Zechariah 4:6

 

I: — Who can forget the photographs of European cities the day after Hitler’s forces invaded their country and their community?  French citizens, Dutch citizens, Poles – they appear horrified and stunned in equal measure.  They know they are going to be subject to an arbitrary brutality already notorious wherever the Nazi boot has alighted.  Their splendid architecture will be reduced to rubble.  Their institutions, the outcome of decades if not centuries of publicly-owned wisdom, will be mocked and rendered inoperative.  Families are going to be disrupted.  Many people will disappear without trace.  Places of worship will be violated.  (The Nazis, it must be remembered, stabled livestock in synagogues.) Anyone who resists will be shot on sight.  Anyone who conspires with others to sabotage will be tortured.
Invasion writes shock, fear and fury on the faces of its victims.  Can anything be worse? Yes.  There is something worse: deportation.  Deportation is worse than mere invasion.  For those deported the immediate future is forced labour, degradation, and finally death.

II: –In 586 BCE the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem and overran the people who looked upon Hier-Shalem as the City of God’s Shalom.  Deportation followed immediately.  In exile the     deported Jewish people struggled for seventy years to preserve their identity and their hope.

Their hope was fired afresh in 522 BCE when widespread revolt convulsed the Persian states.  Surely these revolts heralded the downfall of the Gentile oppressor; surely they anticipated the long-awaited ‘Day of the Lord.’  Haggai and Zechariah were convinced that the messianic king was in their midst.  God would show his hand, end the rule of the enemy, vindicate his people and inaugurate the messianic kingdom.  When the Lord returned to reign in Zion he would find his kingly throne awaiting him, for only then would he execute his sovereign purposes for the world.

If the Lord were to find his kingly throne awaiting him the temple would have to be rebuilt.  The temple was the central place of worship.  But it wasn’t ‘central’ in the sense that it was larger or grander than other places of worship.  The temple was the foundation of Israel’s worship in that it was qualitatively different from all others, qualitatively different, for instance, from the synagogues that soon proliferated.

The synagogue was the locus of preaching and teaching and praying, the locus of probing Torah and applying it, the locus of religious discussion and community cohesion.  The temple, on the other hand, was the venue of sacrifice.  The temple was the only place on earth where God had pledged to meet his people for sure.  Everyone knew that God, in his glorious freedom, could encounter anyone wherever and whenever it pleased God.  At the same time, everyone knew that God had pledged himself to meet with his people for sure in the temple.  In fact the Israelite people envisioned God in the temple with his head in the heavens and his feet on the earth.  Specifically, they envisioned God sitting on the mercy-seat.  The mercy-seat was the gold lid covering the Ark of the Covenant.  The Ark of the Covenant contained, among other things, the tablets on which the finger of God had inscribed the Decalogue.  God sat (royal rulers always sat to speak and to exercise their authority) on the mercy-seat even as he infinitely transcended the temple, while at the same time the earth remained his foot-stool.

It was in the temple that God could be accessed for sure; and the God whom his people accessed there ruled in mercy.  In other words, in the temple unholy sinners could approach, even encounter, the holy One himself and survive.

To say they could approach him, however, isn’t to say they could nonchalantly saunter up to him or presumptuously sashay over to him and carelessly contact him as thoughtlessly as they might brush up against anyone at all on a crowded Jerusalem street.  They were always aware that the chief exercise of worship was sacrifice, sacrifice offered to God.  Sacrifice was the God-appointed means whereby defiled people, guilty people, excuse-less people could come before God and live to plead his mercy.  Sacrifice wasn’t merely God-appointed; it was also God-provided (hadn’t the psalmist said that the cattle on a thousand hills were God’s?); sacrifice was the God-provided means whereby sin was atoned for and sinners were reconciled and defiled people were cleansed and those deserving death could live before him and with him.

The temple would have to be rebuilt, for only then would sacrifice be offered once again and the people revivified, and all of this as God assumed his throne in Zion and manifested his reign.

And yet such a reign, such an operative sovereignty – what would its nature be?  Would it simply be Yahweh out-muscling Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon the way the Allied air forces out-muscled the Luftwaffe when German cities were devastated more thoroughly than British cities had been devastated earlier?  (I trust that no one here thinks that the Allied out-bombing of the Luftwaffe was a sign of the kingdom of God.)  If Yahweh merely out-muscled Nebuchadnezzar then Yahweh’s holiness and righteousness still hadn’t appeared.  For this reason a vision and a word were vouchsafed to Zechariah.

THE VISION: a lampstand with gold, with seven lamps on it, together with two olive trees.  ‘Seven’ is the biblical symbol for completeness.  The lampstand with seven lamps, burning, burning, burning, represents God’s effectual presence, illuminating, cheering, igniting; God’s effectual presence throughout the whole world.  The two olive trees guarantee oil enough to ensure the effectual presence of him whose fire and light never flicker or falter or fizzle out.

THE WORD: “Not by might nor by power but my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts.”  To be sure, the temple, that stone edifice, would be rebuilt in Jerusalem.  Yet Zechariah and his people were promised more than they knew, because centuries later Israel’s greater son was to declare, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” (John 2:19)  In his pronouncement Jesus is plainly moving back and forth between ‘temple’ as the stone edifice where the Holy One, high and lifted up, touches the earth for sure and where penitent people may access him for sure; Jesus is moving back and forth between that temple and the temple which is his body, his flesh.  He, and he alone, is the one in whom God incarnates himself; he is the one in whom God touches the earth; he is the one whose self-sacrifice allows, even invites, sinners to access his Father.

Just as plainly (we must be sure to note) the church building in which you and I worship Sunday by Sunday is not the successor to the Jerusalem temple.  We are wrong, utterly wrong, to say to a youngster, “Now don’t run in church; the church is the house of God.”  The church building, even the site of worship, is nothing of the sort.  God does not house himself in anyone’s church building.  God houses himself in the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, and houses himself there only.  “The word became flesh and housed itself among us, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)

Jesus Christ is God’s holy temple in that Jesus is the venue of atoning sacrifice.  Not only is he the venue of atoning sacrifice, he is the sacrifice itself and the priest who offers it.  Jesus Christ is priest, sacrifice, and venue of sacrifice all at once.  He alone is the sacrifice offered up on the altar of his own flesh.  Believing as we do that his sacrifice is sufficient and efficient, complete and perfect, neither requiring nor permitting repetition, we speak of a communion table in our church buildings but never of an altar.  Jesus Christ is the altar on which there is offered up to the Father the sacrifice sealing the atonement.

“Not by might nor by power but by my Spirit, says the Lord of Hosts.”  “My Spirit”?  According to the apostles God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit, is the power the crucified one bears and bestows.  Everywhere in the Newer Testament Jesus Christ bears the Spirit and bestows the Spirit and pours forth the Spirit in the wake of his cross and resurrection.  There’s nothing wrong with speaking of power (dunamis is a strong, biblical word) as long as we understand power to be the Spirit-power of the crucified.  There’s nothing wrong with ‘might’ (even almightiness) as long as we understand it to be the might of the crucified.  But if we ever start to think of power as sheer force, mere force; if we think of power unmodified, power unqualified, power unchecked, we aren’t talking about God at all.  We are talking about Satan.

III: — My students have enormous difficulty grasping this point.  In introductory theology classes we talk about God’s sovereignty, God’s power, God’s almightiness.  Some students (the Calvinists especially) are eager to speak of the sovereignty of God.  I ask them, “In the 2000 pages of Calvin’s Institutes how many times does Calvin speak of ‘the sovereignty of God?’  There’s silence in the class, and so I tell them: none.  Nowhere in his Institutes does Calvin use the expression.  “But Professor Shepherd, don’t you believe in the sovereignty of God?”  Of course I do.  If God isn’t sovereign he isn’t God.  The crucial question, however, is “What do we mean by ‘sovereignty’?  What do we mean by ‘power’?”

What do we mean by ‘power?’  A brave student (albeit benighted) says “Power is the capacity to do what you want, anything you want.  Power is the capacity to implement whatever you have in mind.”  What the student means, of course, is that power is the capacity to wrench; power is the capacity to coerce; power is unqualified force raised to the nth degree.

The student is wrong.  Power is the capacity to achieve purpose.  What is God’s purpose?  It’s a people who love him and obey him.  How does God achieve this purpose? – through the cross.  God exercises power (God achieves his purpose) when the Son of God die helpless at the city garbage dump, strung up between two criminals, pinned in disgrace to a piece of wood used in that era to execute three kinds of malefactors: revolutionaries, military deserters and rapists.  In the economy of God, God achieves his purpose when he, in the person of his Son, is so helpless he can’t even wriggle.
I tell my startled students that power doesn’t mean “God can do anything at all.” And even if did mean this we’d be no farther ahead, since we don’t know what God can do.  We haven’t a clue as to what God can do or can’t do: we know only what he has done.  In his Son he has given himself up to suffering abuse, degradation and that death which is alienation from the Father (“Why have you forsaken me?”)

This is what God has done.  We know God only as by grace we are made beneficiaries of what God has done on our behalf.  We have no warrant at all for speaking of who God is apart from what God has done.

Then what about God’s power?  God’s power is the power of the cross.  Since God is love, God’s characteristic work is to act in love.  Since God is almighty, he can’t be defeated in reconciling a wayward creation to himself.  At the cross God does his most characteristic and his most mighty work.  God does his most characteristic work (love) and his most mighty work (reconciliation) when, from a human perspective, he appears helpless.

I didn’t say ‘ineffective.’  The cross is anything but ineffective.  When the immature Christians in Corinth wanted a display of worldly power and wisdom in Christian dress Paul reminded them that the cross, and only the cross, is both the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Think about it for a minute.  Through the cross God bore our sin and bore it away, didn’t he?  Through the preaching of the cross God has brought you and me to faith, hasn’t he?  Through the crucified one rendered alive but still bearing the wounds of the cross the Spirit is poured out upon us, isn’t he?  Never confuse seeming human helplessness with divine uselessness.

My students never get this point the first time around.  Upset now, they shout at me, “You’re forgetting something.  You’re forgetting that while Christ was certainly crucified, once, Sunday followed Friday and he was raised above the cross, beyond the cross.”  Whereupon I ask my students, “Was Christ raised whole or was he raised wounded?  Was he raised beyond being crucified or was he raised as crucified?”  According to the apostles our Lord has been raised as crucified, not beyond it.  On Easter morning the risen Lord invites sceptical disciples to confirm the wounds of the cross.  His wounds are that by which they recognize him.
When Saul, soon to be called Paul, is persecuting Christians without letup the risen Christ comes upon him and speaks to him.  What does the risen One say?  We expect him to say, “Why are you hurting my people?”  But in truth he says, “Why are you hurting me?”  In other words, the risen One suffers in the suffering of his people; which is to say, the risen One suffers still.

In the book of Revelation John the Seer looks around for someone who is worthy to open the sealed scroll and render God’s redemption operative.  He looks for the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, someone who can wrench things right.  When John is finally able to see through his tear-blurred eyes he sees not the Lion of the Tribe of Judah but a lamb; specifically, a lamb that is haemorrhaging, haemorrhaging still.
The power of God isn’t the capacity to wrench or coerce.  Zechariah repudiates all such power.  The might of God isn’t the almightiness of sheer might, unqualified might.  Zechariah repudiates all such might.  (What’s more, no less a figure than John Calvin insisted that a god who was sheer power, nothing but power, is a god we could never worship.)

The power of God is the power of the Spirit, and the Spirit is the unique efficacy of the crucified.  God’s almightiness is the limitless efficacy of the cross.

IV: — The point we have made tirelessly tonight concerning the efficacy of God’s Holy Spirit in achieving God’s purpose versus the power of brute force to achieve nothing but carnage; this point no one grasped more profoundly than Martin Luther.  At the Heidelberg Disputation (1518) Luther, recognizing his opponents’ reliance on everything except the cross; Luther declared, “Apart from Jesus Christ [the crucified], God is indistinguishable from the devil.”  Approaching the same matter from a different angle, Luther subsequently announced that he would always reject a Theologia Gloriae, a theology of glory, in favour of a Theologia Crucis, a theology of the cross.   For the rest of his life Luther held up this distinction.

Luther insisted a church that disdains the theology of the cross, preferring to luxuriate in a theology of glory, is a church that boasts.  Such a church struts.  It swaggers.  It brags about itself: its size, its political clout, its place in the community, its material resources, its higher-profile members.  A church luxuriating in a theology of glory exalts itself instead of its Lord; it preens itself instead of adoring him.  It’s preoccupied with self-aggrandizement rather than with its mission.  It craves social acceptance rather than the salvation of the lost. It adulterates the gospel through adding what’s intellectually fashionable instead of bringing the gospel in its purity to bear on what’s intellectually current, if not intellectually questionable.
A church bent on a theology of glory, it would appear, is laughable.  Would that it were merely laughable, for in truth a church bent on a theology of glory is lethal.  Lethal?  Of course.  Such a church has confused the triumph of Jesus Christ (which is to say, the Spirit or power of the crucified) with the triumphalism of the institution.  A triumphalistic institution can’t endure seeming failure, and therefore it has to ensure success (what it considers to be success.)  In a word, such a church insists on converting people.

Now it is never the church’s business to convert.  Everywhere in the book of Acts (and elsewhere, of course) it is the Spirit’s business to convert.  It is the church’s business to bear witness, to evangelize.  Evangelism is the church’s responsibility; conversion is the Spirit’s responsibility.  A theology of glory, however, finds the church impatient with the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit appears not to act quickly enough, dramatically enough, successfully enough.  Therefore the church thinks it can do better than the Spirit what God has declared to be his own responsibility.

A church that confuses evangelism and conversion; a church that usurps God’s prerogative in the salvation of the world does two things.  In the first place it announces to the world that it doesn’t believe in God.  Plainly it doesn’t believe in God, since it has advertised its non-confidence in God to do what God has declared he alone can do; namely, make alive those dead in trespasses and sins, quicken faith in those who are spiritually inert.  Such a church, no longer content with its commission to evangelize and attest, elbows God aside in order to take over his role, thinking it can do better than he what he has declared only he can do.  Any church bent on conversion announces its unbelief.  In the name of God it announces that it doesn’t believe in God (since it doesn’t trust the Spirit of God.)

In the second place, a triumphalistic church, confusing the triumph of the crucified and institutional triumphalism; a triumphalistic church always persecutes.  A church bent on converting people soon finds most people resisting conversion.  Their resistance spells failure (supposedly) for the church.  Having already disdained the ‘failure’ of a crucified Lord the church insists that people become converted.  Such insistence swells into coercion as all kinds of pressure are mobilized: psychological pressure, social pressure, even financial pressure, not to mention that harder-to-define, much more subtle ‘oppression’ of which the Older Testament speaks, ‘oppression’ that is much less visible but no less distressing.

Genuine Christians have always existed as a minority.  They exist as a minority even in Christendom.  And persecution of them at the hands of the church has always occurred.  Think of gospel-believers in The United Church of Canada.  (Never doubt that The United Church was resolute in its efforts to convert people, especially clergy, to its ideology. Never forget the oppression it visited on those clergy who resisted such conversion.)  Think of Protestants in Quebec a few years ago.  Think of the children of my Roman Catholic friends, children who were enrolled in Christian Reformed elementary schools and who were savaged.

Anyone who reads church history reads two stories.  One story is the story of the Spirit-invigorated surge of the gospel as the gospel triumphs over unbelief.  The other story is the story of the triumphalism of the church.  This latter story is a sad story, a shameful story, for it details persecution.

If you doubt what I say you should chat with your Jewish neighbours.  The saddest chapter in the church’s history has been the chapter concerning the church’s relation to the synagogue.  Jewish people have been the target of the church’s persecution for centuries.  Let us never forget that until 1948 when tensions mounted in the Middle East over the arrival of the state of Israel; until 1948 Jewish people had always received better treatment at the hands of Islamic people than at the hands of the church.

V: — “Not by might nor by power but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts.”  Let’s think next about discipleship.  “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34)  We’ve heard it since infancy and it no longer registers; we’ve read it so often we read right past it.  Yet it remains true: discipleship is cruciform.  There is no such thing as cross-less proximity to Christ.  To be intimately related to him is to be appointed to cross-bearing.

Not so long ago I was asked to preach at the worship service of a para-church organization.  I gladly agreed to do so, even though I knew a price, a small price, had to be paid.  The small price was singing sub-gospel choruses before the service.  We began singing: “He bears my shame, my guilt, my cross….”  I elbowed the woman beside me so hard she doubled over.  “No he doesn’t,” I expostulated; “Christ doesn’t bear my cross; he bears his own cross and appoints me to mine.”  Whereupon she looked at me as if I were deranged and gasped, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

But it isn’t small stuff.  If it were small stuff the North American ‘Prosperity Gospel’ would be sound.  But we’re rightly turned off by the Prosperity Gospel.  We know it panders to material acquisitiveness and social superiority.  We recognize it to be a hideous caricature of Christian discipleship.

We must be sure to understand that we are never asked to carry Christ’s cross.  No one of us has commissioned to be the Saviour of the world.  We have been asked to carry our own cross.  We can’t bear his; and just as surely he won’t bear ours. Our Lord bears his own cross and appoints us to ours.

How did North America’s ‘Prosperity Gospel’ come about?  It came about when its proponents assumed that Jesus Christ had been raised post-crucified instead of raised as crucified; when it was assumed that Jesus was raised scar-less instead of raised marked by his wounds; when it was assumed that Jesus had a bad day (once – it happened to be a Friday) but he got over it, moved beyond it and has never looked back.

By definition Christians are those who have been raised with Christ.  If we think he, in his resurrection, has left his cross behind, we shall assume that we have too.  But if we understand that he has been raised as crucified, then to be his disciple means we’ve been appointed to cross-bearing, and therefore sacrificial self-renunciation will always pertain to the definition of discipleship.

VI: — Lastly, in conformity with the cruciform nature of discipleship the Christian knows she will always incur the hostility of the world.  The servant isn’t above her Master.  If he incurred the world’s hostility, she will to.

Think for a minute about the word ‘world.’  In the writings of Paul ‘world’ (kosmos) means the entire created universe, planets, stars, galaxies.  In John, however, ‘world’ (kosmos) means the sum total of defiant humankind tacitly organized in its opposition to God and the gospel.  It’s ‘world’ in this latter sense that concerns us now.  Tacitly organized in its opposition?  Never forget that on the day Jesus was condemned, Luke tells us, Herod and Pilate, two fellows who had had little use for each other, finally became friends.  The Christian incurs the world’s hostility, necessarily incurs the world’s hostility, added Luther.

Now don’t assume that tonight’s sermon is going to end on a ‘downer,’ for the God who operates not by coercion or compulsion but rather by his mysterious Spirit supplies his people with invisible resources.  As often as we incur the world’s hostility we find faith strengthened.  Recall the principal character in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.  The man’s detractors kept pouring water on the flame of his faith in order to extinguish it, while unbeknown to them, out of their sight, oil was always being poured on the flame of faith to keep it burning ever brighter.

For this reason the Christian can rely on the peace that God alone supplies, the peace that surpasses all human understanding just because it isn’t humanly engendered, just because it’s a peace the world neither gives nor takes away, just as the joy of the Lord is a joy the world neither gives nor takes away.

We must always be Spirit-attuned to recognize the strengthening God lends his people by means of their fellow-believers.  Over and over in Acts Luke tells us of the apostles venturing throughout Asia Minor, “strengthening the churches” (Acts 15:41), “strengthening all the disciples.” (Acts 18:23)  Most tellingly Luke speaks of Paul and his colleagues strengthening the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith, saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22).

VI: — If I have made one point consistently tonight it is this: Zechariah’s “Not by might nor by power but by my Spirit” doesn’t boil down to feebleness or ineffectiveness or uselessness.  On the contrary, God’s Spirit is the guarantee of genuine power, God’s purpose achieved.

The apostle Paul always knew this.  He had in his bloodstream what Zechariah his foreparent in faith had written 500 years earlier.  For this reason Paul prays for the Christians in Colosse, “May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy.”

                                                                                          Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                   

August 2012

Zechariah 8:23 

[1] A two-hundred year old tea-cup is antiquated; it is old, very old, and too fragile for everyday use. A brand new typewriter, on the other hand, while new, is obsolete compared to a word-processor. While the typewriter may be every bit as new as the word processor, no one who has had experience with both prefers the typewriter. Why prefer what is relatively awkward, even primitive?

I am nervous whenever I hear the expression “old testament”. I am nervous because “old” suggests either antiquated or obsolete. To be sure, the older testament is several thousand years old — but does this fact alone make it antiquated and therefore unusable? Again, because the older testament is older than the newer is it thereby obsolete in the same way that the typewriter is obsolete compared to the word-processor? If the “old” testament is antiquated then it is old-fashioned, a museum-piece, something for nostalgia-freaks to enjoy. (And who, after all, isn’t nostalgic about the old stories of Joseph and his coat, Noah and his boat, Ezekiel and his visions?) But nostalgic museum-pieces don’t do anything for us beyond amusing us. On the other hand if the “old” testament really is obsolete then why bother with it at all? Who bothers with a typewriter when a word-processor is ready-to-hand?

When I was asked to preach this sermon, “How does the old testament differ from the new?”, the asker’s assumption was that the old testament does differ from the new, and differs startlingly from the new. But does it? Does it differ as much as is commonly thought, or differ in the manner that is commonly thought? Does it differ in essence from the new? (No doubt you have guessed right here how I am going to answer this last question!)

Before we hastily conclude that the older testament is either antiquated or obsolete and therefore useless for us creatures of modernity let’s consider several matters.

 

(i) When Jesus is tempted (tempted, tested, tried — the one Greek word has all three English meanings) in the wilderness he sustains himself by quoting the “old” testament; for instance, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God”. Plainly he regarded it as neither antiquated nor obsolete. What he had read and absorbed for years from Genesis, from the prophets, from the Psalms was a lifeline to him throughout his ordeal.

 

(ii) Months later, when our Lord is nose-to-nose with opponents, looking in the eye those men and women who have shrivelled hearts and malevolent spirits, he says to them, “You know neither the scriptures nor the power of God”. “Scriptures” can refer only to the older testament, since not one word of the newer had been penned. Plainly our Lord insists that not to know the “old” testament is to remain unacquainted with the power of God. This is serious!

 

(iii) All of which brings us to the apostle Paul. He tells Timothy, a young minister, that he should continue with what has meant everything to him since childhood. “From childhood”, says Paul, “you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus”. The sacred writings are the “old” testament. Nowhere does the “old” testament mention Jesus Christ by name. Nonetheless the older testament, vivified by God, is able to bring us to faith in that Saviour whose salvation is the all-important issue for any person in any era.

 

(iv) We could bring forward so many more items like those we have considered in the last minute or two, but I am sure we have brought forward enough to make the point. Before we move on to something else I want to remind you of an apparently small detail which in fact is very large: the only physical description we have of Jesus is that he was circumcised. The apostles don’t tell us whether he was black-haired or brown-eyed, slender or chubby; they don’t tell us this because these features of Jesus have nothing to do with our faith in him. But the fact that he was circumcised has everything to do with our faith in him; it means everything, say the apostles, that Jesus Christ is a son of Israel. Yes, God loves the Hittites and the Amorites, the Philistines, North American Indians, the Chinese and Hottentots. God loves them all, and Jesus Christ is meant for them all. Nevertheless, he himself is a son of Israel, circumcised on the eighth day in accordance with the Torah of Israel. Until she died at seventy-five a woman who helped me much was Clare Heller. Clare Heller was a Hebrew-Christian; that is, someone born Jewish who has embraced our Lord. Clare used to say to me, “Victor, if Jesus isn’t the Messiah of Israel, he’s nothing for a Gentile like you”. If Jesus is going to be all that he is for Gentiles like us then we must learn much about Israel’s Messiah. Where do we learn? There is only one place.

 

[2] Some of you will want to say that a major difference, surely, between older and newer testaments is the severity of the “old”. Many apparently gruesome verses are close at hand: “The righteous one will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked”, “Do I not hate them that hate thee, O Lord, and do I not loathe them that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred!”.

But permit me to make again the point that I have made several times from this pulpit. The older testament insists over and over that hatred is sin; vindictiveness is sin; blood-lust is sin; gloating over another’s misfortune, even over the misfortune of one’s enemy, is sin. Animosity toward one’s fellows isn’t even permitted in Israel, never mind encouraged, never mind divinely sanctioned. God’s people are forbidden vengeance of any kind.

What appears to us to be threats and curses aimed at enemies are in fact prayers directed to God; prayers that God will rout his enemies so as to clear God’s name of the slander which his enemies are heaping upon it. The so-called curses of the older testament are not the acidic outpouring of a heart steeped in vindictiveness; they are the anguished plea that God will act so as to restore his reputation in the face of his enemies who are now sneering at his truth and scorning his way and trifling with his patience. The enemies of the psalmist are the psalmist’s enemies only because they are first God’s enemies.

While we are examining the force of severe language we should look more closely at Jesus himself. No-one has ever suggested that our Lord is mean-spirited or vindictive. (He does, after all, give himself up for his enemies.) Nevertheless, he is severe, stark, uncompromising, unyielding. He stares at fierce opponents whose hearts are sin-shrivelled and he says, “You fellows go halfway around the world to make one convert; and when you have finally lassoed him, you make him twice as much a child of hell as you are yourselves.” How much more severe can language become? A construction accident occurs in the village of Siloam, killing eighteen men. The construction accident is dreadful. Everyone is sobered by the mishap and its finality. While villagers are sensitive to the fragility of life and the certainty of judgement Jesus reminds them of the depravity of the human heart. Uncompromisingly he says to them, “Unless you repent you will all likewise perish.”

We must never say that the older testament is characteristically severe while the newer is not. This simply is not true.

 

[3] Because the Ten Commandments are found in the older testament many people assume that “command” is the core of the Hebrew bible. At the same time they assume that something much less rigorous than command is the core of the newer testament. The truth is, the core of both testaments is the same. In both the core is an announcement of God’s mercy-wrought deliverance, together with a summons to give our allegiance to him to whom we plainly owe our salvation. The core is an announcement that God has gone to hell and back for us to do for us what we could never do for ourselves; now we are give him our everlasting gratitude, love and obedience. A declaration of mercy-wrought deliverance is also a declaration of freedom; our glad obedience to God is our affirmation of this freedom. Since God, everywhere in scripture, is characteristically the one who frees from slavery, obedience to him can only be the enjoyment of our freedom.

It’s evident, isn’t it, that virtually everyone misunderstands the Ten Commandments. Virtually everyone looks upon commandment as a freedom-strangling straitjacket. But the faithful Israelite never thinks that the Torah of God is a freedom-strangling straitjacket. Psalm 119 is a sustained outburst of praise to God for Torah. The psalmist thanks God tirelessly for the delight he finds in obeying. He says he loves the commandments of God. They are sweeter than honey; he is consumed with longing for them. (In other words, so enamoured is the psalmist with God’s commandments that he is lovesick for them!) This doesn’t sound like a straitjacket to me! Nor does the psalmist’s God sound like an irascible fellow whom we must placate lest he turn mean.

Think for a minute about the introduction to the Ten Commandments. The introduction is one brief sentence which says it all: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage”. Before God asks anything of his people he reminds them that he has already done everything for them. His people know once again that they owe him their gratitude, their love, their obedience, their trust — and they are glad to render it. It’s plain that everywhere in the bible gospel precedes law; God’s deliverance grounds God’s claim; God’s mercy elicits our obedience.

Let’s think for a minute about the commandments themselves. The Israelite who knew herself released from bondage at God’s hand knew too that the commandments marked out the sphere in life where she would continue to enjoy and revel in her God-given freedom. For this she was everlastingly grateful, for she knew just as surely that if she ever wandered into areas of life beyond those marked out by the commandments of God she would find herself plunged into misery all over again. The commandments permitted her to move freely, joyfully, richly through life’s minefields. Stupidly, ungratefully to think she could move beyond the areas they marked out would be to have life blow up in her face, even to have it blow up fatally.

The newer testament has the same core, exemplifies the same pattern, and breathes the same spirit: a declaration of what God has paid to rescue us, together with a summons to render him the very life that we owe him. Paul writes to the Christians in Corinth, “You were bought with a price”. This is a declaration of their deliverance at measureless cost to God. “You were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.” This is the summons to yield to God the glad obedience they owe him. The pattern of both testaments is identical.

To deny that God is a nasty fellow with a hair-trigger temper is not to deny that his anger is real. To deny that God is mean-spirited is not to deny that God is a just judge. And yet in both testaments his anger is not the last word about him; his mercy is. In both testaments his judging isn’t the final truth about him; his parenting is.

I am moved every time I read the book of the prophet Hosea. Hosea’s wife was unfaithful to him and prostituted herself. She had several children by men whose names she never bothered to learn. Hosea’s heartbreak over his wife’s unfaithfulness to him imprinted itself upon him as but the merest shadow of God’s heartbreak over Israel’s unfaithfulness to God. The names which Hosea gave to his wife’s children born of harlotry — Lo-Ammi (“Not my people”), Lo-Ruchamah (“Not wanted”) — these names describe God’s attitude to the people of Israel. Then the day came when God said to Hosea, “I will not execute my fierce anger…for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come to destroy.” Whereupon Hosea renamed his wife’s children “Ammi, Ruchamah” (“My people, Wanted”). Does any of this, coming as it does from the older testament, suggest a psychopathic deity whose personality is villainous? What about Jeremiah’s conviction concerning the nature of God, born of the most intimate acquaintance with God? Listen to the prophet Jeremiah: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness.” Having spoken thus of God, Jeremiah adds a line to tell us what it all means for Jeremiah himself: “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will hope in him.”

I am almost fifty years old. I have been reading scripture seriously for decades. I can only conclude that the core of older and newer testaments is identical. The Holy One of Israel is the principal actor in both. To be sure, in the older he acts so as to do something at that time while also pointing to a future fulfilment of what he is doing. In the newer he acts in such a way as to fulfil what he had promised to his older people. Were it any different there would have to be two gods. Were it any different you and I would have to decide which of these contradictory deities we were going to bother with (if we were going to bother at all). The Holy One of Israel remains the subject of both testaments. And for this reason the older testament must never be neglected on the grounds that it is antiquated or obsolete. It is nothing of the sort.

 

[4] How important is it, then to saturate ourselves in the older testament? It couldn’t be more important.

 

(A) In the first place, if the older testament is ignored we shall never know Jesus Christ. If it is ignored Jesus is nothing more than a plasticine toy whom we can bend into any shape we choose.

When existential philosophy appeared Jesus was hailed as the great existentialist inasmuch as he magnified the cruciality of decision as he summoned people to choose authentic existence over against inauthentic drifting or copy-catting. Yes, our Lord did summon people to decision; but he summoned people to repent. Repentance is that unique turning which is always a returning to the God we have forsaken.

When Karl Marx appeared Jesus was hailed as the great Marxist. Why, Jesus said so very much about money. He certainly did. But Jesus always insisted money to be a spiritual threat; Marxists, thoroughgoing materialists that they are, don’t admit the realm of the spiritual at all, and therefore will never agree that money is uniquely a spiritual threat.

When psychotherapy came along Jesus was hailed as the great psychotherapist. Didn’t he speak of inner conflicts and the bubbling up of what is deep inside people? Yes he did, even though he was most concerned not with intrapsychic conflict but with that conflict between his Father and the evil one, which conflict courses through every human heart. A considerable part of present-day psychotherapy Jesus would consider fluff, so shallow is it, while a larger part he would consider narcissistic, so readily does it addict people to themselves. He would never question the importance of psychological integration; he would, however, expose the inadequacy of anything that is content to leave people psychologically integrated in their sinnership.

Several years ago some enterprising Americans published a book, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. The book brought Jesus “up to date” (supposedly) and decked him out in a businessman’s suit. It was felt that Jesus, throughout his teachings, expounded sure-fire principles of business success. Really? When he admitted that he had nowhere to lay his head? If he hadn’t even made provision for the coming night’s sleep can you imagine anyone trusting him with an investment portfolio or an RSP? When he died all he owned was a soggy loin-cloth!

And then the nazis appeared. Julius Streicher, a notorious Jew-baiter, exclaimed, “Jesus is the greatest anti-semite of all time.” After all, Jesus spoke severely of the religious leaders in Israel, didn’t he? Yes he did. But remember what I said at the beginning of this sermon: the only physical description we have of Jesus is that he was circumcised. We are never to forget that he is a son of Israel.

I need say nothing more on this point. Only the older testament can tell us who Jesus is. Apart from it Jesus Christ, so-called, is a plasticine figure which we can shape as fancifully as we like. Apart from it Jesus of Nazareth is nothing more than an artificial support for our favourite agenda, our pet peeve, or our self-serving preoccupation.

 

(B) In the second place, if the older testament is ignored we shall quickly fall into that wickedness which has unleashed measureless misery on its victims: anti-semitism. If the older testament is deemed expendable because antiquated or obsolete then very soon Jewish people themselves are deemed expendable because antiquated or obsolete. (After all, what is old or useless we take to the dump, don’t we?) Since Jesus Christ is not who he is apart from his people, I cannot embrace him without embracing them. Since he is the Messiah of Israel (either the Messiah of Israel or nothing to a gentile like me, as Clare Heller frequently reminded me) I cannot cherish the Messiah without cherishing Israel.

When Paul writes the church in Rome he tells the Christians there that to Israel belong (present tense! — there continues to belong) the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of Torah, the worship and the promises. Paul reminds the gentile Christians in Ephesus that until they met Jesus Christ they were “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world”. Conversely, when gentiles meet Israel’s greater son, they have a place in the commonwealth of Israel and the covenants of promise. Since all Christians are honourary Jews; since all Christians are guests in the house of Israel, shouldn’t we — mustn’t we — treasure our inheritance and probe it zealously? That church which doesn’t will soon be found pouring gasoline on the fires of anti-semitism.

You have heard me mention the name of Emil Fackenheim, Jewish thinker, many times from this pulpit. Fackenheim was one of my philosophy professors during my undergraduate and graduate days; he has had the single largest influence on me since my teenage years. When I was his student I spent little of our private time together talking philosophy; I spent much time listening, simply listening, as he immersed me in the commonwealth of Israel. Through my friendship with this wonderful man I learned that while God is spirit God is the densest, most concrete, weightiest substance; that God can be fled but never escaped; that God alone exposes the world’s self-delusion for what it is; that the characteristic feature of God is that he speaks; that the entire Judaeo-Christian enterprise would be invalidated if prayer were not heard; that the prophet whom God has seized can have no other credential than that flaming word which has seared him; that God is irreducibly God — not a projection of human emotional deprivation nor the rationalization of a human project — God is that undeflectable, inescapable luminous opacity who is inscrutable yet knowable, gracious yet untameable. Fackenheim exposed this gentile philosophy student to the commonwealth of Israel. Only an undiscerning fool would fail to venture in it, cherish it and thank God everlastingly for its riches and its splendour.

 

[5] I still haven’t answered the question which precipitated this sermon; namely, “How does the old(er) testament differ from the new(er)?” I hinted at the answer several minutes ago. The newer testifies that Jesus Christ is the fulfilment of God’s struggle with Israel for 1300 years. The despised, rejected servant of God is now become the Son of God himself whose suffering is the turning point of the world’s restoration; the lamb offered in the temple is now become the self-offering of God himself; the incorporation of gentiles into the people of God fulfils Israel’s vocation to be a light to the nations; the dawning of the Messianic Age appears as the contradiction of the Messianic Age is overturned (namely, the deadly, deadening power of death). The older testament is related to the newer as promise to fulfilment, as expectation to vindication, as longing to satisfaction.

At the same time God never gives us the fulfilment in such a way that we can say,”Now that we have the fulfilment, who needs the promise? Now that we have the vindication, who needs the expectation? Now that we have the Messiah, who needs Israel?” God will not permit this. For we don’t “have” the Messiah; we gentile Christians have been brought to the Messiah of Israel.

Centuries ago the prophet Zechariah heard God say, “In those days ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the robe of a Jew, saying, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you’.” (Zechariah 8:23) As Christians you and I have taken hold of the robe of one Jew in particular. And of the robe of this one son of Israel we must never, ever let go.

 

F I N I S

Victor A. Shepherd

 

Mark 12:24
2 Timothy 3:15-16
Luke 13:4
Psalm 119:127,103
Hosea 11:9
Lamentations of Jeremiah 3:22-24
Romans 9:4
Ephesians 2:11
Zechariah 8:23