Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It was still in search of an ending. That is why, throughout this period, one of the great themes of Jewish thought, writing, and life was hope: a hope born of the faith that because Israel’s God was the creator of the whole world he would—he must!—take action sooner or later to put everything right. Anyone used to reading books about the “atonement” might well ask at this point, “What has this ancient story, with all of its twists and turns and dark mysteries, got to do with Jesus’s death and the meaning it had for his first followers?” Even when Jewish writers contemporary with the New Testament invoke themes and passages from Israel’s scriptures, they do not normally see them within this larger narrative. But from the New Testament’s point of view, the story was what mattered—and the story had come into sudden, explosive, revolutionary focus through the death and resurrection of Jesus himself. As in many stories and dramas, the shocking ending suddenly made everything that had gone before make sense. The ending meant what it meant in the light of the previous story, but you wouldn’t have told the story quite like this if you didn’t know the ending. One of my main arguments in the present book is that only when we see Jesus’s death in its proper connection to this entire narrative, can we begin to resolve the questions we want to ask about what the early Christians actually meant. When the early Christians wrote about Jesus’s death, they used what are often seen as different models or metaphors. These include “redemption,” a metaphor from the slave market; “justification,” a metaphor from the law court; and “sacrifice,” a metaphor well known from the Temple. People often suggest that these don’t really fit together; they are simply different pictorial ways of getting at the central truth. I think this represents a failure to see what it means that Jesus’s death was in accordance with the Bible. What look to us like detached images actually mean what they mean in relation to one another within this story. Take them out of this story, and you will put them into a different one, most likely some version of the abstract “works contract” in which sinful human beings are heading for either hell or heaven. Only when we give full early Christian weight to the phrase “in accordance with the Bible” will we discover the full early Christian meaning of the phrase “for our sins.” And this means renouncing the Platonized views of salvation, the moralizing reduction of the human plight, and ultimately the paganized views of how salvation is accomplished. The first blunts the leading edge of the revolution. The second treats one part of the problem as if it were the whole thing. The third produces a distorted parody of the true biblical picture. The clue to a solution comes, as so often, right at the start.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This is the secret of the “Gentile mission,” which began with Peter’s visit to Cornelius in Acts 10 and continued spectacularly, in practice and also in theory, in the work of Paul. People have often imagined that Paul’s mission to the non-Jewish world was undertaken simply because, finding his Jewish contemporaries unwilling to stomach such an odd message, he was desperate to win a few followers, so he went to non-Jews instead, offering them a less demanding message. That demeaning analysis misses the point. The Gentile mission was neither a pragmatic reaction to supposed Jewish intransigence nor a mere opportunistic attempt to boost recruitment for a strange new sect. From the earliest writings we have, it was seen as the direct and necessary result of the creator God overthrowing on the cross the powers that had kept the nations captive. Up to now the nations had been enslaved; the cross had opened the gates to freedom. This is what Paul says in his speech before Herod Agrippa II, a great-grandson of Herod the Great. He tells of meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus and of the very specific commission Jesus gave him: I am going to establish you as a servant, as a witness both of the things you have already seen and of the occasions I will appear to you in the future. I will rescue you from the people, and from the nations to whom I am going to send you so that you can open their eyes to enable them to turn from darkness to light, and from the power of the satan to God—so that they can have forgiveness of sins, and an inheritance among those who are made holy by their faith in me. (Acts 26:16–18) Now at last the satan’s power has been broken, so that forgiveness of sins and membership in a new family is open to all! This fits exactly with what Paul says when he reminds the Thessalonians of the message he had proclaimed to them from the beginning. People all over Greece, he says, are telling how the Thessalonians turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who delivers us from the coming fury. (1 Thess. 1:9–10)

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  (2 Macc. 7:32–33, 37–38) The implicit echo of Isaiah 53 is not the only biblical allusion here. The “trials and plagues” that this young martyr invokes upon the pagan tyrant send us back to the story of Moses and Pharaoh, in which God inflicted “plagues” on the Egyptians as the prelude to the dramatic rescue of Israel from slavery. That, presumably, is part of the point. When Israel is enslaved and suffering, what is required is a new Exodus. The Maccabean martyrs look back to the first Exodus in order to suggest that it is time for a second one. But this new Exodus will have to do something extra, something the first one had not. It will have to deal with the sins (v. 32) because of which the Jewish people are suffering. The new Passover, if and when it comes, will also have to be the ultimate and exile-ending “dealing with sins.” This martyr at least is claiming that his own suffering will be part of that. Perhaps, he suggests, it will complete that process. The way the book of 2 Maccabees is constructed suggests that this was what the writer intended to say. Right after this horrible scene of torture and death, Judas Maccabeus and his followers begin their surprisingly successful revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes. This leads to the establishment of the Maccabean (or “Hasmonean”) family as rulers of the independent kingdom of Judaea for the next century and more. This was the more remarkable in that, though they were a priestly family (1 Macc. 2:1), there is little evidence that they were Zadokites, that is, from the high-priestly family itself; and, naturally, if as priests they were descended from Aaron, they could not claim to be descendants of David. They nevertheless functioned as priest-kings, in fact, as a “royal priesthood.” Our earlier discussion of the renewed human vocation, as in Revelation 1, 5, and 20 and other parts of the New Testament, comes suddenly into new focus as a matter of history, not simply of literary imagination: here, through the suffering of the martyrs, the defeat of the pagans, and the cleansing the Temple is a kingdom of priests! The claim of the seventh brother in 2 Maccabees 7 emphasizes the first point. The victory and the cleansing came because the suffering of the martyrs somehow brought to an end the sufferings of the people as a whole, which had been caused by their sins . Now the victory over the pagans could begin. I do not suppose that the author of Revelation was consciously alluding to the Hasmonean priest-kings. Nor do I imagine that 1 Peter 2:9, which also invokes Exodus 19:6, had in mind the claims of that dynasty, which by the middle of the first century AD had passed into ignominious history, having failed to prevent the Roman invasion, the rise of Herod, and many other ills.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  The hope for a general resurrection is not, however, an inference drawn from the resurrection of Jesus; rather, it is the premise for Paul’s understanding of Jesus’s resurrection. Twice he emphasizes this: “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised…. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised” (15:13, 16). Understanding this requires introducing the word “eschatology.” Though used with a bewildering variety of meanings by scholars and theologians, its basic meaning is quite simple. “Eschatology” comes from the Greek word eschaton, which means “end.” It has often been understood to mean the “end of the world,” as if it referred to the end of the space-time universe and thus also the evacuation of the faithful to another world, namely, heaven. But, as we saw in Chapter 4, in Jewish thought at the time of Jesus, eschatology was not about the end of the physical world, but about the end of this age —the end of “this world,” a world of domination, injustice, and violence. Jewish eschatology, the premise of Paul’s claims about the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus, was about a transformed world. The hope for the general resurrection was a hope for what we call “God’s great cleanup of the world.” In this context, Paul writes about the resurrection of Jesus “as the first fruits of those who have died” (1 Cor. 15:20). “First fruits” is a metaphor from the harvest; if the first fruits have been harvested, then the general harvest has begun. This means that Paul saw Jesus as the beginning of the general resurrection. There are at least two ways of understanding this. The first builds on Paul’s expectation that the second coming of Jesus was near and might even happen in his own life time. Paul did believe this (see, for example, 1 Thess. 4:13–18; 1 Cor. 15:51–52; Rom. 13:11–12). Within this framework, Paul believed the general resurrection was not happening yet, but would happen soon. In scholarship, this is called “imminent eschatology.” It would all happen soon. About this, Paul was obviously wrong. Candidly, we grant that most scholars see it this way. We understand the resurrection of Jesus “as the first fruits of those who have died” quite differently. We see it is an affirmation that the resurrection of Jesus means that the general resurrection has already begun. God’s great cleanup of the world is already under way. The imperative follows that we are called to participate in it. The general resurrection is about God’s passion for justice in this world—and we are to participate in God’s creation of a transformed world. Participatory eschatology, or collaborative eschatology, sees eschatology as process rather than as instantaneous event. Thus for Paul, Christ crucified and risen had both personal and political meanings.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  72:1–2, 4, 11–14) We are not at liberty to strike texts like these out of the Bible, though some might like to do so—whether because this ancient vision of restorative justice looks too dangerously left-wing for those in power or whether because “we Christians ought to focus on spiritual matters, not earthly ones.” Nor will it do to think to ourselves that we will try to practice justice and mercy in our private lives, while letting the rest of the world do its own thing unchecked. Like many of the great Christian social reformers of an earlier day, we need to be bold in season and out of season in speaking up for the needs of the poor. (There is a popular parody of this just now, in which everybody wants to be a “victim” in order to claim sympathy and perhaps “rights.” Little good will come of this, least of all for the many genuine victims.) The gospel will not allow us to retreat into the private “Christian” space imagined by those for whom the death of Jesus does little except forgive our sins so we can go to heaven. The forgiveness of sins, as we have seen, breaks the grip of the “powers,” and the followers of Jesus must make that point again and again and work to bring it to reality. It has happened before—literally, with the ending of the slave trade and the subsequent freeing of the slaves —and it needs to happen again. And happen it will, because the victory of the cross is real, and the power of the Spirit to implement that victory is real as well. But those who are called to this particular royal and priestly ministry, to worship the Jesus who reasserted the power of love and to bring that powerful love to bear upon the enslaved world, will suffer in some way or other as they do so. That, as we have seen, is the norm. And those who stand behind them, praying for their work in the spirit of Romans 8:26–27, will groan in the Spirit as they find themselves faced with apparently insuperable challenges. But victory is already won. Nothing in all creation can stop this all-powerful love. I have spoken of the most obvious places where idols are worshipped in our time and where forgiveness and freedom from slavery must be announced and implemented by the followers of Jesus. But precisely because our vocation as Jesus followers is to be renewed humans, the “royal priesthood” who worship the true God and work for his kingdom in the world, our own lives must be subject to the same critique, the same vocation. There is no place for people who want to go charging off to implement some social, cultural, or political agenda but who think that this absolves them from the challenge to personal holiness.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The implicit echo of Isaiah 53 is not the only biblical allusion here. The “trials and plagues” that this young martyr invokes upon the pagan tyrant send us back to the story of Moses and Pharaoh, in which God inflicted “plagues” on the Egyptians as the prelude to the dramatic rescue of Israel from slavery. That, presumably, is part of the point. When Israel is enslaved and suffering, what is required is a new Exodus. The Maccabean martyrs look back to the first Exodus in order to suggest that it is time for a second one. But this new Exodus will have to do something extra, something the first one had not. It will have to deal with the sins (v. 32) because of which the Jewish people are suffering. The new Passover, if and when it comes, will also have to be the ultimate and exile-ending “dealing with sins.” This martyr at least is claiming that his own suffering will be part of that. Perhaps, he suggests, it will complete that process. The way the book of 2 Maccabees is constructed suggests that this was what the writer intended to say. Right after this horrible scene of torture and death, Judas Maccabeus and his followers begin their surprisingly successful revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes. This leads to the establishment of the Maccabean (or “Hasmonean”) family as rulers of the independent kingdom of Judaea for the next century and more. This was the more remarkable in that, though they were a priestly family (1 Macc. 2:1), there is little evidence that they were Zadokites, that is, from the high-priestly family itself; and, naturally, if as priests they were descended from Aaron, they could not claim to be descendants of David. They nevertheless functioned as priest-kings, in fact, as a “royal priesthood.” Our earlier discussion of the renewed human vocation, as in Revelation 1, 5, and 20 and other parts of the New Testament, comes suddenly into new focus as a matter of history, not simply of literary imagination: here, through the suffering of the martyrs, the defeat of the pagans, and the cleansing the Temple is a kingdom of priests! The claim of the seventh brother in 2 Maccabees 7 emphasizes the first point. The victory and the cleansing came because the suffering of the martyrs somehow brought to an end the sufferings of the people as a whole, which had been caused by their sins. Now the victory over the pagans could begin.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  It has often been understood to mean the “end of the world,” as if it referred to the end of the space-time universe and thus also the evacuation of the faithful to another world, namely, heaven. But, as we saw in Chapter 4, in Jewish thought at the time of Jesus, eschatology was not about the end of the physical world, but about the end of this age —the end of “this world,” a world of domination, injustice, and violence. Jewish eschatology, the premise of Paul’s claims about the meaning of the resurrec tion of Jesus, was about a transformed world. The hope for the general resurrection was a hope for what we call “God’s great cleanup of the world.” In this context, Paul writes about the resurrection of Jesus “as the first fruits of those who have died” (1 Cor. 15:20). “First fruits” is a metaphor from the harvest; if the first fruits have been harvested, then the general harvest has begun. This means that Paul saw Jesus as the beginning of the general resurrection. There are at least two ways of understanding this. The first builds on Paul’s expectation that the second coming of Jesus was near and might even happen in his own life time. Paul did believe this (see, for example, 1 Thess. 4:13–18; 1 Cor. 15:51–52; Rom. 13:11–12). Within this framework, Paul believed the general resurrection was not happening yet, but would happen soon. In scholarship, this is called “imminent eschatology.” It would all happen soon. About this, Paul was obviously wrong. Candidly, we grant that most scholars see it this way. We understand the resurrection of Jesus “as the first fruits of those who have died” quite differently. We see it is an affirmation that the resurrection of Jesus means that the general resurrection has already begun. God’s great cleanup of the world is already under way. The imperative follows that we are called to participate in it. The general resurrection is about God’s passion for justice in this world—and we are to participate in God’s creation of a transformed world. Participatory eschatology, or collaborative eschatology, sees eschatology as process rather than as instantaneous event. Thus for Paul, Christ crucified and risen had both personal and political meanings. In its personal aspect, it was the path of transformation: we are transformed by dying and rising with Christ, by undergoing an internal death and receiving a Spirit transplant, so that it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us. As a political statement, it proclaimed that Jesus was Lord and Caesar was not. And it proclaimed that God’s great cleanup of the world had begun.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The human vocation certainly includes a strong and nonnegotiable moral element, which is enhanced rather than eliminated when placed within the larger category of the “image-bearing” vocation. And the means of salvation, as we shall see throughout this part of the book, does indeed involve the death of Jesus as the representative and then the substitute for his people, though not in the sense that many have understood those rather abstract categories. At the heart of it all is the achievement of Jesus as the true human being who, as the “image,” is the ultimate embodiment (or “incarnation”) of the creator God. His death, the climax of his work of inaugurating God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven, was the victory over the destructive powers let loose into the world not simply through human wrongdoing, the breaking of moral codes, but through the human failure to be image-bearers, to worship the Creator and reflect his wise stewardship into the world (and, to be sure, breaking any moral codes that might be around, but this is not the focus). And the reason his death had this effect was that, as the representative and substitute in the senses we shall explore in due course, he achieved the “forgiveness of sins” in the sense long promised by Israel’s prophets. Once we step away from Platonizing, moralizing, and paganizing schemes of thought and back into the world of Israel’s scriptures (“The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible”), this all makes sense, though it is a different kind of sense from what many Christians imagine. With that, we are ready to return to Luke’s story. When we left it a moment ago, the two disciples were on the road to Emmaus with the risen Jesus, who was offering a radical redefinition of Israel’s hope and explaining that this hope had, in fact, been accomplished through his death and resurrection. But when we look at the whole sweep of Luke’s two books, the gospel and Acts, we see the same kind of redefinition going on throughout. The hope of Israel is not abandoned: it is affirmed, but, as with many other Jewish groups of the time, the early Christians saw this affirmation as involving a redefinition around actual people, particularly of course Jesus himself. The redefinition begins, however, not with Jesus, but with John the Baptist. Zechariah, John’s father, produces a hymn of praise to Israel’s God.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  The earlier decision there was kosher for none, but James of Jerusalem, brother of Jesus, demanded that it be changed to kosher for all. All the leaders agreed except Paul, who even called Peter a “hypocrite” for reversing his position. For Paul this was solved by a no-concession policy that resulted in his separation from the others and “even Barnabas” (Gal. 2:11–14). We suggested in Chapter 3 that Paul’s absolute refusal to compromise on that subject was less theologically than polemically motivated and that that would explain his different response to the exact same meal problem at Rome (Rom. 14). Here in Romans 14 we get a far better vision of Paul operating from his own theological basis than in that earlier dispute at Antioch. And it has some rather obvious lessons for us today. Those tensions between “weak” and “strong” Christians over Jewish observances within Christianity may sound distantly irrelevant to us after two thousand years of separate identities. But, in that time and place, they were a major issue, maybe even the major issue. What contemporary intra-Christian disputes will seem just as dated and irrelevant to later Christian centuries as those at Antioch and Rome may seem to us today? But, in any case, how Paul sought to resolve those ancient disputes may still be paradigmatic for later intra-Christian disagreements. In any such debates, the “strong” are those who “despise” the “weak,” while the “weak” are those who “judge” the “strong,” and to both Paul says, “Welcome one another, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God” (15:7) and “not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions” (14:1). WITH FEAR AND TREMBLING In his letter to the Romans the good news (gospel) from Paul is that the divine self, the Spirit of God, is freely offered to all—without prior merits or conditions—but that we humans are still free to accept or decline it. In summary, the distributive justice of God is our justification coming as grace to be accepted by faith. With that understanding of his theology, we had one very special question for Paul. We wanted to know why he tells the Philippians, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (2:12b). In fact, Paul is even more emphatic in the original Greek than in the English translation: “With fear and trembling, work out your salvation.” Why does he put fear and trembling first and make God a God of terror? We decided it would be wise to read the entire sentence, to read the phrase in context. Paul tells the Philippians: Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (2:12b–13)

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Sarah and Nile have three kids who keep her running all day, every day. She has made it very clear to Nile that it takes a lot to get her out of that role, and very little for her to slip back in. “I used to think that it was a matter of being in the mood, but I was disabused of that idea a long time ago. Waiting for the mood is like waiting for the Second Coming. I like the planning. It gives me something to look forward to when I’m playing with Barbies and checking homework.” What Sarah looks forward to is more than the sex; it’s the ritual. Spending ample time together, woman to man, they temporarily slip out of the chains of reality. Their foreplay lasts hours. They’ve been at this for twelve years, and like a mastered discipline, they miss it when they skip it. They know that great sex generally demands more than fifteen minutes right after the eleven o’clock news. Cultivating Play When couples complain that their sex life is listless, I know it isn’t mere frequency they’re after. They may want more, but they certainly want better. For this reason, I prefer to talk about their erotic life rather than about their sex life. The physical act of sex is too narrow a subject, which easily degenerates into a conversation about numbers. Human nature abhors a vacuum of intensity. People long for radiance. They want to feel alive. If given half a chance, loving partners can fill the intensity void with transcendence. Animals have sex; eroticism is exclusively human. It is sexuality transformed by the imagination. In fact, you don’t even need the act of sex to have a full erotic experience, though sex is often hinted at, envisioned. Eroticism is the cultivation of excitement, a purposeful quest for pleasure. Octavio Paz likens eroticism to the poetry of the body, the testimony of the senses. Like a poem, it is not linear; it meanders and twists back on itself. It shows us what we see not with our eyes but with the eyes of our spirit. Eroticism reveals to us another world inside this world. The senses become servants of the imagination, letting us see the invisible and hear the inaudible. Eroticism, intertwined as it is with imagination, is another form of play. I think of play as an alternative reality midway between the actual and the fictitious, a safe space where we experiment, reinvent ourselves, and take chances. Through play we suspend disbelief—we pretend something is real even when we damn well know it is not. Earnestness has no place here. Play, by definition, is carefree and unself-conscious.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Luke is most emphatic, in his gospel and then over and over again in Acts, that the ultimate destination of God’s people is the resurrection. But “paradise,” the interim state, the blissful garden of refreshment prior to that final destination, will be won that very day for all who trust in Jesus, because through his death, the innocent dying the death of the guilty, the sovereign rule of God will come to birth in a whole new way, with results as personal and intimate as they are cosmic and global: “I’m telling you the truth,” replied Jesus, “you’ll be with me in paradise, this very day.” (23:42–43) This sequence of thought comes to its conclusion when the centurion at the foot of the cross, watching Jesus die, insists like the others that Jesus was innocent, was “in the right” (23:47). Against those who have insisted that Luke has no theological interpretation of the cross—because he does not include a “formulaic” or “dogmatic” statement like Mark 10:45!—we must insist that for Luke the cross does two things in particular. First, it is the means by which the powers of darkness (note again 22:53) are defeated, so that God’s kingdom, his newly minted sovereign rule over the world, can at last begin. Second, this is accomplished because the innocent Jesus is dying the death of the guilty. In fact, though Luke does not have the “ransom” saying, he does include, on the lips of Jesus, a clear reference to Isaiah 53: Let me tell you this: when the Bible says, “He was reckoned with the lawless,” it must find its fulfillment in me. Yes: everything about me must reach its goal. (22:37, quoting Isa. 53:12) In the light of this, one can only wonder at the real agendas behind the attempts to deny Luke a theological understanding of the crucifixion. The idea that Jesus was identifying with his fellow Jews as they faced imminent judgment is in fact inscribed into the larger narrative of Luke’s gospel as a whole. Particularly from chapter 9 on, Jesus is constantly warning his people of the great disaster that is hanging over their heads. His message about God’s kingdom is offering a different way, but their determination to resist the way of peace that he is advocating will lead to nothing but ruin. Yes, he says, Pilate had instigated a massacre of Galilean pilgrims in the Temple, but that event was not unique: “Unless you repent, you will all be destroyed in the same way.” Eighteen people had indeed been killed when the tower in Siloam collapsed: “Unless you repent, you will all be destroyed in the same way” (13:1–5). In the same way .

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  My normal answer is that things were like that in the first century too, if anything worse (think of Herod; think of Caesar!), but that Jesus went on talking about God becoming king anyway. Why did he do that? Answer: Because the perversion of human rule is just that, a perversion. We ought not to let the perversion rob us of the good news; and the good news is not only that God is sorting out the world, but that his rule is a different kind of rule entirely from those that give monarchs a bad name. Prophetic passages such as Isaiah 11 and psalms such as Psalm 72 demonstrate that when God is faced with the corruption of monarchy, he promises not to abolish monarchy, but to send a true king to rule with utter justice, making the poor and needy his constant priority. The human vocation to share that role, that task, is framed within the true justice and mercy of God himself. So too with “priesthood.” This word makes many people think of corrupt hierarchies, organizing “religion” for their own purposes and threatening dire, and indeed “divine,” punishments for any who step out of line. Again, the abuse does not invalidate the proper use. The notion of priesthood, admittedly now often exposed as a cloak for selfish wrongdoing, is another vital part of being human. We humans are called to stand at the intersection of heaven and earth, holding together in our hearts, our praises, and our urgent intercessions the loving wisdom of the creator God and the terrible torments of his battered world. The Bible knows perfectly well that this priestly vocation can be corrupted and often has been. But once more it proposes not abolition, but full and complete cleansing. The Coming One “will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to YHWH in righteousness” (Mal. 3:3). This ancient Jewish promise points ahead to the ultimate “priesthood” of Jesus himself. We should not be surprised, then, that horrible abuses have spoiled our sense of both the royal and the priestly vocations. That is what we should expect. The remarkable thing is that the Creator, having made the world to work in this way—with humans functioning like the “image” in a temple, standing between heaven and earth and acting on behalf of each in relation to the other—has not abandoned the project. Yes, it gets distorted again and again.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  So what happens when we read the story of Adam and Eve and then the story of Israel in parallel, on the one hand, and in sequence, on the other? In both cases the promise of life is exchanged for the reality of death, and for the same reason. The early humans rejected the Creator’s call and command; Israel rejected the much-amplified call and commands of the covenant God. Faced with the tragedy and terror of exile, the great prophets struggled for meaning. The pagan hordes had triumphed over Israel, trampled upon the holy places, and taken the chosen people off to Babylon (the “Babel” where, in Genesis 11, human arrogance had reached its full height). What sense could be made of that? The prophets’ central insight, exactly in line with Deuteronomy, was to see the exile as a kind of living death. But this could not be the end of the story, or chaos would indeed have come again. Somehow—and the greatest of the prophets struggled in prayer and poetry to bring this insight to birth—just as the Creator chose the covenant people to be the means of rescuing the human race, so now, with the chosen people themselves in need of rescue, God might do the same thing again. He might act in a new way to call from within exilic Israel a remnant, perhaps even a remnant of one, through whom he would deliver Israel. How that deliverance would be accomplished remained obscure. That it would have to happen was the conviction born of the prophetic belief. If Israel’s God was indeed the world’s creator, he was under a solemn obligation to bring it to pass. He would, despite all, be faithful to his covenant, to his purposes for creation itself. The early Christians believed that this was what had just happened in and through Israel’s Messiah, Jesus. So why would this whole story lead to the idea of a coming climactic moment of “forgiveness of sins”? Why would Paul or anyone else suggest that when God dealt with sins this would be “in accordance with the Bible”? To answer those questions we need to retrieve and develop our earlier discussion of “sin” and show what it meant within this larger story. “Sin” and “Exile” in a Biblical Framework The word “sin” is not only sad and ugly as it stands; it is much misunderstood. In Western culture it has come to be associated, rightly or wrongly, with a killjoy, finger-wagging, holier-than-thou moralism, with a fussy, nit-picking concentration on small personal misdemeanors that ignore major injustice and oppression. Talk about “sin” is regularly associated with a dualistic rejection of the “world,” with a smug “otherworldly” pietism, and with a severe story line that cheerfully sends most of the human race into everlasting fire. There are of course many preachers and teachers who have spoken wisely and biblically about “sin.” It remains an enormously important topic.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  No. In fact he said, “This is what had to happen: the Messiah had to suffer, and then come into his glory!” After that, “He began with Moses, and with all the prophets, and explained to them the things about himself throughout the whole Bible” (24:26–27). His answer was, to be sure, a radical redefinition of the “redemption of Israel.” It brought the entire expectation into a new focus, namely, his own unique role. The story of the Bible as a whole, he insisted, had been rushing forward toward the events of his own death and resurrection. The recent happenings were to be seen as fulfillment, not simply as a shocking turn of events. But to redefine is not to abandon. Many Jews of Jesus’s day had been praying and pondering what it might mean for God to fulfill his ancient promises at long last. There was no single template. Many groups, many teachers, many would-be prophets offered different interpretations. Jesus’s particular redefinition (and Luke’s showcasing of that redefinition) belongs on that map, even though it transforms it beyond anything previously imagined. The hope of Israel, expressed variously in the Torah, Prophets, and Psalms, was not for a rescue operation that would snatch Israel (or humans or the faithful) from the world, but for a rescue operation that would be for the world, an operation through which redeemed humans would play once more the role for which they were designed. It was the hope for a renewed world in which justice and mercy would reign forever. Jesus was explaining not that this hope had been abandoned in favor of “saved souls going to heaven,” but that this hope for new creation had been fulfilled in a shockingly unexpected way. The revolution had already taken place. By the evening of that Friday, had they but known it, the world had changed. From our point of view, as we read this story, it all involves a double redefinition. First, there is indeed a radical redefinition of the Jewish hope of rescue from pagan oppression, of a new justice and peace for the world, of the ultimate return of YHWH to his Temple. Once you put the crucifixion and resurrection of Israel’s Messiah in the middle of that story and make it the new focus, everything looks different.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  All this, I suggest, is Luke’s way of saying that with the death, resurrection, and exaltation of Israel’s Messiah and with the powerful gift of the Spirit, God’s world has been renewed, the kingdom has been inaugurated, and those who believe in Jesus and who are indwelt by the Spirit are now formed as a royal priesthood, who in their worship and their witness are carrying forward the work of the kingdom. The decisive victory against the powers has already been won. The revolution has already begun. Third, therefore, after worship (acclaiming the returned and reigning God of Israel) and witness (announcing to the world its rightful and rescuing Lord), there is the hope that Israel will be rescued from pagan rule. One might imagine that this had been left behind in the flurry of events taking place on a different plane, but it is important to see that this is not so. When Jesus himself, Israel’s Messiah, was raised from the dead, Israel-in-person was set free from death and, with that, from the ultimate weapon of every tyrant, the ultimate exile imposed by every Babylon. In the excitement of the Gentile mission, the reflex for ancient Israel is not forgotten. The death of Jesus, going ahead of Israel into the mouth of the pagan lion, has created a breathing space in which Peter can urge his hearers, “Let God rescue you from this wicked generation” (Acts 2:40). “The whole house of Israel must know this for a fact: God has made him Lord and Messiah” (2:36). Thousands of Jews, including a great many priests, believed this message and became part of the renewed community (2:41, 47; 4:4; 5:14; 6:7; 11:24; 21:21). We should be in no doubt that Luke, like most other early Christian writers, saw the messianic community focused on Jesus as the liberated, redeemed people, those in and for whom the long-awaited promise of rescue from pagan overlords had been fulfilled. Luke has thus inscribed into history the truth spoken of in the formulas of Revelation 1, 5, and 20, which we studied in Chapter 4. The other New Testament writers make the same point in different ways. What has happened to Jesus’s followers? They do not simply have some new, exciting ideas to share with people who are interested in such things. They are not telling people that they have discovered a way whereby anyone can escape the wicked world and “go to heaven” instead. They are functioning as the worshipping, witnessing people of God: as the “priestly kingdom” of Exodus 19, as the “servant” of Isaiah 49, as the people who, in one psalm after another, worship the God of Israel and discover in doing so that he is also the God of all the earth.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  That seems to be what Paul has in mind when he says in Colossians 1:24 that he is celebrating his sufferings, which are for the benefit of the young church. He is completing in his own flesh, he says, “what is presently lacking in the king’s afflictions on behalf of his body, which is the church.” This is a striking claim. It seems to mean that part of Paul’s apostolic vocation is to go ahead of the young churches scattered around the Mediterranean world, like a brave commander on the battlefield drawing the enemy fire away from those more vulnerable, to take upon himself the suffering that might otherwise come their way. There is no sense here of Paul trying to add to the once-for-all achievement of Jesus. He elsewhere emphasizes that, for instance in Romans 6:10. But his claim here goes closely with what he says in more discursive mode in Romans 5:3–5 and then at length in 8:17–25. It is worth looking briefly at both. In the first of these passages Paul explores the inner dynamic of suffering. This is how it works, so to speak, inside the person concerned: We also celebrate in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces patience, patience produces a well-formed character, and a character like that produces hope. Hope, in its turn, does not make us ashamed, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the holy spirit who has been given to us. (5:3–5) But then, in the other passage, he explains that sharing the Messiah’s sufferings is the means by which, already in the present and then ultimately in the future, those who belong to him will share his rule in the new creation: If we’re children, we are also heirs: heirs of God, and fellow heirs with the Messiah, as long as we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. This is how I work it out. The sufferings we go through in the present time are not worth putting in the scale alongside the glory that is going to be unveiled for us. Yes: creation itself is on tiptoe with expectation, eagerly awaiting the moment when God’s children will be revealed. Creation, you see, was subjected to pointless futility, not of its own volition, but because of the one who placed it in this subjection, in the hope that creation itself would be freed from its slavery to decay, to enjoy the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  He means that doing it declares it. Think how this works. The actual event—the breaking of bread, the pouring of wine, and the sharing of both all in Jesus’s name, which recall his last meal before his death—effectively makes a public announcement. This may have seemed odd to the Corinthians, who were used to sharing the bread and the wine in private, not in front of their pagan neighbors or the wider world. But the word Paul uses for “announce” (katangellō) is a word regularly used in his culture to describe the announcement of a public decree. If a message came from Rome with a new imperial decree to be read out in the public forum in Corinth with all citizens paying attention, katangellō might well be the word you’d use to describe what was going on. So what does Paul mean here? Doing it declares it: breaking the bread and sharing the cup in Jesus’s name declares his victory to the principalities and powers. It states the new, authorized Fact about the world. It confronts the shadowy forces that usurp control over God’s good creation and over human lives with the news of their defeat. It shames the dark powers that stand in the wings, waiting for people to give them even a small bit of worship so that they can use that power, sucking it out of the humans who ought to have been exercising it themselves, to enslave people and render them powerless to resist the temptations that the powers have within their repertoire. The bread-breaking meal, the Jesus feast, announces to the forces of evil like a public decree read out by a herald in the marketplace that Jesus is Lord, that he has faced the powers of sin and death and beaten them, and that he has been raised again to launch the new world in which death itself will have no authority. I know that for some readers this sort of talk seems dangerous. Am I not encouraging a kind of magic in which robed priests try to manipulate created elements to produce special effects? Isn’t that the kind of thing that the Protestant Reformers protested against? Yes, the Reformers did protest against what they saw as a kind of magic, but that didn’t stop them developing their own rich and serious sacramental theology. The abuse doesn’t take away the proper use. Magic is, in fact, a parody of the truly human vocation. Image-bearing humans, obedient to the Creator, are meant to exercise delegated authority in the world in order that life can flourish. Magic is the attempt to gain power over the Creator’s world without paying the price of self-giving obedience to the Creator himself.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The next time “forgiveness” is mentioned in Acts it comes in the wider context of the welcome of non-Jews. When Peter goes to the house of Cornelius in Acts 10, the summary of his gospel announcement, which in other ways stays very close to the passages we have just looked at, adds the note of final judgment. This appears to be seen by Luke as an important part of the message to non-Jews. And now the “everyone” clearly takes in these non-Jews too: He commanded us to announce to the people, and to bear testimony, that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets give their witness: he is the one! Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name. (10: 41–42; see also 17:31) The final mention of this theme in Acts is in the sermon of Paul in Pisidian Antioch: Let it be known to you, my brothers and sisters, that forgiveness of sins is announced through him, and that everything from which you were unable to be set right by the law of Moses, by him everyone who believes is set right. (13:38–39) This leads directly to the point at which the gospel opens up explicitly, still exactly in fulfillment of scripture, to include the whole world (13:46–47). Paul and Barnabas, faced with angry rejection of their message by many of the Jews, declare that to deny this good news is to judge oneself “unworthy of the life of God’s new age.” They therefore turn to the Gentiles and quote Isaiah 49:6: “I have set you for a light to the nations, so that you can be salvation-bringers to the end of the earth.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  That, to be sure, is vital. But if we go there too soon, we may miss the breathtaking sweep of what is being said. Jesus’s followers are to go out into the world equipped with the power of his own Spirit to announce that a new reality has come to birth, that its name is “forgiveness,” and that it is to be had by turning away from idolatry (“repentance”). Something has happened, clearly, that has unleashed this new kind of power into the world. That something is the chain-breaking, idol-smashing, sin- abandoning power called “forgiveness,” called “utter gracious love,” called Jesus. It isn’t that first you have to repent and then, as a result, God may decide not to press charges on this occasion. It isn’t that somehow you thereby gain “forgiveness” as a kind of private transaction unrelated to the truth about the wider world. It is, rather, that forgiveness is the new reality. It is the way the new creation actually is. All it requires to belong to that new creation, with that banner over its doorway, is that you should turn from the idols whose power (did you but know it) has already been broken and join in the celebration of Jesus’s victory. This is why, by the way, “believing in Jesus’s resurrection” isn’t simply a matter of giving acknowledgment to the fact that on the third day he rose again from the dead, though of course it includes that. To say yes to Jesus’s resurrection is, by that very thought and deed, to say yes to the new world of forgiveness that was won on the cross, the world that was then launched into heaven-and-earth reality on Easter morning. It is not a matter first of convincing oneself that perhaps “miracles” may happen after all, then that Jesus’s resurrection might be one of them, and then that the evidence really does seem to point this way. Resurrection and forgiveness are not strange things that might perhaps happen in the old creation. They are the hallmarks, the telltale signs, the characteristic marks of the new creation. Believing in them is a matter of glimpsing and clinging to the reality of that new creation itself.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The loving purpose of God, working through the sin-forgiving death of Jesus, frees us from the power of the “present evil age,” so that we may be part of God’s new age, his new creation, launched already when Jesus rose from the dead, awaiting its final completion when he returns, but active now through the work of the rescued rescuers, the redeemed human beings called to bring redeeming love into the world—the justified justice-bringers, the reconciled reconcilers, the Passover People. Many Western Christians have discovered that if we try to act on this basis, bringing God into the public square, working as explicit Christians for justice and peace in the world, we run into problems. Partly this is because the non-Christian Western world, shrill in its zealous secularism, would like to see the church shrink, huddle into a corner, and ultimately disappear altogether. Statistics that appear to point in this direction are seized upon eagerly. Likewise, any sign of a renewed mission will meet howls of protest and charges of “triumphalism” or worse. In part this is quite justified. We can all recite the litany of the church’s follies and failings: crusades, inquisitions, and so on. The modern world, no less than that of several centuries ago, has seen major mistakes made in the name of the gospel. Very often, when Christian people have set out to “make the world a better place,” they have sadly left the world a worse place instead. Their tangled motives and flawed schemes have become simply another variation on the world’s normal power games. This should not put us off. A world full of people who read and pray the Sermon on the Mount, or even a world with only a few such people in it, will always be a better place than a world without such people. Church history reminds us of the radical difference that can be made, that has been made, and that please God will be made. But the point is that once the revolution was launched on Good Friday, the vital work was already done. We do not have to win that essential victory all over again. What we have to do is to respond to the love poured out on the cross with love of our own: love for the one who died, yes, but also love for those around us, especially those in particular need. And part of the challenge of putting that into practice is that the powers, in whatever form, will be angry. They want to keep the world in their own grip. They will fight back. The New Testament shows again and again what this means in practice.