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.

The Song of the Prince Everything

Colossians 1:15-20

Perhaps it is because we don’t actually hear in our heads the notes they used to sing, but it is easy to for we latter-day saints to forget just how simply sing-able early Christianity clearly was; how their adoration of Jesus Christ just could not be contained by ordinary, bald prose, or expressed by chit-chat or in a series of, horror of horrors, bullet points (which I assume they would have called ‘arrow heads’ anyway) but always resulted in them singing about it. They filled their lungs and sang, as if the words were a living part of them, ‘dwelling in them richly’, a lived reality, because this is exactly what they were; and if we were there with them we no doubt wouldn’t have recognized any of the tunes, or even liked the tunes much (would it have sounded to us uncomfortably like the Islamic call to prayer?), but we would have recognized the same words as we have in our Bibles today.

Now some nitpicker will no doubt pull me up at this stage and comment on the lack of explicit commands to sing in the New Testament (though surely with New Testament commands one is plenty to be going on with), but that kind of person tends to be the sort who sees the trees, and even individual branches and leaves on the trees, but fails to see the majestic forest. The Bible is many things, but it resembles nothing so much as a musical or an opera; and if the thought that the Scriptures resemble an episode of Glee in any way at all makes you feel a little uncomfortable then you need to get used to it I’m afraid: from the Song of Miriam to the Song of Deborah to the Song of Hannah to the Psalms to Song of Mary and the angels in the sky above Bethlehem to the holy choirs in mighty anthem around the throne in the book of Revelation all is glorious song. The people of the book, God’s people, are nothing more than those whose calling it is to adore God with their praises; the remarkable even shocking thing about the gospel is its call for people to adore Jesus Christ – to worship him as only God may be worshipped, to exalt him as only God may be exalted. 

It should not then surprise us that Paul the apostle made use of hymns – or composed them – as he addressed his letters to the scattered churches. The Christians adored Jesus Christ – this was who they were. This series of three sermons makes use of three great pieces of hymnody in the Pauline corpus: what I have called ‘The Song of the Prince of Everything’ from Colossians 1:15 -20, the ‘The Adoration of the Humble One’ in Philippians 2:5-11, and ‘The Song of the Mystery’ in 1 Tim 3:15. In each case we are privileged to hear - perhaps - a record of the voices of our long ago brothers and sisters as they sang their adoration to Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours.

When a small child wants to explain something enormous and their language collapses under the weight of the effort so that they say ‘big, big, BIGGEST, big’ and they stretch their arms so wide trying to show you that they almost fall over, then perhaps we see what is the ‘Song of the Prince of Everything’ from Colossians 1:15-20 is all about; only, it is not only expansive but also carefully precise in everything it claims – with none of these words are we left thinking that it wasn’t really exactly what was meant in this one unfolding song. 

It’s the size of the whole thing that strikes you when you hear it read of course, the scope of it all: it’s 14.5 billion light years across, this song, with nothing in time and space lacking from it; and even the end of life is no boundary to it, since death was not obstacle to the figure at its centre. And the size of the picture should make us think for a minute about the people who were hearing this and possibly singing this for the first time: they were little people, living in an uncertain world – a world which had no apparent point of coherence other than the Emperor of Rome and his legions and his bureaucrats. They came, don’t forget, from a world in which there were many deities fighting for supremacy over the material order – Poseidon in the sea, Hades in the Underworld, and Zeus in the heavens to name but three, each supreme in his sphere but none over all; and all was chaos, as a result. For our part, we are continually reminded by the grand prophets of our times, the Hawkingses and the Dawkinses, that the feelings of insignificance we have are probably right; that there is no hinge on which the universe turns, or at least not any hinge that we can see; and so we had better make the best of a pretty bad lot and rescue whatever meaning remains from the rubbish heap: so be it. 

But that is not the impact or the import of the Christian gospel; for Christ is the lynchpin, the still point around which it all turns, the hub of the wheel: by him all things were created, and in him all things hold together – there is purpose, that is to say, to be found in this one, the purpose of all things, the secret to the meaning of things no longer concealed but now declared in broad daylight. But we ought to think this one through a bit, because it is far too easy for us to say it and not understand it: what could it mean for us to say that centre of the whole created order, the universe in its vastness and diversity and incomprehensibility, holds together in him? 

The hymn itself helps us by telling us a story: it mightn’t look much like it, but there is in this little poem a narrative. There’s a then and then there’s a now – and what happened in this story adds up to the meaning of this extraordinary person. 

What then, are the things that have happened? Things were created, and this one was the agent by which they were created: the existence of things is his responsibility and gives him power and authority. It is the same thought we see in Revelation 4, where God is worthy of worship precisely because he created all things and by his will they were created and have their being. If you create, you rule, in the mind of the Bible’s authors; because you have priority you have authority. 

But the creation of all things was just the beginning; because he is also, in vs 20, the one through whom God acted to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. This is quite specific now, not simply referring to what happened concealed from our view in the creation before time began: now we are dealing with the events of living memory, the blood, sweat and tears of history itself; and the focus is the event of the cross on which Jesus Christ shed his blood. 

This blood was no ordinary blood, since the one on the cross was not ordinary; the bloodshed was an act of peace-making, or reconciliation, between the creator and the creation. And notice how the scope of the peace-making matches the scope of the creation itself: Jesus dies not just for a few select, elect individuals to rescue them from a failing planet before it dissolves; his blood is what reconciles all things in heaven and on earth: nothing is beyond its reach. It is vast atonement, of things as well as people, of cats and rocks and trees, of nebulae and seas and atoms. It is all-encompassing, trans-dimensional, universal and cosmic; and it is right that we pause here for a second and entertain, just for a second the godly heresy that all are saved: for how could such an act of reconciliation fail in any instance? How do any fall through the net if we are to believe these verses?  How do ‘all things’ not also include ‘all people’?

Now, it is on other grounds that I think the Bible does not allow us to believe that all are saved, however much we might hope for it; but we should recognize that that fact that not all are saved is a mystery to be explained given the kind of God we worship. 

The role that Christ plays in both creation and reconciliation is the same, isn’t it? He’s the firstborn over all creation and the firstborn from the dead that in everything he might have the supremacy. The firstborn - firstly in the sense that he is the prince, the heir, the one for whom creation exists – a designated title with authority derived from the invisible God of whom he is the “born” first, from the dead, not finally defeated by the death that he suffered but triumphant over it, delivered from the womb of death, so to speak, his supremacy sealed in victory. 

And the heart of his princely role is in the two things that he does in this passage – he mediates the power and the authority of the divine King to the creation; and he, like a good prince acting on behalf of a King, makes peace. 

So, first: he is the very icon of God the unseen: the visible representation of the one who can’t be represented. Fundamental to Israelite religion was the fact that you weren’t to make images of the divine; but here is THE image of the divine. Here is the one who takes the role originally given to Adam and Eve, who were made in the image of God. He’s the tangible intangible, a view on what can’t be seen. Yet God was pleased (a word that reminds of the baptism of Jesus) – God was pleased to have all his pleroma – his fullness dwell on him – which means not only that Christ has all the attributes of the divine being, being the complete and not partial embodiment of God, but that through Christ God worked, confined we may have thought in the space allocated to an ordinary human body but nevertheless the expanse of the divine being focused at that one point so that creator can do business with the creation. 

And so, we have a declaration of peace, for Christ the prince reconciles all things to himself. From the far reaches of the heavens to the depths of the earth, he brings them all together; they cohere in him and now they are reconciled in him, not the pax Romani, but the pax Christi, the end of the disturbance and disruption of all things. All things are reconciled to him because he reigns over all things, and are now, even now, at peace. And that includes, note, the church – ‘the gathered people’: the tiny insignificant gathering in Colossae and Ephesus and Jerusalem and in Thessalonica and few other towns: he is the head of this body. They are now the people of the true Empire.

So: two might truths to take away. First, be of good cheer, because the whole sweep of world history is going Christ’s way. Do not despair or feel crushed by the forces that are all around us. Do not be overwhelmed. God’s plan and purpose in creation is being accomplished in Christ in a mighty act of reconciliation.

Second, give him your wholehearted praise and acclamation. Don’t hold back anything from him in your words or in your world. He is a worthy recipient of your adoration, an extraordinary object for our delight. The aberration, the oddity, is when anyone keeps anything from him. If we are to learn anything from Paul, it would be to let our theology spill over into doxology – in life and in language. Let that be your motto for the year, before you drown in your academic work; let your delight in him be never-ending.