sheol?” That’s a reading that requires a level of faith that is way beyond my capacity to imagine.)

III.

We return to the theme of Advent. Advent is about the “once and future coming” of Jesus. But speaking of Christ’s “second coming” can be misleading. Of course it isn’t wrong to use this language, but we have to be careful that we not think that it means the Jesus is not here right now.

This is why Karl Rahner says that Christ’s “second coming” is really only the fulfillment of his one coming which is still in progress at the present time. The church has spoken of Christ’s Advent in three ways: 1) his advent in the Incarnation (past), 2) his advent in glory (future), but also 3) his advent in and through his Word and the sacraments (present).

That’s what Rahner means by saying that Christ really only has one coming which has already begun and will one day be fulfilled—but is also unfolding right now.

The mystery of Advent happens at any moment we open ourselves up to it. Through the power of the Holy Spirit you and I are being made to be the hands and feet of Jesus—his body. So, to put it another way, Christ wants to make his Advent to the world around you through you right now.

John was called to proclaim the Advent of the Lord. But John not only announced Christ’s initial coming, but he is also called to embody Christ’s advent even in prison.

Chris Green points out that it is odd that Jesus commands his followers to visit people who are imprisoned and yet here in Matthew 11 Jesus does not go and visit John in prison. Why doesn’t Jesus just go to visit John himself? Green says, because Jesus is in John in prison. “Whenever you visit the prisoner you do it to me.”

Jesus was inside John in prison, which is why John was able to become the Advent of Jesus for the sake of his disciples. Because Jesus was present in John in his suffering, his suffering was turned outward for the good of others.

IV.

Many of us feel like we are suffering in a sort of prison right now. And it is easy to begin to wonder why Jesus doesn’t come to you in your prison, in your suffering. But what we have to realize is that Jesus is in you in your suffering, turning it for your good and the good of those around you.

That doesn’t mean it was God’s will for John to be in prison. God didn’t put you in your prison but he is inside you in your prison and the walls will come tumbling down. That’s the promise of resurrection.

But in the waiting he’s filling you with his Spirit for the sake of your neighbor. In the midst of your prison God is making you to be the Advent of Jesus.

Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.

(Psalm 42:5)

Psalm 42 is a psalm of hope in the face of despair, but there isn’t a hint of optimism in it. The literary critic Terry Eagleton once said that the optimist is just as bereft of hope as the nihilist—neither has any need of it.

In common usage, though, the language of “hope” is on a continuum with optimism, only weaker. Imagine you have plans for a picnic with friends this weekend, but the forecast is predicting a strong chance of rain. You text one of your friends, “Do you think we will still have the picnic?” They respond, “I’m hopeful, but not optimistic.” You would think they were saying, “I’m wishing for it to happen, but I really don’t think it will.” In this usage, hope amounts to something like “wishful thinking” which doesn’t even rise to the level of optimism.

But the psalmist is not an optimist, and he is certainly not engaged in any wishful thinking. He’s hopeful.

Herbert McCabe defines optimism as the superstitious belief in “inevitable progress.” Everything will naturally work itself out in the end. Bad things are always followed by good things. “Happily ever after” is the arc of the universe.

If this psalmist was an optimist, his psalm would’ve sounded something like this: “My tears have been my food day and night and my enemies taunt me, my soul is cast down within me, BUT I’m sure tomorrow things will start looking up.”

This psalmist is not optimistic, but he is filled with hope. Optimism is impersonal, but hope is relational. Hope is the belief in a living God you know you can count on, even if you can’t predict what he is up to. His hope is in God.

When we talk about “hoping in God” today I think what we often mean is: “I wish my life would go a certain way, and God is the one who can make that happen.” It’s basically optimism with a dash of “God” thrown in. God becomes the mechanism that ensures the outcome we want.

But notice that the psalmist does not actually hope for any specific outcome in his life. His hope is only in God. I think we could put it in even stronger language: the psalmist’s hope is not just in the Lord, his hope is the Lord.

The prophet Jeremiah says, “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord” (Jer. 17:7). We could use this same formulation for the psalmist, and insert the word “hope.” His hope is in the Lord, but even more than that his hope is the Lord.

Your treasure could be in the bank but your treasure isn’t the bank itself. Our way of using the language of hope turns God into the bank that ensures our desires are fulfilled. Of course there isn’t anything wrong with hoping in God for certain outcomes in your life. But there is a difference in hoping in God for favorable outcomes, and trusting God with the entirety of your life.

Theologian Karl Rahner distinguishes these two hopes as “mundane hopes” on the one hand and “theological hope” on the other. Mundane hopes are not bad in any way. But they must give way to theological hope, a complete trusting in and desire for the Giver not just the gifts.

In one of his sermons Rahner puts it like this:

We have many hopes in our lives that fade, and the question arises whether we also have a hope given by God himself that underpins and embraces everything; a hope that does not perish, but lasts through all our other hopes’ undertakings. We have many hopes: for health, for victory over sickness, for success in life, for love and security, for peace in the world, and thousands of other things to which the life impulse reaches out. They are all good in themselves; we also experience repeatedly the fulfillment of these hopes in part and for a period of time. Finally, all these hopes get disappointed. They fade and pass away, whether they have been fulfilled or not; because we are headed toward death, and along this path our hopes are taken away one after another.

What then?...Is there just despair at the death of every hope…? Or does there occur then the event of the one and only, but all-encompassing, hope? Christians witness the experience that in the death of all hopes hope can surge up and conquer. Then we have no single thing to hold onto; the one unfathomability embracing all, and called by the true name of God, silently receives us. And when we let ourselves be taken and fall, trusting that this unfathomable mystery is the one blessed homeland, then we experience that we do not have to hold on in order to be held, we do not have to struggle to win…

He is himself our hope. God is the one all-encompassing, all-embracing hope that surges up and conquers even in death. The question is whether or not you can let go of your “mundane hopes” and fall into the hope that is God? Can you trust that falling into him is actually the best place to be?

Julian of Norwich, the 14th century English anchoress, led a life filled with suffering. She lived through three sieges of the black plague which killed over half of the population in Norwich. She lived through the assassination of a king and an archbishop. She witnessed the nationwide rioting of the poor in the Peasants’ Rebellion and the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. The world she lived in was, by all accounts, falling apart at the seams. On top of all this she herself almost died from terrible health crisis. And it was in the midst of this sickness that she had 16 visions (or showings) that she later recorded and called Revelations of Divine Love.

In the most famous line in her Revelations Jesus said to her:

"It is true that sin is the cause of [the pain of the whole world],

It seems to me that what happened to Julian in her visions is precisely what Karl Rahner described above. Julian is brought to the brink of death and meets Christ—the one ell-encompassing, all-embracing hope which holds us. She is not told how things shall be well, but only that they shall be well. Her hope is not merely in the Lord, her hope is the Lord.

Julian is not optimistic but she is completely hopeful. She experienced in her bones what the psalmist is saying. All shall be well, not because she thinks she will get what she wants in the end, but because in the end she knows the God who holds her in his hands and she trusts him to be her hope.

That’s hopeful, but it’s not optimistic.

The superscription of Psalm 34 contains an oddity. It reads: “A Psalm of David, when he changed his behavior before Abimelech; who drove him away, and he departed.” The account of David “feigning madness” is found in 1 Samuel 21, but in 1 Samuel it is not before Abimelech that David “changed his behavior,” it was before King Achish. So, why has the name been changed in the superscription of Psalm 34? Why Abimelech instead of Achish?

For many of us in American evangelical spaces this at least hints at questions of “inerrancy.” Is this a historical error in scripture?

In class we took this opportunity to discuss why theories of inerrancy frame the question of scripture’s authority in precisely the wrong way. In short, theories of inerrancy encourage us to spend all our energy trying to prove inerrancy is true rather than reading and studying the scriptures to be formed into Christlikeness. Theories of inerrancy often end up teaching us to read the Bible in order to prove that we are right rather than to be sanctified by the Spirit.

Robert Jenson argues that many modern people go at the question of the inspiration of scripture backwards. We have begun with what we think we need from scripture, and then have recruited the Spirit to assure us that our expectations are satisfied. But what we think we need the scriptures to be and what God has actually made them to be are two different things. Scripture is God’s gift to us, but it’s not what we would’ve bought for ourselves if we were shopping at Mardel’s. As with everything in life, God gives us what he knows we actually need, not what we think we want.

The easiest example of our (misguided) expectations is historical and scientific accuracy. We think that for the Bible to be true it must be completely accurate in all the things we care about. But instead of thinking that we know what the scriptures need to be, shouldn’t we do it the other way around and ask, “What is the wisdom of the Spirit in giving us these texts?”

Jenson writes,

“We might even ask what [the Spirit] intends with any errors found in [scripture]… Some of the [early church] Fathers had a theory that may not be so bizarre as it sounds at first: manifest errors and lacunae are there to trip up our penchant for exegetical simplicities.”

To put it bluntly: Is the Spirit’s goal to ensure the scriptures are inerrant and scientifically accurate or is his goal to form you into the image of Jesus with them?

Jenson points out that the early church Fathers had a much different relationship to “errors” or “oddities” within scripture (although they would never have called them errors). Premodern Christian readers assumed that the “errors/oddities” were all there on purpose. Why? To slow us down. To provoke us to wrestle with a text as Jacob wrestled with God until he was blessed.

In class we compared the two approaches: 1) how do people read the superscription of Psalm 34 if they are concerned about upholding inerrancy versus 2) how St. Augustine read it in the fourth century?

The contrast is stark. Those who read with the goal of upholding inerrancy inevitably end up explaining away the “oddity” of the text. Augustine sees the oddity as an invitation into the mystery of Christ’s sacrifice of his body and blood.

Hopefully you can see my point in all of this. It’s not that there isn’t a way to affirm that the Bible is “inerrant,” it’s just that it isn’t very helpful. To put it cheekily (and overly simplistically): You can either read the scriptures to pile up information or for the sake of your transformation, but you can’t do both.

The Spirit’s intention with the scriptures is to speak the living Word (Jesus, himself) to you whoever you are and whatever situation you find yourself in. It’s that particular and personal precisely because Jesus is the Word in the words of scripture. And what the Spirit spoke to Augustine and his church will be different from what the Spirit is speaking to us in our churches this Sunday. And, even more, what he will say to your neighbor sitting in the pew next to you this Sunday will be different than what he is saying to you. That’s just what it means to say Jesus is risen.

It seems to me that very often attempts to secure a wooden theory of inerrancy are covert attempts to have the Bible without the resurrected Jesus. It can be an attempt to contain Jesus in the past, and therefore control what he has to say.

As I try to stop preaching at you, I’ll leave you with Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the doctrine of the inspiration of scripture (as opposed to a theory of inerrancy):

The biblical doctrine of inspiration removes the Bible from the historical situation... Inspiration means that God commits himself to the word spoken by this human being in all its inadequacies. Inspiration [means] that God turns his word back to himself.

What hard travail God does in death!

The Gospel of John begins by linking itself to the book of Genesis with its first words, “In the beginning…” The attentive reader will be on high alert for further connections.

Like the synoptic Gospels, John has the sabbath controversies between Jesus and the religious leaders play a big role in the narrative. But with John’s strong connection to Genesis we may be able to discern more layers in the controversies. The command to remember the sabbath day finds its grounding in the creation narrative of Genesis. On the seventh day God rested from all his work. And, notoriously, Genesis doesn’t mention any conclusion to this seventh day. God continues to rest. Or, at least, that’s the implication many have taken.

John Behr, in his book John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel, notes that in John 5 Jesus heals a sick man on the sabbath. The religious leaders “started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the sabbath.” Jesus’ response to them is curious: “My Father is still working, and I also am working” (Jn. 5:17). The Son and the Father are not resting, but still working.

Just a few verses later Jesus tells us specifically what the works of his Father are: “The Father raises the dead and gives them life…” (5:21). This is God’s work. And he is still working. The creation week of Genesis 1 is not finished yet.

Just as in Genesis, so also in the Gospel of John: God works until the end of the sixth day. And in John it is on the sixth day of the week that Jesus is crucified. In the Genesis creation account it is on the sixth day that God creates human beings as his final work before resting. And now on the sixth day in John’s Gospel Pilate brings Jesus before the crowd and says, “Behold the human being” (ho anthropos; Jn. 19:5).

And when the sixth day is nearing its conclusion, Jesus says, “It is finished.” What is finished? The works of God—dying with the dead in order to give life to them. The sixth day of John’s creation week is over. Only now does God rest from his work.

Startlingly, this would make the seventh day the day that Jesus’ body lay in the tomb. The deep truth of the sabbath is that it is actually Holy Saturday, when Jesus rests from his work of creation—of giving life to the dead.

And, if I can hazard this thought, I don’t think John means to say that the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is the beginning of a new creation or re-creation. But that this is God’s first work of creation. The Father is still working. In John’s telling the sixth day of the first creation week has not concluded yet.

To put it another way: the sabbath rest of God that Genesis tells us about is happening right before our eyes in John’s Gospel. Jesus in the tomb is God resting on the seventh day of the creation week.

This is the sabbath sleep we are called into. For God to finish his work in us, we are called to rest in the rest of Jesus. To sleep with him so that we may also rise with him.

Stop striving. Stop working. Just rest. God’s greatest work begins when you and I sleep (Ps. 127:2). The God who brought Eve out of Adam’s side while he slept; the God who made the covenant with Abraham while he slept; the God who was at work in the sleep of Jesus will do what you and I cannot do.

As Wendell Berry says, “What hard travail God does in death! He strives in sleep.”

Trust yourself to his work and sleep his sabbath sleep with him.

Psalm 27

Last week I was listening to an interview with theologian Geoff Holsclaw who works in the intersection of theology and neuro-science—specifically with attachment theory. In the interview he discussed how children become attached in healthy and unhealthy ways to their parents and what this might suggest about our relationship with God.

He made a few interesting comments about children and their parents’ faces and how that might relate to our relationship with God:

* Typically from birth to around nine months, the eyesight of children is scanning to find faces, especially eyes.

* Humans are one of the few species that have white in their eyes. This allows us to lock eyes with another person and it allows us to have joint attention to other things while we are making eye contact. (If you are talking with someone and they suddenly look over your shoulder, it’s virtually impossible for you to keep from turning around to take a peak at what they are looking at.)

* Locking eyes and seeing faces is key to infant development.

* Holsclaw gave this example: Say you are at a friend’s house for the first time with your 8 month old. Your friend has a cat and your child has never seen a cat before. The cat makes a sudden movement and your child is scared. What does the child inevitably do? It looks to you to know how to feel and react in the situation. If you are not scared, their panic will decrease. But if you are scared, the child’s fear will increase. In other words, the parent is the person the child looks at to understand their environment and how to respond to it.

* Holsclaw then makes the point that the Scriptures are keyed into this when it comes to our relationship with God our Father. The psalms reference the face of God repeatedly. “I lift my eyes to the hills, where my help comes from.” Or most famously the Aaronic blessing in Numbers 6:24-26, “The Lord bless you

and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.”

* Holsclaw concludes that it is God’s face that we are to look to in order to know the condition of our situation, just as a child looks to the faces of its mother and father.

I really love this. It’s beautiful and true. But something hit me as I was listening to the interview. What does it mean to “seek God’s face”? What do we mean when we tell people to “seek the face of God”? It is pretty abstract and vague. It can mean almost anything and so is in danger of meaning nothing.

As a cradle Pentecostal I grew up thinking it meant something like locking myself in a room, putting worship music on and reading the Bible, hoping tears come. To seek God’s face was about cultivating feelings of love and devotion in your heart.

I think this gets right to the heart of one of our issues today: we have so interiorized our relationship with God and made it primarily about our hearts.

To bring it back to the example of a child finding the face of their parent—I can’t help but notice these are two different movements. The child is panicked and so it looks outside of itself to the face of the parent. But when we think of seeking God’s face we think of a movement into ourselves. The child is looking at something concrete. They have a place to look. But with God do we have any place to look? Or does it remain an abstraction?

And this question occurred to me as I was listening to that interview: Do we really think God has a face that we can see or not? Is this language of seeking God’s face a mere metaphor or is it really true in some sense (even if it is mysterious)?

The psalms seem to suggest that he does have a face we can see. Other places in scripture talk about the “eyes of God” or the “hands of God” or, famously, Moses could only see the “back of God.”

I learned this first from Robert Jenson. He makes the point using Ezekiel’s vision. In his vision Ezekiel sees one “like a son of man” sitting on God’s throne. In other words, he sees someone who looks like a human.

So, Jenson asks: If the man on the throne in Ezekiel is not an actual man but merely a symbol or picture or something of the sort, then it is anthropomorphic language—presenting God as if he were a man although he isn’t. In that case, this language of God’s “face/hands/back” would be nothing more than a relic of ancient paganism and needs to be explained away. And that’s what most modern theology and biblical scholarship has tried to do.

God doesn’t really have a back, or hands and feet, or eyes to see, or a face that can be seen. This is all just metaphorical language for something else.

I asked Chris Green (one of Jenson’s students) about what Jenson meant in all this. This was his response:

There’s a difference between reading it figuratively (as merely a metaphor for something else) and reading it mysteriously, spiritually. When we talk about God’s back, for example, we can say (and [Jenson] himself does say) that there are “sides” to our knowledge of God. But we don’t know which God we’re talking about unless we have first said that God actually has a back—and it was whipped.

So, if I say, “Now, God doesn’t really have a back; this is just a figure of speech to refer to the limits of human knowledge,” then I am dealing not with the God of Jesus but a god I’ve dreamed up.

Let’s put this back into the question of the psalms and “seeking God’s face.” If we take the language of “seeking God’s face” as a mere metaphor for trying hard to be genuine in our devotion to God, then we aren’t talking about the God of Jesus yet.

In fact, we are forgetting the central confession of our faith: that the second person of the trinity, the eternal Son of God, is a man who does have a back that was whipped and a face that can be seen.

The account of the transfiguration makes the point. Peter, James, and John see Jesus transfigured, he is shining with God’s own light—because he is God’s own light. Now, did Peter, James, and John really see the face of God or was this a mere metaphor for something else? This makes the point sharper.

God has a face and as Paul says clearly in 2 Corinthians 4:6 “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.”

But this is mysterious. God has a face because God is incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. But where do we see Jesus’ face?

Again, we have been conditioned to think that our relationship with God is purely a private, interior reality that is never mediated to us. But that’s just not how this God works. God mediates his face through his creation—through us.

The New Testament makes this point over and over again (see 2 Cor. 1:19 or 1 Thess. 2:13). Listen to the way Peter speaks to his congregations about seeing God:

Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

(1 Peter 1:8–9)

Peter does say that they have not seen him, and yet they love him. Of course they haven’t seen him like Peter did. But they have seen him. How? Through the witness of Peter. How did these people who had never seen Jesus fall in love with Jesus? They know Peter. They’ve seen Peter. They’ve seen Jesus in Peter. After all, Peter is a member of Jesus’ body!

Jesus is filling up the whole world with himself, beginning with his body, the church. If you want to see Jesus you have to find his body. You have to put your body in the right place to see him. Or as Jenson says,

In Paul’s general conceptual discourse, a person’s body is that person’s own self as he is available to others: it is his visibility and audibility and tangibility...In Paul’s language, to say that the church is the body of the risen Christ is straightforwardly to affirm that the church is his availability in and for the world. Would you now see Christ? View this gathering called the church—and blessed is he who is not offended by what he sees. Would you now come to him? Join them.

To see Jesus you find his body. And there you will find the preaching of the word (you will hear him). You will find the bread and wine on the communion table (you will see him, touch him, and taste him). And you will find a little group of people gathered around these things, and these people Jesus calls his body.

God does have a face. It is the face of Jesus. But Jesus’s face is not a million miles away in heaven. It is right here with us. We have to be trained to see it. It isn’t straightforward, but it is true.

How do you seek the face of God? You seek the face of Jesus. How do you seek the face of Jesus? You come near to the people who know him.

As Paul says to the Corinthians:

16 But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. 17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18 And we all, who with unveiled faces reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

(2 Cor. 3:16–18)

Jesus is the face of God and you and I are made to become the face of Jesus. If my vision is trained correctly, I can see the Lord Jesus in you because you are reflecting his face to me.

We are called to seek the face of the Lord. But we can only do that because God first turned his face toward us in the face of his Son, Jesus Christ. This means he is a strange God, indeed. He is a God who actually has a face.

Our God can be seen, touched, heard, smelled, and tasted. Because our God is Jesus. As Chris Green says, “He’s somebody. He has a body!” And you have been included into it.

Gerard Manley Hopkins “As kingfishers catch fire”

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

In his book A Religion Against Itself Robert Jenson makes the case that the Christianity is an anti-religious religion and that the Bible is an anti-religious religious text. At first this seems to fit nicely with our cliched (and mostly wrong) ways of speaking negatively about religion (think vapid statements like: “It’s not religion, it’s relationship). But that isn’t what Jenson is up to. He isn’t out to rid Christianity of liturgy and ritual.

So, what does he mean by religion?

Jenson defines religion something like this: Religion is a way to guarantee the outcome of your life. Religion is using God as a tool to secure your own dreams and desires for your future.

It works like this: If I obey, if I give my tithes, if I sacrifice, then I will put God in my debt and he will give me what I desire. Religion in this sense is a quid pro quo with God. We scratch God’s back so that he will scratch ours.

But, according to Jenson, this is precisely what the Bible is arguing against on every page.

The very beginning of the Bible is an audacious piece of religion-debunking. We lift just one verse from the long polemic which is Genesis 1: “And God made the two great lights... he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” What is the point of this? Ancient man found his greatest single religious assurance—later, his greatest religious anxiety—in the sight of the wheeling heavenly beings. There were his gods, visibly enclosing him, knowable and predictable in their visibility and eternal in the mathematics of their behavior. The words of the cynical old priest who wrote our passage were a deliberate impiety: “Gods nothing! Energy sources that God hung up there!” From here to Galileo is a matter of details.

What is the gospel in this? Quite simply: “You do not need to fear and worship the world in which God has put you, or any part of it. Subdue it, have dominion over it enjoy it!” The first chapter of the Bible is like the last, where we read: “And when I heard and saw [these things], I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed them to me; but he said to me, ‘You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you...Worship God.’”

In between, the message is the same. Christ was crucified for blasphemy. Paul, who understood the crucifixion better than most, spent most of his literary energy in anti-religious polemic. For example, he wrote to the believers at Galatia: “You observe days, and months, and seasons, and years! I am afraid I have labored over you in vain.” What was the matter with days and months and seasons and years? Surely we can, also in our life of faith, not do without a calendar? But the Galatians “observed” the calendar, i.e., they watched it, expecting something from it. What could be expected from a calendar? Eternity—for the great feasts and fasts of a religious calendar return each year with the same content. Every great festival cancels time, for each year despite all that has happened we end where we began.

What is the gospel in Paul’s polemic? “You do not need to cling to the past, to the way things have always been. If something utterly new should happen, something which broke the sheltering wheel of the returning seasons and festivals. you need not fear. You may take the risk of the future. For the risk of the future has been made by Jesus Christ to be the kind of risk which love brings.”

Religion comforts and sustains us by abolishing the radical newness and unpredictability of the future, by suspending the future into an eternal present. There is, trusts religion, something already there that guarantees the future, guarantees that something good will come of me. Because this something is already there it is knowable, and because it is knowable I can experience the guarantee of my future which it gives. To be already present and knowable, it must be given in the past—in the “once-upon-a-time” of mythical stories about how things are in eternity, or in the “I fast twice in the week” record of accomplishments at which legalistic religion looks back. Religion is the rule of the past. The security it gives is that all will be again as it was, the security of return to the womb, of peace in death. This religious security is exactly what the gospel seeks to free us from…

The anti-religious polemic of the Bible is, therefore, polemic in principle… The gods are attacked for the sake of God.

Is then the faith of the Bible after all about a god and therefore itself a sort of religion? To be sure—but it is a religion opposed to religion. Faith as we see it in Scripture is religion at odds with itself, a religion polemic against its own character as a religion.

If Jenson is right that the consistent theme of the Bible is an anti-religious polemic, then we should expect to find it in the psalms. Unsurprisingly, I think we find an attack on the religious act par excellence: sacrifice.

Sacrifice is the great religious act because it is literally a quid pro quo. In sacrifice we give the gods food to eat, we fill up their bellies, and in return they protect us from disaster. They help us win in battle. They make it so that our harvest is good and that our children are strong and healthy.

But the witness of the Bible from A to Z is that this God does not want sacrifice. The psalms repeatedly make this point:

* Psalm 40:6 “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire—but my ears you have opened—burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require.”

* Psalm 50:9—13 “I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens, for every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains, and the insects in the fields are mine. If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?”

* Psalm 51:16—17 “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.”

The phrase of Hosea 6:6 (which Jesus takes up in Matthew’s Gospel) is a good summary: “I desire mercy not sacrifice.”

Of course we know that Scripture can also use the word “sacrifice” in a positive sense—in the merciful sense. But what does a merciful sacrifice look like?

Hebrews 10 takes up Psalm 40 and argues that what God wants is not sacrifice, but obedience. But not any kind of obedience. He wants the obedience that the Son of God gives to the Father. In other words, he wants free obedience. He doesn’t want the obedience of a slave. That would be obedience as sacrifice. The slave offers the master his obedience and in return the master provides shelter and food for the slave. God is not a master. He does not want to dominate us—which is precisely why he does not want sacrifice. The obedience God wants is the free obedience of a son—of the Son.

The only sacrifice that is pleasing and acceptable to God is the sacrifice of Jesus. If we are to offer God anything, it can only be Jesus.

But what does it mean to offer God the sacrifice of Jesus? Isn’t Jesus God’s gift to us? For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. Jesus is what God gives to the world because he loves it. What would it mean for us to offer Jesus back to God?

To offer God his Son back to him is to begin to love the world the way he loves it. It is to have the obedience of the Son become your obedience by the power of the Spirit. It is to have the Son’s life and your life become one life. What God wants is for the life of his Son to become your life and flow out of your life. When that is the case, your obedience becomes the obedience of the Son.

The sacrifice God is pleased with is Jesus. And Jesus is the one who serves others. In other words, don’t feed God with your sacrifices and your obedience, feed your hungry neighbors through the mercy of Christ.

Hebrews 13:15—16 couldn’t be clearer: “Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”

To offer God the sacrifice of Jesus is to love the world around you. To love it with God’s own love. To have the life of Jesus pouring forth from your belly, rivers of living water.

The gospel frees us from religious sacrifices so that we can live from grace and in gratitude.

I’ll leave you with the freedom of the gospel according to Jenson:

The gospel is permission, granting of freedom, to love. The believer is, simply, one who knows that he does not need to worry about himself because God will take care of that, and who therefore has all the time and energy unused to worry about other people.

Diagram: The question is does the sacrifice precede God’s word that “You are accepted” or does the sacrifice follow God’s word? If it precedes it, then it is religious sacrifice. It is trying to control the future and dictate outcomes. It is a quid pro quo. It is a slave’s obedience. But if the sacrifice follows God’s word, then it is the free obedience of the Son. It is mercy. It is a free gift that is freely received and freely returned.

Messianic Psalms

The psalms are filled with promise—particularly the promise that God will put an end to evil and injustice. The so-called “messianic psalms” are the beating heart of this promise. God promises that, through his messiah, he will overcome the evil of the world (specifically the evil of “the nations” and “the kings of the earth”).

The promised messiah is portrayed in the psalms as the true king of Israel. But almost every messianic psalm moves directly to the global (or even cosmic) nature of the messiah’s kingship.

Listen to Psalm 2:6-10

6 “I have installed my king on Zion, my holy mountain.”

7 I will proclaim the Lord’s decree:

He said to me, “You are my son; today I have become your father.

8 Ask me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession.

9 You will break them with a rod of iron; you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”

10 Therefore, you kings, be wise; be warned, you rulers of the earth.

And Psalm 110:1-2, 4-6

1 The LORD says to my lord:

“Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.”

2 The Lord will extend your mighty scepter from Zion, saying, “Rule in the midst of your enemies!”

4 The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind: “You are a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.”

5 The Lord is at your right hand; he will crush kings on the day of his wrath.

6 He will judge the nations, heaping up the dead

and crushing the rulers of the whole earth.

You can see the movement of the messiah’s kingship extending from Israel (Zion) to the whole earth. The image we are given for how this is accomplished is “a rod of iron” in Psalm 2 and “a mighty scepter” in Psalm 110.

Christians have naturally read these psalms as being about Jesus. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all make use of the messianic psalms and suggest that they are fulfilled in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Rod of Iron, A Mighty Scepter

“I will break them with a rod of iron” (Ps. 2:9) and “The Lord will extend your mighty scepter from Zion, saying, ‘Rule in the midst of your enemies’” (Ps. 110:2).

These are harsh images that give violent pictures of wrath, anger, and justice. But they are images. God does not literally have a rod of iron or a mighty scepter—as if he needed them. This is metaphorical language. The images speak of God’s rule, his justice, his authority, and dominion.

But the question lingering is one of identity. Who is the one we are being told holds the iron rod or the scepter? We know what the rod of iron looks like in the hands of Caesar or Herod or Hitler. But Jesus is unlike these rulers. He is the true ruler of Israel—and the entire world—by laying his life down, not lording it over them.

Martin Luther in his lecture on Psalm 2 gives us the typical Christian interpretation of the “rod of iron”:

Rod of Iron is the holy Gospel, which is Christ’s royal scepter in His church and kingdom… It is called a ‘rod’ because it directs, convicts, reproves, and upholds, etc.

St. Augustine (fourth century) interprets the “mighty scepter of power” in Psalm 110 like this:

What has to happen, for [Christ’s] enemies to be subjected beneath his feet? Listen to his own words as he teaches and explains it: And for repentance and forgiveness of sins to be preached in in his name throughout all nations, beginning from Jerusalem (Lk 24:47)…From Zion will the Lord send forth your scepter of power because the preaching of his lordship will begin from Jerusalem.

In other words, the power of the scepter by which the Messiah will rule is the power of the word of the gospel. Many will hear this as a softening of the meaning of “the rod of iron” image. This is meant to be a brutal image, an image of force and forcefulness. I agree. The rod of iron does strike and it does kill. But it strikes and kills in the way Jesus strikes and kills. This is the wrath of the lamb, as Revelation 6 puts it. The wrath of Caesar and the wrath of the crucified Jesus are not the same wrath.

As Augustine points out, the mighty scepter of the Messiah extends forth from Zion, or Jerusalem. Why? Because the resurrected Jesus told his disciples that because all authority in heaven and earth had been given to him, they were to go into all nations preaching the gospel and baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The “scepter” is the preached word of the gospel and the sacrament of baptism.

The scepter “extends forth from Zion” because Jesus said to his disciples, “You will be my witnesses [beginning in] Jerusalem, and [extending out to] all of Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

How does the this Messiah subdue the nations? He does so by the power of his mighty scepter, with his rod of iron. But the power of God is Jesus Christ and him crucified. The power of the gospel proclamation moves into all the earth as the rod of iron, subduing all who hear it.

Does the rod of iron kill? Absolutely! But it is the killing of baptism. As Paul says in Romans 6, “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.”

The kings of the earth are conquered the same way you and I are: by the mighty scepter, by the wrath of the lamb, by the word of God, by baptism.

The world is conquered by a Conquered Messiah.

Jesus is the wrath of God, which means that the world is subdued not by being overthrown, but by love.

One of the primary themes of the psalms is God’s care for the poor. He is their judge and defender. But the bond between God and the poor is extends beyond mere compassion, and into identity. God will not—indeed, he cannot—forget the poor any more than he can forget himself. God is poor and he is inviting us to share in his poverty that we might be rich as he is rich.

Herbert McCabe makes just this argument in a wonderful little essay titled “God and Poverty.”

I want to suggest that there is something godlike about being able to live in poverty; so we shall have to think about the poverty of God. And I want to suggest that there is something less than human about needing to live with riches. And the movement from riches to poverty, from having to not having, can be a movement not only to being more human but to being divine. In a way, the success story for Christians is from riches to rags…Riches and poverty in themselves represent two extremes, two directions we might aim at. Riches represent the ideal of taking the world for your own use; poverty represents the ideal of complete freedom from possessions. Whichever we aim at we could never attain for ourselves. But poverty we can in the end be given. Sometimes we think of that as death, the cross, and sometimes as resurrection, new life.

I would like to contrast possessions and being. We take possession of things. Even if they are gifts we can either take them or refuse them. Taking is essential to possessions. Being or life, on the other hand, cannot, in this sense, be taken. It can only be sheer gift.

No one can take upon herself life; nothing can bring itself into existence. Always we receive being from another or from others. To aim at riches is to aim at taking possession of things, even, perhaps, taking possession of people. To aim at poverty is to aim at the giving of life, and this comes from gratitude for receiving life ourselves. And giving life is a specially godlike activity.

It is simply not possible for God to be like someone who aims at riches. We cannot speak literally of the riches of God, for he has not, and could not have, any possessions. It is true that often enough, in the psalms for example, we speak of God as though he were a landlord of the whole earth: ‘In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also; the sea is his, for he made it, and the dry land, which his hands have formed’ (Psalm 95:4–5). But these are images to be offset by other images, just like the images of God as a warrior or a rock or an eagle. We have, and we need to have, hundreds of images of God, incompatible with each other and not to be forced into some system, not to be taken literally. The image of God as a wealthy landowner holding court amongst his tenants is one of these. We cannot speak literally of the riches and possessions of God for he could not take anything to use for his own purposes. He can only use one creature for the sake of another, for the benefit of another. Nothing is or acts for the benefit of God.

We cannot speak literally of the riches of God. But I think we can speak literally of the poverty of God. Of course, his poverty is not the same as our poverty, as his wisdom is not the same as ours. But he is literally poor because he simply and literally has no possessions. He takes nothing for his own use. He only has life and being. And, if you want to press the point, he does not even have life, as he does not have wisdom or have goodness. In God, being alive or being wise or being good are just simply being God and nothing more, nothing extra he has. So for us to aim at poverty is for us to aim in the direction of the simplicity and poverty of God—a direction away from possessing to being.

God’s creative act is an act of God’s poverty, for God gains nothing by it. God makes without becoming richer. His act of creation is purely and simply for the benefit of his creatures. We are sometimes tempted to ask what motive God had for making the world—meaning ‘What did he hope to gain by it?’ But, of course, this question is absurd. It is only creation that gains by God’s act. It is a purely gratuitous act of love, that characteristic act of love which is the giving of life.

The beauty of creation adds nothing to the beauty of God, as the light of the moon adds nothing to the light of the sun but simply reflects it. And God’s delight in his creatures and their beauty is not something extra to his delight in the beauty of his creative divinity itself—the delight that we call the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit is just God’s delight in his own life as he contemplates it in conceiving his Word. Or, as we say more formally, the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Word. This eternal delight is the joy that belongs to aiming at poverty, as sorrow belongs to possessions…

The gospel does not tell us to have no possessions. It tells us to aim at poverty, to move towards it, and certainly not to aim at riches. We cannot serve both God and riches.

Diagrams from Class

Diagram 1: “Riches” and “Poverty” are two extremes, two directions we might aim at in life. “Riches” represents the ideal of taking/possessing the world around you. It is marked by sorrow (Rich Young Ruler). “Poverty” represents the ideal of giving/receiving the world around you. It is marked by joy (Widow’s Mite).

Diagram 2: We need to break the equivalence in our minds between good fortune and blessing. This is at the heart of Jesus’ teaching. Blessing can be present in both bad fortune and good fortune. In fact, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor” or “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” To be “poor in spirit” is to recognize and accept that you have limitations, that you are dependent, that you are called to live a life of giving/receiving rather than taking/possessing. In truth, everyone is poor in spirit. But it is harder for those with good fortune to see (hence, the distance). As we see throughout the Gospels, poorer people (people experiencing bad fortune) have an easier time accepting that they are poor in spirit. But it is possible to be poor in spirit in both bad and good fortune. As Paul says in Philippians 4:12—13, “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in lack [good fortune or bad fortune].”

God Is Our Home

Psalm 46 begins with one of the more memorable lines in scripture: “God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble.”

The psalms never tire of emphasizing this theme. Psalm 90 says that God has been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Psalm 91 says that we live in the shelter of the most high and that we abide in his shadow.

In other words, God is our home. This is basic to Christian spirituality: God is our true dwelling place. “In him we live and move and have our being,” as Paul says in Acts. “Build your home on the rock not the sand,” Jesus says. “Abide in me,” says the Gospel of John.

We Are God’s Home

But Psalm 46 goes on to tell us that God also has a dwelling place: God dwells in his holy place, or his holy tent (v. 4). This should strike us as odd if we stop to consider it. We dwell in God—that makes sense. But surely God has no home. Nothing can contain him. But the psalmist says that God does have a home—in his holy place/tabernacle.

If you were to ask an old Israelite: “Where is your God?” They would probably say, “Well he sits enthroned above the heavens. He is the author of our story and, in fact, the author of the story of the whole world. So, of course he is ‘up there.’ Oh but also he is over there in that small little tent that he had us make for him.”

For the Israelites, God has an address: 1 Tabernacle Way. Yes, he is God above all things, enthroned in the heavens, not contained by anything, but you can also locate him. His home is over there in that tent. Israel bears witness to the fact that God is two things at once” He is God above us, but he is also God with us.

The Gospel of John picks up on this, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God…And the Word was made flesh and dwelt [tabernacled] among us” (Jn. 1:1, 14).

One of the chief themes in the Gospel of John is that Jesus himself is the temple. In other words, Jesus is God’s address. If you want to locate the eternal, omnipresent God, you must find the man Jesus of Nazareth.

This is what Jesus tells us in John 14:8–10

8 Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” 9 Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10 Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, dwelling in me, who is doing his work.

Paul puts it this way “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col. 1:19). In other words, The Father’s home is in Jesus.

If you want to locate the Father you must come to Jesus. But how do you come to Jesus? Psalm 46:4 gives us the clue—although most of our English translations hide it from us. In Hebrew the text actually says that God “dwells in his holy places/tents.” It’s plural. The KJV preserves it: “The holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High.”

But doesn’t God only have one tabernacle, or one temple? Isn’t there only one Jesus? Yes, all that is true, but we can’t leave it there. Jesus says in John 14 that God the Father dwells in him, but he doesn’t leave it there either. He goes on to say, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our dwelling with them” (John 14:23).

Now, we can hear the deep truth of Psalm 46. God is our dwelling place, but in Christ God has made us his dwelling places. Or as Paul puts it in Colossians: The fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Christ, and the mystery hidden for ages is that Christ is in you, the hope of glory! Or again in 1 Corinthians Paul tells the believers, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?”

Our true home is in God and God’s true home is in us.

This mystery is grounded and takes place in the person of Jesus. He is fully God and fully human in one person. Two distinct natures are brought into union in him.

Maybe we could put it like this: Jesus’ divinity finds its home in his humanity and his humanity finds its home in his divinity. Jesus is both our home in God and God’s home in us.

How To Become a Home for God

Psalm 46:7 summarizes the mystery: “The Lord God almighty is with us, the God of Jacob is our fortress.”

God is our fortress (he is our home), but he is also together with us (he makes his home in us).

All this can easily become empty abstraction. We need a concrete example. Think of Mary. God sends the angel Gabriel to her, “Greetings Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.” And she was puzzled at these words. Why? Because they mean two things at once. “The Lord is with you.” Mary has found favor with God. God is her true home. She belongs to him. But precisely because she belongs to him so fully, he is coming to make his home in her. “The Lord is with you.” Mary’s home is in God and God is now making his home in Mary. God is with her and she is with child (two ways of saying the same thing).

Jesus is saying to her, “Mary, I love you. You come be at home in me. I’ll take care of you. I will be your refuge and strength. I will be your very present help in trouble.”

But he also is saying this to her, “Mary, because I love you I am making my home in your womb and in your arms. I will need you to take care of me. I will need you to be my refuge and my strength. I will need you to be my very present help when I am in trouble.”

Because God is Mary’s home he comes to her and makes it so that she will become his home. He is taking care of her, but the way he takes care of her is by coming to her so that she will take care of him. Mary’s salvation comes in her caring for God.

By Jesus depending on Mary he is actually giving grace to her. This is the power and majesty of the God of Israel: Jesus saves us by becoming dependent on us. God’s helplessness helps us.

Hans Urs von Balthasar puts it like this:

“[Mary must] introduce her Child into the business of being human… She must do two things simultaneously: teach her Son, nourish him, care for him… and learn from him, feed on him, trust herself to him.”

But don’t miss the point. Mary is not something other than we are. She is our example! We are called to the same thing Mary is called to. God is our home, and the way he makes us at home in himself is by coming to us so that we will be a home for him.

Will We Welcome Jesus?

But how does Jesus come to us?

Jesus brings a child before his disciples and says, “Whenever you welcome one of these little ones in my name you welcome me!” Later in Matthew 25 he says, “Whatever you do for the least of these, you do to me.”

By caring for those helpless around us we welcome Jesus in and care for him. We become his home. This is how Jesus is our home: He comes to us and asks us to be his home.

God is our refuge, and precisely because he is our refuge he calls us to be a refuge for him. And he comes to us in the least of these—children, the poor, the weak, the imprisoned, the sick, the immigrant, the helpless.

Those of us who consider ourselves friends of Jesus need to take seriously the fact that we might not like the way he comes to us. Everyone is comfortable with the idea that God is our refuge, but it is much more difficult when God comes to us in unexpected ways and asks us to be his refuge. We want God to save us, to deliver us, but we want it to be in a way that fits our expectations, and God is more often than not an enemy of our expectations.

While sitting in the Tegel prison in July of 1944 Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a poem on the way that God takes care of our needs by calling us to care for God’s needs:

“Christians and Heathens”

Be Still and Know

This can begin to sound like a burden that is too heavy to bear, but the psalm delivers us the pure gospel promise in verse 10: “Be still and know that I am God.”

Becoming a home for God is not about our white-knuckled effort. Quite the opposite. It’s about being still and resting in God. The only reason we can become a home for God is because he is already our home. Mary can only become a home for Jesus because Jesus has already been her home.

Be still and know that God is your home. It’s for this reason that the pressure is taken off of us. Jesus takes pressure off of us when he draws near. He calls us to lay our burdens down and take up his yoke because his burden is easy and light.

Think of the experience of having a guest coming to stay at your house for a few days. There is a kind of pressure for you and your household to entertain and host a guest. You can’t be as relaxed as usual. You can’t wear the things you would normally wear around the house. There is a pressure that the guest applies to your life.

But God desiring to dwell in you is not like having a guest move in. He doesn’t add pressure the way a guest does because he is the guest that turns out to be your true home. He comes to you as a guest and asks to live in your heart. But when you invite him in you realize he is home.

Jesus stands at the door and knocks. Home stands at the door and knocks. Let him move in. Because the truth is you are not his host, he is yours. He comes as a guest, but as a guest who is our home.

Psalm 51: Superscription

Prayer for Cleansing and Pardon

To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.

Most of us will know the background for this psalm. King David is home in his palace as his army is off fighting one of his wars. From his palace he spots a woman named Bathsheba bathing on her rooftop and he is overcome with desire and lust. He calls for her to be brought to him, and he “goes in to her.” Bible isn’t very shy, is it?

And Bathsheba became pregnant. As it turns out Bathsheba was the wife of one of David’s military men, Uriah the Hittite. So, in an effort to cover up his sin David had Uriah sent home from the battlefield to the palace. David has him come to the palace for dinner and gets him plastered. David then tells Uriah to go home to his wife, hoping Uriah will sleep with his wife and no one will know that anything untoward happened between David and Bathsheba. But Uriah is a more noble man even when he is drunk than David is sober. Uriah refuses to go home to his wife while the rest of his men are out on the battlefield. David has to come up with a new plan. David has his general, Joab, put Uriah on the front lines of battle so that Uriah will be killed. After Uriah has been killed David could then take Bathsheba as his own wife before anyone knew she was pregnant.

And David thought he had gotten away with his scheme…If it wasn’t for the meddling prophet, Nathan. The prophet comes to confront King David with his sin, but he doesn’t confront him directly. He is subtle, even subversive. Nathan tells the King a story about a rich man and a poor man. The rich man had a great amount of cattle and sheep, while the poor man only had one little ewe lamb that he raised, even sleeping with the lamb in his arms. When the rich man had a guest come into his house, rather than using one of his own sheep to prepare a meal for the guest, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man to feed the traveler.

David burned with anger and proclaimed that the rich man should be put to death and repay the poor man four times what was taken from him. The prophet turned to the King and said, “You are the man.” And the King’s eyes were opened. He confessed his sins. The prophets replied, “The Lord has taken away your sins.”

St. Augustine preached a sermon on this psalm in Carthage in the summer of 411. He begins his sermon saying”

We say this with grief and trepidation, yet since God wanted the matter to be written about, he does not mean us to hush it up. What I am going to say, therefore, is not what I want to say, but what I am forced to say. I say it not to encourage you to imitation, but to teach you caution.

Augustine’s primary concern as he begins his sermon is one I had never even considered as a preacher. That if we hear what the great King David did, we may find it easy to justify our own sins.

Augustine cautions his audience saying:

There are many who are very willing to fall with David, but unwilling to rise again with him. The story is not put before you as an example of falling, but as an example of rising again if you have fallen…Let all who have not fallen listen, to ensure they do not fall; and let all who have fallen listen, so that they may learn to get up again.

Psalm 51:1—2

Have mercy on me, O God

Augustine then makes the insightful point that this grave sin of David’s happened when he was exalted on the throne and in the palace—when everything was going well for him. We all fear adversity, but most of us are not afraid of prosperity. “Yet prosperity is more dangerous to the soul than adversity is to the body.”

David did not commit that sin while he was being persecuted by Saul. While the holy David was enduring Saul’s enmity, while he was hounded hither and thither by Saul’s pursuit, while he was fleeing from one hiding-place to another in his effort not to fall into Saul’s hands, he did not desire any woman who was not his, nor did he murder any man with whose wife he had committed adultery. The more wretched he perceived himself to be in his weakness and distress, the more intent he was on God. Tribulation is a useful thing, just as the surgeon’s knife may be more useful than the devil’s blandishments. But once David had defeated his enemies and gained security, the pressure was off him and his pride grew to excess. His example is therefore valid for us in this sense too, that we must beware of complacency.

Comfort and success can lead to pride, Augustine suggests. And pride is the root of all sin.

The medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, commenting on Paul’s discussion of his “thorn in the flesh,” (2 Cor. 12) was convinced that Paul’s thorn was a habitual sin. But, he asks, why would God not remove sin from Paul? Surely God does not want us to remain in sin. But, Thomas says, God is a great physician, and any wise doctor knows you have to be willing to use a lesser disease to combat a greater disease (think: chemotherapy). Because God is the great physician he will allow even a grave sin to remain in our lives if it can keep us from the even more dangerous sin of pride.

Paul asked for the thorn to be removed because he doesn’t know what the doctor is up to. He knows the thorn hurts—it feels wrong—but what he is asking is for is for the doctor’s remedy would be removed from him. And of course, the doctor does not oblige.

I think Thomas’s reading has a lot of merit. Why does Paul say that the thorn was given to him? To keep him from being too elated—literally “puffed up with pride.” The thorn kept him humble, kept him in touch with his weakness. And, hearing the doctor’s orders, Paul decides he will boast in his weakness, because in his weakness Jesus’ strength is made perfect.

God refuses to heal us in a way that will lead us to a worse sickness.

King David has become comfortable in his palace. He is puffed up. There is no thorn in his flesh, and Augustine is suggesting that that’s part of his problem. Comfort and success is not bad, but it is perhaps the most dangerous sickness because we easily become elated—puffed up with pride.

Augustine continues:

This psalm warns those who have fallen in sin, but it does not leave those who have fallen in despair…Listen to [the prophet David] crying out, and cry out with him; listen to him groaning, and groan too; listen to him weeping, and add your tears to his; listen to him corrected, and share his joy. If sin could not be denied access to you, let the hope of forgiveness not be debarred. The prophet Nathab was sent to that man; and notice how humble the king was. He did not brush his mentor’s words aside… King in his majesty though he was, he listened to the prophet; now let Christ’s lowly people listen to Christ.

This is what makes the psalms so unique. That a king like David could hear God’s “No!” That David could have the humility to see that what he desires is not the same as what God desires.

The German philosopher, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, wrote an essay on the psalms giving voice to God’s divine “No” to humanity. The essay was entitled, “Hitler and Israel, Or on Prayer.”

Rosenstock-Huessy says that the psalms present to us a God who is free. He is free to come to his people Israel and tell them, “No. Not this way.” God’s freedom is what allows him to correct the desires and the will of his own people. This, Rosenstock-Huessy says, is right at the heart of the difference between Hitler and Israel. For Hitler there is no possibility for God to say “No” to Hitler’s plans, Hitler’s will, and Hitler’s dreams. In Hitler’s mind his will and his God’s will are not separable. They are one and the same.

Put another way: Hitler thinks that what he wants is always what God wants. And so he is not open to hearing God’s, “No.” This exhibit A of what pride looks like. Rosenstock-Huessy puts it like this:

[The psalms testify to] God’s ‘No’…

Hitler’s will and his God’s will are nauseatingly one… [but] God touched Israel’s lips with his fiery coal: My will, O mortal, not thine, be done.

[The Psalms are] the white heat of speech, during which man’s will is separated from God’s will, and men come to know God’s will as differing from their own wishes and from their leader’s will.

Psalm 51:4

Against you, you only, have I sinned

This verse can be misleading. It can sound as though David doesn’t think he sinned against either Bathsheba or Uriah (or his whole kingdom, for that matter). But of course he had. Sin is always the harm we do to our neighbors. We can’t truly harm God. Our sins cannot impinge upon him or violate him. Our sins violate our neighbors.

So how can David say this? If we see the truth of who God is in Jesus of Nazareth it becomes clear: God is not God all by himself. God is and always has been the God-human. But precisely for this reason he has taken who we are in our human weakness into himself. He is God as human, not in spite of being human.

If we follow the logic of God’s incarnation in Jesus, then we can say it this way: to harm any human being is to harm God, because God has identified himself with humanity in Christ. Our sins do not violate God by nature, but he takes it personally. This is why Jesus comes to Saul on the road to Damascus and says, “Saul, Saul why do you persecute me?” This is why Jesus tells us in Matthew 25 that whatever you have done to the least of these little lambs, you have done to me. He is the Good Shepherd who has become the lamb of God.

David is witnessing to the truth that the Apostle Paul had to come to realize. On the road to Damascus Paul was saying, “What have I done to you Lord?” And Jesus’ response is that what Paul had done to the least of these he had done to him because he has filled all things with myself.

To sin against your neighbor is to sin against God because God has become your neighbor in Jesus of Nazareth.

Psalm 51:9

Hide your face from my sins

David says, “Hide your face from my sins,” but Augustine notes that David does not ask God to hide his face from himself.

God is concerned with you, not your sin. A lot of the preaching we have heard has caused us to think that God is really only concerned with our sins—that our sins are some massive problem for him, but they aren’t. God turns his face away from your sins, but never from you.

And here we have the confession portion of the David’s psalm. He has confessed his sins and pleaded for God’s great mercy. David is forgiven, and he is certain of it. How is he certain? It’s not simply because he feels innocent now. He is certain because he has heard a concrete word from God through the prophet Nathan. The prophet told him, “The Lord has taken away your sins.”

This is where we come up against a problem we face today. The modern churches many of us have known do not have any practice of personal confession and absolution. We are left on our own to confess to God and so we are left alone with our own perception of God’s assurance of pardon.

Robert Jenson puts it like this:

We do not have the arrangements the psalmist did. We confess, indeed, silently “directly” to God or in generalities with a group, under which we silently insert our actual sins.

But David doesn’t do this. He confesses his sins to Nathan.

Jenson's point is that because we have done away with the practice of personal confession of sins we are stuck in the situation that many of the psalms lament: If I keep silent about my sins, my bones will waste away. Put another way: if this Psalm 51 invites us to confess our sins along with David, to where will we confess? We are left by ourselves.

Jenson is saying that the believer in Israel could do something specific with his sin, and then be blessed by it. But we don’t have that anymore because we have forfeited the practice of personal confession to one another as James instructs (James 5:16).

This makes us uncomfortable. We think we should just be fine confessing our sins straight to God without anyone else involved. We think our relationship with God is private and unmediated. And there is some truth to that. For some of us that may be enough. But what about those of us who, after confessing our sins, are not sure whether or not we have been really, truly forgiven?

Are we missing out on a gift of God that we should regain?

Bonhoeffer and the Gift of Personal Confession

In one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s most famous books he makes just this case. He argues that we have missed out on one of God’s greatest gifts to us because our churches have disposed with the practice of personal confession—confessing our sins to one another. (You can read more from Bonhoeffer in the attached document below.)

These are his primary points:

* “In confession there takes place a breakthrough to community.”

“‘Confess your sins to one another’ (James 5:16). Those who remain alone with their evil are left utterly alone. It is possible that Christians may remain lonely in spite of daily worship together…the final breakthrough to community does not occur precisely because they enjoy community with one another as pious believers, but not with one another as those lacking piety, as sinners. For the pious community permits no one to be a sinner. Hence all have to conceal their sins from themselves and from the community. We are not allowed to be sinners. Many Christians would be unimaginably horrified if a real sinner were suddenly to turn up among the pious. So we remain alone with our sin, trapped in lies and hypocrisy, for we are in fact sinners.

“However, the grace of the gospel, which is hard for the pious to comprehend, confronts us with the truth. It says to us, you are a sinner, a great, unholy sinner. Now come, as the sinner that you are, to your God who loves you.”

* “In confession there occurs a breakthrough to the cross.”

“The root of all sin is pride…Confession in the presence of another believer is the most profound kind of humiliation. It hurts, makes one feel small; it deals a terrible blow to one’s pride.

“And it is nothing else but our community with Jesus Christ that leads us to the disgraceful dying that comes in confession, so that we may truly share in this cross. The cross of Jesus Christ shatters all pride. We cannot find the cross of Jesus if we are afraid of going to the place where Jesus can be found, to the public death of the sinner. And we refuse to carry the cross when we are ashamed to take upon ourselves the shameful death of the sinner in confession.”

* “In confession there occurs a breakthrough to assurance.”

“Why is it often easier for us to acknowledge our sins before God than before another believer? God is holy and without sin, a just judge of evil, and an enemy of all disobedience. But another Christian is sinful, as are we, knowing from personal experience the night of secret sin. Should we not find it easier to go to one another than to the holy God? But if that is not the case, we must ask ourselves whether we often have not been deluding ourselves about our confession of sin to God–whether we have not instead been confessing our sins to ourselves and also forgiving ourselves. And is not the reason for our innumerable relapses and for that feebleness of our Christian obedience to be found precisely in the fact that we are living from self-forgiveness and not from the real forgiveness of our sins? Self-forgiveness can never lead to the break with sin.

“Who can give us the assurance that we are not dealing with ourselves but with the living God in the confession and the forgiveness of our sins? God gives us this assurance through one another. The other believer breaks the circle of self-deception.”

I’ve attached both the handouts I distributed to the class. The first is a selection of excerpts from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s chapter on “Confession and the Lord’s Supper” from Life Together. The second is the liturgy of the Reconciliation of a Penitent from the Book of Common Prayer.