Twelve Months of Sundays. N.T. Wright
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(there were, of course, no marks, or even spaces, in the early texts): ‘What shall we say? Have we found Abraham to be our forefather in terms of flesh?’ Paul’s question comes, of course, from his insistence that God’s faithfulness is now unveiled, fulfilled, in Jesus Christ. Does this mean, then, that those who come to faith in Christ must join the fleshly, ethnic family founded by Abraham?
No. This family is not marked out by works of Jewish law. The law, as Paul made clear, discloses only sin, leading to wrath. The promise stands outside that scheme, opening the wider world before the patriarch long before the giving of the law. Paul’s mind leaps over the intervening scheme of Torah, holy land, ethnic restriction, seeing instead the glittering promise in the early dawn of Israel’s ancestry. ‘He would inherit the world’: a line drawn from this point reaches right into Romans 8.
And how would Abraham’s family attain their promised land? Through Exodus, marking them out as liberated slaves, God’s freedom-people (Genesis 15).
The good news, then: Abraham is father not of one nation merely, but of all, all who now share his faith in God the life-giver. ‘The father of us all’: 4.16 (which doesn’t need a bracket, as some versions think) gives the climactic answer to the question of verse 1. With this, Paul’s argument is nearly done: this is how the one true God has been, in Christ, faithful to what he’d promised. From here, he too will journey on, through water (chapter 6) and Spirit (8) to the larger promised land. When, finally, he opens up the sight of cosmic liberty, creation free at last from death, part of the point is ‘This, then, was what God promised Abraham’.
What then of Jesus, and his night encounter with the puzzled teacher? ‘New birth’, in Jewish ears, meant a new family: leaving the old, cleaving to something new. Abraham’s family redefined, out-nomading the old nomad. Water and Spirit, baptism and faith. Israel took its shape from Exodus and Sinai, sea and fire, its healing from the strange bronze serpent. Now, a new covenant: the love of God, not Israel’s private boast, but for the world. All is revealed in one who left his father’s home and went where he was told. ‘So must the Son of Man be lifted up.’ God is now newly working: everyone, all who believe, will share the glory of the age to come.
The Third Sunday of Lent
Exodus 17.1–7
Romans 5.1–11
John 4.5–42
John’s great sprawling story (what an excellent move to have some of Jesus’ Johannine encounters in full during Lent) offers food for thought at every level. The antipathy between Jews and Samaritans was not just a cold standoff: then as now, if you travelled through Samaria from the Dead Sea region to Galilee, you could expect trouble. Josephus tells of violent riots, a few years after Jesus’ time, when Jewish pilgrims tried to make the journey. Try telling someone in the Middle East today that, while ‘salvation is from the Jews’, in God’s design there will be no such thing as a holy mountain. That’s fighting talk.
The dialogue is a long string of double meanings and misunderstandings (did John actually intend it, perhaps, to sound funny, a semi-comic scene with a serious point hidden among the to-and-fro of the repartee, like some of Shakespeare’s clown scenes?). Jesus offers living water (the regular phrase for ‘running water’, as opposed to still or stagnant), and the woman reminds him he hasn’t got a bucket. Is Jesus greater than Jacob, the original giver of the well (notice the ‘our father Jacob’, and the long memory of water rights – again, today, a sore point in the same region)? She can’t, of course, cite Exodus, since the Jews claim that as their text – but there, too, water is all-important, and a cause of strife between the wilderness people, their leader, and their God. When Jesus responds with the promise of a water that slakes thirst for ever, she is suddenly submissive. She probably doesn’t know what it is he is really offering (did she think he was making advances?), but she wants it.
As in his response to the rich young ruler, Jesus puts his finger on the point where her life is most sorely in need of living water. Repartee again: ‘Call your husband.’ ‘Haven’t got one.’ ‘No – five down, one to go.’ Oops, change the subject… ‘Are you a prophet by any chance? We have this thing about which mountain we should worship on.’ (‘Oh, you’re from that church, are you? My granny said we should go to this one.’ Always a good distraction.) Objection overruled. ‘Spirit, not mountain, is what matters; and the one God is looking for Spirit-people right now.’ ‘Oh, very interesting – of course one day the Messiah is coming. He’ll explain all that complicated stuff.’ Phew. Let’s not get too far with this.
Pause. No way off the hook. Jesus holds her gaze. Ego eimi, ho lalon soi: ‘I am, who am speaking to you.’ Messiah, and … ‘I am’? End of repartee. Time for action. Sower and reaper are about to rejoice together.
The extension of Jesus’ ministry to the Samaritans, even during his lifetime, is a foretaste of that full extension which Paul celebrates throughout Romans. The Messiah’s death demonstrates the love of God, undercutting all regional or ethnic claims and boasts, and creating a new people, Spirit-people, worship-people.
The Fourth Sunday of Lent
1 Samuel 16.1–13
Ephesians 5.8–14
John 9.1–41
Don’t miss the sinister moment towards the end of John’s great story. We were told from the beginning that the blind man’s condition from birth had nothing to do with previous sins, whether his own or his parents’. That possibility, so prevalent in folk-religion (and in some more sophisticated systems), is alien to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Bible regularly refuses to ask ‘why?’, but rather ‘what?’ Our instinct is to look for a ‘solution’ in terms of a theory about the cause or origin of suffering (which might then mean we wouldn’t need to do anything further). God’s is to provide a solution by working towards new creation.
The Pharisees, however, don’t see it like this. Jesus is a sabbath-breaker; he can’t be the Messiah. His mighty works must have a different origin. He is deceiving the people. When pushed in discussion, they give the answer Jesus rejected to the question with which the chapter began: ‘you were born entirely in sins’ (v. 34). Your condition proves that you, and your parents, were in fact ‘sinners’, so you can’t teach us. There is a distant echo of Psalm 51.7, but they can’t be thinking of that (it would apply to them too).
The notion of purity in some sectarian Jewish groups (the Dead Sea Scrolls have the same idea) includes physical wholeness. It was this symbolic world, claiming to be the true observance of the Jewish law, that Jesus opposed with his fresh vision of that very Jewish vocation, to be the light of the world (v. 5). His healings, with all their own rich symbolic value, posed a deep-level challenge: is this not what it means to be loyal to the God of Israel, to be doing his work of salvation and new creation? If this is so, to cling to the symbols of a different world, a hard, exclusive system, is to be truly blind. It is to call down on oneself the very judgement one has pronounced on others (v. 41).
God sees, then, in a different mode to how we see, as Samuel discovered when examining Jesse’s sons – every bit as subversive an action, granted that Saul was still king, as that of Jesus in healing on the sabbath. Christian obedience can be categorized, as a result, in terms of learning to see differently. The image of light flickers and flashes through Ephesians 5: you are light, you are children of light, so your role (unfashionable though this may be) is to shine into the dark corners of life and show up what is going on. In doing so, you are acting as agents of Christ himself, the world’s true light, summoning the dead to life, to wake up to God’s new day. This message is all the more important at a time when our culture seems to have forgotten the meaning of shame. Take the reading back a couple of verses: ‘Let no one deceive you with empty words.’