August 28, 2011

Proper 17, Exodus 3:1-15; Psalm 105; Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 16:21-28

Today's readings seem determined to try our patience. A bush burns yet is not consumed by the fire's energy. Lose your life and you will find it. Evil is not to be avenged, but responded to with love. These are not easy readings. Every reasonable expectation that we might hold on to is upturned by God's invasion into the world and the kind of life that he calls us to embody. The gospel that emerges out of to day's readings should provoke the kind of shell-shocked verdict that the city authorities of Thessalonica declared about Paul and his companions, 'These people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also ... saying that there is another king named Jesus' (Acts 17:6-7). Living out this gospel should aspire to turning the world upside down.

A bush bums yet is not consumed. The Church Fathers, those bearded theologians who in the first centuries of the Church's life articulated how Christ is Savior, read the Old Testament 'around Jesus' [Rowan Williams, Open to Judgment: Sermons and Addresses (London: Dartman, Longman & Todd, 1944) p.160]. Indeed, how can one not read the Scriptures in this way if one believes, as Christians do, that 'the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob' (Exodus 3:6) is the God of Jesus Christ too? The God whom we worship is the same God who reveals himself to Moses in the burning bush - the God Christians identify as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If you believe this then of course the Old Testament must be read around Christ, unless we want to believe in something as unhelpful as a divided God.

To read the Old Testament around Christ is not to say that every author of every Old Testament book was really speaking about Christ when they wrote, as if they were writing in code for later readers. In their original context no Old Testament author spoke about Christ. No, reading the Old Testament around Christ involves the more radical claim that texts like Exodus 3 have another meaning over and above their original context. That context is quite simply what God has done in Jesus Christ. In the context of Jesus the Old Testament texts become transparencies, windows into another world. The new meanings these texts gain in the light of Christ are in line not with the authors' original intentions but with the purpose of God in Christ. Jesus puts this plainly when he begins the Sermon on the Mount by declaring that he has come not to abolish the law but to 'fulfill' it (Matt. 5:17). In Christ Old Testament texts are filled with new meaning.

So, to return to our texts: When the Fathers read this morning's Exodus text around Christ they read the burning bush as a sign pointing to the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us. Just as God indwelt the bush with his energy causing it to bum and yet not be consumed, so in Christ 'all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell' (Colossians 1 :19), dwelling in such a way that the first Christians believed that they had heard, seen and touched the Word that called the world into being.

Here is an incredible thing! God in Jesus Christ is not less 'divine' the more 'human' he is, but he is entirely divine and entirely human. Jesus brings us into fellowship with our Creator precisely because in his person he unites both divinity and humanity. This is why we confess, in the Nicene Creed, both that Jesus is 'of one Being with the Father' and that 'for us and for our salvation' he 'was made man'. Christian worship of Jesus seeks to strike the right balance between these two claims.

Striking this balance can be helped by imagining a bush that burns yet is not consumed. Like the bush, Jesus bums with the divinity of the One who called the world into being and yet this divinity never consumes his humanity. At every stage, as Moses can see the bush, so Jesus the man, the Jew from Nazareth, is never lost from our sight, 'We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our own eyes, what we have touched with our own hands, concerning the word of life - this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it' (1 John 1:1-2). The life of this man, Jesus of Nazareth, is the life of God made visible to us.

Precisely because this teaching is a scandal, a stumbling block, it is tempting to make sense of it by opting for one of two dead-ends. On one hand, we can try to make Jesus exclusively divine - so that he does not fully experience the realities of human life. This is the Jesus who only acts out his death, rather than crying out in agony from the cross, 'My God, my God why have you forsaken me?' (Mark 15:34). On the other hand, we can so emphasize Christ's humanity that we lose sight of the New Testament belief that 'all things have been created through him and for him' (Colossians 1: 16). Only if we remember that Jesus is a perfect union of all that is divine and all that is human can we look to him as 'a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth' (Ephesians 1:10).

In Jesus what is human and what is divine come together in a union in which neither is extinguished. Our God is not some kind of puppeteer who saves us by mere will. Instead he saves us by taking on our humanity, taking it up with all its limitations into the divine life of God. If we want to discover Jesus' divinity there is nowhere else to begin other than his humanity - a humanity never consumed by the divine reality that lies at its centre.

The story of Jesus is the story of a bush that bums yet is not consumed, of a God who unites with us in a way that does not destroy our humanity but restores, redeems, and elevates it - making it more fully human.

Paul's teaching in Romans 12 is underestimated when it is read as general advice for getting along with one another. This teaching is Christological, and it has Christ at its centre, so too it has the world at its centre. Dietrich Bonheoffer wrote that 'Partaking in Christ, we stand at the same time in the reality of God and in the reality of the world' [Bonheoffer, Ethics p.58]. What else is this reading from Romans 12 other than a description of Jesus' life? Was Jesus not 'patient in suffering' and persevering in prayer? Was Jesus' ministry not distinguished by the radical hospitality he shared with those on the margins of society, a bold association with the lowly? (Romans 12:16). And was not Christ's life, death, and resurrection the revealing of God's glory to those who were strangers to Israel, the Gentiles?

When Paul tells us to bless those who persecute us not only is this an echo of Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:44), but it is also a reflection of how Jesus lived. Were this not so, Paul's advice would be utterly unrealistic. Christ's response to the terror of the cross is peace - the peace which passes all understanding - and which he gives to us his disciples. 'Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you' says Jesus in John 13:21. Paul's teaching, 'Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good' (Romans 12:17), would always be vulnerable to our failings, to our redemption of good and evil as situations change, were it not for the reality that Jesus has overcome the world. 'In me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution. But take courage, I have overcome the world!' (John 16:33). We can say that Christ has inscribed peace into the world, and that those who bear his peace are being faithful to the script.

Like Moses in the wilderness, the Church is sent to join God's work in the world. God whose energy indwells a bush yet does not consume it - God who becomes human in Jesus of Nazareth. As God's agents in the world our lives must echo the hospitality and peace that we see in Jesus' life, death and resurrection. Perhaps then, God willing, we too might be accused of turning the world upside down. Amen.