commentary and reflections – easter 6B

River Baptism

Acts 10:44-48 NRSV text
Psalm 98 NRSV text
Genesis 35: 9-15 NRSV text
1 John 5: 1-6 NRSV text
John 15: 9-17 NRSV text

Salvation for this world

There are all sorts of interesting pairings in this week’s Lectionary passages: love and obedience, abiding and joy, self-sacrifice and friendship, being chosen and bearing fruit, faith and the Holy Spirit, parents and children, belief and birth, name and nation-building.  The common factor is the “If this,… then that…” dynamic.  It’s about consequences.  Matters of faith and theology – belief and spirituality – are not meant to be confined to the head and heart, to the interior, psychological life of believers.  They are to make a difference here and now, otherwise they are empty and not “true”.  I have said this before, but it needs saying time and time again: faith and theology need to make a difference because salvation is for this world!  It needs saying because we inhabit a tradition that has spiritualised and individualised salvation, focussing on “If you died, where would you be tonight?”

It’s as though the only interesting and important question is what happens to us after this life, when we have escaped from this world.  If that is true, then this life is nothing but preparation for death and beyond, and this world an unfortunate waiting place where we have to kick our heels until real life and reality kicks in.  That is an easy response from people who have an easy life and little to fear from this world: poverty, despair, oppression and starvation – people, in other words, who find this “waiting room” quite comfortable!   But it is also a temptation for those whose life is a living hell and who have given up hoping that God’s promises of life in Jesus Christ are Good News to the world in which they struggle desperately to live to see another day.  Both are faithless in the same way, albeit for different reasons.

John’s gospel, more than the others, has lent itself to this sort of dualistic, world- and body-denying interpretation.  The problem is that it is the most explicitly “theological” of the gospels.  That is not to say that the other gospels are in any way less theological: it is just that theology comes even more to the fore in John’s gospel than in the others.  There is a “Messianic Secret” in the Synoptic gospels, for example; John, by contrast, is at pains to leave the readers in no doubt as to who Jesus is!  But that has meant that generations of exegetes have been able to ignore John’s dynamic connection between theology and practice at the expense of theology.  To “believe” thus becomes a matter of “getting your head around doctrine”, rather than to trust.  It becomes enough to talk at length about the inner relations of the Godhead, without recognising that John intends these “truths” to become incarnate – to take flesh in the world in Jesus-like actions.

Theology and Jesus-shaped living

For John, good theology results in more faithful living.  That is as it should be.  Look at what he says in vv 10-11, for instance: obedience (a thoroughly Jewish concept) is good and proper – but if we understand that Jesus is God incarnate (the concrete manifestation of divine love), we will begin to realise – and experience – obedience as love and joy, rather than cold duty.  And that results in a very different sort of spirituality and experience of God!  It means, furthermore, that we begin to understand faithful living differently: our Christ-like actions are not just about “doing the right thing”, but disclose God, because they are instances of God’s-love-in-action” (just as Jesus was).  Obedience is “lived love” – and it is joyful!

John wants us to discover the abundance of life that God has for us in Jesus.  Joy is a vital part of that.  Isn’t it ironic that the picture most ordinary people have of Christians is of dour, joyless, duty-urgers, whose first words always seem to be “Thou shalt not…”?  We are still plagued by a Puritanism that stifles abundant life.  Someone once characterised a Puritan as “a person haunted by the suspicion that someone, somewhere, is happy!”  That could well describe so many church-goers today.

Love, says John, is Jesus-shaped (v12).  It is self-sacrificial.  It is seen in laying one’s life down for one’s friends (v13).  Jesus here points back to the foot washing (chapter 13) and forward to the crucifixion.  John hammers the point home again: Jesus laid his life down.  It was voluntary self-sacrifice.  He didn’t have to do it and wasn’t forced to do so.

From followers to friends and family

This leads on to the new relationship with the disciples that the resurrection has made possible.  The disciples move from being servants to friends.  There’s something deeper in John’s gospel about friendship, though.  “I call you my friends,” says Jesus, “because I have made known everything I have heard from my Father” (v15).  Friendship in this case means being drawn into the family life of God.  The “our Father”, in John’s gospel, is Jesus saying, “Your Father and mine”.  As Jesus’ friends, we move from being followers and learners to friends and family.  We are to be Jesus in the world.  And we share in Jesus’ intimate access to God: in the task of saving the world (3:17), we, like Jesus, can ask God for what we need in the confidence that God hears us obedient children.  God delights in us, and gives us delight.

Parents and children (1 John 5: 1-6)

The apostle John closes the previous chapter of his letter by reminding us that if love is about concrete actions, we cannot claim to love God if we hate our brothers and sisters.  If we accept less in life for them than we do for ourselves, we do not love them.  They are not “them” – they are “us” (brothers and sisters).  Now he swings the equation round: if you love God, you will love others.  If God is the parent, we will love God’s children.  Further, we know we are children because we are obedient – we obey God’s commandments.  And God’s commandments are summarised in love.

Conquering the world (1 John 5: 1-6/Psalm 98)

This is dangerous language!  Human beings are always up for conquering the world and imposing themselves on others, and Christians are no exception!

Read Psalm 98.  It begins with praising the victorious Yahweh.  But for what?  Is this an instance of a military victory for Israel, which is ascribed to Yahweh’s care and intervention?  Verse 2 could easily be read as “Yahweh has shown the other nations and their gods who the Daddy is!”  It certainly could be read like that – if the psalm stopped at v3. But the next line is surprising, if we are meant to read it like this: “Make a joyful noise to Yahweh, all the earth“!  Why would the whole earth respond joyfully to Yahweh’s victory if it had been at the expense of the rest of the earth?  Bowing down in worship – yes; bowing in humility or abject surrender – yes; bowing in resignation and fear, or in a plea for mercy – yes!  But making a “joyful noise”?  Not likely, is it?

In v7, the whole of creation joins in the celebration of “the presence of Yahweh” (v9).  And here is the key: Yahweh is coming to “judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity”.  Yahweh’s presence and judgement does not herald destruction, but salvation.  Yahweh “conquers the world” – not by annihilation but by righteousness, justice, equity and salvation.

John too, in this week’s epistle, means something different from world dictatorship by the Church!  “Conquering the world” is about overcoming all that is ranged against God.  In his gospel, John refers to that as “darkness”.  Jesus is Light.  The Light has come into the world, and the darkness has never been able to put it out or defeat it.  Note that here, too, this form of “conquest” is not about annihilation!  It is about transformation.  Jesus has come not to condemn the world, but to save (transform) it.  The transformative power of God – the power that death cannot vanquish – is the power of love.  Jesus on the cross in John’s gospel is King of the whole world.  The power by which he reigns is the power of love.  That is the conquest – the triumph of Life, Light and Love.

Incarnation and salvation

But that only happens, says John, because Jesus is the Word made flesh.  Jesus was truly human.  He didn’t only appear to be human (as though he was actually God and not human at all): he was a real person.  This is what John is driving at in the rather mysterious verse 6.  Some in John’s church were denying that Jesus was a human being whose entire life was that of a fully human being.  There were two different mistakes being made, both of which had profound consequences for salvation and life in the world.

The first was what came to be known as adoptionism: Jesus was an ordinary human who, at his baptism, received the Spirit and was adopted as God’s Son (as Paul says we are).  They would say that Jesus “came by water only”.    However, for these believers, it was inconceivable that Jesus on the cross was divine.  The Spirit left him at the crucifixion, and Jesus died as an ordinary human being.  This isn’t just some quaint theological tiff from the second century.  The significance is that these people denied that God could be involved in death and darkness.  The Spirit’s leaving Jesus (as happened in their theology of the cross) was a divine “escape plan” from human sinfulness.  But then salvation is something radically different.  This world isn’t saved by Jesus – it is abandoned by God!  Darkness does overcome the Light!  Jesus is not ruler of the world – the powers that enslave are!  And while we might be rescued from this world and the powers at death, salvation is for somewhere else.

The other, opposite error is docetism (from dokeo, meaning “to seem/appear”).  Here Jesus only seems human, but is in fact divine and not subject to human error and weakness.  Then the cross is about God triumphing – but salvation can’t have anything to do with transformed human living!  It is meaningless to urge people to “live like Jesus” if that is impossible for humans to do!  It is pointless and cruel enjoining us to “obey God’s commandments” if human beings, filled with the Spirit, are unable to do so.  It is because Jesus was human that he shows us what abundant life means for human beings – life we are meant to experience here and now.

No, says John, neither of these will do.  Jesus is God incarnate as a human being.  The Spirit doesn’t make us “superhuman” but truly human – able to live as Jesus did and relate to both God and the world as Jesus did.  It also means that human destiny is to be children of God.

Names and mission (Genesis 35: 9-15)

We need to read the incident of the renaming of Jacob in this light.  Jacob the individual is to be Israel, father of nations.  This personal blessing from Yahweh is not just for Jacob to enjoy personally here and now.  What Yahweh is doing for Jacob is in order to bless the whole earth.  Symbolically, Jacob is representative of a nation under Yahweh and thus of the whole earth under Yahweh.  The blessing is not exhausted in Jacob’s lifetime, but will be fulfilled over millennia.

How often do we take the long term view in our instant world of today?  Our consumerist society tells us the key question to ask is, “What’s in it for me?”  Yet when God calls us – chooses us, as John reminds us – God’s purposes are global.  Our salvation is part of the wider picture of the salvation of all creation.  We are either obsessed with the here-and-now (by which we mean “today, and maybe as far ahead as next week”) or with the hereafter.  Neither of these is Christian.  The images of mustard seeds and huge trees, and parables of growth encompass huge lengths of time.  God’s long-term is long! After all, if we think in terms of days, the bible reminds us, God thinks in terms of 10,000 year increments!

What does this mean?  It means we ought to be encouraged when we see very little effect from our actions in the world.  Jesus didn’t, after all!  We ought not to be discouraged or depressed, but to keep the faith.  But more significantly, it means that we ought to be concerned with the world as it will be long after we’re gone!  There is no place in faithful living for the short-termism that exhausts our natural resources now and leaves nothing for our great-grandchildren.  Global warming, as the adverts tell us, is not a problem for this generation, but for our children and grandchildren.  When we squander the earth’s resources, we squander our children’s salvation!

It’s the Spirit … (Acts 10: 44-48)

Salvation for the world.  The whole world!  We talk about it, and make it sound wonderful.  And in the back of our minds, we usually have the unspoken assumption that it means everyone becoming like us so it’s a very comfortable thought.  The reality is different.  The world is not just “us and ours” writ large – it encompasses people radically unlike us.  Those differences are differences of culture, “race”, political persuasion, sexual orientation, gender … all the things that cut us off from different sections of humanity.  Salvation is uncomfortable, because God doesn’t accommodate God’s saving purposes to us.  Salvation does not mean that the things we find offensive, scary, foreign, alien and incomprehensible about other people and places will be done away with.

That was the very thing that the Jewish Christians found so utterly impossible to comprehend when Gentiles received the Spirit.  Their assumption was that the Gentiles first had to become good Jews – or at least, Jewish imitators!  They were looking for converts who would gradually become more and more like them.  After all, surely God didn’t value all those foreigners as much as God valued them?  This couldn’t be happening!

But it was!  And it changed the face of Christianity.  Instead of remaining a form of Jewish messianism, it became an international phenomenon – particularly with Paul’s ministry.  There were radical differences in its forms, too.  The Church in Corinth was as unlike the Jerusalem Church as it was possible to be.  The gospel became incarnate in other places and cultures – and faith took on those same different hues.

We want people to join our churches.  What is it that we expect to happen?  Do we expect them to become “assimilated” into our ways, and become like us?  Or are we open to the work of the Spirit, so that we might become more like them?  We hear the same sorts of protests about “foreigners” in the UK: “We wouldn’t mind if they behaved and thought like the British, but they don’t!  They expect to be allowed to dress differently in schools, and demand we take account of their customs!”  A world faith celebrates diversity and difference.  It wrenches us out of the comfort of the familiar and the assurance that what we have known is how things ought to be.

But does God intend these differences?  It is the question of difference that has so agonised Christians over the centuries.  The issue of slavery is rooted in racial difference, as was Apartheid and the Civil Rights struggle.  The Cold War was about competing socio-political differences.  The issue of the ordination of women is a question rooted in gender difference.  And the hot potato of our time – the sexuality debate – is about differences of sexual preference.  How are we to find our way to discovering the mind of God?  We ought to take a leaf out of Peter’s book, and the debate over the place of Gentiles in the Church.  It’s the same test that has proved so decisive in the struggles over difference down through the centuries, and is devastatingly simple: to whom does God give the Spirit?  And if God pours out the Spirit upon black people, poor people, people of other cultures and on homosexuals, who can withhold the recognition that these all are our brothers and sisters in Christ – equal participants in a salvation that encompasses the world?

Amen

Tagged as: 1 john 5: 1-6, acts 10: 44-48, being part of god's family, conquering the world, easter 6B, from followers to friends and family, genesis 35: 9-15, incarnation and salvation, john 15: 9-17, Lawrence Moore, lectionary blog, liberation theology, psalm 98, salvation for this world in john, the gentiles receive the spirit, the united reformed church, The Windermere Centre, theology and jesus-shaped living