Safe in the arms of Jesus

I

Ma'afu Kefu lay hard up against the headstone of Muriel Firmage, 1837-41 - safe in the arms of Jesus. The warm and slightly stale air of the Sydney morning coughed gently over the unmown spider grass. The blowflies circled each other with no obvious intent. A magpie hopped onto the garbage bin at the side of the church and jabbed half-heartedly at the black plastic bag overflowing the rim.

Ma'afu’s bald head was slightly propped up against the sandstone. A trail of brown ants trudged its way from the top of the headstone, down across his pate and down behind his left ear on a journey to some hidden destination. His head was turned slightly to the right; his strong body, dressed in a blue singlet stained to white by the salts of his sweat, was simply arranged, with the arms and legs in alignment.

It was a Thursday, and Ma'afu was dead. 

II

The café was unusually full for a Thursday morning, which was Graham’s morning off. It was the only café on a quiet suburban road, and it filled up at about a quarter past nine with mums and the occasional dad having a post drop-off gossip about the teachers at the school and last night’s cooking shows.

Graham on his morning off did not look a good deal different from Graham on his working days. He sat with his Macbook open vacantly sipping the frothed skim milk off the top of his cappuccino, which was the quality of cappuccino made by a café with no visible competition for some distance. The small square table had a missing foot, which meant that, when Graham typed with any force into it – which did happen when he got lost in what he was doing and had a constant stream of thought that seemed close to something like an interesting idea – he was quickly diverted from his reverie.

On Thursdays, his morning off, Graham picked away at the detective novel he wished he had written years ago. He had never been a particular fan of detective fiction, but he had been an English teacher before he got ordained and somehow imagined that a foray into detective fiction on the side would be a relatively unpretentious and easy way to satisfy his literary urges. Starting his work without much of a plan, he had been surprised by how unpleasant the detective he had created was; his name was Mike Overhall, and he was a rather smug disbarred lawyer with an eye for the ladies, a wallet for the horses, and a nose for a decent red, and he was now trying to pay his alimony by solving mysteries. Overhall had kept his hair long beyond middle age – and dyed the grey out of it - did cryptic crosswords which he thought showed how clever he was and affected a supercilious smirk which was the effect of his surprising self-consciousness about his yellowed teeth. 

In a couple of short stories Graham had already written, Overhall had triumphed over himself and over the evil underworld of Sydney mostly by waiting for events to play themselves out. There was little actual solving of crimes. Overhall stumbled across murderers in the same way that he stumbled across corpses. This kind of detective narrative seemed to Graham the easiest one to pick off, since he didn’t have to do much by way of plot. He was hoping that the jaunty writing style and his gothic depictions of the Sydney underworld would make his pieces readable to someone somewhere.

On other days of the week, Graham sat in the same spot, but he was there writing his sermons or preparing other material for his parish. He liked to write his sermons out word for word so as to give full play to his rhetorical ambitions, which meant that he was a slightly aloof figure in the pulpit, and his parishioners did not feel they knew him intimately or that he gave himself to them overly much. As he wrote his sermons he sometimes had their faces in front of him, but very often he was more aware in his head of what his friends from college might be thinking if they dropped in on the off chance, or if they happened on his website and listened to the MP3. His sermons had in them little gestures to the crowd that wasn’t there, dropping in a hint that he knew that this passage was a controversial one in the scholarly world – not that his parishioners cared one little bit, but his classmates would have. 

But that was not today’s task. He was attempting to immerse himself in Overhall’s grubby life, hunched over his machine a little, with his legs tucked in under the chair with a loafered foot hooked over one of the cross bars. He wore a nondescript but nice pair of jeans, a collared shirt ironed only where it showed (cuffs, collar and buttons) and a corduroy jacket that wasn’t particularly new. The effect was less business than PhD student, and Graham didn’t mind that effect at all. It went with his short dark slightly woolly hair, kept short so as not to look unkempt. What people noticed when they met him (at least, was sure they did) was his pock-marked features, the result of a dire case of acne that had descended on him in his final year at school. It dinted his confidence then, quite badly; but his faith, kindled at a youth camp when he was 16, was not harmed by the pitting of his face. When people met him, they quickly saw that he was generally at ease with himself and the world and that his sense of humour was intact. 

His mobile phone, resting flat on the metallic table, buzzed now and then. Graham didn’t mind leaving it on for his day off – in fact, it was nice to be contactable, and it felt good to be able to tweet something if a piece of wry wisdom came to mind.

Flicking a glance at it, he noticed he had an SMS from Glenda in the church office:

NEED YOU TO COME UP TO THE CHURCH. POLICE HERE.

Anglicans and sacraments 1

There is no question but that the evangelical Reformers of the sixteenth century saw themselves as making a deliberate and conscious move away from the view of the sacraments that had prevailed in the medieval church. They were in loud agreement that the sacramental system had become an avenue for the worst tendencies in medieval Christianity – an expression of a soteriology that made no sense, a celebration of what seemed to them to be abhorred in Scripture, and even the re-institution of the very things that the apostles had railed against in the New Testament. As they were, the sacraments were indicative of an entire theological system that needed to be dismantled and reconstituted from the ground up. And yet this proved more elusive to them. The Reformers could not find agreement on a positive account of the sacraments, especially the Lord’s Supper. 

Most famously, Luther and Zwingli clashed at the Colloquy of Marburg in 1529 – even though they had been called together by Philip I precisely for the purpose of presenting a united Protestant front. The division was irreconcilable: in the end Luther simply refused to acknowledge the validity of Zwingli’s position. The fifteenth point of the colloquy recognized this sharp difference of opinion:

Fifteenth, we all believe and hold concerning the Supper of our dear Lord Jesus Christ that both kinds should be used according to the institution by Christ; also that the Sacrament of the Altar is a sacrament of the true body and blood of Jesus Christ and that the spiritual partaking of the same body and blood is especially necessary for every Christian. Similarly, that the use of the sacrament, like the word, has been given and ordained by God Almighty in order that weak consciences may thereby be excited to faith by the Holy Spirit. And although at this time, we have not reached an agreement as to whether the true body and blood of Christ are bodily present in the bread and wine, nevertheless, each side should show Christian love to the other side insofar as conscience will permit, and both sides should diligently pray to Almighty God that through his Spirit he might confirm us in the right understanding. Amen

There was substantial and noteworthy agreement. The Reformers together rejected the understanding of the Mass as a substitutionary sacrifice in any way making a propitiation that only belonged to the cross of Christ. They also agreed that the elements should both be offered to the congregation (the practice of offering communion ‘in one kind’ was ubiquitous by the time of the Reformation). They were strongly agreed that to take the Lord’s Supper was something an obedient Christian ought to do. But they were vociferous in their disagreement about what occurred in the rite itself. Luther wished to assert that Christ was present at the Lord’s Supper, whereas Zwingli did not. The other Reformers present at the Marburg Colluquy – among them Martin Bucer, who would go on to have a significant influence on the English Reformation in the 1540s and 50s – leaned more to Zwingli’s position while still wanting to affirm a ‘spiritual presence’.

The English Reformation was somewhat of a latecomer to this discussion. Even following the break with Rome in the 1530s, Henry VIII did not permit a significant development of teaching on the sacraments. The Ten Articles of 1536, though it affirmed justification by faith alone, also upheld the necessity of baptism, the sacrament of penance and the substantial, real and corporeal presence of Jesus as the Eucharist under the form of bread and wine. The text of the Bishop’s Book, designed to accompany the Ten Articles, reads

under the form and figure of bread and wine, which we there presently do see and perceive by outward senses, is verily, substantially, and really contained the very selfsame body and blood of our Saviour Jesu Christ.

This position was affirmed in the Six Articles of 1539, in which the practice of withholding the cup from the laity was also defended. 

Thus, the Henrician church cannot claim to have moved to a recognizably Reformed or Lutheran position on the sacraments. The theological building blocks for a change were nonetheless beginning to be put into place, since the doctrine of purgatory to which the mass was linked was being attacked, and since the doctrine of justification by faith alone did not allow for the same role in the salvation of a person’s soul as was formerly in operation. Futhermore, despite the official caution of the leading bishops, more radical views had certainly been circulating in England for at least two decades before Henry’s death in 1547. William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man had briefly expounded a view of the meaning and purpose of the sacraments that pre-empted later Anglican accounts, arguing that the sacraments were chiefly signs of God’s promises, apprehended by faith as the accompanying word is preached.[1]

---

[1] William Tyndale and David Daniell, The Obedience of a Christian Man, Penguin Classics (London ; New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 108-9.

The Hymn of the Great Mystery -1 Tim 3:16

One of the first things that you work out if you start a blog is that the title makes all the difference to your hit rate; and you can really increase your hit rate if you make your title a ‘how to’: how to find a marriage partner, how to increase your muscle mass, how to manage your time, how to smile for a photograph, how to write a theology essay. In fact, you may be able to disguise a perfectly abstract thought in a ‘how to’ blog post and gain quite a readership for it.
It’s practical wisdom we are seeking. We want advice in the craft of life; to gain a knowledge that has a direct purpose in engaging with the world; to be able to translate what we learn into action that counts and makes a difference. And it makes a lot of sense: life is complicated and the business of living in it messy; and I just want to be able to survive the next challenge and maybe just maybe succeed a little bit if I can. Practical wisdom gives us traction; the kind of abstract knowledge about matters far off from our experience leaves us with our wheels spinning.

What good, then, is Christian theology? It appears to apply the power of thought to a place far removed from the lives we lead, and demand from us a series of strenuous mental gyrations to get down to the ground. Or, perhaps it seems that Scripture itself divides worship from everyday life without ever bridging the gap – the ethics of Scripture are simply tacked on as a kind of ‘well, I guess you’d better behave while you are at it’. It is no accident that Christian books of practical knowledge check theology off at the door and, for the most part, simply couldn’t be bothered about making the connection. Believe in orthodoxy, and do this – it works. Be a principled pragmatist, but don’t ever let your principles too close to your practice… principles only get in the way after all.


To think in that way, though, you’d have to be reading Scripture with one eye closed. The three hymns of adoration of the Son of God that we have been addressing in this series all emerge directly from or connect directly to the practice of the church. The most grandiloquent pieces of poetic theology in the New Testament have direct consequences for what we do today. Let your attitude be the same as that of Christ Jesus, he says in Philippians. In Colossians, the inner being of the church emerges directly from the kind of Lord she worships – the great reconciler of all things by his blood, the peacemaker who cancelled the written code.
And today’s third great hymn, from 1 Timothy 3:16 is planted by Paul right in the centre of his first letter to Timothy, in the midst of his descriptions of the qualities of the various orders of ministry.
Beyond all question, the mystery from which all true godliness springs is great.

The NIV has added the word ‘springs’ to the sentence but it is right I think. Godliness, or piety, or the business of actually living well in the world of the creator, has its source in a great mystery: it flows out of it as water from a well, and as such you can’t see the divide between the mystery and the piety or godliness it produces.

The great Elizabethan puritan theologian William Perkins would say this: ‘Theology is the science of living blessedly forever’. It could have been drawn from this text. The extraordinary and exalted ideas of this theological hymn are the standing orders of the church. 

Now of course it is not simply a piece of theology without also being a piece of doxology – it isn’t simply thought; it is an offering of adoration. It is worship, that is to say: and that observation provides the key perhaps. The division between the abstract and the concrete in the Christian life is overcome by worship. Our thoughts about God are not simply thoughts but have are oriented to the Holy one, and so orient us to him. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom has the same structure in it. Likewise, the commandments do not separate worship from life but rather show how worship and holy living belong together, with the one springing from the other. Perhaps we could even go so far as to say: Scripture contains no ethics and certainly no morality. What it contains is guidance for right worship.

And just as a corrective to our current talk about worship: yes, worship is ‘all of life’, but it is only ‘all of life’ because it springs from our verbal expressions of adoration; our lives are made worshipful because they match the words we say to God.

And this particular act of adoration is sublime. It reveals a mystery: in what sense is it a mystery? It was once a concealed truth and now it is a revealed truth. It was the plan of God from before the foundations of the earth; it was the song in his head that he has now played out loud. It’s a great mystery, too, not simply I think because it is really really mysterious, but because it is central and powerful. It’s a mystery that makes a difference to everything.
And what is this mystery? It has six parts:

First, He appeared in the flesh. Who did? The later scribes corrected ‘He’ to ‘God’, and while I think the proper reading is ‘He’, they were right in what they wanted to explain – after all the nearest antecedent is ‘God’; which, if that is right, makes this a profound statement about Jesus Christ: God was made manifest in the flesh, in Jesus Christ, true God, true man, truly God-man, overcoming the huge distance between the two realities. As Calvin puts it:
‘The difference between God and man is very great and yet in Christ we see God’s infinite glory joined to our polluted flesh so that the two become one.

There is no reason for us to think this is any different from the kind of Christological affirmations we see in chapter 2, where Christ is described as the one mediator of the one God, who gave himself a ransom for all.

Second: He was vindicated by the Spirit. It was the Spirit of God that pointed to Jesus and testified that he was God; we think especially of his anointing by the Spirit settling upon him as a dove; but also of his resurrection from the dead by the power of that same Spirit: as Paul himself says, Jesus was descended from David according to the flesh but declared to be the Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead. 

Third, He was seen by angels. Why does this make it to the list? Angels attended Jesus and point to him at every stage of his earthly life. They worshipped him (Heb 1:6); his conception and his birth were heralded by angels, his temptation, his death, his resurrection and his ascension were all accompanied by the presence of angels – he was ‘seen’ in the sense of ‘recognised’ by them as they do their work in pointing to him; but also, we might speculate, the angels themselves are part of the final picture of the final victory of Christ since he is Lord of the angels as well as the rest of creation.
Fourth, he was preached among the nations. Jesus was declared and revealed to the Gentiles and not simply to the Jews; perversely it seemed given the facts of history God chose to reveal himself made manifest in the flesh to the nations – and to do it by means of the preaching of the gospel of Jesus.
And this preaching was effective, for, fifth, He was believed on in the world. The preaching of Jesus Christ did not fail to get a response, as much as it was rejected; the obedience of faith was not absent from the nations to whom the gospel came. Christ’s work in bringing people to believe him is ‘no ordinary miracle’, to cite Calvin again; and on it goes, a work in which we are privileged to share.
And the last spoke of this wheel is that He was taken up in glory. If the Son of God descended and took on flesh, it is also the case that he ascended to glory – and now reigns with God on high, which is a declaration about his rule of the world, sharing us he does in the divine rule itself. 

This then is the mystery of godliness – not trying harder, not doing more quiet times, not lists of how to do things, not pragmatism, not techniques. No – the secret to the pious and godly life is Christ – manifested, attested, preached and glorified. 

But the pragmatist might validly object: how does that actually help me? What does that have to do with me?

How?

And we shouldn’t dismiss this question as simply impertinent, or beneath contempt. But still: we might much like the answer we get.

The answer is it helps you because it changes everything about the world in which you live. And knowing that mystery makes living here possible: it is the basis for a true human life, because in this divine mystery we have declared to us the holy and glorious potential of human life. We have in this extraordinary disclosure the appearance of the divine in our midst while as yet we were still far off from God and not even seeking him.

What are we to do? Nothing but adore him. Bless him with our praise and adoration. Worship him not only with our lips but in our lives. The secret ‘how-to’ of the Christian life begins with the exaltation of Jesus as Lord of all.

This then is the vision statement and mission statement for the church you are going to plant – and it’s a believable one that’s worth trusting in (rather than placing your own charisma at the heart of your vision for the church, which is what so many of us secretly or not-so secretly do).

This is the truth you need to begin counselling people in their walk with Christ. This is the core reality out of which you will learn to preach great sermons and raise up a generation of leaders of God’s people. This is the bullet-point list you need to recall at every moment. This is the software you need to run in your ministry and in your marriage. This is what you need to teach people about holiness and about Christian maturity and growing in godliness. This is the powerful antidote to the legalism of so much that passes for Christian literature.

Praise Him: and his praise will be steady point around which we can integrate all the things we need to know to get by - and much, much more.

The Adoration of the Humble One

Philippians 2:5-11

In his long poem ‘The Hymn to Proserpine, Algernon Swinburne, one of the Victorian era’s most celebrated poets, pretends to be a late Roman pagan lamenting the rise of Christianity in the Empire. The most renowned lines from the poem are these:

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath

We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

Jesus Christ is of course the ‘pale Galilean’, the one whose breath (for Swinburne) makes the world grey; the religion spawned by Christ subdues and oppresses the human spirit, and makes the human soul ignoble. 

It’s a thought that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would pursue, with his bristling moustaches and long walks in the Swiss alps: Christianity is nothing more than a slave faith, a corruption of all that is possible in the singular human being, a denial of the real. In his words:

Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life

Christianity is the very antithesis of the idea of the Ubermensch, the Superman, the kind of Olympian ideal of the heroic man who is able to live out his humanity in complete freedom, exercising his will through power unrestrained by fetters of compassion or the chains off milksop and subservient virtues like humility.

We have learnt from Swinburne and Nietzsche that the true hero amongst us is the successful narcissist, especially if they can redeem themselves with such great deeds that we laugh off their failings; like Shane Warne, the classic naughty boy, loved but not much liked by the Aussie public, as the model anti-role model, the epitome of what we’d all like to be as men at least, playing poker, driving too fast, sticking it to the authorities and hurling with an actress across three continents; he’s good and he knows it, a legend of the game; he knows we think of him as better than the rest, as inhabiting some superior plane of human existence, and he agrees with our assessment: 700 wickets says so, which is pretty much 700 more than any other man he meets; and for a while we seem to bow the knee in this cult of the Warne ego. Age? It is not for him: he simply reconstructs his face to look younger. He scoffs at age.

The thing about Nietzsche is that he was exactly right about Christianity. It turns out that it is a faith that celebrates servility and submission, a religion that that produces ignoble acts of service that make the pleasures of life seem trivial, a cult of worship that makes people deny themselves. It glorifies the inglorious.

In fact, Christians adore a Lord who is Lord precisely because he gives up his noble entitlements. As Paul shows in Phil 2:5-11, it is the Lord who stoops who is worthy of worship. This isn’t accidental, or embarrassing; it is something to sing about, to advertise to the world. Yes: the Lord was a slave, and being the slave of others is what he calls us to be, as the high point of human existence. All the freedom and power in the world was most gloriously used when it was exercised in the filthy business of service.

For as Paul shows, the most divine of human beings was a model in quite a different way, a paragon not of the usual virtues – strength and mastery resulting in fame but something quite perverse in fact.

Not a superman, but an underman, not Ubermensch, but Untermensch.

Even so, this one is the model: as Paul says, Your attitude, your cast of mind, your approach to other people should be just like Christ, the royal Son of God, the majestic King, whose very nature made him ripe for equal standing with the Father: He was in very nature God. That was His being. He deserved nothing less than a seat alongside the Father. He had the right to it by dint of who he actually was in and of himself

But - and this is quite the extraordinary thing - for no apparent calculation of advantage to himself he relinquished his power, and emptied himself ; he nothinged himself; he did not seek to become something, but let go of his grasp on the something that he had; he insisted upon not insisting upon his rights; exchanging the very nature or the morph of God himself for the very nature or morph  of a slave – the complete embodiment of the one with no rights, the very one whose purpose is to serve and to do no other – that is the form he took upon himself. He poured himself out.

I said that he did seem to calculate the advantage: that he falls under suspicion like this is typical of our cynicism – where we cannot imagine the act of pure love. Surely he could see his future glory, and, like an athlete in training for Olympic glory, endured the pains and discomforts of the world because of the outcome. But the benefit he wins belongs not to him but to those who bow the knee to him in the final scene. He in essence gains nothing he did not already have except for one thing: our worship of him, which reconciles the created world to its creator.

And what was the form that he became, the nature that he embraced? It was to become like a human being. To be ‘a little lower than angels’; perhaps there is here a reminder that the purpose of human being was to live to the service of God, to humbly live out that calling without grasping at divinity.

By contrast Caesar in all his might would claim for himself divine properties, a seat at the table of the gods in heaven, and demand the prayers and sacrifices of men and women – longing to ascend to the highest place in his arrogance.

But not this true Lord, deserving of power and status, but not grasping; having what tyrants long for, but giving it away, emptying himself and becoming no different to the most abject non-citizen of the empire. He takes on our form: as Athanasius puts it:

He has not assumed a body as proper to his own nature, far from it, for as the Word He is without a body. He has been manifested in a human body for this reason only, out of the love and goodness of His Father, for the salvation of us men.

What he takes on himself is not simply the indignities of bodily life, with all its liquids, solids and gasses; but he opens himself up to the vulnerability being human life. We are vulnerable to pain, to loss, and to death. Could there be any less vulnerable position than being divine? But the Son of God exposed himself to – can we say the risk? – of human living, as Athanasius says, ‘out of the love and goodness of His Father’. 

And his life itself was a humble life of obedience to command of God – and to a particular command, the command to embrace a human death – indeed the sin-bearing death of which human kind was in dire need.

What an extraordinary mystery this is – the obedience of the Son of God! That, we discover, in divinity itself is not simply raw authority and power but a submission to power and authority – not a coerced submission, as if he left heaven at gunpoint, or because he had been tricked in some divine card game, or outvoted by the other persons of the trinity, but a completely voluntary submission: a submission without necessity other than the desire of God’s heart that the lost be saved. 

I don’t know when it was that you last gave up something that it was your right to have; it is part of our ongoing childishness as human beings that we continue with this demand that we be treated according to what we feel we deserve: it has become a part of our cultural discourse, our way of getting noticed. As well we might: this has been the way in which oppressed groups in our culture have asserted themselves as full human beings among other human beings, and achieved equal status before the law. With Jesus, however, we are not dealing with an outsider. He had the rights of an insider, the rights off the one who was born to rule, the rights of the powerful, not the powerless. It is precisely we the powerful and included who ought to hear this word, then: whenever you find yourself pointing the loaded gun of submission at someone else, you have missed the point; it isn’t a teaching that is meant to increase the subjugation of others, it is meant to be about you: you ought to consider others better than yourself, and stop complaining that others aren’t. 

It is this submissive, obedient, dying Lord who is vindicated, nevertheless. In this him there is an exaltation which is higher than than the degradation with which we began. The journey above trumps the journey downwards – for God has exalted him to place above all places, and given him the name that is higher than any name – a name which can only be God’s own name. If the Son gave away equality with God, we see that here is it fantastically restored, to the glory of God the Father. 

And finally, we will see the complete unveiling of the glory of God in the Son. Whereas he came anonymously to earth, obscure and unknown, he is now the bearer of a name on every tongue. Where once he was the slave of all, he is now the object of the worship of all, recognized by all as the Lord of all, with no exceptions or qualifications.

And this should be your attitude? The hymn of Christ’s descent from heaven really overwhelms Paul’s appeal for the Philippians to show humility to one another, doesn’t it? That was just the beginning; yes, be humble, to the point of abject subservience and loss of dignity – not simply because here we have some Aesop’s fable of humility, but because the way of humility runs with the grain of the universe. That’s the direction in which it is all purposed – the final moment when all recognize the Lordship of the humble one, not because he has subdued them but because he has served them to the point of death and beyond, and because that is what the Father celebrates and honours above all. 

But if you see that this is where everything is headed, it may lead you to sit in the mud alongside those who also sit there; to expose yourself to the unlovely and unloveable people of another culture; to listen for hours to the lonely old woman when you have better things to do with your time; to exercise your freedom to live in acts of sheer love; to pour yourself out for the needy; to spend your life’s silver coin in a way that seems like such a poor investment to everyone else around. 

How trivial our petty calls for recognition seem! How completely this puts our grasping to shame! How marvelously this turns us from the usual bickering and complaining to the words with which we must forever worship and adore the Son of God, as we humble ourselves before the one who humbled himself for us: Jesus is Lord.