Members of God's household

The 3rd of 5 addresses I am giving on Paul's letter to the Ephesians on the 5 Sundays before Lent. This one given was given in Templederry and Nenagh on Sunday 20th February 2011, the 3rd before Lent.

Today we take the 3rd of 5 bites at Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
Taken as a whole the letter is, I think, the finest expression of Paul’s vision for his churches. It is an answer to the question, ‘How should Christians, as God’s adopted children, behave in God’s household, which is Christ’s Church’.

In the 1st and 2nd bites we reflected on the themes ‘We must start with Christ!’, and ‘In Jesus Christ, God is saving us by grace through faith for good works’.

This Sunday we look at the 2nd half of chapter 2, and a bit of chapter 3 (Ephesians 2:11-22, 3:8-13). The theme is ‘We are all members of God’s household, which is Christ’s church’.

What sort of people were the Ephesians to whom Paul wrote?
In Paul’s time Ephesus was the Greek-speaking capital of the Roman province of Asia, with a population second in the Empire only to Rome itself, perhaps as many as half-a-million. It was as vibrant and cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic and multi-faith as any modern European city is. And it was rich, as I saw from the amazing archaeological remains when I visited it 20 years ago, including an amphitheatre big enough for 20,000 spectators - still used for concerts.

Paul stayed in Ephesus for 2 years on his 2nd missionary journey, according to Acts. His first dozen or so converts had been baptised by John the Baptist – they were Jews like himself no doubt – Paul re-baptised them in the name of Jesus and they received the Holy Spirit. At first Paul preached the gospel in the Synagogue, but he encountered opposition there, so he withdrew elsewhere with his growing flock of Christians, both Jews and Greeks. By the time he left 2 years later, he had converted enough followers of the Greek goddess Artemis to threaten the business of local silversmiths who specialised in making shrines to her, provoking them to a nasty riot.

By the time Paul wrote his letter it is clear the Ephesian church was overwhelmingly Greek.

Paul addresses the Ephesians as ‘you Gentiles by birth, called the “uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision”’
Called that is, by Jews – like Paul himself – who were traditionally brought up to despise and dislike Gentiles, whom they saw as immoral and unclean.

Paul believes absolutely in the continuity of the new faith in Christ that he preached, with the old faith of the Jews. He reminds the Ephesian Gentiles that before they became Christians they were cut off from the true God that the Jews knew. They were ‘aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world’.

But he is intensely conscious also of the staggering change that Christ brings to all people, Jews and Gentiles alike. Christ has ‘create(d) in himself one new humanity in place of (Jews and Gentiles), thus making peace, reconcil(ing) both groups to God in one body through the cross’. All Christians, whatever their background or traditions, are made one people in Christ, ‘for through him (all of us) have access in one Spirit to the Father’.

Paul’s insight is just as important for us in Nenagh today as it was for the Ephesians then. Our town, our country, is increasingly cosmopolitan like Ephesus. Our neighbours come from many countries, speak many languages and hold many faiths. The old divisions of Catholic and Protestant are increasingly irrelevant. All our churches must work together, we must break down the barriers between us, we must move from being exclusive to being inclusive, if we are ever to make a reality of Paul’s vision of one new humanity in Christ.

Only then will we be able to hear Paul’s words clearly, ‘So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God’.

Paul goes on to describe the Church as being built like ‘the household of God’.
The Church as a building is a lovely, suggestive metaphor. It is an alternative to the slightly more familiar metaphor of the church as the body of Christ, which Paul also uses later on in the letter (Ephesians 4:11-16).

It is ‘built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone’, says Paul. ‘In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God’.

Without the right foundations a building is unstable – as unfortunate people living in new Dublin housing estates have recently discovered, when foundations made from unsuitable pyrites rock swelled and cracked. The right foundation for the church is the teaching of the apostles – those Jesus sent out, of which Paul understood himself to be one – and the prophets – no doubt Christian as well as Hebrew prophets. As the church we must be grounded solidly in scripture before we can build anything worthwhile using tradition or reason.

In Paul’s day builders made sure the walls of a building were true by carefully aligning them with a cornerstone – Jesus serves that function for the church. Jesus joins all of us together into a structure worthy of God, in which we can find God present.

Is today’s church recognisable in Paul’s description? Or do we see instead a building site with a higgledy-piggledy jumble of jerry-built shacks and lean-to extensions, where the architect’s plans have been ignored? I rather think we all need some lessons in construction!

We are all members of God’s household, which is Christ’s church - whoever we are, wherever we come from!
Paul believed that by God’s grace he was chosen ‘to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God’.

God’s plan, in Paul’s words, is ‘that through the church’ – through God’s household, of which we are all members – ‘the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known … in accordance with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord’.

This is the heavy responsibility we bear as Christians, as members of God’s household, built into Christ’s church – to make known the wisdom of God in all its rich variety.

Let us pray through ‘Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have access to God in boldness and confidence through faith in him’, that we may together play the parts God has given us in his plan as he intends we should play them.

Eternal God and Father,
whose Son at supper prayed that his disciples might be one,
as he is one with you:
draw us closer to him,
that in common love and obedience to you
we may be united to one another
in the fellowship of the one Spirit,
that the world may believe that he is Lord
to your eternal glory;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen

There are printed copies of the first 3 addresses at the back of the church, if you missed any or want to look back at them. But there’s no substitute for reflecting on Paul’s words for yourself, so you might like to read a chapter or so of Ephesians each week to keep pace with me. If you want to read ahead we will be looking at Ephesians 4:22-5:14 next Sunday, with the theme ‘In God’s household we must be kind and forgiving and live like children of light’.

Saved by grace through faith for good works

The 2nd of 5 addresses I am giving on Paul's letter to the Ephesians on the 5 Sundays before Lent. This one given was given in Templederry and Killodiernan on Sunday 13th February 2011, the 4th before Lent.

Today we take a 2nd bite at Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
In the 5 Sundays before Lent we are taking 5 bites at Ephesians. Taken as a whole it expresses Paul’s vision for his churches – it is his answer to the question, ‘How should Christians, as God’s adopted children, behave in God’s household, which is Christ’s church’.

If you miss any of the 5 addresses, or want to read them again, printed copies are available. But there’s no substitute for reflecting on Paul’s words for yourself, so you might like to read a chapter or so of Ephesians a week keeping pace with these addresses.

In our 1st bite last Sunday, after looking at the context of the letter – who wrote it, to whom, and why - we saw how Paul in chapter 1 almost bludgeons us to recognise that ‘We must start with Christ!’

This Sunday we look at the first half of chapter 2 (Ephesians 2:1-10), which we have just heard.

But before we turn to Paul’s words, I invite you to travel back in your memory to your early childhood – what did it feel like to be you?
I was blessed with a childhood filled with love and happiness, and I hope you were too. But not everyone is so blessed – if you weren’t, you might imagine some other time when you did feel filled with love and happiness by the presence of another.

As a baby, my mother made me feel completely and utterly loved – my father too, but she spent much more time with me - can you conjure up the warmth and scent of your mother, that sense of complete happiness and safety in her presence? I responded, I suppose, in the only way I could respond, with complete trust and love in return.

As a toddler, I was often bold, as toddlers are. But even when I could see I’d done something to make her unhappy, I was still sure of her love. I could learn to say I was sorry and mean it. And in response she would forgive me, give me a cuddle, and the warmth and closeness would be renewed – can you recall the rush of relief that came with that cuddle?

And as I grew up, imitating her, encouraged by her, I learned how to behave, how to be a good boy – at least some of the time, how to be ‘a useful engine’ like Thomas the Tank Engine, how to be kind to others - including the dog and the cat, and my baby brother, hard as that sometimes seemed! I began to learn the difference between right and wrong, and I began to understand that happiness comes from doing right. And that lesson of course is one we never stop learning as long as we live.

‘You were dead’, says Paul to the Ephesians – and we are all Ephesians!
‘You were dead through (your) trespasses and sins’.
We are all souls with consciences. We are all made in the image of God, and we have all eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, to use the imagery of Genesis. Yet like all human beings we so often do wrong or fail to do right – that is a matter of observation, part of the human condition.

You followed ‘the course of the world… the ruler of the power of the air… the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient’.
We don’t see the world the same way people in Paul’s time did – they believed the air teemed with demons under Satan’s influence that put evil thoughts into people’s minds. And yet… We know, don’t we, that the spirit of a place and time is a powerful influence on us, for good or ill? I have seen marriage-breakdown sweep through a social circle in a small community like an epidemic, bringing untold hurt to children and adults alike. And we must all be aware of how so many of us bought into the Celtic Tiger ethos of greed and excess, with the evil results we are now struggling to live with.

You lived ‘in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses’.
We are so primed by our natures to always want more, aren’t we? More and richer food and drink, more sex, more comfort, more excitement, more luxury, more than our neighbour has. And today as never before we are bombarded with messages to tempt us, ‘because we’re worth it’.

Our own failures, social pressures and our greedy desires cut us off from God. And they make us feel dead to all that is good and true and beautiful, dead to God.

‘But God’, says Paul, ‘out of (his) great love, made us alive together with Christ’.
‘(God) raised us up with him and seated us with him in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus’. ‘For’, says Paul, 'by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God… For we are what (God) has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works’. What wonderful poetic words!

In summary, ‘In Jesus Christ, God has saved us by grace through faith for good works’. This is Paul’s great message to the Ephesians – and also to us. It is a dense and coded formula – as hard to understand as Einstein’s famous equation, ‘E=MC2’. Let me try to tease out what it means.

• Despite our trespasses and sins, God has saved us – he has healed us and made us whole, reunited us with himself – he has made us rise from the dead like Christ.
• God has done this by his grace alone, by his loving kindness towards us – it is not our own doing – there is nothing we could possibly do to deserve it.
• God has done this through faith – our faith in Jesus Christ, who leads us to God and shows us all that is good and true and beautiful.
• And it is because Christ has led us to God that the Spirit moves us to be the kind of people that God has made us to be – people who do good works.

In Ephesians Paul speaks of salvation as something completed, in the past.
But it is better, I think, to see it as something that is continuing, as Paul himself does elsewhere – we are ‘being saved’.

Salvation is surely a dynamic psychological process – much like the process of socialisation we experience as children. That is why I asked you earlier to imagine how you felt as a child as you were learning how to behave.

• When God shows us his grace - his loving kindness – in Jesus Christ, we respond with faith in Christ, and we feel enveloped in God’s love.
• Our conscience tells us when we offend against God’s love, and we hear Jesus call us to repent – to change our ways. And when we do repent, God responds by forgiving us. We are saved. No longer crushed by a burden of guilt, we feel loved and close to God again.
• When we feel touched by God’s love, we can respond to the prompting of his Holy Spirit to do good and reject evil, to live as the sort of people God wants us to be.
• And this dynamic process of being saved continues as long as we live.

In Jesus Christ, God is saving us by grace through faith for good works.
Let us give thanks for this message from Paul to the Ephesians – it is surely also meant for us. Amen

Next Sunday we shall look at the 2nd half of Chapter 2 (Ephesians2:11-22), and the theme ‘We are all members of God’s household’.

We must start with Jesus Christ

On the five Sundays before Lent I shall be giving a series of addresses on Paul's Letter to the Ephesians. This is the first, given in Templederry and Nenagh on Sunday 6th February 2011, the 5th before Lent.

Today and the next 4 Sundays I shall be talking about Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
When the Rector invited me to give a series of themed addresses I confess I gulped hard several times. But something prompted me to reply, ‘Why not?’ And when I thought about possible themes ‘Ephesians!’ jumped straight into my mind, as if somebody had put it there.

In many ways it’s the supreme expression of Paul’s vision for his churches. I see the whole letter as Paul’s answer to this question: ‘How should Christians, as God’s adopted children, behave in God’s household, which is Christ’s church’. Its often poetic imagery is just as relevant today as it was in Paul’s time, I think.

I’m enjoying the challenge of probing deeper than I've done before into Ephesians and what it means. Inevitably in just five addresses I can only talk about some of its themes, but I hope you will find my take on it thought provoking. If you miss an address one Sunday, or want to come back to one, there will be paper copies available.

But there is no substitute for reading and reflecting on Paul’s words for yourself. So I would encourage you to take down your Bible at home and read perhaps a chapter or two of Ephesians a week, keeping pace with these addresses. It’s quite short – 6 chapters take up just 6 pages in my copy.

This week I shall first look briefly at the context of the letter, and then turn to examine the great theme of chapter 1, ‘We must start with Jesus Christ' - he is the source of all our blessings.

What is the context of Ephesians - who wrote it, to whom, and why?
The letter claims to be written by ‘Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God’. But many scholars doubt that it was written by Paul himself, for reasons of style and vocabulary. They suggest that it may have been written by a slightly later author in Paul’s tradition, drawing on other letters, in particular Colossians, in order to summarise and pass on Paul’s thinking about the church.

In the version handed down to us the letter is addressed ‘to the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus’. But most scholars today think that it is really a circular letter sent to several of Paul’s missionary churches, and wasn’t written specifically to the Ephesians at all. The earliest manuscripts omit the words ‘in Ephesus’. And it is strangely impersonal, unlike Paul’s other letters. There are no personal messages or references to specific events in Ephesus, even though Paul knew the Ephesian church and people very well.

Ultimately I don’t think these scholarly arguments matter a whit. What does matter is the quality of the thinking in it about the nature of the church and its role in God’s plan of salvation. I shall continue the ancient tradition of calling its author Paul and those to whom it’s addressed Ephesians.

We are all saints! Did you realise that? You, you, all of you, and me too – we are all saints, at least in the way that Paul uses the word - ‘hagios’ in Greek means one who has been made holy. The idea that a saint is someone with a halo, someone who is peculiarly good, someone able to grant miracles through intercession, is a much later idea, a medieval superstition. We are saints because by the grace of God we are Christians, ‘faithful in Christ Jesus’, to use Paul’s words. Our baptism was an external and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace that God has made us holy.

In fact I suggest that we should see Paul’s letter as addressed to us – we are ‘the saints who are in Ephesus’!

Paul begins his letter (1:3-14) by counting the ways in which God has blessed the saints.
It is an amazing, poetic passage, a single sentence in the original Greek. The subordinate clauses break one after another like waves on a seashore, pounding in the message that God, in Paul’s words, ‘has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places’. It is the same message we heard in the Gospel reading (John 1:14-16): ‘From (Christ’s) fullness we have all received grace upon grace’.

The name of Christ echoes and re-echoes through Paul’s words:

• ‘In Christ’, God ‘chose us … before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love’.
  We are not Christians because we choose to be, but because God has chosen us to be - and we can trust God not to change his mind, because he chose us from the very beginning.
  
• ‘Through Jesus Christ’ God has ‘destined us for adoption as his children …, according to the good pleasure of his will’.
  God adopts us as his beloved children, full members of the household of God, because God's Son Jesus Christ introduces us to him.
  
• ‘Through (Christ’s) blood we have redemption and the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us’.
  It is Christ’s example of self-sacrifice upon the cross which shows us the way to redemption and forgiveness. It is a gift from God we do not deserve.
  
• In Christ, God has revealed ‘the mystery of his will … as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him’, that is in Christ, ‘things in heaven and things on earth’.
  The Greek word translated here as ‘plan’ is 'oikonomia' - also the root of the English word 'economy', which we are probably tired of hearing in this election time! It literally means the stewardship or overseeing of a household or institution. Paul is saying here that God’s purpose in overseeing his creation is that the whole of it should be drawn together in Christ. The whole of creation - chosen, adopted, redeemed and forgiven, all in Christ - what a breathtaking cosmic vision!
  
• ‘In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance’. Those who hear Christ’s ‘word of truth, the gospel of salvation and … believe in him’, are ‘marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit’ And ‘this is the pledge of our inheritance towards redemption as God’s own people’.
  It is precisely because we feel Christ’s promised Spirit at work in and through us, that we can be sure that God has chosen and adopted us as his children, and has redeemed and forgiven us.

Paul almost bludgeons us to recognise that we must start with Christ! This is the key message Paul begins with. This is the message which I hope you will take away from all my words today. We must start with Christ – everything else, including the church insofar as it is a human institution, can only be secondary to Christ.

Paul continues, thanking God for the Ephesians’ faith and the love they show the saints.
He prays in beautiful words that they may know ‘the immeasurable greatness of (God’s) power for us who believe’ - we will shortly pray them for ourselves as our parish prayer for February.

And finally Paul drives home again to the saints at Ephesus, that Christ must be their starting point, finishing the 1st chapter with these words: ‘God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand … And he has put all things under his feet and has made him head of all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all’.

‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ’

He must be our only starting point! Amen

Next week we shall look at Ephesians 2:1-10, and the theme ‘We are saved by grace through faith for good works’.

May Jesus's disciples be one!

I was very privileged to be invited to give this address at the Evening of Prayer for Christian Unity, hosted by Nenagh Catholic parish in St Mary's of the Rosary on 23rd January 2011.

Dear friends, brothers and sisters in Christ.
How wonderful it is to come together from our different Christian traditions to worship, to hear God’s word, and to pray together for the unity of Christ’s disciples!

As we do so, we follow Jesus’s new commandment, to love one another as he has loved us, and we echo his prayer, that his disciples may be one, as he and the Father are one.

On behalf of those here from other traditions, I want to thank the Catholic parish for calling us together and for hosting us in this beautiful church.

There are some – Baptists, Methodists and the Living Water prayer group - who sadly cannot be with us tonight, because of prior commitments, but I know they too are with us in spirit and would wish me to extend their greetings to you.

The worship materials we are using this evening were developed in Jerusalem.
Christians in Jerusalem today live under tremendous pressure, from both the political and religious situation and their dwindling numbers. But despite that, they are communities of faith which worship, pray and study together, which work for the good of their society, and which pray for unity of Christ’s Church and the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Representatives of their many Christian traditions meet informally each month as the Ecumenical Circle of Friends. The World Council of Churches and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity asked them to prepare materials for this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

They chose as a theme ‘All things in common’, and they invite the world-wide Church to pray with them not only for Church unity, but for justice and peace in the Holy Land and throughout the world.

They invite us to pray for unity, but that is not the same as uniformity. God loves diversity in the life he has created, and I don’t doubt he loves the diversity among his disciples, their different ways of worshiping, their different ways of understanding their faith. The unity we pray for is surely not uniformity, but a unity of love for one another, and a unity of purpose, to proclaim together, to all who will listen, the good news proclaimed by Jesus Christ.

The theme chosen by Christians in Jerusalem is a challenge to us all.
It is taken from the description of the earliest Christian community in Jerusalem in Acts (2:42-47), which we have just heard. How hard it is to see these characteristics of the earliest Church in today’s splintered Christian landscape!

‘They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers’. Fellowship in breaking bread? We encounter such difficulty sharing the Eucharist together, not just between our different traditions but even within them – I’m thinking of my own Anglican communion - for profound theological reasons we are told. But can these so-called obstacles really be insurmountable?

‘All the believers were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need’. Living simply so that others can simply live? Christians live embedded in the greedy consumer culture around us, in which we are defined by what we possess, and we are constantly urged to acquire more. God’s creation suffers to feed the greed, and the needs of the poor and vulnerable are too often ignored. As Christians we may be personally generous - but do we do enough to challenge that pervasive culture of greed and waste, with Christ’s values of loving God, and loving our neighbours as ourselves?

How will we respond to the challenge from Jerusalem?
Will we leave here today with a warm feeling that we have done our duty by praying together for unity this one day of the year?

Or will we leave here determined to act together this coming year to bring unity closer, a unity of love, and a unity of purpose to proclaim together the good news of Jesus Christ?

Let us join ourselves in Jesus’s prayer, that we his disciples may be one!

Here is the Lamb of God

Adoration of the Lamb,

Detail of the Ghent Altarpiece, Jan Van Eyck

‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!’
Beginning with these words from St John’s Gospel (1:29-42), John the Baptist publicly testifies to the great truth about Jesus, which had suddenly come to him as he baptised Jesus the day before – that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.

And pointing to Jesus, the Baptist says to two of his own disciples the next day, ‘Look, here is the Lamb of God!’ One of them is Andrew, who after spending a day with Jesus goes to find his brother Simon Peter, to tell him, ‘We have found the Messiah’. Andrew and Peter go on to follow Jesus and become two of his chosen apostles.

Jesus as the Lamb of God is such a familiar image, isn’t it? We’ve all seen those icons of Christ as a lamb holding a cross. And we still sometimes use the Agnus Dei during communion, which I remember from my childhood in the ancient chant, ‘O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us’.

The seal of the Moravian Church, featuring the Agnus Dei.

The image is so familiar that we often don’t realise just how strange it is – the Son of God represented as a small, vulnerable lamb. Wouldn’t a noble beast like a lion be more appropriate for the Son of God? CS Lewis in his Narnia books chose Aslan, a fearsome lion, not a tame lion, to represent the Christ-like character in his stories, not a lamb. Jesus chose to describe himself as the Good Shepherd, not as a lamb. So why does the evangelist have John the Baptist describe Jesus as the Lamb of God?

The image of the lamb had layer upon layer of symbolic meaning for Jews at the time of Christ.
It would remind them of the old story of the Passover Lamb (Exodus 12). The Israelites are told to sprinkle the blood of a lamb on the doors of their houses, as a sign to the Lord to pass over the house without killing the firstborn within. The Lord strikes down the firstborn of the Egyptians and the firstborn of the Israelites live. The Passover Lamb protects and saves the Israelites and they escape from Egypt.

It would remind them of the daily sacrifice in the Temple in Jerusalem of ‘two male lambs a year old without blemish’, one in the morning and one in the evening, as an offering to God (Numbers 28:3-4), an offering intended to turn God’s wrath away from the sins of the community.

So the lamb would have represented reconciliation with God, and forgiveness of sins – atonement in the language of theology. The English word atonement originally meant ‘at-one-ment’, being put in harmony with someone.

And the lamb would also have represented uncomplaining gentleness. Jeremiah writes, ‘But I was like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter’. And Isaiah writes of God’s suffering servant, ‘Like a lamb that is lead to the slaughter … he did not open his mouth’.

Today we are horrified by the cruelty and injustice of sacrificing living animals to God. It also horrified the prophet Isaiah (1:11-17), who told the people of Judah that God did not want their animal sacrifices, but rather wanted them to ‘cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow’. But his words were ignored, perhaps because of vested interests - the privileged status and livelihood of priests would have depended on sacrifices continuing, and sacrifices were no doubt cheaper and easier for the well-to-do than Isaiah’s alternative. Jewish practice of animal sacrifice did not cease until the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70AD.

Jesus taught his disciples that God would pardon their sins if they truly repented. In perfect obedience to God’s will, he submitted to a cruel death upon the cross although an innocent man. Perhaps it’s not so very surprising that his disciples, the first Christians, should identify Jesus with the sacrificial lamb, as John does, and as Paul did too.

As the years passed, early Christians came to see the self-sacrifice of Jesus on the cross as the final and complete atoning sacrifice, taking their sin away, reconciling them to God, and making further ritual sacrifice of animals unnecessary.

The imagery of Christ as the sacrificial lamb lived on after animal sacrifice ceased.
Christians have always meditated upon it. And very many have pondered just how Christ’s death on the cross reconciles us with God – that is, how atonement works. Theologians have come up with innumerable theories.

There’s ‘ransom’ atonement: Adam and Eve are held to have sold humanity to Satan at the time of the Fall; Justice requires that Satan be paid a ransom to free us from his clutches; God pays the ransom on our behalf through Christ’s death; Justice is satisfied and we are freed from Satan’s grip of sin and death. I can’t accept the dualism of this theory. I believe in one God, and I do not believe in any kind of anti-God like Satan.

There’s also ‘substitution’ atonement: the debt humans owe for their sin is not to Satan but to God himself; human kind deserve God’s punishment for sin; God’s Justice means that God cannot simply forgive the sin without exacting punishment; but God takes the punishment on himself by sending his Son to die on the cross in our place as a substitute; and this cancels out human sin, allowing us to receive forgiveness and be reconciled to God. This theory repels me, because it makes God appear to collude in the unjust punishment of Jesus, rather than being the loving, forgiving and merciful Father that Jesus revealed to us.

And then there’s ‘moral influence’ atonement: Jesus’s self-sacrifice on the cross shows us how to deal with the consequences of sin, and also demonstrates God’s love for us; we respond with repentance, and receive God’s forgiveness; we are reconciled to God and transformed by the Holy Spirit. I find this a much more satisfactory explanation of atonement.

But all these musings of theologians are like smoke compared to the fact of atonement.
Human attempts to define the purposes of God must always be inadequate, and we should not let differences of opinion about how atonement works divide us one from another.

Rather we should rejoice together in the reality of atonement - that Jesus Christ reconciles us to God, who will forgive our sins if we repent.

It is to this reality that John the Baptist points when he says, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’.

God has come close to me, as close as my own skin

Today the Church asks us to remember the Baptism of Christ.
So I take this opportunity to reflect on what Jesus’s baptism means, both to those at the time, and to you and me 2000 years later.

But first I invite you to picture again, in your minds eye, the moments after John baptised Jesus, as described by Matthew in his gospel (3:13-17).

Here is Jesus, a man in the prime of his life, about 30 years old. He is glistening wet from receiving John’s baptism of repentance, as he walks up out of the river Jordan. Then, suddenly, the heavens burst open. The Spirit of God descends like a dove to settle on him. And the voice of God declares from heaven, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased’.

It is a striking and dramatic scene which engages our senses – it’s easy to imagine being there, isn’t it? And artists have painted many beautiful images of it over the centuries.

The Baptism of Christ, Joachim Patenir, c. 1480-1524, Kunsthistorische Museum, Vienna

I don’t believe Matthew the Evangelist was an eyewitness to Jesus’s baptism.
Nor is he likely to be the same person as Matthew the Apostle, the tax-collector Jesus called to be one of the twelve, a while later.

Whoever he was, Matthew is describing an epiphany, in which God reveals himself to be the Father of Jesus and sends his Spirit to Jesus. The very same epiphany, bringing together Jesus at his baptism, the dove and a voice from heaven, is also described by Mark, Luke and John. It must have been part of the common tradition of the earliest Christians on which Matthew and the other evangelists drew when writing their gospels.

For Christians by the 4th Century AD these baptism passages came to be seen as supporting and illustrating the doctrine of the Trinity, the idea that the one God consists of three persons, Father, Son and Spirit. They are the only passages in the NT where we encounter all three persons together at the same time, in the same place.

Matthew, like any educated Jew of his time, would have known the prophesy of Isaiah well. He would surely have noticed the parallels with today’s OT reading (Isaiah 42:1-9), in which God declares, ‘Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him’. But there is this crucial difference: for Isaiah, God identifies his chosen one as just a humble servant; whereas for Matthew, God identifies Jesus as his beloved Son.

What did John the Baptist make of Jesus’s baptism?
John recognised Jesus when he came to ask for baptism, not surprisingly since they were cousins close in age. John says to Jesus, ‘I need to be baptised by you, and do you come to me?’ What’s going on here?

John proclaimed ‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’ (Mark 1:4). He called people to repent, and baptised them as a sign that God forgave their sins. I think John must have believed Jesus was such a good man that he had no need of baptism, repentance and forgiveness. But John knew he did need them himself.

The gospels tell us next to nothing about Jesus before he started his ministry. However Luke (2:41-52) does tell us that Jesus amazed the teachers in the Temple with his understanding when only twelve, and that afterwards Jesus ‘increased in wisdom and years, and in divine and human favour’. John’s reaction confirms Luke’s picture of Jesus as a man widely seen to be remarkably holy and charismatic.

John would also have recalled Isaiah’s description of God’s chosen servant in today’s reading, ‘He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth.’ Perhaps John recognised the Jesus he knew in Isaiah’s description - softly spoken, filled with compassion for the damaged and the weak, yet determined and passionate for justice.

Despite John’s reluctance to baptise him, Jesus insisted, and John consented. And we know John then experienced the same epiphany described by Matthew, since John’s Gospel records him saying: “I saw the spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptise with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptises with the Holy Spirit.’” Only then does John realise the full truth, that his cousin Jesus is not just a remarkably holy man, but is in fact the promised Messiah, the incarnate Son of God.

I wonder what his baptism meant for Jesus himself.
Jesus very deliberately chose to ask John for baptism, and insisted on it – it must have been of great significance to him.

Matthew gives us a clue when he records Jesus saying to John, ‘it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness’. For Jews, righteousness meant obeying God’s law and doing God’s will. Jesus clearly believed God wished him to be baptised by John. But baptised for what purpose?

Perhaps God's Spirit prompted Jesus to seek John’s baptism at the very start of his ministry in order to demonstrate that Jesus was God’s incarnate Son, not just a good man like Isaiah’s servant. This was certainly the effect it had on John. But Jesus himself surely also needed to be certain of his identity before beginning his ministry. Is it possible this is also the very moment when Jesus finally understood that he was Christ the Messiah, the Son of God?

Whatever the truth of this, Jesus clearly associated himself quite deliberately with John’s proclamation, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’ (Matt 3:2) - because he went on to proclaim this message in his own ministry (Matt 4:17). And I like to think that Jesus did so because he wanted to show his solidarity with sinful people like you and me, who desperately need to repent and be forgiven, even if Jesus had no such need himself.

So to finish, what does Jesus’s baptism mean to you and me, 2000 years on?
Well, no doubt there are many answers. But this one strikes me.

The epiphany at the baptism of Jesus marks a great new insight into the nature of God as the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As God says through Isaiah in the 1st reading, ‘See the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare’.

Before it Jewish religious thinkers could only conceive of the relationship between God and a human being as that between a remote master and a terrified servant. After it Christians could begin to see the relationship as one in which God is incarnate in a human being like you or me.

Everything is changed and made new. God ceases to be a remote figure and we are no longer afraid. God comes near to us, as close to us as our own skin. We feel his presence to be like that of our loving Father; to be like thst of Jesus, his Son, our friend and brother; to be like that of the Spirit which inspires all that is good and true in us.

Let us thank God for Jesus’s baptism, most particularly for the insight it gives us into God’s intimate and loving nature as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Remembering Prophets

An address given on the 2nd Sunday of Advent 5th December 2010 at Nenagh (it would have been given in Templederry too, but the service there was cancelled due to the icy conditions).

Today we lit the 2nd candle in the advent wreath to remember the prophets.
And today’s readings are concerned with two of the greatest of them: Isaiah in the Old Testament (Isaiah 11:1-10) and John the Baptist in the New (Matthew 3:1-12). Christians see their prophetic words as referring to the incarnation of God in Jesus, and the coming of Christ’s kingdom.

We shouldn’t see prophets, I think, as being like weather forecasters, or racing tipsters, who foretell the future without engaging in it. Rather a prophet is someone who expresses a vision of the way things are, and the consequences that flow from this, which powerfully influences those who listen, so that they act to make that prophetic vision a reality. Prophets change history through their words!

Let me try to tease out what these prophets’ words say to me.

Let’s start with Isaiah’s vision of a world of peace and justice.
‘The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.’

A beautiful image - but we all know, don’t we, that the strong prey on the weak; the natural world is all about survival of the fittest. ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’ – the phrase comes from Tennyson's long poem ‘In Memoriam’ (canto 56). In it the poet contrasts the idea of a good and loving God with the terrors of an uncaring Nature. He talks about a person of faith,

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law-
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed

Surely Isaiah’s vision of predator and prey at peace together can be nothing more than a fairytale? That’s not the way the world works. What’s going on here?

The context is important, I think.
Isaiah is writing in Jerusalem, the capital of Judah, at a time of great danger. The Assyrians have just conquered Judah’s twin kingdom of Israel and carried the people off as captives, and now they threaten Judah. Isaiah believes that the social and political collapse of Israel was caused by its failure to live up to the spirit of the law given in Sinai – and he sees the same thing happening to Judah. Isaiah has just prophesied that Judah too will be overthrown, but he can’t believe that a God who is faithful will desert his chosen people completely – once the Assyrians have purged those who have broken the covenant, surely a faithful remnant will be left.

So in today’s reading Isaiah prophesies that from the root of Jessie, a new shoot will rise up. From the ruins of Jerusalem, of the kingdom of Jessie’s son David, a new kingdom of justice and peace will arise, worthy of God’s favour. It will be marked by ‘the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord’. Its ruler – from the stock of Jesse – ‘with righteousness … shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth’.

It is a vision of the kingdom of heaven. In such a society the powerful will not prey on the weak. Isaiah’s vision is about people, not nature. Survival of the fittest should not – must not - apply in human society, however much it does in the natural world.

Isaiah was wrong in his belief that Judah would fall to the Assyrians.
The Assyrians mysteriously abandoned their attack on Jerusalem. When destruction came, 100 years later, it was the Babylonians, not the Assyrians who laid waste to Jerusalem and carried its leaders into exile.

But Isaiah’s vision was not forgotten. His words were remembered by the exiles. His vision inspired them to hold firm in their traditional faith, to keep their identity as a people, and to return home when conditions allowed.

Over the centuries that followed, Isaiah’s words were studied and elaborated. By Roman times, religious Jews felt quite certain that God would send his Messiah – his anointed one – of the stock of Jesse, who would rule over the Jewish people, as Isaiah had prophesied, with righteousness and faithfulness.

John the Baptist believed in Isaiah’s prophecy and expected God to send his Messiah.
As Matthew reports, he told his followers ‘one who is more powerful than I is coming after me, I am not worthy to carry his sandals’. Matthew also believed that John himself was the messenger that Isaiah said would announce the Messiah, ‘the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight”. John called the people to, ‘Repent,’ – to make a new start, to change their lives – ‘for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’ – the kingdom of Isaiah’s vision.

Jesus surely pondered Isaiah’s words too. I believe he came to the conclusion that they were to be fulfilled in him. But God gave Jesus the insight that as the Messiah he must come not in physical power and glory like a king, but as a suffering servant, leading his people – all people, Jews and gentiles – by his example, to the kingdom of heaven which his loving father God willed.

The early Christians, steeped in the Jewish Messiah tradition, were convinced that Jesus is the shoot from the stock of Jesse in Isaiah’s prophesy. The spirit of the Lord rested upon him. He preached the kingdom of heaven. He died that we might be saved, he rose from the dead, and he ascended to God. Surely, they said, he will return to rule with righteousness and faithfulness over God’s kingdom of justice and peace.

So what of us today? Do we believe in Isaiah’s vision?
In our own time, as in Isaiah’s, we are faced with danger and uncertainty. But we must never give up hope.

Isaiah’s vision is in front of us – the world can be like the kingdom of heaven, filled with justice and peace. John’s call echoes in our ears, to make a new start because the kingdom of heaven has come near. Jesus has shown us the way as God incarnate. He has sent us the Spirit to lead us, and fire to drive us forward, just as John said he would. Our task as Christians is to do our bit to make his kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, a reality.
God is faithful to his faithful people.

‘They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.’

Isaiah’s vision is not a fairytale, because for God all things are possible!