Twelve Months of Sundays. N.T. Wright
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is the Christian call to suffer. The transformation of suffering is a further key part of the meaning of the ascension.
The ‘suffering’ that comfortable Western Christians endure often seems small in comparison with that which our brothers and sisters still face day by day in (for instance) the Sudan. Much of it – the stresses of contemporary life and all that they produce – is partly self-caused, at least at a societal level. But there is a deep suffering, unquantifiable and hence impossible to compare, which comes from living as one who believes that the crucified Messiah is the world’s true Lord, in the midst of a world that lives by the rule of force, or pleasure, or wealth. We are called to be out of tune with the world’s orchestra, swimming against the world’s wind and tide. Not merely cross-grained and awkward; rather, in tune with God’s hidden music, buoyed up by the submerged swell of his love.
It is therefore vital to remember that the ascended Lord is precisely the one who was crucified. In John’s Gospel, indeed, reaching something of a climax in the great prayer of ch. 17, crucifixion and exaltation seem to be merged together, so that the ascension, when it is promised in John 20.17, does not ‘reveal his glory’ any more fully than the cross itself.
Without this, Acts 1 would simply be a triumphalist rant. In Luke’s readers’ world, the way Roman emperors were formally declared divine after their deaths was to have someone declare that they had seen him ascend into heaven. Ascension was the instrument of power and glory: the power of the Roman state to keep subject peoples controlled with religious, as much as military, threat; the glory of the imperial system and the all-powerful person at the top of it.
For Luke, however, as the whole of Acts makes clear, the fact that it was the crucified Jesus who was now exalted to share the throne of the one true God (he has Daniel 7 in mind as well, of course) means that the mission of his followers will carry power, and indeed glory, but of a very different sort. It will be the power, and the glory, of suffering love. When Jesus speaks of the glory the Father had given to him being shared with his followers (John 17.22), this seems to be central to what he has in mind.
Day of Pentecost
Numbers 11.24–30
Acts 2.1–21
John 7.37–39
Jesus, quoting Scripture, says that rivers of living water will flow out of the believer’s heart. But no Old Testament text says exactly that. Which Scripture is he referring to, then?
Isaiah 55, of course, issues God’s invitation to all who are thirsty to come and drink. This, however, is not the part of Jesus’ saying that carries the phrase ‘as scripture says’. No: the ‘rivers of living water’ seem to evoke the great river which flows out of the restored Temple in Ezekiel 47, to make even the Dead Sea fresh. The image goes all the way back to the second chapter of Genesis; to call it up indicates the renewal of creation. And it goes all the way on to Revelation 22 – though where the river flows to there is not clear, since the sea, symbolizing the forces of chaos and evil, has been abolished altogether (21.1). Jesus takes this wide-ranging and powerful image and gives it a further twist.
There is a place in the Scottish Highlands where the broad and tranquil River Dee is funnelled in a swirling and seething foam through a gap in solid rock, narrow enough for a foolish teenager to jump across. (Don’t ask me how I know that.) So it is here. The four great rivers that flowed from the garden, the great new river that will stream from the Temple, are to come rushing and churning into, and (equally importantly) out of, the one who believes in Jesus. All the new life of God’s new creation is to be focused on, and channelled through, each believer.
To invoke or invite the Holy Spirit, then, is not simply to hope for a gentle nudge from time to time, a quiet sense that things are going to be all right after all, though that (thank God! ) is often how the Spirit’s presence is known. It is to take the risk of having all that wild, untameable energy sweep through us. The resulting transformation can be dramatic, something which Christians of many years’ standing can easily forget. But the rivers of living water have a purpose. They are not bubbling and whirling around for the sake of it. They are designed, not simply to satisfy our thirst (though they will more than do that), but to irrigate the land beyond us. If the rock is worn into a new shape in the process, so be it. If the expected, even the official, channels seem to be bypassed, as with Eldad and Medad, so be it.
Peter’s speech on the day of Pentecost was an attempt to explain how God’s wind had come to blow in this way, how God’s fire had escaped from the fireplace of the Temple and was striking flames all over the place. It was nothing short of the promised new creation, undoing the effects of the fall and of Babel. Don’t trivialize Pentecost. Think how the Spirit-imagery works. Water, wind and fire are not tame.
Trinity Sunday
Isaiah 40.12–17, 27–31
2 Corinthians 13.11–13
Matthew 28.16–20
The doctrine of the Trinity used to be caricatured as a piece of irrelevant theory: learned people using human philosophy to make simple things overly complex. The charge often rebounds on those who make it. The beginnings of trinitarian thinking, in the New Testament, are powerful and relevant, designed to help in time of need, to bind us together in love, to send us out on our mission.
People often puzzle, reading Matthew’s conclusion, over Jesus himself offering his followers the first-ever ‘trinitarian’ formula as their baptismal symbol. Actually, the whole passage is implicitly trinitarian; if there wasn’t a trinitarian formula somewhere we’d have to supply one to make sense of it all. What does it mean to say that all authority, in both created realms (heaven and earth), has been given to Jesus? What does it mean to say that he is truly the Emmanuel (1.23), with his followers to the close of the age? The Trinity is, paradoxically, a doctrine about Jesus: it safeguards the reality of his humanness, then and now, as the true and final revelation of the one true God. It simultaneously unites him with, and distinguishes him from, the unseen source of all, on the one hand, and the breath of life that sustains us now, on the other. And the point of it all is mission: the God revealed in Jesus is the missionary God, sending his healing love into the world in Jesus, and now, under Jesus’ authority, sending Jesus’ followers out with that same healing love, of which baptism is the sign and seal.
So also in Paul. The trinitarian blessing is not bolted on to 2 Corinthians as an afterthought. It arises from the inner logic of the whole letter, as Paul wrestles with the grace of Jesus as the motive for his work (e.g. 8.9), learns to live by the love of God in good times and bad (e.g. 1.3–7), and celebrates the Spirit through whom he and his diverse, often difficult, congregations learn to see Christ in one another (e.g. 3.1–18). It all comes down to very practical and basic matters, as 13.11 makes clear: sort things out, pay attention to what you are told, agree together, live in peace. ‘The God of love and peace will be with you’; the Emmanuel promise again, guaranteed by the God-with-us person, Jesus, and renewed in daily reality by the God-with-us Spirit.
Behind it all stands the God of Isaiah, the God of creation and covenant. Since the very heart of his incomparable greatness is self-giving love, the more one contemplates his power and glory the more one discovers that it is strangely available, shared not least with those who are weary and exhausted. To understand the Trinity, ask yourself, as you read Isaiah 40—55, addressed to those in dire need: what might this God look like if he were to become human?
Proper 4
Genesis