Twelve Months of Sundays. N.T. Wright
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and acting as servant, giving, as he has received, freely. Do Jesus’ instructions to his followers, though, somehow imply that they are also to be like the three men, going about with great promises and great warnings? Dare we take that seriously as a model of the Church and its mission?
Proper 7
Genesis 21.8–21
Romans 6.1b–11
Matthew 10.24–39
The prince of peace comes with a sword. To that theological oxymoron we must add the sad, and still tragic, story of Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael. Go down into the Genesis story, down the dark staircases of imagination, and even then you will perhaps never plumb the depths of Hagar’s misery, of Abraham’s dilemma, of Sarah’s memories, of Ishmael’s destiny. The next chapter, Isaac’s nightmare, belongs closely with this one, but that hardly constitutes an explanation. If God is to heal the world appropriately it must be through the obedient covenant people. But what if the covenant people are themselves disobedient? They themselves must share the pain of the healing process. The fact that it is also God’s pain does not make it easier.
Jesus’ challenge here is not that his followers should be anti-social for the sake of it, but that they should live out of a new identity, in comparison with which the normal Jewish identity, based tightly upon kinship, is to be set aside. Deep kinship loyalty is not normally our problem; where then are our deep loyalties, and how does this call of Jesus put us on the spot? Why did they call Jesus ‘Beelzebub’? Why don’t they call us that? We must ask, too, what we are most truly afraid of, and whether that squares with v. 28 – which I persist in taking to refer to Satan, not God (God can be trusted with the hairs of your head; he’s not out to get you).
Paul’s appeal in Romans 6 is likewise based on a new sense of identity. Underneath the whole argument of chapters 6—8 lies the Exodus narrative, emerging triumphantly into the daylight halfway through ch. 8 itself. As in 1 Corinthians 10, Paul sees the Christian life in the light of the wilderness wanderings of God’s people. They have left Egypt by coming through the waters of the Red Sea; in other words, they have left the territory of sin and death in their baptism into the Messiah. They will then come, not to Sinai to be given the law, but to the new Pentecost, the giving of the life-giving Spirit (7.1—8.11). That Spirit will be for them the pillar of cloud and of fire, leading them home to their promised inheritance, which turns out to be the entire redeemed creation (8.12–30).
Paul’s concern, therefore, is that in appreciating who they are in Christ his hearers should no longer regard themselves as ‘in Egypt’, constrained by the old order of sin and death. ‘Reckon yourselves to be dead to sin’, v. 11; this is not a matter of ‘if you make a big enough mental effort it’ll become true’, but ‘do the mathematics and you’ll see that this is who you are’. Like the children of Israel, we often hanker for the leeks and melons of Egypt. We need, instead, to be encouraged by the fruit brought fresh from the promised land.
Proper 8
Genesis 22.1–14
Romans 6.12–23
Matthew 10.40–42
Perhaps precisely because it is one of the darkest of all Bible stories, the tale of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah has left deep imprints in Judaism and Christianity. Child sacrifice was as abhorrent to pre-Christian Jews as it is to us.
So the old questions arise: did God really tell Abraham to kill Isaac? Did Isaac really consent (as one Jewish tradition claimed), so that his readiness for martyrdom became a kind of proto-atonement? Our own day has added other questions: what would that experience do to Isaac? What did Sarah feel about it? And, once again, what is this story saying about God?
Part of the answer, as often, lies in the larger narrative. Ishmael has just been banished; is this chapter part of God’s response? Is it, in other words, not so much a sudden arbitrary demand, but rather a way of ascertaining whether Abraham is really interested in founding a pure clan of his own rather than trusting God to fulfil the promises in his own way?
Early Christian tradition offers answers from other angles, too. Abraham’s faith, says Hebrews, was a kind of resurrection-faith, believing that he would receive Isaac back from the dead (Paul, interestingly, doesn’t use that argument in Romans 4, where you might expect it). But supremely, of course, the early Christians saw that the odd, shocking thing God was calling Abraham to do was the long-range, and certainly ambiguous, signpost to the thing that God himself would do, not sparing his own dearly beloved son. ‘God will provide,’ said Abraham; Christianity began on the basis that he had, finally and fully. And, lest anyone therefore accuse God, as some are doing today, of ‘cosmic child abuse’, we must insist, with the New Testament writers, that God himself was personally and intimately present and involved at Calvary. The only full answer to the mystery of Abraham and Isaac is the far greater mystery of the Trinity.
Out of the death of ambition, pride, all that gives the word ‘self’ its unpleasant ring, there emerges freedom. Abraham is promised a superabundant blessing, a huge family (vv. 15–18). Those who obey the call of God to lay on the altar everything that belongs to the old life, the life that was crucified with Christ, discover the new freedom that points the way to ‘eternal life’. And, as Romans 8 will make clear, this eternal life consists precisely in the largescale fulfilment of the promise to Abraham: the whole world will be set free to share the freedom of the glory of God’s redeemed children.
Meanwhile, if God was in Jesus on Calvary, God is in Jesus today; and Jesus is in those who go in his name. This brief gospel reading is not primarily a command to give hospitality to those who preach the gospel; it is an encouragement to wandering missionaries, a reminder that as they go about their work God will provide once more.
Proper 9
Genesis 24.34–38, 42–49, 58–67
Romans 7.15–25a
Matthew 11.16–19, 25–30
An American sent me a strange book the other day. Jesus, he argued, was an alcoholic. Roused from his drunkenness by the preaching of John the Baptist, he struggled to kick the habit, and finally made it. Telltale ‘evidence’ is provided by Matthew 11: did they not say that Jesus was ‘a glutton and a drunkard’?
Well, yes, they did, and the early Church wouldn’t have made it up. But the book (which may be a source of hope to some, though I doubt it) misses the point here as much as elsewhere. ‘Glutton and drunkard’ is what, according to Deuteronomy 21.20, the parents of a rebellious son will say of him to the elders of Israel. It is part of a capital charge. Jesus knew that his celebration of the Kingdom with all and sundry was incurring the righteous indignation, and even the condemnation, of the respectable and religious. He was out of line. The Torah had things to say about people like him.
So it did, indeed; but the Torah, the Jewish Law, plays a deeply ambiguous role within the work of Jesus and the subsequent theology of Paul. Romans 7, which is hard enough to get your tongue around, never mind your mind, is the point par excellence where Paul wrestles with the question of why God gave the Law and what its role had been. Here the understanding I seek often eludes me; the misunderstandings I try to avoid come back to haunt me. The best explanation I know runs like this: when Paul says ‘I’ here, he is speaking, with Christian hindsight, of Israel as a whole, Israel under Torah. Israel is right to embrace and celebrate Torah; it is indeed God’s Law, holy and just and good. But Israel, being also ‘in Adam’, innately sinful, finds that the Law condemns. Paul may also be alluding to well-known sayings from pagan moralists about the weakness of the human will. Even the God-given Law cannot rescue