commentary and reflections – christmas 2B

Jeremiah 31: 7-14 NRSV text
Psalm 147: 12-20 NRSV text
Ephesians 1: 3-14 NRSV text
John 1: (1-9), 10-18 NRSV text

For all its surprise and wonder, Christmas doesn’t come out of nowhere.  It isn’t God’s ‘Plan B’ for the world, for Israel, or for the Gentiles.  What all of our texts tell us, in different ways, is that God’s salvation in Jesus is linked to creation: Jesus was involved in creation, as God is, and Jesus’ incarnation is intimately part of God’s plan and will at creation for Life and flourishing.

The meaning of Life

We are in the Prologue to John’s gospel this week.  John’s Christmas Day is 1:14:

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us”.

Yet John doesn’t start his gospel with the birth of Christ – with the Word becoming flesh.  Instead, he starts ‘in the beginning’.  The Word who becomes flesh in v14 is the One in whom all things came into being (1:3).  John wants us to be clear about this: everything that has come into being – that has life and existence – has it through Jesus (1:3b).  First, there is nothingness; then, there is … everything!  Yet existence – organic life – isn’t an end in itself.  God, through the Word, does not create for the sake of it.  There is divine purpose in creation.  If Monty Python suggests that there is meaning to life (if you haven’t seen the film, rent it and watch it!), John tells us where we ought to look to discover its meaning!  It is not just life (existence) in and of itself, but quality of life.  Life has its origin and purpose in God, and Jesus (the Word) is its agency: it is ‘Life in all its abundance’ (John 10:10).

Life, Light and darkness

John has been criticised as a ‘gospel from above’.  John takes the ‘God’s-eye-view’.  Implicit – and sometimes explicit – in this criticism is the idea that God is somehow ‘way out there’ – uninvolved and unaware of conditions on earth.  This is the God who is too busy tending to the cosmos to care properly for creation; the God who is to be blamed when things go wrong, children die, Tsunamis hit, and people suffer.  This is the God who views the world ‘from a distance’ (to quote the title of a beautiful but theologically and spiritually dangerous song), from which the world looks beautiful and serene, the suffering is invisible and the cries of the people inaudible.

This is radically to miss John’s whole point: God is intimately close to and involved in creation.  God wills Life – human flourishing.  God wills abundant living.  And God is only too well aware of the darkness that characterises the way in which we humans have made our world.  The Life that God intends stands in radical contrast to life as we have made it.  It is like Light that shines in deep darkness.  1:5b is a promise: however deep the darkness, whatever the destructive power the darkness has to throttle and choke off Life, it does not have the Last Word.  The Last Word belongs to the One who has the First Word, and it is the same Word – Life and Light!

‘The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it’

Darkness is truly dark.  There is no sense in which John (or God!) downplays the darkness.  God knows about our suffering.  God knows about the experiences of life that are akin to a living death; a hell on earth.  And God’s response in Jesus is to bring heaven down to earth (1:14).

Human suffering and the Life of God

God, in Jesus, enters into human darkness.  The history of our rejection of God and of the consequent suffering, waste, despair and death is literally taken up into the very Life of God.  Look at vv 10-11: the world belongs to the Word because the Word gave life to everything.  Yet the world ‘did not know him’.  What does this mean?  It means that God has become invisible- not because God has withdrawn and made God’s self invisible, but because we humans have created a world in which there is no space for God.  If God is absent, it is because we have pushed God out.  If God is invisible or inaudible, it is because we have wrapped ourselves in darkness and blocked our ears.

The history of the human rejection of God is lived out and played out in the life of Jesus.  Jesus comes bringing Life and Light; we choose death and darkness.  God comes to live among us, and we crucify him.  Yet the God who is the God of creation is also the God of Resurrection – re-creation.  God’s First Word is Light in darkness and Life out of nothingness; God’s Last Word is Life out of the ashes of crucifixion and rejection!   What drives God?  John’s answer – through Jesus – is Love.  It is this trinity of Light, Life and Love that cannot be defeated.  And it all happens in Jesus!

Having Life

John speaks a great deal about ‘knowing’ (cf v18) and ‘believing’.  He is absolutely explicit about his purpose in writing:

“These things are written so that you might come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have Life in his name” (John 20:31).

It is far too easy to make the mistake of thinking that John intends to convey merely information; to make sure that our theology is correct.  In other words, faith can all too easily be seen to be a matter of ‘believing the right things’.  That is not what John means.  We live in darkness – which is to say, we live life cut off from God, the source of Life.  Our world as we have created it is not a place of Life, but of death.  If we live well, we do so only at the expense of others.  Our darkness is so dense that we no longer ‘know’ the purpose of Life and so doom ourselves to a ‘living death’.  That is what John means when he tells us that ‘though the world was made by him, the world did not know him’ (1:10).  This is the tragic futility of human existence – a futility that we have deliberately chosen.  Not to ‘know’ God is to be cut off from the source of Life.  It is not an issue of ‘academic ignorance’, but of tragic experience.

To come to ‘know’ God is to know God in the sense that we come to ‘know’ one another – to be in relationship with God though Jesus.  ‘Believing’ doesn’t mean ‘giving assent to certain propositions’, but of committing our whole life and living to God as God is revealed to us in Jesus Christ.  It is to choose a whole new way of existing in the world and of being human.  It is to relate to God intimately as Jesus did – as a child of God.  It is being filled with the Spirit – the very Source of Life.  In Jesus’ terms, it means ‘being born again’ (John 3:3).  That is the purpose and meaning of Christmas.

The darkness of exile (Jeremiah 31: 7-14)

One image of suffering is the experience of life as ‘living in darkness’.  It is to be in a place in which we are unable to do anything about our situation.  It is like being chained to the wall of a deep, dark dungeon.  It is to be a slave.

This is the dominant biblical image for the human condition.  It comes from the literal experience of slavery.  Israel has two foundational such experiences: slavery in Egypt and exile in Babylon.  Exodus – the deliverance from Egypt – is the lens through which Israel understands the nature, purpose and character of Yahweh.  Yahweh is the God who hears the cries of the Hebrew slaves and, utterly gratuitously, delivers them.  To be God as Yahweh is God is to be a saviour.  Yahweh is ‘Almighty’ because Yahweh alone can take on the might of the slave system of the Egyptian empire.  Yahweh is ‘the-God-who-saves’.

The second experience is of exile in Babylon.  Although Exodus is the key for Israel’s self-understanding and faith in Yahweh, Exile necessitates a complete re-evaluation and re-understanding of that faith.  The Exile was far worse than slavery in Egypt – not because the physical conditions were necessarily worse, but because the Exile was experienced as abandonment by Yahweh.  Yahweh had saved them in the Exodus and made them Yahweh’s own people through the Covenant.  They believed that they could be secure in the promise of Yahweh’s eternal protection.  And yet the Babylonians had defeated them, razed Jerusalem to the ground and had taken the people into slavery in Babylon.  Yahweh was either too puny to protect them against the might of the Babylonians, or else Yahweh had broken the divine promises and had abandoned them.  Either way, the only possible response seemed to be despair – a despair that made the darkness of Exile doubly dark.

Into this annihilative darkness comes the prophetic beam of light: they have not been abandoned; they are in Babylon because Yahweh is punishing them and refining them.  They have systematically and fatally broken covenant and the Exile is the consequence.

Astoundingly, they are told something more: not only has Yahweh not abandoned them, but, even in punishment, Yahweh has journeyed with Yahweh’s people into Exile!  Yahweh is with them.  Yahweh does not abandon people to darkness, but, even when that darkness is the creation of Yahweh, Yahweh journeys with the people into darkness, just as Yahweh journeyed with them in the desert.

Party time!

You have to try and imagine yourself into that darkness to appreciate Jeremiah’s oracle of deliverance.  It begins with the affirmation that Yahweh’s love has never been in doubt (v3): Yahweh has been faithful even when Israel has been faithless.  Exile has not been about abandonment, but about Yahweh’s deliberate ’scattering’ of Israel (v10).  Look at the images used of Yahweh’s relationship to Israel: Yahweh is ‘the God of all the families of Israel’ (v1); ‘a father to Israel’ (v9b); a ’shepherd’ (v10).  And running throughout the oracle is the fact that Yahweh will give Israel joy!  Party time is just ahead!  There will be wine and music and dancing and singing and revelry!  There will be feasting and harvest and plenty.

Jeremiah’s oracle is straining at the seams with images of salvation: family, deliverance from the sword, grace, rest, everlasting love, faithfulness, rebuilding, music and dance, vineyards, planting and reaping, meeting Yahweh in worship, shouts of joy, praise, salvation, gathering, great numbers of people, care for the vulnerable, consolations, water to drink, vindication, ransom, redemption, singing, radiance, Yahweh’s goodness, abundant harvest, Yahweh’s flock, return to Eden, merrymaking, no more crying, satiation, Yahweh’s bounty!  Every verse is crammed with these images.

The Return is a brand new start.  Faithless Israel is once again a ‘virgin’ (v4); Jacob and Ephraim are newly fathered (v9).  It is a re-run of the Exodus: Jacob (Israel) has been ‘redeemed from hands too strong for him’ (v11).  The ‘nations’ shall see Yahweh’s deliverance and once again marvel (v10).  The darkness has ended.  The darkness of Exile has proved unable to overcome the Light of Yahweh’s salvation.  Israel has been born again!

‘Always winter but never Christmas’?  (Psalm 147: 12-20)

In CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the reign of the White Witch in Narnia is a time of endless winter – ‘always winter, but never Christmas’.  These verses from Psalm 147 pick up the image of Exile as winter – a time when the world as they know it is blanketed in cold and frost.  In exile, it was tempting to believe that the snow and frost were the power of the Babylonians, yet the psalmist affirms otherwise: snow and frost are the power of the One who created all things.  They come and go at Yahweh’s command.  They are Yahweh’s word-in-action (v15):

“He gives snow like wool; he scatters frost like ashes.  He hurls down hail like crumbs – who can stand before his cold?” (vv 16-17)

Barren times are as much a part of Yahweh’s presence and care as the harvest time of wheat (v14) and the provision of grass and food for the wild animals (vv 8-9).  Times of plenty are the norm, yet this can lead to complacency and faithlessness.  Just as the winter concentrates people’s minds on their physical needs, so the Exile is designed to concentrate their minds on Yahweh and their failure to keep covenant.  And just as winter can seem interminable yet is only for a season, so the people celebrate the fact that Yahweh’s Word will again go forth – this time to melt the snow and ice (v18).

Yahweh cares.  Yahweh loves.  Yahweh stays close – always!  In the bad times and the good; in the times of darkness and light, for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, Yahweh does not abandon those whom Yahweh loves.  Yahweh has not dealt thus with any other nation.  With Yahweh, there is winter … but there is also always Christmas!

A second Jeremiah (Ephesians 1: 3-14)

Here is Paul in Jeremiah mode (specifically, in Jeremiah 31 mode!): he reflects on the dramatic changes in the lives of the Ephesian Christians and breaks forth into a hymn of praise to God.  There is nothing that God has failed to do; no blessing that could have been bestowed upon the Christians has been withheld.  And it is all in Jesus Christ.  Just look at the number of times Paul uses the phrase ‘in him/in Christ’: Jesus is the extravagant gift of God poured out liberally and graciously by a God whose goodness in Jesus is overwhelming!

We are ‘blessed in Christ with every spiritual blessing’; we are ‘chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world’; we are ‘adopted as children in Christ’; we have grace ‘freely bestowed on us’ in Christ; we have ‘redemption through his blood and forgiveness of our sins’ in Christ; we are recipients of ‘God’s good pleasure’ in Christ; we have ‘an inheritance’ in Christ; we are ‘marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit’ in Christ.

‘You could have knocked me down with a feather!’

You have to try and imagine yourself into Paul’s mind and heart: here is a fanatical Jew – a Pharisee, steeped in the promises of God, convinced that the primary focus of God is the establishment of the Jewish Law and the establishment of the kingdom of Israel.  En route to Damascus, engaged in his Jihad against those who fail to keep the Law, he is knocked off his horse by none other than the risen Jesus, who had been crucified under the Law as a blasphemer!  His whole world is turned upside down.  In an instant, he realises that he has been drastically, dramatically wrong about Jesus – and therefore about God – all along.  He has been so steeped in the past that he has failed to recognise the new thing that God has done in Christ.  He, Paul, in seeking to prepare the way for the Messiah, has failed to recognise the Messiah when he came.

What he learns over time is the astounding fact that God, through the Messiah, has opened up the promises made to Israel to the whole world.  The gospel is not only Good News for Israel, but for the Gentiles as well.

‘It’s all about Jesus!’

What Paul also comes to believe, through his ministry and mission to the Gentiles, is that this is not something new in the sense of novel, but something that has always been part of God’s planning and dealing with humanity.  The God who made the world in and for Christ is in the business of saving the world in Christ.  Jesus is the focus of everything that God has ever done and ever will do.  Jesus is the source of all that is (Colossians 1: 16), the salvation of all that is (Colossians 1:20), and everything that is will be summed up in him (cf Philippians 2: 9-11).

Here in Ephesians, Paul traces back the daily life of the Ephesian Church to … the Beginning!  We are ‘chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world’ and ‘destined for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ’.  We’re back, in other words, to God’s purposes for Life in creation.

Election, predestination and Jesus

Election/predestination: I don’t know about you, but for me those words take me back immediately to the great Calvinist debates about who is chosen to be saved and who is chosen to be damned.  In so much Reformed theology, the subject of election has been about God’s sovereignty – God’s right as God to choose whomever and damn whomever God wills.  Election has been seen as the way of affirming God’s majesty and sovereignty.

Paul’s emphasis here is different.  What Paul wants to say is that God has always willed Life and blessing, but that these were always and only in and through Jesus.  Jesus, for Paul is the Second Adam – the true human being.  The first Adam blew it and, in the biblical story, took us on a fatally wrong track.  We have been fated always to live as sub-humans or non-humans because we have failed to live in proper relationship to God.  In so doing, we have frustrated God’s purposes in creating us.  Significantly, instead of living as children of God, we have chosen to live as enemies of God.

Jesus is different.  Jesus, alone of all humanity, lived in right relationship to God.  He thus becomes the model for true humanity.  He is not a model whom we can emulate by choice, though, because we are no longer free to live as we choose.  We do not have free will.  Paul laments this eloquently in Romans 7: 14ff:

“I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do… Wretched man that I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

Paul’s experience tells him that our trouble is not that we don’t want to live as God intended; the trouble is that we cannot.  In that sense, says Paul, we are ’slaves to sin’, held in the grip of a power too great for us to break.  Instead of living for God, we are trapped in what he calls ‘a body of death’.  His question is, ‘Who will rescue me?’  His answer is, ‘God, through Jesus Christ – thankfully!’ (Romans 7:25).

How does this happen?  According to Paul’s theology, it is through participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus.  By faith in Christ, we die to our old self/body, and are re-created in Christ as new creatures (2 Corinthians 5:17).  We are filled with the Holy Spirit – the very Life of God – whose job is to shape us to become more and more like Jesus.

This is why we are chosen – not to satisfy God’s credentials as divinely sovereign, but to become like Jesus (what Paul refers to as ‘holy and blameless in love’).  Election, in Jewish understanding, was all about becoming children of God.  That is Paul’s theology, too.  We are created by God, not just to exist, but to be God’s children in the manner that Jesus is (Ephesians 1:5).

Chosen in Christ

Paul is a universalist in the sense that he believes the gospel is the Good News of God’s salvation for the whole world and not just the Jews.  All of creation is summed up in Jesus.  Jesus is the model of what it is to be human.  To be human, therefore, is to be chosen to be God’s children.  The true destiny of every human being is to be adopted and to live as a child of God.  That is what drives Paul so passionately on in his mission to the known world.

Karl Barth re-focused the doctrine of Election radically through Jesus: Jesus is the New Creation which is made possible through his death and resurrection.  We are all, therefore, ‘elect in Christ’.  It is not the case that God chooses some humans for salvation and  others for damnation.   Jesus is the means through whom God is saving all of creation.

Barth resisted the clear implication of his own theology that all humanity would be saved in Christ.  He was not prepared to say that because of the clear warnings in Scripture about people being lost.  The Lutheran theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, similarly has said, “Am I a universalist?  No – although I suspect that God might be!”

What both theologians recognise is this: firstly, that if we are ‘in Christ’, we are held by the grace of God, justified and forgiven through Jesus Christ, sealed with the Spirit and therefore need to rejoice in wonder, love and praise.  Like Paul here in Ephesians, they want us to recognise that we are new creations in God, beginning a process of liberation and salvation that makes us more and more like Jesus.  Wonderful as this is, and incredible though it is to experience it, God’s purpose is that, becoming more and more like Jesus, we use that freedom to do what God is doing in Christ – transforming this world into the Kingdom!  Election frees us to be useful rather than consumed with anxiety over whether or not we are saved.

And secondly, they recognise in Jesus Christ God’s unfailing, unchangeable and irrefusable passion to save the world.  Jesus is God’s Christmas present to us… from all eternity.  Merry Christmas!

Amen.

Tagged as: Barth's doctrine of election, christmas 2B, commentary, election, exegesis, hermeneutics, images of salvation, Lawrence Moore, liberation theology, predestination, revised common lectionary, the united reformed church, The Windermere Centre