Extra Credit Podcast

Blessed is the one

The Covering (Up?) of Sin

In a memorable phrase (not least because Paul quotes it in Romans 4) Psalm 32:1 says, “Blessed is the one…whose sin is covered.”

The language of “covering” is striking here. What does it mean to have your sins covered? This is a suggestive metaphor. And as with any suggestive material, we have to take care in how we hear it. It isn’t immediately clear.

In the winter of AD 412 St. Augustine of Hippo preached a sermon on Psalm 32 to the people of Carthage in the city’s most famous basilica. In explaining what the psalmist means be the covering of sins, Augustine brings up the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.

In Jesus’ parable both the Pharisee and the Tax Collector go to the temple to pray. The Pharisee thanks God that he is not like the adulterers, the robbers, or even the tax collectors. Unlike these filthy evildoers this pharisee says, “I fast twice a week and tithe on all that I get.” But the Tax Collector stands at a distance and beats his breast as he prays: “God be merciful to me a sinner.” Jesus says that it is the Tax Collector who is justified before God.

The Pharisee prays opposite of Psalm 32. Psalm 32 says that blessing is for those whose sins are forgiven, but the Pharisee says, “Blessed is the one who has no sins.” The Pharisee’s problem is that he is sinless—just like Saul of Tarsus or the Rich Young Ruler.

Augustine looks to his Carthaginian audience and says:

The Pharisee was indeed guilty of sin; but he was looking the wrong way, and failed to realize where he was standing. He was like someone in need of healing who had come to a doctor’s surgery, but presented only his sound limbs and covered up his wounds.

Notice Augustine says the Pharisee’s problem is that he “covered up” his sins. But doesn’t our psalm say having your sins covered is to be blessed? Yes, says Augustine, but there are two ways to cover sins: You can cover something in order to hide it or you can cover something in order to heal it. The first leads to death, the second leads to life.

Rather than letting God cover his sins, the Pharisee covers his own sins up to hide them from himself, from his neighbors, and ultimately from God. Augustine continues:

Let God cover your wounds; don’t cover them yourself. If you cover them up out of embarrassment, the doctor will not heal them. Allow the physician to cover and cure them, because he covers them with a dressing. Under the physician’s dressing the wound heals; under the patient’s covering it is merely hidden. Anyway, from whom are you trying to hide it? From him who knows everything?

The Pharisee presented his healthy limbs: “I fast and I tithe on all I get.” The Rich Young Ruler had kept the commandments from his youth. Saul of Tarsus was “flawless” in his righteousness under the law. Fasting, tithing, and obedience are all good things. But all three refused to present their wounded limbs to the Great Physician. And in the cases of all three the wounded limbs were their pride. Pride is the one thing the Doctor has the hardest time treating. Not because it is too hard for him, but because it keeps the patient from staying on the operating table.

Pride just is the covering up of our own sins. It’s blinding. It is the covering that is a hiding and just so it can never lead to the covering that is a healing.

So, Augustine says, present your sins to the Lord and come out of hiding.

Hiding in (Not from) God

But don’t the Scriptures themselves say that “we are hidden in Christ? Or don’t the psalmists often say things like: “Let me hide in the shadow of your wings”? Don’t we sing, “Rock of Ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee”?

Should we hide or not?

The language of “hiding” in Scripture works the same way that the language of “covering” does. As Augustine pointed out, there are two ways to “cover.” There is a way to cover up yourself and there is a way to be covered by God. The same dynamic is at work in the language of “hiding.” There are two ways to be hidden.

I’ve witnessed the two ways of hiding in my young children just this last week. A few nights ago my two oldest kids (5 and 2) were after me to play hide-and-seek. Because my daughter is only 2 years old, she often finds it scary to go hide by herself. So we take turns hiding with her. First my daughter and my son go hide together from me. But the next round my daughter and I would hide together from my son. The first round my daughter was hiding from me. The second round she hides with me.

And I can’t help but notice the absolute giddiness in her as we hide together. Her giggling can’t be contained. Most all of us will all have had the experience of building forts when we were young. There is an excitement and even a giddiness in being safely hidden. Like being in a tent in the rain. I suspect this is the reason most of us sleep with “covers.” There’s a comfort in being hidden.

When the psalmist asks to be hidden under God’s wing he is not asking be hidden from God, but hidden in God. Notice the song Rock of Ages says, “Let me hide myself in thee” not, “Let me hide myself from thee.”

I’m convinced this difference is at the heart of whether or not we grasp the gospel. We have all heard sermons in which the preacher says something like, “If you believe in Jesus, then when God looks at you he doesn’t see you, he sees Jesus.” This is one of the biggest mistakes we can make because what we are suggesting is that we are being hidden in Christ from God. Rather than being hidden in Christ, who is God.

When the psalmist asks to be hidden in the shadow of God’s wings he is comparing God to a mother bird. But a mother bird does not hide her chicks under her wings so that she doesn’t have to look at them. She hides them to be close to them, to comfort them, to protect them from the dangers around them.

For many of us our theology has gone off course here. We have imagined that what Christ does for us is hide us in himself from the Father, so that the Father does not destroy us out of his just wrath.

But this is a perversion of the gospel.

This came home to me reading a book by a modern day shepherd named James Rebanks.  Rebanks says that when it is lambing season they have mothers that die in the birthing process and little lambs that die. They have motherless lambs and childless mothers.

He says an old shepherding trick is to take the dead body of the lamb who died in birth and skin it from the neck to the hoofs. The shepherd then takes that skin and covers one of the orphan lambs with it like a jacket. Then he takes that orphaned lamb and gives it to the mother who lost her lamb in childbirth. The orphan lamb smells like her baby. And, Rebanks says, she almost always will mother it and feed it as if it is her own. But, and I love this, he says you can tell that she knows something is up. He says the ewe looks at the shepherd with a look that says, “I know you did something and I know this isn’t my lamb.” But after a few moments of skepticism she still feeds and cares for the lamb like it is her own.

Reading this I could feel a version of my former self gearing up to preach it straightaway. “Jesus is the lamb of God who has covered us in himself so that the Father accepts us as if we were him.” But this isn’t what the New Testament bears witness to.

If we press into this metaphor we can see its many problems. The first—and biggest—problem it suggests if taken literally is that Jesus (God the Son) is tricking God the Father into loving you. God doesn’t actually want you, in fact he can’t stand to look at you because you are too sinful. But because his Son is perfect and has covered you, the Father accepts you because you “smell” like his Son.

This is not the gospel. That would be hiding from God. The gospel promises that you are being hidden in God. He is your home and in him you find your true self—your true identity. You don’t have to cover it up in order for him to accept you.

The gospel is that the lamb of God has died in order to show you that you truly belong to the Father. The Father desperately wants you. This is the deepest truth of your life. God is head over heels in love with you. But he needs you to know that this is true of you. As John puts it, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” Or Paul says to the Corinthians that “God was reconciling the world to himself in his Son Christ Jesus.”

Jesus does not die to convince the Father to accept you. He dies so that you can see that the Father has loved you from before the foundations of the earth: “You have died, and your life is now hidden in Christ in God” not from God (Col. 3:3).

This is what it means for God to cover your sin. He clothes you in Christ, not to hide you from view, but to keep you close. God doesn’t have to fool himself into loving you. His love makes you who he always meant for you to be.

In other words, when you are clothed in Christ, you are becoming yourself! 

This is precisely what happens in the Prodigal Son story. The younger son has gone away from his father and squandered his inheritance on wild living. He comes to his senses and realizes that he should go back to his father, not as a son, but as a slave. When he gets home he tries to tell his father that he is not worthy to be a son, but asks if he can be made a slave in his father’s house. But the Father will not hear it. He says, “Go and get a robe! Cover him in his own robe! For my son was dead and now he is alive, he was lost but now he is found!”

The father covering his son in the robe is not a lie. The father refuses to regard his son as a slave because he has never been a slave. He’s always only been a son. When the father covers his son in the robe he is telling him, “You are my son. You always have been. I put this robe on you so that you know it is true.”

The robe does cover his sin, his nakedness, his poverty, his filth. But it’s not a robe that doesn’t belong to him. It is his precisely because the father says it always has been. In this act of covering his son the father is making the boy to be who he has always been. The father was saying, “Come out of your delusions of being one of my slaves! You are my child.”

This is how God covers our sin. And his covering sin is precisely what makes him righteous. In fact, in Scripture uncovering or exposing sin is often what the unrighteous people do. If they can, the righteous cover sin.

Think of Joseph and Mary. Before they were married she was found to be with child. In Joseph’s mind this pregnancy is the result of Mary’s sin. But because he was a righteous man he decided he would not expose her, but he would cover her.

“Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, [or, was a righteous man] he did not want to expose her to public disgrace, so he had in mind to divorce her quietly” (Matt. 1:19).

God covers sin. This is what he’s been doing since Genesis 3. Adam and Eve fall into sin and God is there to cover their nakedness. Because he is righteous.

We often think that to be truly righteous is to expose every sin any chance we get. But this is not righteousness according to Jesus.

Bonhoeffer puts his finger on something we desperately need to hear in our world of exposure and cynicism:

“The point is precisely that ‘truthfulness’ does not mean the disclosure of everything that exists. God Himself made clothes for man (Gen. 3:21); and this means that [after the fall] many things in man are to remain concealed…Exposure is cynical; and even if the cynic appears to himself to be specially honest.”

God covers sin. That is what makes him righteous. We’ve often been taught the opposite. It is true that God exposes the evil, but he always covers the person (Col. 2:15).

We are called into this same sort of work for those around us. We are called to cover the sins of our spouses, our families, our neighbors, and even our enemies. This doesn’t mean hiding them from God, or pretending they don’t exist. It means hiding them in God for their ultimate healing and restoration.

I leave the last word to the Apostle Peter: “Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8).

Amen.

We did not meet for our typical midweek Bible study this week, so I figured I would repost an old teaching that I know I need to return to often.

This teaching was from our study of 1 Corinthians 3 in the Spring of 2024.

Psalm 23 (KJV)

The Servant Shepherd

Our familiarity with Psalm 23 can keep us from seeing the masterful progressions contained within these six lines. I’ll point to just a few that we discussed in the class.

The psalm begins with words about God. “The Lord is my shepherd. He makes me leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.” But in the valley of the shadow of death things turn. We move from words about God to talking to God. “I will fear no evil for you are with me. Your rod and staff comfort me. You prepare a table before me.” We meet the Good Shepherd in the valley of death.

But on the other side of the valley we find, to our surprise, that the Good Shepherd is preparing a table before us in the presence of our enemies. First, why is a sheep being allowed to eat at the table? And second, why is it that God is the waiter and we are the guests? Why is God serving us? Isn’t that backwards? Isn’t the point of our lives to serve God?

We aren’t the first to be shocked by this truth. Jesus’ own disciples couldn’t believe it which is why Jesus told them, “The son of man did not come to be served, but to serve.” Chris Green puts the point like this:

“We do not know even how to begin to take it seriously. How can it be that he serves us? But what if it were true? What if we’re trying to serve a God who wants to serve us?”

God is unlike anything we can compare him to, but he is more dissimilar to some things than he is to others. God is more dissimilar to a king than he is to a shepherd. A king exists at the top of the ladder of society. He has servants that do his bidding. Our God is lowly enough to wash feet.

But the psalm keeps moving. The Good Shepherd isn’t just serving you, he is anointing your head with oil. The word “Christ” or “Messiah” simply means the “Anointed One.” Only Jesus is the anointed one—he alone is the Christ—but here he is making you to be like him. But that still isn’t worded quite right. He isn’t merely making you like him so that you can imitate his example. He is making you to be him, to be his own body. He is bringing you into himself—he is the head and his people are his body.

If the head is anointed with oil, the body will be anointed, too. This is what Psalm 133 testifies to. The oil is poured upon the head of the priest, but it doesn’t remain on the head. It runs down upon his beard and to the collar of his garments—to his body!

Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity! It is like the precious oil upon the head, running down upon the beard,upon the beard of Aaron, running down on the collar of his robes!

Ps. 133:1—3

Oil is a sign of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is poured out on the Head at his baptism so that he can baptize us, his body, in the Spirit at Pentecost. He is bringing us all the way into his life. He is sharing everything with us.

From Sheep to Shepherds

Now comes the most astounding line of the psalm: “And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

When the psalm began you were a sheep in the Shepherd’s pasture. He led you around to still waters and walked with you through the valley of the shadow of death. But on the other side of the valley of death something shifted. You are not a sheep in the pasture anymore, you are a guest at the Shepherd’s table, eating his food! And after dinner you have been invited to dwell in the house with the Shepherd. Not for a sheep sleepover, but forever.

What in the world is a sheep doing dwelling in the house of the Shepherd? Sheep don’t live in the shepherd’s house. We began the psalm as sheep, but the psalm ends with us being equals with the shepherd living in his house. In other words, by the end of the psalm you are not a sheep anymore. The work of God in your life is to make you into a shepherd in the way that he is a shepherd. Or as Jesus tells his disciples: “I no longer call you servants. I call you friends.”

How is this made possible?

Remember what John the Baptist said when he saw Jesus approaching him? “Behold the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.” The shepherd is a sheep. Or as John would later write in Revelation 7:17 “For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” 

The Good Shepherd is a Shepherd by becoming a Lamb. Or to put it in terms St. Athanasius might approve of: The Shepherd became a sheep in order to make sheep into Shepherds.

And now we see why the psalmist says that goodness and mercy shall follow him all the day of his life. The psalmist isn’t merely talking about what God will do for you, but rather what God is doing through you for the sake of others.

Goodness and mercy shall follow you like the train of a bride’s wedding dress follows her wherever she goes. It is the trail she leaves anywhere she goes in the room. Now that you’ve been made a shepherd with the Shepherd, wherever you go goodness and mercy will be the result for the people you come in contact with. 

This is the overflowing cup you are given: the eternal life of God. Those who believe in the Good Shepherd will have rivers of living water flowing up out of their bellies (John 7:38).

Your life is meant to become the overflow for your neighbor’s life. Because you are not meant to remain a sheep. You are meant to be a Shepherd with the Shepherd and as the Shepherd. 

This week we continue our discussion of forgiveness and the psalms.

The Soldiers that Pierced Him

The soldiers are not the principally guilty party in the crucifixion of Jesus. They did not decide that Jesus should be executed. In this way we can pity them: they are just doing their job.

But their job is not guiltless. There is still responsibility for the soldiers to bear for this tragedy. It is evil, and Jesus suffers directly at their hands. They are the ones physically wounding him. It is a concrete trauma, and helpful for us to think through how the full process of forgiveness is meant to work.

Kallistos Ware puts it like this: 

If the process of forgiveness is to be brought to full completion, the evil has to be frankly admitted by both sides, by aggressor as well as the victim. It is true that, when we suffer wrong, we should endeavor to forgive the other immediately, without delay; not waiting for the other to acknowledge the wrong. It was precisely in this spirit that Jesus prayed at His crucifixion, “Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” If, however, the forgiveness is to come to proper interpersonal fulfillment; more than this is required. Forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered; and the one who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.”

Even while he was still on the cross Jesus forgave the soldiers. But as Ware points out, more than this is required if the process of forgiveness is to be brought to full completion. The proper fulfillment of forgiveness is both justice and reconciliation.

Jesus shows us here that we should forgive immediately and without delay. But for the proper fulfillment of forgiveness to take place the evil must be truthfully acknowledged by the perpetrator and the victim. If the soldiers cannot admit to any guilt, then they will not benefit from the forgiveness Jesus has given to them. 

But what would it look like if they did?

What might the full process of forgiveness look like between Jesus and the soldiers who crucified him? What does Scripture suggest to us about what might/could happen between Jesus and the soldiers who wounded him? 

To engage this question is not a flight of fancy. This is how Scripture works. It is suggestive by design and it invites us into the stories. Not to simply imagine the past, but to engage us in the present. This is how the resurrected Jesus speaks to us today, right now.

Scripture is like a Picasso painting. Compared to a realistic painting a Picasso has very few brush strokes and they are all suggestive. They don’t tell you the whole story. They invite you in to the blank space and ask you to imaginatively fill them in.

Here’s the question we are asking: What are the “brush strokes” Scripture provides for us regarding the soldiers?

In the Gospels Jesus prays from the cross that his Father will forgive the soldiers for what they’ve done. And Jesus’ prayers get answered. Robert Jenson says that this is a question posed by Jesus to the Father: Will you still be my Father now that I am tied up with these despicable brothers? In other words Jesus is saying to the Father, “If you are going to resurrect me, you will have to accept these soldiers with me because I want them to be forgiven.” The resurrection of Jesus is the assurance that the soldiers (and all humanity) have been forgiven.

But what other texts could we turn to that invite us to imagine the goodness of God in the way he deals with these soldiers?

Psalm 22: Dogs Surround Me

On the cross Jesus also quotes Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). In one of Augustine’s sermons on this psalm he says that the passion of Christ is told to us in here as clearly as it is told to us in the gospels. Psalm 22 not only speaks of the passion of Christ, but we find the soldiers mentioned again:

12 Many bulls surround me;

The “dogs” surrounding Jesus at his crucifixion are certainly not limited to the soldiers, but physically they are the representation of the evil system that has put Jesus on the cross. Augustine points out that dogs bark without understanding, without truth. No matter who passes by the yard, dogs bark. What these dogs have done they have done in ignorance. Or as Jesus put it, “They know not what they do.”

Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:8 emphasizes the same point regarding ignorance: “None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

Again, Paul is not only (or even primarily) speaking of the soldiers here, but they are certainly included. I don’t think it is much of a stretch to say that the soldiers are the most ignorant out of those responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion.

There is a deep truth here about all wounding. All wounds are inflicted without perfect knowledge. Of course some wounding is more knowledgeable, more intentional, more knowing, and so more despicable. Pilate, Herod, and the religious leaders are all more knowledgeable than the soldiers who pierced him, but it is still not perfect knowledge. If we knew the perfect truth of all things we would never wound others because the perfect truth of every situation is the will of God, which is Jesus Christ. To truly know something is to truly love it. “Perfect knowledge is perfect love.”

Scripture has suggested these two things: 1) This is an ignorant act by the soldiers and 2) Jesus forgives them. But as Kallistos Ware said if the forgiveness is to come to it's proper completion, the soldiers will have to come to see the truth themselves and recognize what they’ve done as evil. 

Psalm 22 offers us more on this. In verse 21 the psalmist says something unexpected. There is a turn. 

19 But you, Lord, do not be far from me.

The psalmist prays to be delivered from the power of the dogs, but then says that he will proclaim the name of the Lord to his brothers and sisters. But who are Jesus’ brothers and sisters? Are the soldiers included here? It’s not much of a stretch to say they are. He has pleaded with his Father for the forgiveness and we know that he is dying for their sake, in order to bring many sons and daughters to repentance (Heb. 2:10).

But there’s still more in our psalm:

27  All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord,

All the families of the gentiles, to the ends of the earth, will remember and turn to the Lord. He is the Lord who rules over all the nations, but he does so by forgiving them. The gentiles will worship the Lord, even those who have gone down to the dust, those who have died, will bow before him.

Every Eye Will See Him

When did this happen? Has this happened? This is an eschatological promise, a promise about the second coming of Christ. The book of Revelation supplies us with another brush stroke on the canvas:

Behold, He is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see Him, even those who pierced Him… (Rev. 1:7)

This is a very suggestive line. Does it mean that every person who is alive when Jesus returns will see him? But it says that even those who pierced him will see him.

This odd line seems to suggest that the second coming of Jesus is not simply the last event on the timeline of history, not merely one tick on the timeline like all other events. Rather, Jesus’s second coming is an event that will happen to the timeline of history. Jesus’ return will happen to every moment of the timeline. How else could the soldiers see him when he comes with the clouds?

In other words, Jesus second coming is not just the healing of the end of the timeline, but the healing of every moment on the timeline. It’s not like a fairytale that only ends happily ever after. The promise is that every one of our wounds—even those in our past—will be unmade and remade by the Lord Jesus.

In the way we experience time, it is true that if something has happened then it is in the past. It is over and done. Nothing can change that. But why would that apply to Christ? He is the creator of time—time is his creature! Time is not a condition Jesus has to live within, time lives in him. He is not bound by time in the way we experience it.

Our past is closed off to us. We can’t go back and change it. The soldiers cannot change the fact that they pierced him. But why would we think that God does not have access to all the past moments of suffering, trauma, and evil? The past is not closed off to God like it is to us.

This doesn’t simply mean that God is able to view what has happened in the past, but that he actually has the ability to enter all past events and act on them—to change them and make them be what they ought to have been all along.

This is, at least in part, what the book of Revelation means when it says that Jesus will wipe every tear from every eye. Not just that he will wipe away the tears from the eyes of those who are alive when he returns, but that when he comes he will wipe away every tear from every crying eye in every moment of history. 

This is hard to even imagine. But Paul reminds us that “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has in store for those that love Him” (1 Cor. 2:9).

If we can imagine what God might do to make things right, it is still not even close to what He has prepared for us.

This is the unmaking and remaking of all past traumas and wounds. God will come to every moment on the timeline of history and unmake and remake them according to his will. But he won’t do that without us.

What if in the end, when Christ returns, we are all allowed to work with God and with those who we have wronged and with those who have wronged us in a reworking of those past traumas? To bring justice and reconciliation. What if Jesus’ return is the opening of the possibility of the soldiers reworking what they should’ve done in that moment and making it true to God’s will?

I believe that in the end even Jesus’ wounds that he bears in his resurrected body will be undone and remade, by God—yes—but God with the soldiers who put the wounds into him.

For true forgiveness to be completely done, both the victim and the perpetrator have to see the truth of the evil that was done and then begin the work of making it right. And because of God’s infinite goodness he can make a way where there seems to be no way.

This is one of the greatest hopes that the gospel gives to us: We each will be given the opportunity to participate in the undoing of both the wounds we’ve received and the wounds we have inflicted. We will be given the opportunity to participate in God’s making all things new. That’s hope. That’s hope for the soldiers who pierced him, and that’s hope for you and me.

I’ve often heard pastors say things like this: “Your past has no future, but your present does.” What they mean is that what is done is done. You can’t change what has been done. You can only change yourself right now. And there’s some wisdom in that.

But the promise of the resurrection is that your past does have a future. With God’s help you will be able to forgive and be forgiven. You will have all your wounds unmade.

Psalm 130:1-4

Kallistos Ware points out that while the psalms frequently talk about forgiveness, they do not very clearly talk about the fact that we are called to forgive one another. Jesus teaches us to forgive one another. He teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” And he tells Peter that he must forgive the one who sins against him not merely seven times but seventy times seven.

We are touching one of those seemingly clashing chords here. It seems to be unresolvable. A shallow reading would say something like this: the psalms teach vengeance on our enemies while Jesus teaches forgiveness of our enemies. But there is harmony here. It’s deep and beautiful if we have ears to hear. The tension is there and it’s there on purpose. If music didn’t have tension in it, it would be boring. This is what ensures the harmony: we confess that the voice that speaks in the psalms is the same voice Peter heard walking the shores of Galilee.

Sarah Coakley argues that this line in Ps. 130:4 (“But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be feared”) unearths a deep theological insight: forgiveness is actually impossible. The psalms are testifying to the fact that: only God forgives.

The Fearfulness of Forgiveness

To our ears this line in v. 4 seems odd (“Forgiveness is with you, therefore you are to be feared”). It even seems backwards. What do forgiveness and fearfulness have to do with one another? Surely they are opposites. To forgive someone—to have mercy on them—is not a fearful thing. Imagine neighborhood kids saying, “Watch out for Old Man Jenkins at the end of the street! He forgives people!” Mercy is not something that strikes terror in our hearts. If anything we think the opposite: someone who is merciful and extends forgiveness is wimpy or weak. Forgiving is not fearful behavior. And yet the psalm insists that because God forgives therefore he is to be feared.

Interestingly, the root of the noun “forgiveness” in v. 4 is the Hebrew word salah. Salah is one of the few words that is only properly used of God in the Hebrew Bible. Another example would be the word bara which means “to create.” Only God creates in the sense of bara, and only God forgives in the sense of salah. Jacob Milgrom says that salah is “exclusively a divine gift… Only God can be the subject of salah, never man!”

Only God can forgive, but why should this result in fear?

Sarah Coakley notes that this isn’t the only passage that puts forgiveness and fear together like this. In Solomon’s dedication prayer at the temple he articulates the same movement from forgiveness to fear: “Then hear in heaven your dwelling place, forgive…so that they may fear you…” (1 Kings 8:39–40)

In both Ps. 130 and 1 Kgs. 8 fear is a result of forgiveness, not the other way around. We are more likely to think that if fear and forgiveness are related in any way, the fear would come first—someone is fearful God won’t forgive them—then as a result of their proper fear of God, he forgives them. But these passages say the forgiveness comes first and fear is the result.

In ancient Israel Ps. 130 was one of the texts read aloud on the Day of Atonement (along with the book of Jonah, a story of forgiveness, anger, and fear of the Lord). One ancient rabbinic commentary on the Day of Atonement puts it like this:

“Israel is steeped in sin…but they do repentance and the Lord forgives their sins every year, and renews their heart to fear him” (Exodus Rabbah 1.6).

Rashi, an important medieval rabbi, continues the point: “You have not given the authority to any intermediary to forgive…and therefore no person will trust in the forgiveness of anyone else [but God].”

Most striking to me is the end of the Joseph story. Joseph is reunited with his brothers who had sold him into slavery. They end up begging him for forgiveness. Joseph responds: “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm for me God intended it for good…” (Gen. 50:19–20)

The fear that comes in forgiveness is the recognition that only God can forgive. This is “the fear of the Lord” which is unlike any other fear.

The Son of Man, Forgiveness, and Fear

The Gospels also bear witness to this theme, but with a surprising twist. In the story of the healing of the paralytic man (Mk 2, Matt 9) Jesus sees the faith of the man’s friends and before anyone says a word he declares the the man’s sins are forgiven. The religious leaders put their finger on the same point: “This man is blaspheming,” they say, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Jesus then heals the man in order to show that “the son of man has authority not the earth to forgive sins.” And in Matthew’s account all those standing there were filled with fear.

Again, Sarah Coakley observes, “the more one insists on the uniquely divine characteristic of forgiveness, the higher one’s Christology is pressed.” Who is this Jesus? Yes, the winds and the waves obey him. Yes, he can heal blind eyes and lame legs. These are miracles that other humans have performed in Israel’s history. But no one can forgive sins but God alone. The forgiveness comes and the result is fear. 

The “fear of the Lord” in Scripture is a theme with its own complex harmony. To properly fear the Lord means you aren’t afraid of anything—especially death. The fear of the Lord is an odd kind of fear because it is a fear that liberates us from all other fear. As Maximus the Confessor put it, the fear of the Lord is an “expression of the true law of tenderness.”

It’s a fear that creates love and tenderness. This is a complex chord being played by the Spirit in the Scriptures. And then we get this note added to the chord: in the book of Revelation John falls at Jesus’ feet though dead, but Jesus, putting his right hand on John, says “Fear not. I am the first and the last.” Contained within the chord of “the fear of the Lord” is also “Fear not.”

The 19th century Scottish preacher George MacDonald said that the “fear of the Lord” is another way of referring to the fact that God is a consuming fire. The fire of God “is his essential being, his love” but it is a fire that is unlike earthly fire in that the further you get from it, the worse it burns you. Only at a distance does this fire burn, and the closer we get to it the more the burning turns to comfort, and comfort to bliss. 

Forgiveness is a fearful thing because only God can forgive. It is the fire of God. Once we’ve caught a glimpse of that fire, initially it fills us with fear. It burns. But the closer we move into the burning heart of God’s forgiveness (which is simply Jesus), the more the “Fear of the Lord” becomes a “Fear not.”

Forgiving as the Lord

Forgiveness is a uniquely divine capability. No one can forgive sins but God alone. And the Gospels show us that Jesus forgives sins because he and the Father are one. So far so good.

And yet, we come to another complex chord played in Scripture. Jesus repeatedly instructs us to forgive. Peter is instructed to forgive not seven times but seventy times seven. Paul tells the Colossians to “Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you” (Colossians 3:13).

To forgive someone seventy-seven times is to perfectly, fully, completely forgive—something that is uniquely divine. And Paul isn’t shying away from this either. We are to forgive as the Lord forgives.

In other words, Jesus is giving Peter permission to forgive with God’s own forgiveness. Peter is invited into the divine activity of forgiveness.

In other words, if Jesus is in God and Peter is in Jesus, then Peter has been brought into share the very life of God. Or as Peter himself puts it in 2 Peter 1:4 in Christ we have become “partakers in the divine nature.”

We are the body of Christ, united to our head. Everything that is true of Jesus he makes true for you and for me. If the head says, “Your sins are forgiven” then he is giving his body the ability to say the same.

Think back to the Joseph story. His brothers plead with him for forgiveness and Joseph says, “Am I in the place of God?”

The gospel gives us this surprising and unfathomable truth: You have been united to Jesus Christ. What is true of him becomes true of you. He is loved by God the Father and so are you. He is resurrected from the dead and so will you be. The son of man has the authority on the earth to forgive sins and by grace you have been given the same divine ability to forgive. Forgive as the Lord!

Here’s a final example to make the point. Hanging from the cross Jesus prays: “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” And so Stephen, filled with the Holy Spirit, can pray the same thing when he is being murdered: “Father, forgive them!” 

Stephen speaks up with God’s own voice and declares his murderers forgiven. And of course they have been. Jesus “is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). Stephen can speak up to God with God’s own voice and forgive declare his persecutors forgiven. 

Return to Joseph’s question: “Am I in the place of God?” And in Jesus Christ that’s precisely where we find ourselves. Jesus has made your place his place in the incarnation. And so, too, in the resurrection he has made God’s place to be our own.

Forgiveness is impossible. Only God forgives. But this is just what Jesus does. He is the one who makes a way where there is no way. He is the one who makes forgiveness the impossible possibility.

That’s just another way of saying that he’s resurrected from the grave.

Last week we concluded discussing the difficulty of Scripture. The Scriptures are like the music of God and they are filled with strange, unexpected, and perplexingly intricate harmonies that bewilder and frustrate untrained readers. The unskilled reader will hear in the Scriptures only dissonances, only clashes. I suggested that the only way to start to hear the deep, complex, but beautiful harmony of Scripture is if you are trained to hear it.

The only way to do that is by putting yourself around master craftsmen. Men and women who know how to hear this deep music. Bonhoeffer was our guide last week. This week we turn to Origen, Athanasius, Basil, and Augustine, master craftsmen of the early church, to hear what they have to teach us on the psalms.

(St.) Origen of Alexandria (185—253)

Psalms as Therapy

Origen is perhaps the most important interpreter of Scripture in the church’s history. All our best thinkers, our best theologians, and our best readers of scripture don’t happen without Origen. 

Origen says that reading the Bible is like being a physician. In the ancient world, healers, or doctors, were pretty good at dealing with certain chronic illnesses. Say you had a skin rash. The ancient physicians knew knew how to mash up a couple different herbs from the garden in order to give you relief. Doctors in Origen’s day needed to know every plant and herb growing in the garden. And, Origen says, it’s the same with reading the Bible. You have to know it in order to offer healing to someone who has an ailment.

The psalms, according to Origen, were one of the primary “herbs” used for healing. For Origen, the psalms were a means of therapy for the sick soul. 

St. Athanasius of Alexandria (296—373)

Mirror and Medicine

Athanasius, another very central and key figure in the early church picks up on this notion of the healing properties of the psalms. 

Athansius writes a letter to a man named Marcellinus and he begins like this:

Your steadfastness in Christ fills me with admiration. Not only are you bearing well your present trial, with its attendant suffering; you are even living under rule and, so the bearer of your letter tells me, using the leisure necessitated by your recent illness to study the whole body of the Holy Scriptures and especially the Psalms. Of every one of those, he says, you are trying to grasp the inner force and sense. Splendid! I myself am devoted to the Psalms, as indeed to the whole Bible; and I once talked with a certain studious old man, who had bestowed much labor on the Psalter, and he spoke to me about it with great persuasiveness and charm, expressing himself clearly too, and holding a copy of it in his hand the while he spoke. So I am going to write down for you the things he said.

Athanasius, following Origen, sees himself as physician of the soul. He knows that you can’t truly read the psalms without making them your own. He continues:

[The book of Psalms] has this peculiar marvel of its own, that within it are represented and portrayed in all their great variety the movements of the human soul. It is like a picture, in which you see yourself portrayed, and seeing, may understand and consequently form yourself upon the pattern given. Elsewhere in the Bible you read only that the Law commands this or that to be done, you listen to the Prophets to learn about the Savior’s coming, or you turn to the historical books to learn the doings of the kings and holy men; but in the Psalter, besides all these things, you learn about yourself. You find depicted in it all the movements of your soul, all its changes, its ups and downs, its failures and recoveries. Moreover, whatever your particular need or trouble, from this same book you can select a form of words to fit it, so that you do not merely hear and then pass on, but learn the way to remedy your ill…

In fact, under all the circumstances of life, we shall find that these divine songs suit ourselves and meet our own souls’ need at every turn…

The Psalms thus serve the one who sings them as a mirror.

For Athanasius, reading the psalms leads to deeper knowledge of oneself. The psalms are a mirror that allow you to see yourself more truly. The psalms, as a mirror to the self, have a diagnostic quality to them.  

Like Origen, Athanasius thinks the psalms are therapeutic.

St. Basil the Great (330—379)

A Spoonful of Sugar

Basil, building on Origen and Athanasius, says this in his sermon on Psalm 1:

All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful, composed by the Spirit for this reason, namely, that we men, each and all of us, as if in a general hospital for souls, may select the remedy for his own condition…Now, the prophets teach one thing, historians another, the law something else, and the form of advice found in the proverbs something different still. But, the Book of Psalms has taken over what is profitable from all. It foretells coming events; it recalls history; it frames laws for life; it suggests what must be done; and, in general, it is the common treasury of good doctrine, carefully finding what is suitable for each one. The old wounds of souls it cures completely, and to the recently wounded it brings speedy improvement; the diseased it treats, and the unharmed it preserves. On the whole, it effaces, as far as is possible, the passions, which subtly exercise dominion over souls during the lifetime of man, and it does this with a certain orderly persuasion and sweetness which produces sound thoughts.

Basil goes on to say that the brilliance of the Spirit’s work in the psalms is that it combines good doctrine with song. The medicine that comes from the psalms can be hard to swallow, so the Spirit mingled them with the sweetness of a song. 

I think Basil, Athanasius, and Origen are all exactly right. The psalms are therapeutic. They bring us healing. They are like a mirror for our souls to diagnose our ailments. They are like medicine mixed with honey in order that they go done easier.

But why do the psalms do this for us? Why does the medicine work? How do the psalms mirror us?

St. Augustine of Hippo (354—430)

The Whole Christ: Head and Body

Augustine picks all this up. He sees the psalms as both a mirror and medicine for the soul. In his sermon on Ps. 94 (which begins, “The Lord is a God who avenges…Rise up, Judge of the earth; pay back to the proud what they deserve”) Augustine says:

Meanwhile the wicked triumph, the wicked exult, the wicked blaspheme and commit all manner of crimes…Does this upset you? The psalm grieves with you, and asks questions with you, but not because it does not know. Rather does it ask you with the question to which it knows the answer, so that in it you may find what you did not know. Anyone who wants to console someone else acts like this: unless he grieves with the other, he cannot lift him up. First of all he grieves with him, and then he strengthens him with a consoling word…So too the psalm, and indeed the Spirit of God, though knowing everything, asks questions with you, as though giving expression to your own words…

But then he notes how the psalm shifts in verse 22: “The Lord is has become my fortress, and my God the rock in whom I take refuge.” What happened in the shift? Clearly some sort of healing. But how does the medicine work? Augustine puts his finger right on the answer:

Look how the psalm corrects itself: allow yourself to be corrected along with it. It was to that end that the psalm adopted your complaint. What did you say? How long will sinners gloat, O Lord, How long? The psalm took on your words, so now you take on the words of the psalm. And what does the psalm say? The Lord has become a refuge for me.

The psalm grieves with you and asks questions of you, but then he says the psalm corrects itself, and we have to be corrected with it. This is the key line: “The psalm took on your words, so now you take on the words of the psalm.”

What does that sound like? Or who does that sound like?

Augustine’s great insight into the psalms can be put into this question: Who is the ‘I’ that is praying here? Is it always and only just the psalmist? Is it me? Whose voice is speaking what and to whom are they speaking?

The psalms contain many voices, and the key to understanding them is seeing who is speaking in each case. This is a difficult question because it isn’t always easy to identify the voice in the psalms. Sometimes the psalmist speaks for himself and sometimes for God. Other times the psalmist will speak as though he is identified with the whole people of Israel.  Sometimes he speaks as the king of Israel. And many times he speaks as though he is the poor and the downtrodden. All these voices come through the psalmist.

So, Augustine puts this question to us: What person do you know who is simultaneously a human and God himself, the king of Israel and all of Israel, and the poor and the downtrodden? What person can include all these voices as his very own? Only Jesus of Nazareth.

The one who speaks in the psalms is Jesus Christ as “the whole Christ” (what in Latin Augustine calls the totus Christus). The whole Christ for Augustine is both the head (Jesus Christ himself) and his body (the church with all its members). This is Augustine’s greatest insight: Jesus is both simultaneously the head of the body and the body itself. He is all and in all! In the psalms you can hear him speaking as the head and at other times you can hear him speaking as the body.

Let’s take a few examples of how Augustine does this when he preaches. Here is a bit of Augustine’s sermon on Ps. 40 (on the line: “He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God”):

Someone may perhaps ask who the speaker is in this psalm. Briefly, it is Christ. But as you know, brothers and sisters—and it can never be said too often—Christ sometimes speaks in his own person, as our Head. He is the Savior of the body and its Head, the Son of God who was born of a virgin, suffered for us, rose for our justification and sits at God's right hand to intercede for us… Accordingly he sometimes speaks as our Head, and at other times as from ourselves, his members, just as he spoke in the name of his members and not from himself when he said, I was hungry and you fed me (Mt 25:35). Again, when he said, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? (Acts 9:4) it was the Head crying out in the person of his members, yet he did not say, "Why are you persecuting my members?" but, Why are you persecuting me? If he suffers in us, we shall also be crowned in him. This is the love of Christ. Can anything else compare with it? He put a hymn about this matter into our mouths, and sings it with the voice of his members.”

And here’s Augustine again on Ps. 60:

Christ willed to prefigure us, who are his body, in that body of his in which he died and rose again, and ascended into heaven, so that where the head has gone in advance, the members may confidently expect to follow. He transfigured us into himself…

The psalm takes your words of complaint and despair and sorrow to itself, and then gives you its words to have as your own. This is the beautiful exchange of Jesus. He takes on what is deathly in us and then communicates his own life to us.

The psalms are medicine. We’ve always known that. They heal. But why does the medicine work? Because the one who prays them is Jesus of Nazareth, and he’s always been the head of his body praying these prayers. When the ancient Israelites gathered in the temple with these hymns and lamentations, they prayed them with their head: Jesus Christ. That’s the reason that this psalm is medicine for your soul. 

It’s like the psalms are an IV drip through which you receive the healing medicine—which is the very life of Christ!

In other words, in the book of Psalms we are getting to overhear Jesus’ prayers to his Father. And we find that he prays for us—his body—as our representative. He gives voice to our cries.

Famously the Gospel of John allows the reader to overhear many of Jesus’ prayers to his Father. I think we can learn something of what the psalms are meant to be by looking closer at John.

In John 11 Jesus is standing at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. He has already discussed the resurrection with Martha and wept with Mary. But then we get these revealing lines:

So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me. When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out…” (John 11:41–44)

Why is he praying? For the benefit of the people who can hear him. So that they can believe! Now, if the psalms are also Jesus’ prayers what does this tell us about the psalms? They are Jesus’ prayers that are given to us for our sake! So that we may believe, so that we may be healed.

Jesus’ prayers in John’s Gospel and in the psalms are given as medicine for the sake of our healing. Jesus lets us overhear his words to the Father so that the confidence he has in God can become our confidence.

When Jesus prays so that we can hear him, he is saying: “I’m doing this so that what is always true for me, the head, can now become true for them, my body.”

This is the IV drip connected to our sin-sick souls. The connection is the head to the body. The life flows from the head into the body. This is why when a body is out of alignment with its head we say the patient is dis-eased. There is no ease between the head and body. Medicine, when working properly, restores the ease, the rest, the alignment between a head and body.

The words of the psalms are nothing less than this: they are the words of the head, Jesus Christ, prayed for the sake of his body in order to make the body sing his song again.

The Prayerbook of the Bible

The Psalms are a prayerbook, the prayerbook of the Scriptures. They contain multitudes. Athanasius of Alexandria said that the Psalms are like a garden, containing things of all kinds. What he means is that the Psalms contain every part of the Scriptures: the Torah/law, the prophets, and the rest of what we call the Old Testament. The whole of Scripture is contained in this little garden. 

But the Psalms are an odd book to find in the Bible. The Psalms are a book of prayers and that’s precisely what makes it odd. Why? Because the Bible is the Word of God to us. But prayers by definition are human words to God. 

And yet the Psalms are included in Scripture which is God’s word to us. The Psalms are odd because they are both the word of God to us and also the words of humans to God. How can our words to God also be God’s own word to us?

Who Prays the Psalms?

The only way to understand this is through Jesus. In the incarnation God becomes human. Jesus is simultaneously God and human, never separated but always at one and the same time. So, in Jesus’ mouth the words of human beings (the Psalms) become the word of God. When Jesus speaks it is simultaneously a human word and a divine word.

In this way the Psalms are pure grace. In Jesus, God has made his way to us and then also made our way back to him possible.

T.F. Torrance calls “the double movement of the Incarnation.” Jesus is both God’s word to us and our word back to God. We can see the double movement everywhere within Scripture.

Take the prophets. The Word of God comes to Israel by way of the prophets: “And the Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah/Ezekiel/Hosea/etc.” But then that same word that came through the prophets to Israel is then offered back to God by Israel in the Psalms.

The word coming down to us from God and the word going back up from us to God is the same word. It is Jesus of Nazareth.

Which means that we can only speak to God in and with Jesus. He is our way back to God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it like this:

“It is not simply a religious given that we can come to God in prayer but rather is made possible alone through Christ. No prayer can find the way to God that our intercessor Jesus Christ does not himself pick up and pray for us, that is not prayed in the name of Jesus Christ.”

This is simple if we slow down over it. How do most of us typically end our prayers? Not in our own name, but “in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.” Our way to God is not in our own name, but in his. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through him (John 14:6).

But this means that the only true way to pray the Psalms is in the name of Jesus. Bonhoeffer makes this argument in his wonderful little book on the Psalms:

“It is a great grace that God tells us how we can speak with, and have community with, God. We can do so because we pray in the name of Jesus Christ. The Psalms have been given to us precisely so that we can learn to pray them in the name of Jesus.”

In other words, prayer is always prayer mediated through Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of Jesus. So, what’s the difference between praying in our own spirit vs. praying in the Spirit of Jesus?

Fire from Heaven?

Luke 9 gives us the beginning of an answer.

51 When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. 52 And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to prepare for his arrival, 53 but they did not receive him because his face was set toward Jerusalem. 54 When his disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them [some ancient manuscripts add: ‘as Elijah did’]?” 55 But he turned and rebuked them. 56 Then they went on to another village. (Luke 9:51-56)

James and John wanted to do what Elijah had done. They wanted to call down fire from heaven on their enemies and destroy them. That sounds like a request that you would find in the book of Psalms. And yet Jesus rebukes them. 

Crucially some later manuscripts of the book of Luke provide this line from Jesus at the beginning of v. 56:

“And he said, ‘You do not know what spirit you belong to, for the Son of Man did not come to destroy human lives, but to save them.’”

The Spirit of Jesus and the spirit of vengeance against our enemies are not the same spirit. The spirit that longs for vengeance is our own spirit.

Just a few verses later in Luke Jesus says that if you want to follow him you will have to do what deny yourself and take up your cross. You must lose your life. You must lose your own spirit and in that way you will find your true life, which is the Life/Spirit of Jesus.

This is key. If you pray the Psalms in your own name, you will lose yourself, but to truly find yourself in the Psalms you will have to pray them in Jesus’ Spirit. 

Paul says in 2 Cor. 3 that we must read all Scripture according to the Spirit, not the letter. The same dynamic is at play. To read the Scriptures according to the letter is to read them according to your own spirit—to read them in your own name—and Paul says the letter kills. But to read them according to the Spirit, is to read them according to Jesus’ Spirit. And Jesus’ Spirit is the spirit that inspired the Scriptures. Paul says that reading Scripture according to the Spirit gives life.

This is what the Psalms are actually about. They testify to Jesus.

“He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44).

But the New Testament doesn’t only tell us that the Psalms speak of Jesus, but that Jesus is actually the one speaking in the Psalms. 

“So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters. He says, “I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters;  in the assembly I will sing your praises” (Heb. 2:11–12 ).

Hebrews is claiming that Jesus is the speaker of Ps. 22.

Or again:

“Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased.’ Then I said, ‘Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—I have come to do your will, my God’” (Heb. 10:5–7).

Christ came into the world speaking Psalm 40. He is the true speaker.

But the danger always lurks. Are we going to pray the Psalms in our own name—which will lead to death—or will we pray the Psalms in the name of Jesus? 

According to “the letter” the Psalms can often be ugly, violent, and vindictive. But Jesus has cleansed our prayers by making them his own. When the Psalms are prayed in Jesus’ name they are made whole.

Rowan Williams puts it like this:

“Jesus hears all the words we speak—words of pain and protest and violence and rage. He hears them and he takes them, and in the presence of God the Father he says, ‘This is the humanity I have brought home. It’s not a pretty sight; it’s not edifying and impressive and heroic, it’s just real: real and needy and confused, and here it is brought home to heaven, dropped into the burning heart of God—for healing and for transformation.”

Jesus "is not scared of anything we have to say.” He can handle it. Not because he is insensitive to our suffering, but because he is the one who can heal not only the fact that we suffered, but also the way we speak about our suffering.

Bathe Your Feet in the Blood of the Wicked

Learning to pray the Psalms “in Jesus’ name” can be especially hard in the places where the Psalms talk about enemies. If we pray these Psalms in our own name, we will easily identify our enemies and pray for their ultimate destruction. But what might happen if we pray them in Jesus’ name? The Spirit of Jesus is to love your enemies and pray for their forgiveness, even if those enemies are crucifying you.

To pray the Psalms in this way takes practice. And the best way to practice is apprenticeship to a master craftsman. In July of 1937 Bonhoeffer preached a sermon on Psalm 58 to the students at the underground seminary in Finkenwalde. Psalm 58 contains some of the harshest language of vengeance against the enemy.

“O God, break the teeth in their mouths; tear out the fangs of the young lions…” (v. 6)

“Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime; like the untimely birth that never sees the sun…” (v. 8)

“The righteous will rejoice when they see vengeance done; they will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.” (v. 10)

Upon reading the Psalm aloud to the seminarians Bonhoeffer asks this question: Are we permitted to pray like this? He answers:

“No, we, we cannot pray this psalm. But not because we are too good (what a shallow notion, what incredible arrogance!), but because we are too sinful ourselves, too evil! Only those who are themselves completely without guilt can pray like this.”

To pray like this would not only be to call down God’s righteous wrath on our enemies, but on ourselves as well. We are not completely without guilt. Who can pray this way?

“Only the one who is completely free from any desire for vengeance on his own and free from all hatred, and certainly only the one who does not use his prayers to satisfy his own hunger for revenge can pray in the purity of heart: ‘O God, break the teeth in their mouths; tear out the fangs of the young lions, O Lord!’ That is to say, O God…It is your honor that is violated. O God, may you now step in and destroy your enemy, exercise your power, let your righteous wrath be kindled.”

But how can we hear a line like "The righteous will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked” in the Spirit of Jesus? Shouldn’t we shrink back from praying words like these? No, Bonhoeffer says. What we need is to gain a better ear to hear the voice of Jesus in this.

“Is it not utterly impossible for us, as Christian, to pray the end of this psalm? My dear congregation, if we shrink away here then we have understood nothing… Anyone who shrinks back in horror from such joy in God’s vengeance and from the blood of the wicked does not yet understand what happened on the cross of Christ. God’s righteous wrath at the wicked has, after all, already come down upon us. The blood of the wicked has already flowed. God’s death sentence over the wicked has already been pronounced. God’s righteousness has been fulfilled. All this happened on the cross of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ died the death of the wicked…Christ, the innocent one, died the death of the wicked so that we need not die that same death.”

The blood of the wicked has already flowed, but in this surprising way: it was the blood of the Son of God. The righteous one became the wicked one for the sake of the wicked.

Bonhoeffer finishes his sermon:

And now a virtually incomprehensible riddle is solved: Jesus Christ, the innocent one, prays in the hour in which God’s vengeance is visited upon the wicked on earth, in which our psalm here is fulfilled: Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing… He alone is permitted [to pray this way]. 

The blood of the wicked in which we bathe gives us…a portion in God’s victory. The blood of the wicked has become our redemption; it makes us free of all sin. That is the miracle…

Christ prays this psalm for us in a vicarious representative fashion. He accuses the wicked, summoning God's vengeance and righteousness down upon them, and offering himself on the cross for the sake of the wicked with his own innocent suffering…

And now we pray along with this psalm, with the ardent petition that God bring all our enemies to the cross of Christ and grant them mercy, with fierce yearning that the day might soon come when Christ visibly triumphs over all his enemies and establishes his kingdom. Thus we have learned to pray this psalm. Amen.

Origen and the Music of Scripture

Origen of Alexandria (3rd century) describes Scripture as the music of God. He says it is a composition with strange, unexpected, and perplexingly intricate harmonies that bewilder and frustrate untrained readers. This is why, Origen says, that unskilled hearers hear only dissonances in the Scriptures, as if the Old Testament conflicts with the New, or the Prophets conflict with the Law, or Paul’s letters conflict with the Gospels. In order to hear the deep, beautiful harmonies of the Scriptures, readers will have to be trained for it. We need to apprentice ourselves to masters like Origen or Bonhoeffer.

Origen goes on to say that Scripture is not just the music of God, but it is also the instrument on which we can play the music of God. But, again, he argues that believers can only “hear” the harmonies in Scripture that they can “play.”

If you can only bang on the piano and pretend it is a song (like my 4 year old loves to do) then that cacophony will be all you will be able to hear in Scripture. But if you can hear the music of the love of God even in the dense, difficult, dissonant chords that Scripture often throws at us, you are like someone who can hear and play sonatas by Bach.

The music of God is, at its heart, a four-chord chorus: Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. But that simple chord progression is transposed in all sorts of keys, time signatures, and voicings throughout the Bible. What we are called into is to join the great fugue that is the life of God, and as we join we grow in our musical understanding. We can begin to hear complex harmonies in the places that before we only heard dissonance.

Are the Psalms Coherent?

Most of us have a favorite Psalm the way we have a favorite song. The psalms have been a great source of comfort, a balm to weary souls since the time of ancient Israel. But if you crack open the Psalms at random, chances are you will not open to a pleasant song of praise, but a harsh (even vindictive) song of imprecation. The Psalms of complaint make up a third of the entire psalter.

In other words, your chances of flipping to “The Lord is my shepherd” is much slimmer than finding lines like this: “Happy is the one who snatches up the babies of his enemies and dashes their heads against the rocks.”

The range of mood between the Psalms is vast. And this brings a question: If the Psalms are this varied how do they all hold together? Are the Psalms really one book or are they just a collection of many types of prayers and songs?

Is there any sense in which the book of Psalms works as a whole?

Orientation—Disorientation—New Orientation

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann (RIP) argues that there is a spiritual coherence to the book of Psalms. He suggests that the Psalms can be understood as a movement through three stages:

* Psalms of Orientation: If you are oriented you have balance. These Psalms express a faith in God and creation. There is an obvious equilibrium to the world. God’s creation operates on clear-cut rules that yield clear-cut results. Most of us will have experienced seasons in our life that are like this. (See Psalms 1, 37, 104.)

* Psalms of Disorientation: But there are also seasons where things aren’t working. If you are disoriented you have lost your balance and your bearing. The Psalms of disorientation are songs of anguish, hurt, alienation, and suffering. And these songs are often marked by language that is exaggerated, harsh, accusatory, and even vindictive. (See Psalms 13, 22, 88, 109.)

* New Orientation: And then in the midst of that darkness,l many of us will have experienced the surprise of healing and other unexpected gifts. Joy breaks through the despair; new light breaks through the darkness. And this is a genuinely new orientation, not just a restoration of the old orientation. You see things differently than you did before the pain and suffering. (See Psalms 30, 34, 40, 150.)

We are really just talking about two movements here. The first is a move (downward) from orientation into disorientation. The old way of thinking about things isn’t working anymore. This is where we find ourselves in what the Psalms often call “the pit.”

The second movement is a move (upward) from disorientation into a new orientation. In the midst of the darkness we are surprised by a new gift from God and given a new way to make sense of the world on the other side of the pit.

Brueggemann points out that Christians should recognize the double movement of crucifixion and resurrection here. That is not by accident. The Psalms are a baptism.

Now, it has been hard for us to see this shape of the psalms in all their honesty because, as Brueggemann argues, we live in a culture of denial. We don’t want to deal with the darkness so we deny its existence or power. We numb ourselves in many different ways so that we don’t have to confront disorientation and the reality that we are in the pit.

The Pit

Chris Green, building on Brueggemann’s schema, says that the pit is a situation of alienation, isolation, suffering and grief. Green suggests that a movement down into the pit is always characterized by alienation and disempowerment.  The deeper you fall into the pit the deeper the experience of disempowerment becomes.

The primary problem Scripture identifies with being in the pit is a surprising one: people in the pit do not praise God. The pit is a place where you experience a loss of voice. Your voice is taken from you because of your pain, suffering, alienation. It’s like getting the wind perpetually knocked out of you.

Ps. 115:17 “The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any who go down into silence.”

Isa. 38:18 “For Sheol cannot thank you; death cannot praise you; those who go down to the Pit cannot hope for your faithfulness.”

Ps. 88:3–6, 10–13 “For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; I am like those who have no help, like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep. Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise up to praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Are your wonders known in the darkness or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness? But I, O Lord, cry out to you; in the morning my prayer comes before you.”

To be in the pit is to be the walking dead. You are alive but you are deadened, cut off from your community, from yourself, and from God.

All of this is bound up with the central issue, though: a loss of voice. The deeper you fall into the pit the more difficult it becomes to pray, the more voiceless you become.

There might only be room enough for a cry or a complaint. But there is no praise or thanksgiving. This fall into the pit can happen very suddenly (a diagnosis from the doctor, the death of a loved one) or it can happen over time. You might not even realize how far down into the pit you’ve fallen because of how slow your fall has been. And because we are all unique there are many different reasons that we find ourselves in the pit. Just because what has affected you deeply would not affect others as deeply does not mean that they are not in the pit.

Green suggests that the reason a loss of voice is so dangerous is that when you lose your ability to speak up and give voice to your pain, you can get to a place where you cannot distinguish yourself from your pain anymore. You and your pain become identical. There is a collapse of your pain into yourself. The ability to distinguish yourself from your pain gets harder and harder the deeper into the pit you fall.

The antidote is precisely what the psalter give us in the Psalms of disorientation. The psalmists are people in the pit crying out to God. Sometimes they speak in very mean and angry ways. But they are still speaking! They haven’t completely lost their voice yet. Yes there is complaint, but a complaint is still speech of some sort.

Green puts it like this: “Before you completely collapse into your pain, the last coal that still has some fire in it is your ability to complain.” 

As long as you still have the ability to complain there is hope because you still have some part of your voice left. The most dangerous place to be is when you can no longer speak about your pain at all.

Green argues that the Psalms show us the way out of the pit and we can roughly categorize them in steps:

First, you have to find your voice again. If you can find your voice, you can begin to distinguish yourself from your pain. You can hold it at a distance, away from yourself. You are not your pain. Even a complaint is still a distinguishing of yourself from your suffering. The complaint is a coal that is about to be snuffed out, but if you bring it to God he can breath on it and restore the flame.

Second, we have to move from complaint to being able to name your pain correctly. What happened to you? Who caused this? Why are you here in the pit? The moment you can correctly name your pain you are already on your way out. This is intimately tied up with the human vocation God gives to Adam in the Garden of Eden. He gives him the power to name and distinguish things in the world around him. One way of describing the human vocation is becoming more and more precise with how we name things and distinguish this from that.

Third, once the naming has begun and it becomes more and more accurate, the naming turns to praise. The naming flowers into praise and thanksgiving because you start to recognize the truth of God in what has happened to you. You meet God in the pit. You realize he has been with you this whole time, sustaining you, promising to bring you through. Being able to more accurately tell the story is the beginning of praise. Gratitude grows.

And now the small ember of complaint has grown into a robust flame. You’ve gotten your voice back. Praise brings you into God’s truth about the world.

On the other side of the pit is the knowledge that even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death you are with me.

Ends or Means?

Why did God become human? This is an old question and it is deceptively simple. The way we answer it will fill in answers to a lot of other questions that we aren’t directly considering.

It’s sort of like coming to a dirt road that has a bunch of ruts in it from other cars that have driven down it when the road was soft. Some of those ruts have been dug in so deep that you can easily get stuck. I once heard about a sign at the beginning of one of those old country roads that read: “Choose your rut carefully, you’ll be in it the next 4 miles.”

The same applies with this question. The way you answer it will lock you in to some things you didn’t necessarily intend when you began.

I think there are two broad categories of answers to the question: “Why did God become human?”

* Instrumentalizing

* Humanizing

The difference is simple. We’ve all had relationships that were instrumentalizing and hopefully we’ve all had relationships that were deeply humanizing. If someone is instrumentalizing their relationship with you they are using the relationship as a tool to get something else accomplished. The relationship becomes a means to some other end goal.

But in relationships that are humanizing the relationship itself is the end goal. There is no point to the relationship except the relationship itself.

These two categories can help us map the different answers that might be given to the question: “Why did God become human?”

Is the Incarnation a means to some other end (instrumentalizing)? Or is the Incarnation the end goal itself (humanizing)?

Instrumentalizing

Let’s take just one very common “instrumentalizing” answer: “God became human in order to die.”

This answer says that God became human because someone had to pay the price for sins. The cross does pay the price for sin. Scripture uses the language of a “ransom” (“The son of man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” Mk. 10:45). So, of course sin is addressed in the the life of Jesus, but forgiveness of sins is not the end goal of the Incarnation, rather it is a by-product of God becoming human.

If you make “paying the price for sin” the end goal of the Incarnation, you will end up with some distorted views about God, the world, and humanity. Here’s just one example in meme form:

The reason for the Incarnation here is something like this: We need Jesus to save us from what the Father is going to do to us.

Obviously the issues here are legion (in both senses). At bottom this would pit God against God. The Son is trying to save you from the Father. The Father turns his wrath on the Son instead of you in order to save you from what he was going to do to you. So there are deeply theological problems with this picture.

But this also instrumentalizes the Incarnation. It turns the Incarnation into a transaction between God and God as a means to accomplish salvation.

The Incarnation is the means to the end goal of balancing the Father’s scales of justice. His law has been broken and he demands a pound of flesh in return. So either Jesus gives it to him or we will.

This “instrumentalizing” view (and others like it, even the more sophisticated ones) ends up making the Incarnation an afterthought for God. God created the world, but when things went south he had to send his Son in order to pull things back on track. In this case, the Incarnation doesn’t reveal anything to us about who God actually is or who we actually are. It’s merely a means to an end.

Humanizing (the end goal itself)

The second answer to why God became human insists that the Incarnation is the end goal itself. The Incarnation is the point of all creation. All things were created by Jesus, through Jesus, and for Jesus. The incarnation is the beginning and the end of creation. It is the first and last thought of God about his creation (see Col. 1, Jn. 1, Heb. 1). 

In other words, God’s becoming human is not a tool that gets some other job done. It is the job done! 

Maximus the Confessor puts it like this:

“The one who knows the mystery of the cross and the tomb, knows the reason of [all] things. The one who is initiated into the infinite power of the Resurrection, knows the purpose for which God knowingly created all.”

According to Maximus the Incarnation was not a strategy to solve some other problem. The Incarnation is the purpose of the whole world. God created the world in order to becoming human.

This has a lot to say to us about how we relate to other. Our relationships with others are not tools for us to use to get something else accomplished. (Even if that something else is “getting them saved.”) Our relationships are never our means to some other end goal. Relationship is itself the end goal.

Theosis: Becoming God

In the 4th century Athanasius of Alexandria wrote: “God became man so that man might become like God.”

That can be a very jarring statement to hear for the first time. There are many ways to mishear this. What Athanasius does not mean is some sort of crude polytheism in which we all become gods who rule over our own private worlds apart from God.

Athanasius is saying that what God is by nature, he is making us to be us by grace.

This is the wonderful promise of the gospel: God wants to share his very life with you. He wants you and me and all creation to participate in the life that only naturally belongs to Father, Son, and Spirit. The early church had a term for this: “Theosis.” God is bringing us into his own life.

2 Peter 1:4 says, “[God] has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature…”

If we use the language of “children of God” it might be a little more familiar. Who is God’s Son? He only has one by nature. His name is Jesus Christ. Jesus is the only begotten Son of God. And yet we dare to say that we, too, are called children of God! But we are not children by nature, we are children by grace.

In the Incarnation God has become human–what we are by nature–so that he can include you by grace into what he is by nature. 

God wants to have the same relationship with you that he shares with Jesus. And Jesus wants you to have the same relationship with the Father that he has.

You and I can be called children of God only because we are in Christ. This is the meaning of Athanasius’s famous line.

But even Athanasius’s dictum can be turned into an “instrumentalizing” of the Incarnation. You could mishear Athanasius as saying that the Incarnation is a means to some other end.

We will mishear him if we think he means something like: “God became what was opposite and contrary to himself in order to make human beings something that is opposite and contrary to what they are.” 

In other words, for God to make us “God” he would need to cancel out our human nature. The end goal would be to make us something non-human.

But that’s not what Athanasius means. We have to invoke Bonhoeffer one last time. In His Ethics he takes Athanasius’s famous line and tweaks it:

“Human beings become human because God became human.”

He is not disagreeing with Athanasius. He’s saying the same thing, but in a more precise way. He’s saying that because the God we meet in the life of Jesus is God as human, then to become God in the way that this God is God is to become truly human.

Or as Bonhoeffer will say elsewhere:

“God as human being, and human being as God, must be held together in our thinking…We believe that Jesus the human being is God, and that he is so as the human being, not in spite of his humanity or beyond his humanity…”

“It is finished”

So what does it mean to be truly human? 

Think back to Genesis and the account of creation. In Genesis 1 God sets out each new day to create and fill the creation by saying, “Let there be...” He says it, it is, and it is good. Everything God creates is done in this fashion, except one thing: humanity.

On the sixth day of the week we find a change in the pattern. Rather than saying, “Let there be human beings,” God says, “Let us make human beings…” All the other bits of creation made on days one through five were simply setting the scene—the backdrop—for the play. Now, with the creation of humanity, we’ve come to the main action. This will be center stage: God’s project of making human beings in his image. And a project implies that it is not completed yet.

Two questions arise: 1) Why doesn’t God say, “Let there be a human being,” and 2) Has he finished his project yet?

We find the answer in John’s Gospel. John famously begins with an obvious allusion to Genesis: “In the beginning...” John is claiming (at least in part) that the life of Jesus is what Genesis is about. As you read through John you find that he has slipped in a multitude of echoes and allusions to Genesis.

On the day of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion John stresses that it was the sixth day of the week (John 19:14 “the day of Preparation for the Passover,” or as we call it “Good Friday”). Jesus, now beaten and bloodied, has been arrested and Pilate brings him before the hostile crowd. But Pilate announces something odd. He says,  “Behold, the man,” “Ecce homo” (Latin) “ho anthropos” (Greek), or more accurately in English: “Behold, the human being.” 

In Genesis God began his project of creating human beings on the sixth day and in John’s Gospel he completes it on the sixth day. Behold the human being. And then we get Jesus’ last words from the cross: “It is finished!”

The project that God began in Genesis is now being accomplished in Jesus, the truly human one. “Behold, the human being!”

Jesus, the one who pours himself out, who empties himself for the sake of others, is the image of God. This is the image God is conforming us to.

So again, why doesn’t God create human beings by saying “Let there be human beings”? Because to be truly human is to voluntarily lay your life down, to pour yourself out for the sake of others.

In other words, in order for the completion of God’s project of creating a human being to take place in you and me, we have to say, “Let it be.” God is patiently waiting for us to respond with our own, “Not my will, but yours be done.”

These are truly human words precisely because they are truly divine words. The Spirit makes our words to be the words of Jesus. And oddly enough these human-divine words are words of prayer. As Robert Jenson says human beings are the “praying animal.” 

A Hidden God?

In the early 2nd century a Greek opponent of Christianity named Celsus argued that Jesus could not be God because there was nothing visibly divine about him. Celsus writes:

“If there were a divine spirit in the body of Jesus, that body would of necessity vary in some respect from other bodies…in size, in beauty, in strength, in voice. It would have something attractive in its characteristics for it’s impossible that the body having something of the divine nature should in no way differ from other bodies. But Christians say that the body of Jesus was not at all different. Indeed, they so claim that it was small, ill-favored, and unsightly.”

Surely the divine cannot “fit” inside the human. Wouldn’t God have to become less than God to become human? Wouldn’t he have to undergo some sort of metaphysical surgery to “fit”?

In Celsus’s mind humanity and divinity are polar opposites. Time and eternity, finitude and infinitude, death and life—how could these opposites hold together in Jesus?

And yet this is the central claim of Christianity: God is the one who became human in Jesus Christ. Christians are those who look at the little baby in the manger and the bloodied man on the cross and say: “This is God.”

This bring us to a central theme within Christian theology that is usually referred to as “the hiddenness of God.” Christian theology throughout the church’s history has generally agreed that there is a hiddenness to God even in his revelation. When you look at the baby in the manger or the man on the cross you cannot simply see with your eyes that this is God. There is a hiddenness, an incognito.

But the real question is in what way is he hidden? There’s more than one way to be hidden.

A Kierkegaardian Parable

The Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard told a story that cuts right to the heart of the way God is hidden in the incarnation of Jesus. It goes something like this:

Once upon a time there was a beautiful peasant maiden who worked in the fields gathering wheat. One day as the prince of the kingdom was walking on the parapet of the castle he noticed the young maiden. As he watched her work he was captured by her beauty. It was love at first sight. 

He decided in his heart that he would marry the young maiden. But he immediately recognized a problem. The prince knew that because he had power over all the land the maiden would marry him even if she didn’t love him. He knew that his power as the prince would coerce her into marriage. But he didn’t want that. He wanted her to genuinely love him in return.

So, he devised a plan. He would disguise himself as a peasant and hide his true identity. He put on the brown, tattered clothes of a peasant over the top of his royal purple garments; the purple hidden by the brown, the royalty hidden by the poverty.

Kierkegaard notes that this kind of a story grabs our attention. It’s a classic romantic drama. But, he says, what holds our attention in the story is not whether or not the beautiful peasant maiden will fall in love with the prince. That’s a foregone conclusion. He is noble, he is handsome, he is a prince, we know how these stories go.

What really holds our attention is not whether she will fall in love with him, but rather when he will reveal to her that he is actually the prince. When will he take off the brown peasants’ clothing and reveal the royal purple robes underneath? When will he come out of hiding? And how will she respond?

Perhaps he will tell her his true identity after they have worked together in the fields for several weeks and months. Maybe during a break in their work he will declare his love for her and reveal to her his true identity.

Or maybe he will wait until their wedding day, after she says “I do,” so that he knows she genuinely loves him. Maybe then he will rip back the brown clothes and reveal the purple. Perhaps he will even wait until after the wedding night. Maybe they will spend their first night together in a humble cottage and at breakfast the next morning he will turn to her and say, “You have not only become my wife, you have become the princess of the entire kingdom! Tonight we will sleep in the palace.”

Stanley Hauerwas says that Kierkegaard’s story reveals the way we think about Jesus and the hiddenness of God. Generally speaking, there are two ways Christians have thought about the way God is hidden: 1) “Concealing” and 2) “Revealing.”

1) Concealing. The first way would say: Before the Son of God became incarnate he was robed in royal purple. He was eternal, infinite, all-powerful, all-knowing, and omnipresent. But when he became human, he laid aside some of these things in order to truly be a human being. In the incarnation he becomes finite, weak, limited in knowledge, etc. 

In other words, the prince has to stop being the prince (in some capacity) for a time in order to become a peasant. The resurrection, in this view, is the “rip” of the brown clothes to reveal the purple.

That is, obviously, a type of hiddenness. God hides himself by concealing his true identity.

2) Revealing. The second way to think about this, as Hauerwas says, is that in Jesus there is no purple underneath the brown clothes. The brown clothes of the servant are actually the true clothes of the prince. This is who he is. He is the prince not despite appearing as a servant—he is the prince as a servant.

In Jesus there is no other royal purple robes hiding elsewhere. His purple robes are his slave clothes. 

But this, too, is a type of hiddenness. God isn’t hidden because he conceals his true identity. Rather, God is hidden in that he actually reveals his true identity. God does not hide himself from us, he reveals himself to us. But it is precisely his revelation that hides him. 

Robert Jenson summarizes the two ways of conceiving of the hiddenness of God like this:

“In one way or another, western theology has tended to construe Christ’s human sufferings and death as clues to the character of his hidden divine presence. According to Luther, they are his divine presence among and for us. All orthodox theology is agreed that God remains hidden even when revealed; Luther goes beyond this to insist that it is precisely his revelation that hides him… Traditional theology has tended to say that God is hidden by his metaphysical distance from us, across which we must peer; Luther says that what hides him is that his revealed presence is so unavoidably in our face.”

The first way (concealing) can fall prey to the assumption that Jesus is really a king in the way the world knows kings. The only difference is that he hides it under his slave clothes for 33 years. With his understanding the incarnation is God acting out of character (and/or nature). For the duration of Jesus’ earthly life he conceals himself, but hiding under the brown clothes is really power as we all know it and want it. We can easily start to think that the purple Jesus really has is no different than the purple that Herod or Caesar wears.

I’m convinced the second way (revealing) is the faithful way to understand God’s hiddenness. God hides by revealing himself.

We actually don’t know what divinity is really like. We don’t know what real power is. We only know cheap, earthly imitations of both divinity and power. But in God’s revelation of himself Jesus shows us that the true God is a crucified God; that real power is the power of the cross.

To put it back in the terms from Kierkegaard’s story: True purple is not Caesar’s purple. True purple is the crimson of the cross. God is hidden in his revelation. But the way he is hidden is different than we would ever imagine. He does not hide himself, he reveals himself. But what he reveals turns out to hide him from us because it is not anything close to what we would expect. What he reveals is that he is essentially humble and lowly.

Kenosis, Humility, and Humiliation

Biblically, the rubber meets the road in how we read the Christ hymn in Philippians 2. 

“Although [or “Because”] being in the form of God, He did not consider his equality with God as something to be exploited for his own advantage, But emptied himself [kenosis], By taking the form of a slave, By being born in the likeness of human beings. And being found in human form, He humbled himself By becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and given to him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:6—11).

The hiddenness of God is directly tied to what Paul here calls “emptying” (or in Greek “kenosis”). The question is who is being emptied of what and when?

The typical understanding of the sequence of events of the Incarnation would be something like this:

God → humiliation → Human

In this way of construing the matter, becoming human is a humiliation for God. God’s self is hidden in the act of becoming human because he has to lay aside his divinity in order to become human. He has to give up “the form of God.” He has to undergo metaphysical surgery—a “divinectomy” of sorts.

But then we are left with a major problem. If Jesus has to empty himself of the “form of God,” then his life isn’t really isn’t revealing to us who God actually is. He is hiding the purple divine garment underneath the brown human garment. We still don’t know what the purple garment looks like.

In his Christology lectures, Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggests that we understand the sequence of events differently:

God → Human → humiliation

Jesus’ divinity is seen in his humanity, not despite it. For God to become human is not a humiliation for God, it is a revelation of God. God’s becoming human is the most fitting thing for him because he is the God-human.

Chris Green summarizes Bonhoeffer’s point:

“As Bonhoeffer reminds us in his christology lectures, the incarnation is not a humiliation for God—it is not as if God finds it unbecoming to take humanity as his own! The incarnation is a humiliation for us, because God comes among us as one without beauty, without desirability or comeliness, making nonsense of every frame of reference, every standard of judgment, every order and scheme we have devised for ourselves as a means of giving our lives significance and stability.”

God does not have to become less God in order to become fully human. Jesus is not emptying himself of divinity, rather he is revealing to us that it is the nature of the true God to empty himself. This God is God as human. Or as Luther often said: “I point to this human being [on the cross] and say, this is God!”

This is the mystery of the Triune life. In Jesus’ humiliation we are seeing God’s exaltation. Jesus isn’t humiliated in order that he can then be exalted. His humiliation on the cross is his exaltation.

Put differently, the throne of God and the cross of Jesus are not two separate things, but one single reality. Jesus tells us this in John’s Gospel: “‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die” (12:32–33).

There is a humiliation in the incarnation, but it is not that God would become human. Rather the humiliation, the scandal, is that God would be human in this way: lowly, humble, suffering, shameful, dishonored, and defiled.

Unveiled Faces

Scripture is full of instances in which creatures come in contact with the face of God and they have to hide their own faces. It is too much for them to take in.

In the visions of Ezekiel, Isaiah, and John we see the cherubim/seraphim (those closest to the throne of God) continually hide their faces with their wings. They veil themselves from the glory of the face of God. 

But why? 

In Ezekiel’s vision as he looks upon the throne of God he sees something odd: the one seated on the throne has the appearance of one a son of man—a human being. But why does the one on the throne look like a man? Christian theology must answer: because the second person of the Trinity is a man–Jesus of Nazareth.

Gregory the Great (6th century) describes Ezekiel’s vision like this:

“We should observe how the order is maintained… For above holy men still living in the body are the angels, and above the angels are superior angelic powers closer to God, and above the powers is…the man Christ Jesus.”

That which is most exalted, even above all the angels, rulers, and thrones is the humiliated, crucified man of Golgotha. That is the stumbling block. The Exalted One is the Crucified One.

The the highest is also the lowest. And it is highest by being the lowest.

This is why the angels hide their faces. It’s not simply because God’s glory is so much higher than the glory of the angels (though it is). It’s that the way it is higher is precisely in that it is lower. As Bonhoeffer says, “God glorifies himself in the human being.”

But angels aren’t the only ones to encounter God’s immediate presence. Elijah and Moses also see God in his glory, and they both do so on the top of mountains.

Moses is on the mountain of the Lord and he asks to see God’s glory. God tells him that he cannot look on his face and live, but that he will pass before Moses while Moses is in the cleft of the rock. God covers the cleft with his hand so that Moses can only see his backside.

Moses sees not the face, but the backside of God. Martin Luther notes that “the backside” (or “posterioria” in Latin) is the shameful side of God. Luther then suggests something provocative. What is the shameful “backside” of God except the cross of Jesus? Moses sees the lowliness of God, but in that lowliness he sees God as he truly is. Moses sees Jesus: He sees God in shame, dishonor, and suffering. He sees the Crucified God.

But Elijah also encounters God on a mountain (perhaps the same one):

“A great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.” (1 Kgs 19:11–13).

God comes in a still small voice. Not in the thundering power of the earthquake or the wind, and not in the glory of the fire. God comes in weakness because this is how God always comes to us.

But there is a difference between the stories of Moses and Elijah.

Elijah veils his face just like the angels do. He cannot bear to look on the one who comes in the weakness of the still small voice. But Moses does not. Moses speaks to God face to face as a man speak to his friend. Moses only veils his face with the Israelites, but with God he takes the veil off. 

Moses knows that the truth of God’s glory is that he is humble. Moses knows (somehow, someway) that God is the God-human. Moses unveils his own face and the face he sees looking back at him is the face of Jesus of Nazareth. That’s God’s glory.

The question posed to us is whether or not we will veil our face when we are confronted by the cross. The cross is too much for us to take in because we expect God’s “purple” to be higher than us. But God’s royal purple robes are lower than us, and that’s the block we stumble over. This stumbling stone is precisely what creates faith in us.

Will we veil our faces in his presence or will we take our veils off?

In 2 Corinthians Paul tells us what we are called to do: “And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another…” (2 Cor. 3:18).

But here is the the good news of the gospel: Even if we veil our faces in the presence of this lowly king, he still meets with us. He will continue to meet with us until the veil is removed from our face. He did it for Elijah, and he will do it for you.

The gospel of Luke tells us that Moses and Elijah both met Jesus on a mountain, the mount of transfiguration. Jesus appears in his glory before Peter, James, and John and there he is with both Moses and Elijah. Jesus speaks with the two prophets about his departure, his exodus, his crucifixion. His lowliness.

This is his “backside.” This is the “still small voice.” And on the mount of transfiguration both Moses and Elijah turn to the Lord with unveiled faces because God has turned toward them in his meekness.

The veil that covers our face is our own embarrassment over the fact that God is this humble, this lowly.

Take off the veil like Moses did. Turn to the Lord today. But even if you delay taking off your veil like Elijah, the promise we are given is that one day it will be removed and you will see the Lord high and exalted and your knees will bow.

But your knees will not bow in terror or fear, they will not bow merely because he is so much higher than you are, but because he is so much lower. Your knees will bow because the God you will see is that God whose knees are already bowed down in order to wash your feet. 

And when you bend down to meet him there, the veil will finally be removed. But not until you meet him down low.

Or as Maggie Ross writes, “Behold the God who is infinitely more humble than those who pray to him, more stripped, more emptied, more self-outpouring…The scandal of the incarnation is not that we are naked before Emmanuel, God with us, but God is naked before us.”