If it is true that there is a good God who was responsible for making the world in the first place, it would be a denial of his own character if, in order to rescue the world from its threatened lapse into chaos, he acted upon it in such a way as to deny the goodness, the order and the structure, of the world itself. Rather, relying on one of the good features of the original creation itself, the fact that human beings were made in God’s own image, called to reflect him within the world, God called a family of human beings through whom, even though they themselves were part of the problem, he would eventually act in such a way as to restore and heal his world. It was this family, the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whose story Jesus of Nazareth believed himself to be bringing to completion.
At the same time, Jesus seems to have believed, and his earliest followers explored this enthusiastically, that precisely because the story of Israel, and its coming to its God-ordained climax, was the divinely intended way of putting the world to rights, this plan turned out to be a plan, so to speak, designed for God’s own use – as though a composer were to write a violin concerto knowing that he and he alone would be able to play the solo part, and that it would exactly express his own deepest musical wisdom. It is this double sense, of Jesus as the climax of the story of Israel and therefore also as the climax of the story of God, that goes to the heart of what Jesus himself believed and what his first followers struggled to put into words. This is how we can say, without lapsing into the language either of intervention-from-outside or non-intervention-from-outside, that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine.
But Jesus didn’t come .. merely to display what God looked like in human form. He came with a job to do, to complete the work to which Israel was called. This work, from the call of Abraham onwards, was to put the human race to rights, and so to put the whole creation to rights. As St Paul put it: God was in the Messiah, reconciling the world to himself. As the gospel writers tell the story, this task was to be accomplished, not simply by revealing to the world who God really was, still less by offering an example of how human beings really ought to live. It was to be accomplished by Jesus bringing about, within this present world, the sovereign, healing rule of the creator God. Jesus was addressing the question, ‘What might it look like if God was running this show?’ And answering, ‘This is what it looks like: just watch.’ And then, ‘just listen’. In what he did, and in the stories he told to explain what he was doing, Jesus was announcing and inaugurating what he and his contemporaries referred to as ‘the kingdom of God’, the long-awaited hope that the creator God would run the whole show, on earth as in heaven.
But the problem was, and still is, that other people were and still are running the show. Other kingdoms, other power structures, have usurped the rule of the world’s wise creator, and the forces of evil they have unleashed are exceedingly powerful and destructive. Jesus’ task of inaugurating God’s kingdom therefore necessarily led him to meet those other forces in direct combat, to draw upon himself their full, dark fury so as to exhaust their power and make a way through to launch the creator’s project of new creation despite them. That is one clue at least to the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion, though that event, planting the sign of God’s kingdom in the middle of space, time and matter, remains inexhaustible. But let’s be clear. As the gospels tell the story, Jesus’ death was the culmination of several different strands: a political process, a religious clash, a spiritual war, all rushing together into one terrible day, one terrible death. And in the light of that, according to Jesus himself and his first followers, everything in the world looks different, is different, must be approached differently. With Jesus’ death, the power structures of the world were called to account; with his resurrection, a new life, a new power, was unleashed upon the world. And the question is, how ought this to work out? What should we be doing as a result?
But I hope you can see how the presence of Jesus in the middle of the question of God and the world gives that question a quite different shape. It isn’t a question of either God keeping his distance from the world from which he’s absent, or deciding from time to time to ‘intervene’ from outside. It is, rather, a matter of God being both utterly outside and beyond the world and personally present and active within it. And that activity isn’t a matter of Jesus striding around doing impossible things to prove how divine he was. Rather, Jesus’ powerful actions are all about the breaking in of new creation into the world of the old – a new creation in which the creator’s original intention is fulfilled, through signs which point forward to the day when God will eventually make all things new, put all things to rights, and wipe away all tears from all eyes. Put the fact of Jesus into the middle of your picture of God and the world and ask the key questions, the hard questions, afresh in that light.
As you do that, you will discover one thing in particular. The God who comes to the middle of world history in Jesus does not come to wave a magic wand and automatically cure everything in sight. The God who comes to the middle of history comes to take its pain and shame, its guilt and rebellion, on to himself, to bear the weight of the world’s evil so that the world may be healed. This is not an incidental detail in the picture; it is what gives significance and shape to the whole. It means that whenever we ask the question of where God is in the world – whether in the world in general, or in the Tsunami or the Holocaust or the War on Terror, we should look first for God where the night is darkest and the pain is worst, not in the blaze of glory and the blast of trumpets but in the cry of the baby and the scream of the tortured. And that will colour our reflections from this point on.
.... let me reflect on the earliest Christian sense of vocation. Jesus’ first followers believed that they were called to put into effect what he had achieved in principle; that, if you like, they were to go out and act the play he had written, to sing the song he had composed. He had achieved the victory of the creator God over the forces that were destroying and distorting creation; he had launched God’s project of new creation. Now they had to go into a world still dominated by the anti-creation powers, and in the power of Jesus’ Spirit to make new creation happen. All Christian thinking about God and the world, therefore, must include not only Jesus himself, bearing the world’s pain and launching the world’s renewal, but also the promise of God’s Spirit, active in the world both through Jesus’ followers and out beyond them. The God-and-world question, in other words, needs to be rephrased in terms of the Trinity; and indeed to realise this is to realise that the Trinity, so far from being a dry and dusty dogma that nobody understands, is at the heart of the fresh understanding of God and the world we so badly need today.
... therefore, it is part of the inalienable task of God’s people, of those who worship the creator God, whom we see in Jesus and know through the Spirit, to speak the truth to power: to remind governments, local councillors, authorities in every sphere, including church leaders, of their calling to selfless stewardship, and to point out fearlessly where this trust is being abused in whatever way. Once more, God is not nearly so interested in how rulers get to be rulers as he is in how they behave as rulers, and in the vital task of reminding them of their proper vocation and of calling them to account.
... and in particular, it is the task of the followers of Jesus to remind those called to authority, in whatever sphere, that the God who made the world intends to put the world to rights at last, and to call the authorities to acts of justice and mercy which will anticipate, in the present time, God’s final setting of all things to rights, God’s wiping away of every tear from every eye. This calling – which many authorities and rulers dimly recognise, though many alas glimpse it and turn away to more seductive options – is, whether the authorities recognise it or not, the call to live under the lordship of the Jesus Christ, who in his death and resurrection claims that sovereignty over them: the call to implement the victory he won over evil, over hatred, over violence and death itself, and thereby to anticipate in the present time, always partially and fitfully but none the less truly, the eventual victory of God’s loving, restorative justice. The doing of justice and mercy in the present time by those called to power locally, nationally and globally is thus to be seen within the framework of the historical victory of Jesus in his death and resurrection and of the future, coming, final victory of God over all evil, all violence, all arrogant abuse of power. And where the world’s rulers and authorities genuinely strive for that end – to implement the victory of Jesus, to anticipate the final victory of God – the Christian church declares, as the ancient Jews did with the pagan king Cyrus, that God’s spirit is at work whether the authorities know it or not.I have read this (and the whole lecture) carefully, and my joy and mission in God has been re-vitalised!
What do you think?
