not that reassuring

There was a most candid interview on the Today programme on Friday last week.

A former head of counter terrorism at MI6 had been attending Barack Obama’s summit in Washington, which gathered people from over five dozen countries to address the issue of extremism. He was asked “What’s the most interesting thing you’ve heard in Washington in the last days”:

 “I’m afraid to say that the most interesting thing I’ve heard is the confusion about what to do. And I think that is disappointing in a way. It is understandable but it is disappointing that all the great minds that have been put to thinking about this problem haven’t really come up with a sensible way forward. So, you know, I guess that means we need to keep trying and keep working at it and sort of help it to burn out.” 

1 Tim 2:1-2 I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people— for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.

Psalm 146:3 Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save.

Some notes on 1 Sam 17

I love the David and Goliath narrative and have preached it a few times, always learning something fresh. Here’s a few notes that have helped me get a grip on the passage:

1 Sam 17 is a temptation scene: God’s people fail to trust in the Lord, tempted by a scale-armoured snake until his head is crushed

1 Sam 17 is an abdication: Saul won’t fight for his people despite the fact that

-       it’s his job to go out before his people and fight their battles (8:20),

-       he’s their own giant (9:2)

-       God has promised to strengthen the king (2:10)

And so he hands over his armour to David the way a cowardly sheriff hands over his badge in a Western.

1 Sam 17:26 is a turning point. Before that everyone think it’s a fight between Philistines and Israelites. David knows it’s a fight between the Philistines and the living God. Remembering that makes our enemies a lot smaller. After 17:26 Goliath isn’t called Goliath anymore. He’s just “the Philistine.” He’s been cut down to size.

1 Sam 17 is a slow story. The Israelites and Philistines faced each other for 40 days, morning and evening (17:16). That means the Israelites stood there listening to Goliath’s taunts 80 times. And every time “they all ran from him in great fear” (17:24). Forgetting the Lord hands us over to fear.

Notice the shouting. The Israelites give a battle cry every time they march to battle (17:20). I bet that sounded good on Day 1. Not so good on Day 30, Day 39…

Notice one more shout in 17:52. I bet that one sounded good. God’s people see the Lord powerfully deliver them through an apparently weak king, they celebrate, and do battle with an already defeated enemy. That there’s the Christian life.

Not a bad prayer at the beginning of sermon prep…

At the end of Book 1 of De Trinitate (‘On the Trinity’), Hilary of Poitiers offers this prayer for help in his effort to explain and defend the mystery of the Trinity.

Notably, he wants to devote his every word to God and to be devoted to every word from God. “Grant us, therefore, precision of language, soundness of argument, grace of style, loyalty to truth…”

I know, O Lord God Almighty, that I owe Thee, as the chief duty of my life, the devotion of all my words and thoughts to Thyself. The gift of speech which Thou hast bestowed can bring me no higher reward than the opportunity of service in preaching Thee and displaying Thee as Thou art, as Father and Father of God the Only-begotten, to the world in its blindness and the heretic in his rebellion. But this is the mere expression of my own desire; I must pray also for the gift of Thy help and compassion, that the breath of Thy Spirit may fill the sails of faith and confession which I have spread, and a favouring wind be sent to forward me on my voyage of instruction. We can trust the promise of Him Who said, Ask, and it shall be given you, seek, and ye shall find, knock, and it shall be opened unto you; and we in our want shall pray for the things we need. We shall bring an untiring energy to the study of Thy Prophets and Apostles, and we shall knock for entrance at every gate of hidden knowledge, but it is Thine to answer the prayer, to grant the thing we seek, to open the door on which we beat. Our minds are born with dull and clouded vision, our feeble intellect is penned within the barriers of an impassable ignorance concerning things Divine; but the study of Thy revelation elevates our soul to the comprehension of sacred truth, and submission to the faith is the path to a certainty beyond the reach of unassisted reason.

And therefore we look to Thy support for the first trembling steps of this undertaking, to Thy aid that it may gain strength and prosper. We look to Thee to give us the fellowship of that Spirit Who guided the Prophets and the Apostles, that we may take their words in the sense in which they spoke and assign its right shade of meaning to every utterance. For we shall speak of things which they preached in a mystery; of Thee, O God Eternal, Father of the Eternal and Only-begotten God, Who alone art without birth, and of the One Lord Jesus Christ, born of Thee from everlasting. We may not sever Him from Thee, or make Him one of a plurality of Gods, on any plea of difference of nature. We may not say that He is not begotten of Thee, because Thou art One. We must not fail to confess Him as true God, seeing that He is born of Thee, true God, His Father. Grant us, therefore, precision of language, soundness of argument, grace of style, loyalty to truth. Enable us to utter the things that we believe, that so we may confess, as Prophets and Apostles have taught us, Thee, One God our Father, and One Lord Jesus Christ, and put to silence the gainsaying of heretics, proclaiming Thee as God, yet not solitary, and Him as God, in no unreal sense.

God does not treat us like that

In the last post I was recommending F.F. Bruce’s book on the relationship between Paul and Jesus. In it he helpfully distinguishes the ways in which Paul’s gospel is traditional and yet also involved fresh revelation from Jesus concerning the significance of his death, resurrection and ascension.

Having teased out those distinctions Bruce then shows that Paul and Jesus have a common theology of what he calls ‘the way of salvation.’ Interestingly, one of his main arguments is their agreement on justification by faith.

“Nowhere has Paul more fully entered into the heart of Jesus’ teaching about God and man than in his insistence on justification by faith.” (Bruce, Paul and Jesus, 52)

The language of justification is there in Luke 18 of course: the tax collector and not the Pharisee goes home justified. But Bruce argues that the content of justification is taught far more frequently by Jesus than we might think simply by counting the number of times the language appears. Consider, for example, of the parable of the prodigal son:

“When the black sheep of the family came home in disgrace and started off with the fine speech he had so carefully rehearsed, his father might easily have said "That's all very well, young man we have heard fine speeches before.   Now you buckle to and work as you have never worked in your life, and if we see that you really mean what you say we may let you work your passage.  But first you must prove yourself; we can't let bygones be bygones as though nothing had happened."  Even that would have done the young man a world of good, and even the elder brother might have consented to let him be placed on probation.  And that is very much like some people's idea of God. But it was not Jesus' way of presenting God - nor was it Paul's.

For - and here is where the Pauline doctrine of justification comes in - God does not treat us like that.  He does not put us on probation to see how we shall turn out - although, if he did so, that in itself would be an act of grace. But then we should never be really satisfied that we had made the grade, that our performance was sufficiently creditable to win the divine approval at the last. Even if we did the best we could - and somehow we do not always manage to do that - how could we be sure that our best came within measurable distance of God's requirement? We might hope, but we could never be certain.  But if God in sheer grace assures us of our acceptance in advance, and we gladly embrace that assurance, then we can go on to do his will from the heart as our response of love, without constantly worrying whether we are doing it adequately or not" (F.F. Bruce, Paul and Jesus, 54)

Although he doesn’t have the parable of the Prodigal Son in mind John Barclay develops this a bit further. He argues that the similarity between Jesus and Paul extends beyond an emphasis on grace to the sense in which their view of grace is offensive as well as inclusive. They both “enact and express a paradigm of God’s grace that is simultaneously welcoming to the lost outsider and deeply challenging to the insider – challenging to the point of scorching away the secure marks of a bounded system” (John M.G. Barclay, “‘Offensive and Uncanny’: Jesus and Paul on the Caustic Grace of God,” in Jesus and Paul Reconnected: Fresh Pathways into an Old Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 17).

That, of course, is exactly what we see in the parable – the prodigal son, the lost outsider, and the tax collectors and sinners with whom Jesus kept company, they are welcomed by God’s lavish grace. And yet the same grace deeply challenges the self-righteousness of the elder brother and the Pharisees who lamented the breadth of Jesus’ social circle.

So, what unites Paul and Jesus? Among other things, the message of the offensively inclusive grace of God.

Paul: disciple or distorter of Jesus?

From time to time the idea goes round that Jesus founded an inclusive, loving, knit-your-own-sandals kind of community before Paul came along and went and invented intolerance, bigotry and institutionalized religion.

Happily there have been those who have defended Paul – David Wenham has been doing a splendid job in recent years (see e.g. here). Before Wenham though, there was F.F. Bruce whose 1974 work Paul and Jesus (see what he did there? ‘Paul and Jesus’ not ‘Paul or Jesus’) is one of the most helpful books on the subject of their relationship.

Central to the book is the insight that Paul’s gospel involves both tradition and revelation. On the one hand there is tradition. Paul describes himself as someone who has been passing on the traditional gospel:

-         I praise you for remembering me in everything and for holding to the traditions just as I passed them on to you. (1 Cor 11:2)

-         So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the teachings we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter. (2 Thess 2:15)

-         I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand… For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,  that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures (1 Cor 15:1-4)

As Bruce outlines, Paul passes on ethical teaching, traditions about Jesus (in particular concerning the Lord’s Supper in 1 Cor 11) and shares a basic gospel message as he outlines in 1 Cor 15. Most likely he received such traditions during his time with Peter and James (described in Gal 1:18-20) and then again later with Peter, James and John (Gal 2:1-10)- indeed it’s hard to imagine Paul not pressing Peter, John, and Jesus’ brother for all the stories they could tell about their time with Jesus. And as he is at pains to emphasize he fulfills the criteria he sets out later in 2 Tim 2:2 – he himself has proved reliable in passing on these traditions.

On the other hand one of the strange features of Paul’s letters is the relative absence of detail about Jesus’ life, teaching and miracles. How do we explain that? Is it because he is pursuing a radically different agenda? Bruce says no and offers a few explanations. In part it is because his letters are occasional – responding to the needs of the congregations. He mentions Jesus instituting the Lord’s Supper because that’s an issue he needs to address in the church in Corinth. But there is a more fundamental reason, namely that Paul’s message also constitutes fresh revelation in light of the fact that Jesus is now raised and ascended and enthroned.

“Paul, wrote Albert Schweitzer, ‘shares with Jesus the eschatological worldview and the eschatological expectation, with all that these imply. The only difference is the hour in the world-clock in the two cases. To use another figure, both are looking towards the same mountain range, but whereas Jesus sees it as lying before him, Paul already stands upon it and its first slopes are already behind him.’ Without some such appreciation of the eschatological factor, it will be difficult to discern the true relationship between Jesus and Paul.” (F.F. Bruce, Paul and Jesus, p17)

Bound up with that eschatological factor is the idea that Paul has received fresh revelation. He is not simply preserving memories of the earthly ministry of Jesus. Rather, he is given insight into the significance of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. One of the main ways he describes this is in terms of mysteries now revealed:

The mystery hidden for ages by God

Romans 16:25 Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages

Ephesians 3: 8-9 To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things

Colossians 1:26 the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints.

The mystery revealed to Paul, proclaimed by Paul and passed on by Paul

Ephesians 3:3-4 how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ

Ephesians 6:19 [Pray] also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel

Colossians 4:3 At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison

1 Timothy 3:9 [Deacons] must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience.

The mystery concerning Christ

Ephesians 1:9 making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

Colossians 1:27: To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Colossians 2:2 that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ

Which is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles

1 Corinthians 2:1 And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the mystery of God with lofty speech or wisdom.

1 Corinthians 2:7-8 But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

And yet this mystery is being embraced by the Gentiles during a time of hardening for Israel, which itself is a mystery:

Romans 11:25  Lest you be wise in your own sight, I want you to understand this mystery, brothers: a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.

In many ways this is the key to understanding the relationship between Paul and Jesus. Back in 1974 Bruce helpfully focused attention here and so it’s surprising that no-one until very recently has explored the theme of mystery in Paul in much more depth. Happily though there is now Hidden but Now Revealed: A Biblical Theology of Mystery by Greg Beale and Benjamin L. Gladd (see here) which works through each of these texts of Paul and is well worth a read…

For now though, as much as Paul’s gospel involves fresh revelation, it’s worth noticing that you still can’t drive a wedge between Paul and Jesus because

-         The revelation was made by Jesus (Acts 9, 22, 26)

-         The revelation was made to the apostle appointed by Jesus (Gal 1:1, cf. the same Acts passages)

-         the revelation is about Jesus (the mystery now made known is Christ and his work – Col 1:27, 2:2)

-         In all of this Paul sees himself as the slave of Jesus (Rom 1:1, Phil 1:1, Titus 1:1)