1 John 1:6-13       Romans 8:14-16

 

I: — I remember so very many of them, the Sunday School teachers who are memorable just because they were of unspeakable help to me during my most formative years.

June Hocking was my teacher when I was 8 years old. As we approached Good Friday and Easter she explained to us 8-year olds what the cross was about. She told us it was God’s provision for us needy, needy people who were so very needy on account of our deep-dyed depravity and God’s just judgement. (Of course she didn’t use big words like “provision” and “depravity”; she knew the vocabulary of 8-year olds; because I don’t, I shall have to tell the story in my own words.) Then she asked those who grasped this, anything of this, to stand up if they wanted to own it for themselves. I stood up. She asked me specifically if I understood what any of this meant. I convinced her I did. Again in words suitable for little people she told me that my public declaration on that day was ratified in heaven eternally.

Soon afterward my family moved to another congregation. Now Catherine Heasman was my teacher. She was quiet, gentle, understanding. She knew I felt strange in my new church-home. She went out of her way, in her sensitivity, to defuse my apprehension.

When I was 10 or 11 my teacher was Dorothy Greenshields, an unmarried woman about 50 years old. One Sunday I became embroiled in a vehement argument with a classmate as to the correct spelling of an obscene word. Can you imagine it? Your beloved pastor arguing heatedly over the spelling of an obscenity! Miss Greenshields let the argument rage for a while, then told us we should talk about something else.

By the time I was 12 Gordon Fairbank was my teacher. Gordon was a graduate of the University of Toronto in Greek and Roman history. Gordon spent much of class time telling us that Greek and Roman history was the finest university program anyone could pursue. The weekly lesson always had much to do with the Roman background to the gospel-stories, and it was in Gordon’s class that I learned the word “Mesopotamia”, together with many other unusual words. One Sunday Gordon had to be in New Orleans (he worked for a travel agency) and so he sent along his fiancee, Jean, in his place. I thought she was the prettiest woman I had ever seen.

Grace Eby was another teacher: middleaged, reserved, anything but outgoing or hail-fellow-well-met. While she was much older than I, and often appeared to a live in a world that seemed older still, there was something about her that hooked my heart — for when I was 14 I discussed with her my new-born call to the ministry. Earnestly, haltingly, fearfully I discussed my unsuppressible vocation with her, and discussed it with her when I didn’t say anything to my parents. (In fact I was 22 years old before I breathed a word of it to anyone else.)

My last Sunday School teacher was Carlton Carter. He was a superintendent with the Scarborough Board of Education. He taught a class of 15-year olds. Every Sunday he brought so many books and reference materials to class you’d have thought he was doing Ph.D research.

II: — What was the point of all that my Sunday School teachers did on my behalf? What was the point of the diligence and faithfulness and affection that they exemplified? What is the point of Sunday School teaching now?

The point of it all was highlighted for me through a recent newspaper article. The article accompanied a photograph of Mafia gangsters in Hamilton carrying the casket of one of their fellow-thugs out of a church. Mr. Dominic Musitano had died. “Tears flow at funeral of mobster”, the headline read. Dominic Musitano had engineered the beating and killing of many people in the course of his underworld career (fellow-gangsters, I assume, who had been less than cooperative). He had the conscience of a cobra. At his funeral the clergyman said, “As a young child Dominic Musitano was brought to this church for baptism with holy water. It was then that he became an adopted son of God.”

No! He didn’t become an adopted child of God because he was baptized with holy water. And it wouldn’t have made any difference if he had been baptized with unholy water. And it wouldn’t have made any difference of he hadn’t been baptized at all. According to scripture we become adopted sons and daughters of God through faith; only faith, always and everywhere faith. John writes in the fourth gospel, “To all who received him [Jesus], who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” To all who received him, who believed in his name (nature, presence, effectiveness).

Paul says more about adoption than any other New Testament writer. The apostle insists that while Jesus Christ is Son of God (uniquely) by nature, you and I become children of God by adoption into God’s family through faith. The point of Sunday School is the quickening of faith in youngsters. The point of Sunday School is the fostering of that faith by which they will come to first-hand experience of what Paul speaks of when he writes to the believers in Rome, “You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery that plunges you back into fear; you have received the spirit of sonship, of adoption. When we cry, `Abba! Father!’, it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”

We sometimes hear it said that faith is caught, not taught. It’s a false dichotomy! Something has to be taught. The gospel has a precise content; youngsters must become acquainted with it. The gospel is truth; youngsters must learn to distinguish it from error, falsehood and illusion. The gospel is inseparable from him whose gospel it is; youngsters must grasp, therefore, how truths are related to Truth (i.e., how correct articulation of the gospel is related to the reality of living person, Jesus Christ.) “Faith is caught, not taught”? It’s a false dichotomy! Something has to be taught!

At the same time, something also has to be caught. If Sunday School concerns only what is taught, never what is caught, then Sunday School is simply an exercise in shuffling one’s mental furniture. To say that something has to be caught is to say that youngsters have to be infected. And the teacher, from a human standpoint, is the “infecter”.

Jesus speaks at length with a Samaritan woman, speaks with her alone. The woman in turn goes back to her village and tells the villagers all that Jesus Christ has come to be and to mean to her. A short while later several of the villagers come to faith in the master on the strength of the woman’s testimony. Then as faith grows in them and with it the assurance of faith, they tell her, “It is no longer because of your words that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this indeed the Saviour of the world.”

What’s the point of Sunday School? — the fostering of faith, such faith as will find the youngster-turned-adult saying, “It is no longer because of your words, Sunday School teacher, that we believe; we now know, for ourselves, him whom we have trusted.”

III: — Yet more than faith is needed, and therefore more than faith is the purpose of Christian Education. A Christian mind is needed too. A Christian mind can’t be acquired overnight. It takes years to develop spiritual antennae that can discern critically what is going on in the world and whether the Christian should support or oppose, welcome or denounce, wait for further light or warn others loudly. It takes years to develop that critical sophistication without which victimization is inevitable.

During the daily update on the Bernardo trial this summer a newspaper columnist, commenting on the sexual adventures of Mr. Bernardo, poured scorn on a lawyer connected with the prosecution. The columnist spoke of this lawyer as slightly older than middleaged, gray-haired, someone who had no doubt married only once and who had had, no doubt, one sex-partner only. What would such a man understand of Mr. Bernardo and his proclivities? So that’s it! Someone who has been married only once and has had only one sex-partner (spouse) is a 14-carat “nerd”? There are several issues here that have to be assessed on the basis of a Christian understanding.

Daniel Johnson, the Quebec politician, was annoyed (again, during the summer) at the outrageous and fatuous pronouncements of Jacques Parizeau, premier of Quebec. “Who does Parizeau think he is?”, said Johnson, “an archbishop or something?” Are church leaders inherently outrageous and fatuous? Church leadership is to be patterned after the leadership/servanthood of Jesus Christ himself. He gives himself up to death even for those whose hearts are ice-cold and treacherous towards him. It takes diligence and patience to acquire a mind that thinks in Christian categories.

When our daughter Catherine returned from Hong Kong during July she told us she had had a terrific argument with her Chinese boyfriend. The argument concerned China’s practice of packaging human fetuses (10 to a package) and selling them for food. The Chinese people add ginger to the fetuses, mix them with pork, and eat them. Catherine’s boyfriend defended the practice, explaining that in a nation of 1.2 billion people anything that can be eaten must be eaten — or else people aren’t going to eat. The Chinese, he insisted, don’t have the luxury of fastidiousness.

Catherine told us she replied to her boyfriend, “The line has to be drawn somewhere, and your people don’t know where to draw it.” (I was surprised at Catherine’s vehemence, since I didn’t think she was particularly eager to draw lines.)

Once again there are several issues here: abortion, cannibalism, and the matter of what (who) is going to be eaten next. Will a corpse be eaten next, provided it didn’t die from disease but was rather a traffic accident victim?

The story Catherine related to us had already been sent to North America by means of UPI, the international wire service that sends news items around the world. Not one North American newspaper picked up the story from the UPI wire; not one! A Christian Publication, First Things, did pick it up and print it. And therefore I was able to read more about this abhorrent development. Dr. Qin, a physician in Shenzhen, said she herself had eaten 100 fetuses in the last six months. Said Dr. Qin, “We don’t carry out abortions just to eat fetuses, [but they would be] wasted if not eaten.”

Not one North American newspaper wrote up the story handed to it by the UPI wire service. At both the Ottawa Summer School of Theology and McMaster University Divinity College I have lectured students — and illustrated my lectures profusely — that the manner in which the media handle news has more than a taint of propaganda. In both institutions students have looked upon me as an extremist. Discernment is needed if we are going to identify the distortions and assess the nature of the distortions that the media foist on us every day.

If the purpose of Sunday School is to foster faith, it must be understood that the faith so fostered includes the foundations of that Christian mind which adults must acquire.

IV: — Tell me: do you think I am possessed of faith in Jesus Christ? However slight or weak or sin-riddled my faith might be, do you think it is nonetheless genuine? And the faith that possesses me: has it issued in a Christian understanding beyond the kindergarten level? If so, then my Sunday School teachers are to be honoured and thanked.

Where are my teachers now?

Misses Dorothy Greenshields and Grace Eby are enjoying that reward which Jesus has promised to faithful servants.

June Hocking is the assistant minister at Knox United Church, Calgary. I didn’t know she was there until I spoke at Knox Church one weekend last October. During the question and answer period after my first address she stood up and asked, “Do you know who it is?” Did she think I was ever going to forget the person who first acquainted me with what St.Paul calls “the word of the cross”?

Catherine Heasman is the secretary in the chaplain’s office at Scarborough Grace Hospital. As often as I have reason to phone the chaplain’s office there I speak with her and thank her again.

Carlton Carter has long since retired from the Scarborough Board of Education. With his remarkable administrative abilities he has volunteered himself to his congregation as unsalaried church-administrator. It’s important that I tell him what he meant to me when I was 14. His three adult offspring worship nowhere themselves and make no profession of faith whatsoever. I have heard him ask, “Where did I fail?” He needs to hear from me that he hasn’t failed.

This leaves Gordon and Jean Fairbank. My little book, Making Sense of Christian Faith, is dedicated to them. The inscription reads, “To Jean and Gordon Fairbank, because they were there.” When I was 19 several developments precipitated me into a dark valley that was near-hideous and that lasted longer than I ever thought it would. Jean and Gordon kept me going, one fumbling foot in front of the other, until I emerged on the other side. They stood with me at the edge of the abyss, and what I owe them I shall never repay.

Still, I do what I can. Two or three years ago Jean was waiting alone, at night, for a train in the Rosedale subway station, when she was “swarmed” and assaulted by a band of hooligans. She was badly “unhinged” by the incident. I visited her several times afterwards, lending her whatever comfort I could. Last April her husband asked me if I would serve on the board of trustees of an institution related to the University of Manitoba. I said “yes”. (Don’t worry, it involves only one, two-day trip to Winnipeg each year.) Of course I agreed to help Gordon. Street-wise people are fond of saying, “What goes around, comes around.”

When I am on my deathbed and there is little breath in me, I shall nonetheless summon what little breath I have and pronounce “Blessed!” those men and women who were my Sunday School teachers and without whom I should today be who knows where, and be who knows what.

                                                                                            Victor A. Shepherd
September 1995

1^st John    ( in its entirety)

 

Erasmus was the most brilliant figure in the Reformation era.  He was also the wittiest. He was also the shallowest theologically. It was said of Erasmus that when he looked out over the dreadful abuses in the church he laughed and called for another glass of wine. Luther, on the other hand, Luther went home and cried all night.

Yet Luther did more than weep, since weeping alone is useless. Luther wrote. He wrote tracts: brief, pithy, pointed pamphlets that people could read in one sitting. A tract is easily remembered, easily copied, easily distributed.         Luther wrote dozens of them. The Freedom of the Christian. Two Kinds of Righteousness. Preface to the New Testament.. I love them all.

John Knox, another Sixteenth Century Reformer and closer in some respects to this congregation, wrote tracts too. His most notorious tract has a wonderful title: The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. And how many women were numbered in the “monstrous regiment”?  Two, only two. But two “biggies”: Mary Queen of Scots and Mary Tudor (“Bloody Mary” of English infamy.) Knox’s pamphlets, like Luther’s were effective beyond anything anyone imagined.

A tract has an intensity, a concentration, a relentlessness that a letter lacks.  John’s first “letter” (so-called) isn’t really a letter at all: he isn’t sending it to an individual or a specific congregation. It’s a tract written for all the churches in Asia Minor ( Turkey today). Like all tracts, it’s condensed; and like biblical tracts, it addresses a specific problem in church life.

Whereas John’s gospel aimed at striking fire in the hearts of those who hadn’t yet owned Jesus Christ in faith, John’s tract was written for people who were already part of the Christian fellowship. Some people in that fellowship were causing a major disruption.  Who were they and what were they saying?   In other words, what was the problem in church life that John had to address?

 

I: — The congregation was fragmenting under the false teaching of a cult called “Gnostic”.  The Gnostics regarded themselves as religious elitists.   They alone were “in the know”.  They had special illumination.  Their extraordinary illumination gave them spiritual privilege.    They possessed a knowledge of God that the “lower” types (so-called) didn’t have.

One feature of Gnosticism: it insisted that while God is good, the creation is bad, evil in fact. Therefore God couldn’t have created it. Matter is evil. God couldn’t have created it. History is evil.   God couldn’t have fashioned it.  Then who had? An inferior spiritual being had (inferior to God, that is); an inferior spiritual being that could afford to dirty itself with dirty matter and dirty history, since God was too pure to soil himself with the “stuff” of creation.

There were many implicates of the Gnostic perversion of Christian truth. Since the entire created order is evil, the human body is evil too; loathsome, in fact. The body should be shunned.

And since the human body is loathsome, Incarnation is impossible. God would never have polluted himself by incarnating himself in human flesh.

Now in the past several years you Schombergers have learned from me how the Hebrew mind thinks.  The Hebrew mind insists that the creation is good.  It may be (and is) distorted as a result of the Fall, but it is and remains good in itself just because it has come forth from the hand of God who is good. The Genesis stories reiterate tirelessly, “And God saw what he had made, and behold it was good.” Because everything God makes is good, Paul insists that the Christians in Corinth should “glorify God in their bodies”.  In other words, the human body is a fitting vehicle of the glory of God.

But the Gnostics denied this. The human body is vile, they said.  Not surprisingly, then, the Gnostics fell into two different patterns of behaviour, both of which are foreign to the Hebrew mind.

[i]    One was a rigid asceticism. Pleasure of any kind was to be shunned. No Hebrew thinker would ever consent to this.   The book of Ecclesiastes tells us we are to take pleasure in food and drink and work. The psalmist reminds us, “At God’s right hand are pleasures for evermore” – and if at his right hand, then so at ours.  King Solomon, reputedly the wisest person in Israel , imported apes and ivory and peacocks – but not because they were useful; simply because looking at them brought him pleasure.  And of course Israel always upheld what it euphemistically called “Sabbath blessings”, “the way of a man with a maid.”

Rigid asceticism – it surfaced again centuries later with hermits who lived in a shoe-box and didn’t wash for twenty years so that vermin swarmed them – is simply foreign to the Hebrew mind.

[ii] Another kind of behaviour rooted in the Gnostic contempt for the body was just the opposite. Since the body is bad, invariably bad, incurably bad, why not indulge it?  Since God didn’t create our bodies, surely we can dishonour our bodies and glorify God at the same time, can’t we?   These Gnostics fell into the most vulgar wantonness, the grossest degradation.

Now if you give people a choice between rigid, pleasureless asceticism and gross self-indulgence, 90% are going to choose the latter. It was this latter outlook that infected the churches to which John sent his tract.

What’s more, since the Gnostics denied the importance of history, they denied the importance of obedience to God, since obedience, yours and mine, is always exercised in the wider world of history; our obedience to God is what we do “out there”.   Not surprisingly, the Gnostics ignored the cruciality of obedience in their (mis)understanding of the Christian life.

Needless to say, the end result of Gnostic false teaching was a broken-down church fellowship.   Because the Gnostics looked upon themselves as a spiritual elite possessing “insider” information, they were contemptuous snobs.  Because they cavalierly indulged their appetitive nature, they turned the church premises into a brothel.         Because they disdained obedience, they were a terrible example to right-thinking Christians who were struggling with assorted temptations.

John could take it no longer.  He had to act. He wrote a tract, a pithy, pointed pamphlet that addressed the problems in the congregations the Gnostics had infected.

 

II: — What did John say to his people then? Why does he say to us now?

[i] First, John underlines the truth of the Incarnation.   Jesus Christ is Emmanu-el, God-with-us.  Jesus Christ is the human embodiment of the Word and Way and Truth and Power of God. The Gnostics said that Jesus couldn’t be God-Incarnate since he wouldn’t soil himself with human flesh. John said Jesus had to be God-Incarnate or else the gospel disappears and we are still in our sins.

John was right.   Jesus is God-Incarnate or else you and I remain unsaved and face a fearful prospect. Unless Jesus Christ is God, he can’t save us, since only God can save sinners. Unless Jesus Christ is human, he can’t save us, since only his sinless humanness can restore ours. He is wholly divine and wholly human simultaneously.  “This Word”, says John ; “This Word – God’s self-utterance and self-bestowal rendered Incarnate in one man from Nazareth – we have seen with our eyes and touched with our hands.”

For decades I have been aware that if Jesus Christ is wholly divine and wholly human there is a gospel; if he isn’t, there is no gospel. I’m always moved at the story of the Unitarian speaker in Glasgow , the roughest city in Europe , who stated in an open-air service that Jesus was a good man; Jesus was a kind fellow; Jesus was a sensitive person.         (This is as much as Unitarians will ever say about Jesus, since Unitarians deny the Incarnation.) A streetwalker who listened for a while turned away saying to the Unitarian spokesperson, “Your rope isn’t long enough for me”.

How long do you think the rope has to be?   The church catholic knows that in Jesus Christ God has let down a rope that never dangles just above our humanness; which is to say, never dangles just above our suffering, and worse, just above our sin.  More than let it down, God has descended the rope himself; in fact, in Christ Jesus our Lord, God is that rope which reaches all the way down to us precisely in order that we might reach all the way up to him. Incarnation means that in the Son who is flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, God’s love doesn’t “love us from a distance” (Do you remember a few years ago when every radio station was playing that wretched blasphemy, “God is watching from a distance”?)  In the Incarnate One God has humiliated himself for our sakes and identified himself with everything about us that saddens him, angers him, disgusts him – and this precisely for the purpose of rescuing us from all of it and relieving us of all of it.

Because the Incarnation is truth, we have a gospel. Without it we have, like the Gnostics, religious ideas that are never better than mere ideas (salvifically useless); what’s more, ideas that aren’t even true.

Let me say it again.  Because Jesus Christ is wholly divine there’s no limit to God’s condescension, humility, even humiliation, for our sakes.  And because Jesus Christ is wholly human there’s no area, aspect or dimension of our existence that God hasn’t absorbed for the sake of healing it.

Preaching the gospel thrills me just because the gospel itself thrills me.  Just think: the gospel of the Incarnate One Crucified for our sakes is sufficient for sinners who are otherwise lost and sufficient for sufferers who are otherwise unrelieved.

 

[ii] The second emphasis in John’s tract concerns our aspiration after godly obedience. Again and again John bristles in the face of Gnostic indifference to behaviour.  John is horrified at the cavalier way the Gnostics in the congregation glibly provide a rationalization for sin.  He knows that genuine disciples long to please the Master they love. Followers of him who is the Way want to walk the Way. Walk?  The Gnostics would rather wallow.  John watches them wallowing and describes them in one word: lawless. They are lawless.

For this reason John repeats himself tirelessly in his tract: “We may be sure that we know God if we keep his commandments.” “Whoever says ‘I know God’ but disobeys his commandments is a liar.”  In case we’re slow to get the point, John adds, “Whoever says she abides in Christ ought to walk in the same way he walked….If we know that God is righteous, we may be sure that everyone who does right is born of God.” Having made the one point five times over, John crowns it all with his declaration, “This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.” In other words, we don’t genuinely love God unless we keep, aspire to keep, the commandments of God.

Then John adds a line that describes the atmosphere of our obedience: “And God’s commandments aren’t burdensome.” Not burdensome. Godliness isn’t grim. Obedience isn’t onerous.

Think of what our Lord said decades before John penned his tract.  “Come unto me, all of you who are sick and tired, frazzled, frenzied and fed up; come to me, and I will give you rest.  For my yoke is easy, and my – burden – is light.” “Yoke” is commonest Hebrew metaphor for obedience.  Obedience to Jesus Christ – a burden, you say? – but it’s light.

Someone “on the ball” is going to say, “but Christ’s invitation is just that: invitation.  It’s not a command.” Oh, isn’t it? “Come.”  Isn’t that what grammarians call the imperative mood?  It’s a command. “You come. Come right now. Don’t procrastinate. Don’t pretend you don’t need to come. Come.”  Plainly it’s a command. But the spirit of the command is invitation.  His commandments are not burdensome.

“This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.”  Surely this isn’t difficult to grasp.  After all, it’s our love for our children that fuels our patience with them and our kindness to them.  If we didn’t love them, patience and kindness would boil dry under the fires of frustration. It’s our love for our spouse that inspires our faithfulness.         To say this isn’t to deny that we all need to be reminded, in periods of temptation or apathy or carelessness, which a promise was made and a commitment must be honoured.  Still, who is going to remain faithful forever in the absence of love? Who is going to remain faithful out of grim, joyless duty?

Not the apostle John this time but the apostle Paul: he urges young Timothy to train himself in godliness.         Training. It sounds onerous. It sounds grim. But is it?  Is it necessarily? Since I’m an ardent cyclist myself, I follow closely the “life and times” of Lance Armstrong, winner of the Tour de France seven consecutive times after being almost dead from testicular, lung and brain cancer. Lance Armstrong trains eleven months a year, seven hours per day, uphill and downhill in 90 degree heat. There’s only one way he is able to train like this: he loves it.  Nothing we have to do is onerous if we relish doing it.  So far from onerous, training in godliness is exhilarating if we are attracted to it.

It so happens that when Jesus says “I am the good shepherd” the word he uses for “good” (kalos) means “attractive, inviting, compelling, comely, winsome.”  “I am the good shepherd” means “I am the fine shepherd: if you truly apprehend me, you can’t help falling in love with me.” For this reason his commandments are not burdensome.

 

[iii] Lastly, John corrects the Gnostics inasmuch as they have fractured the fellowship, or at least have wanted to, and certainly have come close to fracturing it. The Gnostics, remember, regarded themselves as a spiritual elite that disdained lesser folk, the unillumined, who of course made up most of the congregation.  John states bluntly that we can’t love God and disdain our brother or sister. The Gnostics maintained that they had privileged access to God and elevated intimacy with God and “insider” information about God.  John tells them starkly that their contemptuous superiority – their lovelessness, in other words – advertises their spiritual impoverishment.

Whereas the Gnostics maintained that they were spiritually reborn inasmuch as they possessed “insider” information and all it implied, John states simply “We know we have passed from death to life because? – because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death.”

John is no fool.  He’s aware that a congregation gathers up (rightly gathers up) people of every sort, in the same way a net pulled through the water gathers up fish of every sort. He’s aware that within the congregations to which he writes there are sound believers; there are sound believers who are vulnerable to false teaching; there are Gnostic snobs who think they’re on the right track but who in fact disrupt the congregation; and there are out-and-out nasty troublemakers, any troublemaker in a congregation being a big toad in a small pond. John is aware of all this.

When John insists we love them all, the whole grab-bag, he’s not waxing sentimental. After all, he knew our Lord insisted we love our enemies.  And John knew that the enemy we are to love really is our enemy; not an irritant, not a nuisance. The person who is mere irritant or nuisance is a pain-in-the-neck, to be sure, but he isn’t dangerous. The person who is enemy, however, can actually harm.  Even this person is to be loved.

The point is this. John could have written to his people, “You know the Gnostic snobs among you who think they’re superior to you?  Always remember that thanks to your better theology you are superior to them.” John could have written, “Do you know the most effective way of coping with people who dismiss you? Dismiss them.” Had John written like this, he would have denounced the Gnostics as spiritual elitists only to substitute orthodox believers as spiritual elitists.  But to do this would be to gain nothing.  When John says, “The sign that we’ve passed from death to life is that we love one another”, “one another” includes the person whose theology is deficient and whose attitude is snobbish and whose presence is disruptive.  After all, how are the snobs going to be helped if they are made unwelcome? “We know we have passed from death to life just because God mysteriously enables us to love the person we otherwise can’t stand.”

 

Conclusion: — So much for John’s impassioned tract. He wants the truth and power of the Incarnation reinforced.         He wants godliness encouraged.  He wants the fellowship infused with a patient, hurt-absorbing love that refutes elitism.

He wants all of this because he wants the truth upheld. Yet he has another motive too: he says he writes “So that our joy may be complete.” “Our joy: his joy, plus the joy of the people to whom he’s written his tract, plus the joy of the people who are going to read his tract.  Then today, as we read his short tract, may the profoundest joy be magnified in your heart and mine.

Rev. Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    October 2005

1^st John 4:8      John 3:16      Galatians 2:20

 

There are few thinkers more profound than Augustine. Born in the year 354 and living until 430, he was philosopher, theologian, political theorist, cultural commentator, and all of these at once; and not only all of these at once, but all of these superbly. His words are always weighty and need to be heard again and again. He wrote much about love, approaching the topic of love the way an appreciative jeweller approaches a gem, glowing over the different lustres it radiates as light shines on it first from one angle and then from another. One word from Augustine that we are going to linger over tonight is as brief as it is brilliant: “Love means ‘I want you to be.’”

I: — Let’s think first about the creation. On the one hand God doesn’t need the creation; i.e., doesn’t need the creation to be God. God is without deficit or defect. Therefore he doesn’t create in order to find in the creation what he somehow lacks in himself. On the other hand we know that God is life and God is love. God is the one and only “living” God in that God alone has life in himself. Because God is life God alone can impart life. Because God is love he appears to delight in creating and vivifying creatures who aren’t God themselves but who are made to live in love with the God who lives and loves by nature.

To say that God conceived us in love and fashioned us in love and constantly visits us with his love means, says Augustine, that God is forever saying to us, “I want you to be.” Be what? When God creates mountains and monkeys he says, “I want you to be that thing.” When he creates humankind, however, he wants us to be what monkeys and mountains can never be: creatures whose purpose, delight and fruitfulness are found in a living relationship with him, which relationship is love.

The apostle John has said most pithily, “God is love.” Less pithily but equally profoundly Augustine would say, “God is the one who longs to have us be; God longs to have us love him; God longs to have us reflect back to him the love with which he first loved us and continues to love us. This is what it is to be.“

The problem is, as everyone knows, that the creation didn’t remain “good” without qualification. Instead the creation was undone (in some respects) by the fall. We who were created to find our purpose, delight and fruitfulness in a living relationship of throbbing love for God now look everywhere else. We who are to reflect back to God the love with which he first loved us and continues to love us now do everything but that. For this reason God can no longer say, “I want you to be.” Now he must say in his judgement, “I want you not to be.” Insofar as God wants us not to be he plainly isn’t the creator; he’s now the destroyer. Anyone who reads scripture attentively knows that as soon as the creator is presumed upon or traded on; as soon as the attempt is made to exploit God or test him, as surely as God is disdained or merely disregarded, the creator becomes the destroyer. Scripture speaks like this on every page.

We’d like to think that if God were displeased with us, justly displeased with us, it’d be enough for him to ignore us. But destroy? Destruction sounds like “zero tolerance.” It’s odd, isn’t it, that we fault God for “zero tolerance” when we insist our legislators implement it everywhere in our society. We insist on legislation that guarantees zero tolerance for wife-beating, drug-trafficking, sexual exploitation of children; zero tolerance for income tax evasion and impaired driving. We insist on social policies of zero tolerance because we know in our hearts that tolerance isn’t a sign of generosity or magnanimity or large-hearted liberality. Tolerance is ultimately a sign of confusion, blindness, and spinelessness – none of which can be predicated of God. His tolerance, in the wake of our primal defiance and disobedience, would be only the shabbiest character defect in him.

Israel always knew this. To the prophet Amos God said, “I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel.” (Amos 9:7) A plumb line is used in house construction to expose deviations from the upright. The house of Israel was found deviant. And the result? When the plumb line is spoken of in 2 Kings 21 the conclusion is stark: “Says the Lord, ‘I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down.” It’s over! “I want you not to be.”

II: — Yet to another prophet, Hosea this time, God spoke as anguish-riddled a word as we shall ever overhear in scripture: “How can I give you up? How can I hand you over?…My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender, for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come to destroy.” (Hosea 11:8-9) Not even the destroyer will come to destroy. Then what will he come to do, given his recoiling heart and tender compassion? He will come to save. “For God so loved the world”, is how the apostle John speaks of this truth. “World”, in John’s vocabulary, doesn’t mean what it means in the Oxford English Dictionary; “world” for John is the sum total of men and women who blindly yet culpably disdain their vocation of reflecting back to God the love in which he created us. The “world” is the sum total of men and women who slander God’s goodness and slight his patience and scorn his blessing and ridicule his truth and laugh at his judgements even as they lecture him, “Don’t tell us what to be; we’ll decide for ourselves what we’re going to be. We forge our own identity, and our identity has nothing to do with you.” And then with a love that will forever remain incomprehensible God so loves such ungrateful rebels that he will submit himself to the humiliation of a stable and the horror of a cross. Plainly he’s saying, once more, “I want you to be.”

But there’s a difference this time. On the day of our creation God loved into existence the glorious creature that he had conceived in his own image and likeness. So glorious were we as we emerged from God’s own hand that we mirrored his glory. It was grand, then, when he said to us, “I want you to be.” In the wake of our rebellion and subsequent disfigurement, however, when his image is defaced in us and shame attends us and we are as loathsome as we formerly were resplendent, his loving us now isn’t akin to Adam’s loving Eve on the day of their primal splendour; God’s loving us now is akin to Hosea’s loving his wife when Hosea found her, now a prostitute with three illegitimate children, shamed and disgraced and valued commercially at 15 shekels, half the price of a slave. It is for broken down creatures like this that God now breaks his own heart. “How can I give you up? How can I give you up when I want you to be?”

The love with which God created us appears to have cost him nothing; but the love with which God so loved the world manifestly cost him everything. Christmas clearly cost God everything, for the sole purpose of Christmas is the Christmas gift crucified. John Calvin was fond of saying that the shadow of the cross fell upon the entire earthly life of Jesus. And so it did. The shadow of the cross fell even upon his birth. His birth? Even upon his conception, for on the day that Mary learned she was pregnant she was told, “a sword will pierce through your heart too.” (Luke 2:35) It appears not to have cost God anything to have us come forth in primal splendour. But to have us be born anew, to have us made afresh, to have us be, at last, what we were always supposed to be; this entailed that child, born for us, who from the moment of conception gathered into himself the eventuality of the cross. Christmas, therefore, costs God everything.

III: — “God is love.”(1^st John 4:8) It means, “I want you to be, be those made in my image whose love for me reflects my love for them.”

“God so loved the world.”(John 3:16) It means, “I still want you to be, even though you are a disgrace to me and disfigured in yourselves; I still want you to be those whose love for me reflects my love for them, regardless of what anguish I must suffer in the person of the cruciform child of Christmas.”

“He loved me, and gave himself – for me! (Gal. 2:20) Listen to the apostle Paul exult. “He loved me!” If love means “I want you to be”, then “He loved me!” can only mean, “I am. At last I truly am. I’m finally alive.” Is this the same as mere existence? If love means “I want you to be”, could we ever substitute, “I want you to exist“? Never! “He loved me!” will never mean, “I exist.” It will always mean, “I am! I truly am! I’m profoundly alive!”

“He loved me!” But didn’t God so love the world? Of course he did, and Paul knows he did. Then why the exclamation, “He loved me!”? It’s because the purpose of the Christmas gift has been fulfilled; fulfilled in this one man at least. The purpose of God’s so loving the world is to have this individual and that individual and yet another come to be: come to abandon herself to the one whose love incarnate for her has brought her to spend the rest of her days in love for him. Yes, God did so love the world; but only the individual can respond. “He loved me!” is precisely the cry of someone who has responded. And in such an individual the Christmas gift has proved fruitful.

We can’t help noticing that when the cry, “He loved me!”, was torn out of the apostle, it wasn’t merely that one matter was settled (he thereafter knew himself loved); ever so much more was settled. In fact, everything was settled. Thereafter he never groped and guessed as to what life means. He never hemmed and hawed, wondering what he was supposed to do with his life. He never drowned in doubt over the significance of his toil and his suffering. He knew what life means, knew what he was to do, knew the significance of his toil and suffering even if those for whom he toiled and suffered didn’t know. And his future? “Life means Christ”, Paul told the Christians in Philippi, “and my dying can only mean more of him.”

Let’s come back to one question Paul never asked. In the wake of “He loved me!” he never asked, “What’s the meaning of life?” He didn’t have to ask it. He wasn’t puzzled. The Christmas gift ends bewilderment here. The Christmas gift embraced restores us to that immediacy and intimacy we crave in our hearts. The Christmas gift cherished finds us no longer asking about the meaning of life, but not because we now have a 10,000 -word answer complete with footnotes. The Christmas gift, rather, has brought us to live in a love to God that reflects the love he has always had for us. Living in such love, in the immediacy and intimacy and contentment of such love, we need neither arguments nor explanations nor demonstrations. When the writer of Proverbs records, “He who finds me finds life!” (Prov. 18:35) we shout, “’Tis true!” When the prophet Amos records, “Seek me and live!” (Amos 5:4), we exult, “Yes!” When the prophet Ezekiel records, “Turn [repent] and live!” (Ez. 18:3), those who have turned to face God simply know it’s true. No longer are we expecting only the detachment of an abstract idea; now we glory in the immediacy of a concrete encounter. “What does life mean?” Those who have embraced the Christmas gift and henceforth resonate the Son’s love for the Father aren’t left asking the question. Those, on the other hand, who are impelled to ask the question are also unable to recognise the answer.

Forever unable? Of course not. Phillips Brooks, author of O Little Town of Bethlehem, writes, “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given. So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven.” The gift is wondrous; that is, it transcends human comprehension. It is given “silently”; that is, the manner of its impartation is a mystery. Because the gift transcends human comprehension, and because the manner of its impartation is a mystery, you and I are ultimately speechless before the secret work of the Holy Spirit that prepares anyone’s heart for the blessings of heaven. We can’t describe or explain the secret work of the Holy Spirit that moves the person who is incapable of recognising the answer to no longer needing to ask the question. But that there is such a work of God’s Spirit, and that such a work we can’t measure or control or describe or explain; this we never doubt. And therefore we give up on no one; we dismiss no one. Instead we pray, and continue to pray, then pray some more, knowing that in the mystery of God’s secret work “where meek souls will receive him still the dear Christ enters in.” And where Christ enters in someone has come to be. Where Christ enters in the purpose of the incarnation is fulfilled. And the love wherewith that person was created and redeemed is now reflected in her love for our great God and Saviour, who is rightly said himself to be, to be eternally, even as he guarantees as much for all who hold – and hold on to – the infant born in Bethlehem.

Victor Shepherd            

Christmas Eve 2002

 

1^st John 4:8

    Ezekiel 36:26    Habakkuk 3:2     Isaiah 62:5     Luke 15:7, 10

 

“We passed you on the street, Victor, and you didn’t even see us. You must have been living in your head — again.”         Many people have said this (or something like it) to me many times. I can only conclude that I often appear to live in my head.  Of course I live in my head: I’m not devoid of the capacity to think. But I don’t live in my head exclusively.

I live in my body as well. I relish vigorous physical activity. The hottest day of the summer still finds me on my bicycle, imagining that I’m Lance Armstrong, winning the Tour de France yet again as thousands of Parisians cheer me on. I revel in physicality.

Plainly, then, I live in both my head and my body.  Above all, however, I live in my heart.  I live in my passions. I have never been ashamed of being an impassioned person.  For this reason my favourite hymn-line is “Love with every passion blending”. This line states that love (it is speaking of our human love) is foundational; all other passions must be subordinated to and blended with the grand passion of love.

But we human beings aren’t the only persons who love.  God loves too. God is impassioned.

 

The church hasn’t always admitted this.  In fact, for centuries the mediaeval church upheld the doctrine of the impassibility of God. The doctrine of God’s impassibility stated that God is utterly without passion. On the one hand I know why the mediaeval church thought it had to uphold this doctrine.  On the other hand I know what was lost when God was said to be without passion.

Why did the church think it had to say that God is without passion? Because the church thought that to say God is impassioned meant two things: one, that God is emotionally unstable, emotionally erratic; two, that God can be manipulated emotionally. All of us know how difficult it is to live with someone who is emotionally unstable or erratic. And all of us know how inappropriate it is to be manipulated emotionally.  It was felt that since God is neither unstable nor capable of being manipulated, God had to be pronounced impassible, wholly without passion.

But what was lost when the church made this pronouncement?  The living person of God was lost; which is to say, God himself was lost. You see, when our mediaeval Christian foreparents maintained that God is without passion they inevitably had to say that God doesn’t suffer; God cannot suffer. But of what help to suffering people like you and me is a God who knows nothing of suffering himself? Inevitably our mediaeval Christian foreparents rendered God an icicle, inert.  What could a God devoid of anguish say to us, do for us, when we are anguish-ridden every day? Inevitably, in denying that God is impassioned, our foreparents rendered God a non-person. Then what relationship could there be between people who are persons and a God who is a non-person? No relationship at all.

Our foreparents were correct in maintaining that God is not unstable and cannot be manipulated.  But they were wrong in maintaining that God is devoid of passion.  Scripture speaks everywhere of the passion of God, just because scripture speaks everywhere of the person of God.

There isn’t enough time today to say all that can be said about the passion of God. In the time we have this morning we shall deal briefly with four aspects only: God’s love, God’s jealousy, God’s anger and God’s joy.

 

I: — Let’s begin with God’s love, since love is God’s essence, God’s nature, God’s innermost character. God’s jealousy, on the other hand, God’s anger, God’s grief are all reactions in God; reactions in God to something about us (specifically, to our sin). But God’s love isn’t a reaction in God at all; God’s love is what he is eternally. God’s love is what he would be eternally even if the creation had never appeared.  The apostle John writes, “God is love”. To be sure, God hates, God rages, God grieves. But nowhere are we told that God is hatred, or God is rage, or God is grief. Hatred, rage, grief are reactions within the heart of that God whose eternal nature is constant, consistent, persistent, undeflectable love.

When prophets and apostles tell us that God is love, however, they are quick to tell us as well what love is not.         Love is not indulgence. God indulges no one and nothing. In the same way God tolerates nothing.  (We must always be sure to understand that God never tolerates sin; God forgives sin.)  Neither is love sentimental froth.  God is oceans deeper than this.

God’s way with Israel , and God’s way at the cross, make plain that God’s love is God’s self-giving without qualification. To speak of self-giving without qualification is to say that God holds nothing of himself back; nothing is held back for self-preservation, nothing is held back for self-protection.  God’s entire self is poured out — without reserve — upon you and me.

Let me repeat. When prophet and apostle speak of God’s love they know that God has cast away all self-protection, all self-concern with dignity, decorum, respectability. When you and I love a little bit we give a little bit of ourselves to someone else and risk a little bit of rejection.  As we love more we give more of ourselves and risk greater rejection. To love still more is to give still more and risk still more.  But do you and I ever love anyone so much as to abandon all self-protection, throw away all the subtle defences we have spent years perfecting, and risk uttermost rejection? Prophet and apostle insist that God has done this not once only in giving up his Son; God does this without letup, since love is his nature.

There is even more to God’s love than that self-giving whose vulnerability leaves him defenceless.  There is also a humiliation which leaves him with no face to save. Let us never forget that Rome crucified its victims naked. All Christian art depicts Jesus clad in his loincloth on Good Friday.  The Roman soldiers may have snatched away his cloak, we are told, but at least they had the decency to leave him his underpants.  No. One of the cruellest aspects of punishment was public humiliation, especially where Jews were concerned. On the one hand, the Israelite people were body-affirming, completely non-neurotic about body-parts and body-functions; they were earthy.  At the same time, they were always modest.  In fact they were earthy and modest in equal measure, a distinguishing feature of Israelite consciousness.  Forced immodesty was much harder for Jews to endure than for Greeks. Jesus was stripped of minimal modesty for the sake of maximal humiliation.

The humiliation which the Father knew in the humiliation of the Son the Father had already known for centuries on account of the infidelity, the waywardness, of his people.  Centuries before Good Friday the prophet Hosea learned about that humiliation which God’s love brings God.  Hosea learned this through the humiliation his love for his wife brought him. Hosea’s wife, Gomer, traipsed off to the marketplace and sold herself.  Pregnancy, of course, is an occupational hazard of prostitution, and Gomer bore three children who weren’t Hosea’s.  When Gomer was sufficiently used up that her market-value was all but eroded and she thought she might as well return home (at least she would be fed there) Hosea went down to the marketplace, endured the taunts and crude jokes of the ruffians and vulgar louts who lounged around there, and paid fifteen shekels to get his wife out of their clutches. Fifteen shekels was half the price of a slave. Why did Hosea endure such humiliation? Because he loved his wife, loved her regardless of the cost to himself, loved her regardless of the face which couldn’t be saved.  Thereafter Hosea preached about a divine love which loves to the point of public humiliation.

I glory in God’s love for me.  I know that God loves me not in the sense that he feels somewhat warm towards me and thinks about me now and then.  God loves me inasmuch as he has poured out himself upon me without qualification; he has risked himself in a vulnerability so drastic as to leave him defenceless; he has undergone a public humiliation without concern to save face or preserve dignity — and all of this in order that my defiant, ungrateful, rebellious heart might be overwhelmed and I renounce my stupid, stand-off posturing and throw myself into his arms. This is what it means to say God loves us, and to say God loves us on the grounds that God is love, eternally.

 

II: — “Love with every passion blending”, says the hymnwriter.  He is speaking of our love, but his line is true of God’s love too, and true of God’s love first: “love with every passion blending”. What about the passion of jealousy?

Jealousy in men and women is frequently a sign of insecurity.  A fellow sees his wife talking at a wedding reception with a guest he has never met before. Immediately he thinks ill of it and imagines his wife and this guest in all manner of luridness. A woman groundlessly suspects her husband at the office and mobilises surveillance in order to expose the “bounder” who in fact has never turned his head from the computer screen.  The more insecure we are, the more ridiculous our jealousy becomes.

But God isn’t insecure at all.  Then whatever we mean by God’s jealousy we can’t be speaking of ridiculous suspicion born of pathetic insecurity.  To speak of God’s jealousy is not to speak of a character-defect in God. God’s jealousy is simply God’s insistence that he alone be acknowledged and honoured and trusted as God.  God’s jealousy is reflected in the first of the Ten Commandments: “You shall have no other gods before me”.  God forbids us to worship, adore, love, or finally entrust with our heart anyone or anything except him.  But he insists on this not because he is a self-important tyrant who has to be flattered. He insists on it for our sake.  He insists that we acknowledge him to be God alone for our blessing. God knows that if you and I don’t honour, love, obey and trust him, we only bring dissolution upon ourselves.  To say that God is jealous is to say that God wants passionately that we honour him, and wants this passionately so that we may always live within the sphere of his blessing.         Through the prophet Ezekiel God cries, “I will … have mercy upon the whole house of Israel , and I will be jealous for my holy name”.  As long as Israel honours God in God’s claim upon Israel ’s loyalty, Israel will live within the sphere of God’s mercy.  To live anywhere else is to bring down dissolution.   Because God is “for us”, in the words of the psalmist, God’s jealousy for his own name can only mean that God wants passionately to prosper us.

Let’s go back to the first commandment.  “You shall have no other gods before me” isn’t the petulant scolding of the self-important. It’s a promise. (Our 17^th Century friends, the Puritans, insisted that all God’s commands are but “covered promises.” Therefore when we hear the command we should look for the promise.)  The promise is: “In the future you won’t have to have other gods. In the future I shall prove myself God-enough for you. In the future you will find me, the Holy One of Israel, sufficient for your needs; you won’t have to run after any other deities or ‘isms’ or institutions.   In the future I shall be your satisfaction.  If my love has delivered you from slavery in Egypt already, isn’t my love going to keep you too?   There is no need to look to any other deity and therein forfeit your blessing at my hand”. God’s promise is the meaning of the first commandment.

To say that God is jealous is to say that he insists on being acknowledged uniquely, exclusively, as God. And since God is “for us”, God insists on this acknowledgement for our own good. Let’s rephrase it. To say that God is jealous is to say that fathomless love always warns foolish people against giving their heart away to what isn’t fathomless love.

 

III: — And yet because we are foolish people we do exactly what we are warned not to do. All of us do, without exception. God reacts to our foolishness. His reaction is his anger or wrath. When God’s loving warning goes unheeded, his anger heats up.

While his anger is real (not merely seeming anger), his anger nevertheless is an expression of his love.  It has to be, since God is love. God is love, with every other passion blended into this love.  God’s anger is never a childish loss of temper; his anger is never mean-spirited vindictiveness; his anger is never frustrated love now turned nasty. God’s anger is simply his love burning hot. God’s anger is his love jarring us awake, his love shaking us up until we admit that something about us is dreadfully out of order.

A minute ago I said that fathomless love aches to see foolish people disdain such love, because the God who is love knows that when humankind disdains him it brings dissolution upon itself.  And Jesus? For the same reason on countless occasions Jesus is so angry he’s livid.  You see, if he weren’t livid, he wouldn’t be loving.  Elie Wiesel, the most articulate Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, repeats in virtually all his books that the contradiction of love is not hatred; the contradiction of love is indifference.  If our Lord were indifferent he couldn’t love.  The fact that he is angry proves that he cares.  And to say that he cares is to say that he loves.

From time to time people tell me they are upset as they read through the written gospels, for on many occasions Jesus doesn’t seem nice. Correct.  He isn’t nice. On many occasions Jesus uses language that would take varnish off a door, like the time he spoke of Herod as “that fox”.  “Go and tell that fox”. When we modern folk read “fox” we think of sly, cunning, devious.  But “fox” as a metaphor for sly or cunning comes out of the eighteenth century English sport of foxhunting.  Jesus was never an eighteenth century English sportsman.  In first century Palestine “fox” was the worst thing you could call anyone.  “Fox” bespoke anger and loathing rolled into one.  What would we say today? –“that snake, that skunk, that weasel” (not to mention what we might say if we used less polite expressions). Yes, our Lord said it and he meant it. His vocabulary on other occasions, we might as well admit, was no different.  BUT — and a huge “but” it is — the people who ignite our Lord’s anger he will die for. For them he will die that incomprehensible death of God-forsakenness precisely in order to spare them it. And he will do all of this inasmuch as he and the Father are one; which is to say, love is Christ’s essence, his pure nature, as well.

The prophet Habakkuk cries to God, “In wrath, remember mercy”. To remember, in Hebrew, doesn’t mean what it means in English; it doesn’t mean to recollect the idea of. To remember something, in Hebrew, means to render that thing the operative reality of this or that situation. To remember mercy is to render mercy the operative reality of — of what situation? — of the cross, and of our predicament before God in light of the cross.  Habakkuk’s cry to God — “in wrath, remember mercy” — is answered in the cross. God has made his mercy the operative reality of that situation (the cross) when the cross is his definitive judgement on humankind.  For wrath is love burning hot as it reacts to our sin, while mercy is love bringing blessing as it forgives our sin.

 

IV: — All of which brings us to the last aspect of God’s passion which we are going to probe today, God’s joy. Joy floods God himself when God’s love for us achieves its purpose and we lose ourselves in love for God. Nasty people attack Jesus on the grounds that he welcomes irreligious people and even eats with them. He in turn tells his accusers why he welcomes irreligious people and eats with them. The parable of the lost sheep concludes with the declaration that there is joy in heaven over one sinner (even just one!) who repents.  Next parable, the lost coin; it concludes with the declaration that there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.  Of course joy floods God at this; for in the repentance of one sinner his fathomless love has achieved its purpose and has quickened an answering love for him.

I should never deny that repentance entails — must entail — what the apostle Paul calls “godly grief.” (2 Cor. 7:10) I should never pretend that repentance is possible without sober, sometimes tearful, recognition that a wrong road has been pursued and pursued for a long time. I should never deny that the heart which is newly acquainted with its iniquity and treachery can be other than horrified at itself.  Nonetheless, repentance doesn’t remain fixed in godly grief. Ultimately repentance is self-abandonment. Repentance is abandoning ourselves to a love so vast that we are left unable to do anything else. Repentance is giving ourselves up to a love so far-reaching that we forget our hurts, our wounded pride, our petty grudges, our self-serving ambition, our childish vendettas. We forget it all inasmuch as we are taken up into the very love which has taken us over.

You must have noticed that the tantrum-prone two year-old, clutching in his fist whatever a two year-old thinks supremely important, won’t give it up. The more you ask him to give it up the more his childish defiance hardens and the more tightly he grasps it. If you try to pry it out of his hand he will explode and then sulk and then make everyone around him miserable.  When will he give it up? — when he is offered something more attractive. Before God we adults have the spiritual maturity of the two year-old.  We hold fast our hurts, our grudges, our self-promoting schemes.         When the preacher rails against us and tells us we should let them go we only hold them more tightly, even become irritable.  We shall abandon them not when we are chided but when we are overwhelmed by a love so vast as to quicken a love in us that gladly leaves behind all such childish encumbrances.

The prophet Isaiah knows of God’s joy at the repentant homecoming of his people. “As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.” (Isaiah 62:5)

 

When next you ponder who God is, what God is, repeat one simple line: “Love with every passion blending”. Repeat it until it goes so deep in you that the love of which we have spoken today — God’s — quickens in you an identical response to him: namely, your “love with every passion blending”

 

Victor Shepherd     

July 2006

  1^st John 4:8        Exodus 34:1-9     Romans 5:1-5            

                                

I: — Maureen and I are fortunate: both our daughters live within a 40-minute drive of our home. Several years ago, however, our older daughter Catherine lived in Hong Kong . Needless to say, while she was in Hong Kong , on the other side of the world, our love for her never diminished.  We loved her as much as we had ever loved her.  Still, because she lived so very far away there was less – much less – that we could do for her. When Catherine eventually returned home we didn’t love her more.  We couldn’t love her more than we did already.  Neither did we begin to love her. We began to love her from the day she was born (if not sooner.) But it was the case that when she lived closer to us our love was able to do more for her.

God comes closest to us in the cross.  Note that: God comes closest to us not in nature (as so many people try to tell us); God comes closest to us in the Incarnation of his Son. Jesus Christ (not anything in nature) is the image of God, the apostles tell us.  You and I are made in the image of God. Then we are closest to God where God draws close to us by means of that image, his Son, in whose image you and I are made.  More specifically, God draws closest to us in the cross of his Son. God’s love for us is brought to effectual focus in the cross.  The cross doesn’t mean that God loves us more than he did prior to Christmas and Good Friday; and the cross doesn’t mean that God began to love us there. But the cross does mean that God’s love — begun in eternity and undiminished through time — did something for us there and was able to do something for us just because God himself came among us and dwelt with us in the incarnation of his Son.

This lattermost point is crucial, for in day-to-day life we are aware of people whom we love, love ardently, yet whom we are unable to help; at least unable to help precisely where most they need to be helped. Perhaps the most poignant, most piercing instance of this is the person dearest to us who is chronically ill or terminally ill.         Regardless of how much we can do and should do for her, our love can’t do the one thing that uniquely needs to be done: our love can’t reverse, can’t overturn, whatever it is that has rendered our dearest scarcely recognizable.

By contrast, when we were unrecognizable as those created in the image and likeness of God, God’s love did for us what most needed to be done.  What did God’s love for us do uniquely?  In his love, focused effectually in the cross, God made provision for us. In the cross God’s love made the provision apart from which other expressions of his love would be pointless.

Specifically God’s provision for us in the cross did three things. (i) His crucified love cancelled our guilt as God himself bore his own judgement upon us. (ii) His love reconciled us to him, bridged the abyss that our sin had opened up between him and us. (iii) His love replaced the sign before the heavenly court — “No Access!” — with a new sign — “Welcome Home!”.

In other words, where human love often can’t do for our dearest what most needs to be done, God’s love could — and did.  In the provision God made for us he overturned our predicament before him.

In all of this we mustn’t think that God “fixes” the human predicament the way a serviceman fixes a malfunctioning dishwasher. In repairing the broken-down dishwasher the serviceman suffers nothing himself. If he has to replace a part he does; he doesn’t replace a part of himself.  If he has to use a propane torch on metal joints he doesn’t sear his own heart. But in the cross God “fixed” the human predicament only at the cost of a suffering that was greater than the suffering of those he was helping.

During World War II an American troopship, the U.S.S. Dorchester, was crossing the North Atlantic when it was torpedoed. The troopship had been crammed — overfilled, really — with men needed for the war effort in Europe . As the foundering ship was about to sink it was discovered that there weren’t enough life-jackets for everyone.         Whereupon four military chaplains gave up their life-jackets to four 19-year old soldiers, and perished themselves.

Scripture constantly points to the nature of God’s provision and its cost to him. Peter writes, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.” (1 Peter 2:24) Paul writes, “For our sake God made him (his Son) to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor. 5:21)  Isaiah says, “He was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities.” (Isaiah 53:5) Jesus himself says simply, “I came to give myself a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45)

Please note the verbs: “He bore; he made, he was wounded; he gave”. They are all verbs of action: God did something on our behalf. His purpose in Christ wasn’t chiefly to show us something (as if we needed an illustration) or to tell us something (as if we needed instruction).    His purpose in Christ was to do something — and he did it.  He provided the remedy for the human predicament precisely at our point of incomparable need.

 

II: — Yet we must be honest in all things. God’s provision benefits us only as we own it for ourselves in faith, only as we seize it and glory in it and accord it a huge-hearted “Yes”.

Think again of the four military chaplains on the U.S.S. Dorchester who gave up their lives.  The soldiers into whose hands the life-jackets were pressed still had to put them on. The sacrificial act of the chaplains was certainly necessary to save the soldiers, but just as certainly it wasn’t sufficient: the soldiers themselves had to own the life-giving gift.

And right here’s the problem, for right here the analogy breaks down. So sunk in spiritual inertia are we that we can’t “put on” Jesus Christ in faith.  The soldier could put on the proffered life-jacket just because the soldier wasn’t inert, wasn’t already dead.  But fallen humans are spiritually inert; spiritually dead.  If we doubt this or dispute it we need only recall our Lord’s conversation with Nicodemus. Says Jesus, “Truly I say to you, unless one is born anew, born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God .” (John 3:3) We can’t even see it, much less enter it. Since we can’t see it, aren’t even aware of it, how could we ever want it?   How shall we ever know of it?

On the one hand we must embrace our Lord in faith, or else the provision God has made for us is of no benefit to us.         On the other hand, we can’t so much as recognize our Lord’s approach, much less seize him. And not being able to recognize the provision God has made for us, we can’t recognize our incomparable need before God.  The worst aspect of spiritual blindness is that we are blind to our blindness; we are ignorant of our ignorance, deluded about our self-delusion. With his characteristic pithiness John Calvin remarks, “What can a dead person do to attain life?”

According to the written gospels Jesus spent much time throughout his earthly ministry assisting the deaf and the blind.   He did so for two reasons. One, deafness and blindness are disfigurements of God’s good creation, instances of evil, and therefore ought to be remedied.  Two, physical deafness and blindness are parables, metaphors, of our spiritual condition. Sin-vitiated men and women, of themselves, cannot hear the word of God or see the kingdom of God . Of ourselves we can’t hear the word of God as word of God; we can only hear religious words about religious opinions suggesting religious notions of greater or less credibility.  But recognize the truth and reality of God’s address when he speaks to us? Recognize our Lord’s approach when he visits us?   No. Calvin knew whereof he spoke when he said, “What can a dead person do to attain life?”

Then how will God’s provision for us ever become a benefit to us? There has to be a secret, stealthy visitation of God’s Spirit.  God must steal upon us and rouse us at least to the point where we can see, hear, recognize and respond. God must infiltrate us by his Spirit (the Spirit being God’s secret agent) and awaken us to our need, his provision, its availability, and the urgency of it all.

This subtle, imperceptible work of the Spirit John Wesley called “prevenient grace”. Pre-venient grace is grace that “comes before.”  Comes before what? Comes before that flood of grace, that flood of God’s love which floods the hearts of all who welcome him who is God’s provision for us.  A needy woman reached out in faith to touch Jesus.         As she made contact with him he said to her, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” When she reached out to him she exercised faith.  But before she reached out to him why did she think he could help her? How did she recognize him as God’s provision for a capsized world?  Before blind Bartimaeus cried out to Jesus, “Son of David (i.e., Messiah), have mercy on me!”, what gave Bartimaeus to understand that Jesus was the Son of David?  When Jesus called fishermen to leave their nets and begin fishing for men and women, what rendered Christ’s word believable and compelling? Prevenient grace is the hidden movement of God’s Spirit within us moving us towards that moment when we consciously embrace the grace of the crucified and find God’s love flooding our hearts.   Prevenient grace renders faith possible; we render faith actual as we welcome him who has already welcomed us; whereupon God’s love is lavishly spread abroad in our hearts. (Romans 5:5)

 

III: — God’s love, spread abroad in our hearts, issues in glad and grateful hearts; issues in faith; issues therefore in our answering love for him.  As faith develops, his love for us and our love for him interweave ever more profoundly. A bond is forged that becomes the instrument whereby God works for good, for our good and others’ good, in the midst of much about us that isn’t good. Paul writes, “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28)   We must note the strong conviction in Paul’s declaration: “We know; we know that in everything God works for good with those who love him.”  Paul himself was living proof of his conviction.  Think of his two-year imprisonment (house arrest) in Rome . In itself this wasn’t good. Yet think of the good that God “worked” from it. For two years Paul declared the gospel to visitors who could get to him readily just because he was in the largest city in the Roman Empire . Imprisoned in Rome and unable to travel, he pondered and then wrote the “prison epistles”: Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians and Philemon, letters that breathe the sufficiency of Christ.  Then again, the suffering that his imprisonment forced upon him authenticated his ministry; everyone knew he wasn’t an apostle because it was a “cushy” job. In fact his ministry cost him dearly; and the price he was willing to pay magnified the truth of the gospel and his vocation to the gospel.  Paul’s experience confirmed his conviction: in everything God does work for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.

I have long been convinced of the truth of the apostle’s word: in everything — even the bleakest and the blackest — God does work for good with those who love him. I have long been convinced of something else: one day we shall be permitted to see what good God wrought from so much that wasn’t good, and see as well how God wrought it. I have long been convinced of all this just because I have seen enough of God’s work already that I can’t doubt what he’s doing now, and seen enough of God’s work already that I can’t doubt he’ll one day let me see it all.

At the same time we must note the full measure of Paul’s statement. He doesn’t say, as a general principle, “In everything God works for good.”  He says, “In everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.”

Let us make no mistake. There is a fork in the road. To speak of those who love God is to admit that there are those who do not love God but are indifferent, even hostile.  To speak of those who are called according to God’s purpose is to admit that there are those who prefer the “call” of another purpose; these people have their own agendas and schedules, their own priorities and preoccupations.   But their spiritual obtuseness in no way impedes the work of God in the “everything” of those who do love him, those whom his oceanic love has brought to life and freed to love.   For to know ourselves the beneficiary of God’s love is to sense the throb of our own heart’s love for him.

 

IV: — The outcome of such interwoven love is glorious.  Because nothing in God himself can interrupt his love for us, and because nothing outside God can separate us from him, his love is going to see us home, and see us home gloriously. “Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord”, the apostle exults.         We must be sure to note the future tense.  “Nothing will be able to separate us — ever”. We already know that nothing can separate us from God’s love in the present; we know this because God’s love is shed abroad in our hearts now, flooding us at this moment. Just because God’s love drenches us now, and just because we know God himself is steadfast, constant, undeflectable, we know therefore that no future development will ever pry us out of God’s love.         It all means that God’s love, vivifying us now, sustaining us now, is going to be the vehicle that carries us home triumphantly to the glory that awaits us.

I was only a child when I became fascinated with the story of Elijah. According to the old Hebrew legend Elijah , Israel ’s greatest prophet, was taken up to heaven by a chariot of fire pulled by horses of fire. As Elijah was taken up in flaming splendour his successor, Elisha, cried, “My father, my father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” (2 Kings 2:11)   By this Elisha meant that Elijah, equipped with the Word and Spirit of God, was more formidable than all the armoured divisions of the Israelite army; more formidable than any hostile army.  Twenty-five hundred years later, in the year 1546, when word of Martin Luther’s death (he died in Eisleben) reached his friend, Philip Melanchthon, in Wittenberg, Melanchthon burst into the classroom of startled students at Wittenberg University and cried, “My father, my father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” Melanchthon meant that Luther, equipped with the Word and Spirit of God, was more formidable than all the forces arrayed against Luther that had battered him for years yet had never broken him.  It can be said — and will be said — of any Christian, of any person equipped with the Word and Spirit of God, “My Father, my mother. The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” For any Christian, equipped with the Spirit of God by definition, is more formidable than all that assaults us and tries to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  In other words, God’s love is the chariot of flaming splendour that bears us home triumphantly to the glory that awaits us.

 

V: — Bring us home?“Us”?   Who are the “we”? Who are the “we” of whom Paul speaks when he says, “Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord”?   He is speaking of “those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”  He is speaking of those who have owned for themselves that love which made provision for them at the point of their incomparable need.  These people have “put on” the Lord Jesus Christ in faith as surely as four young men on foundering troopship put on the life-jacket pressed upon them by those who gave it up at enormous cost.

                                     Victor Shepherd    

October 2006