Author Archives: revjohnleach52
Job Part 5 – God’s Answer
Unconditional or Unrequited?
Rom 3:20-31
Lk 15:11-24
Valentine’s Day and the first Sunday of Lent coincided this year: here are some thoughts on the love of God.
It would be the easiest thing in the world today to talk about God’s love. God is love, according to John, and love is certainly one of the first characteristics of God to spring to the lips of Christians. We love quoting John 3:16: ‘God sooooooo loved the world’. We may even have one of those Bible versions which mistranslates this as ‘God loved the world so much …’ But I want to suggest that there is a deeper, more fundamental characteristic of God which trumps love every time: his righteousness.
Righteousness in the Bible is the characteristic of God by which he is faithful, true, just, qualities which are seen to be lived out in right actions. Righteousness is also demanded of God’s people, but is only available through Christ. In Romans 3, a passage written into a world where you became righteous by keeping to the letter of the Law, Paul explains that a new kind of righteousness from God has been revealed, available through Christ. In fact Paul has a lot more to say about righteousness than he does about love. To understand this, it will be helpful to think about it through one very common misunderstanding of the nature of God’s love: that it is ‘unconditional’.
This commonly used phrase is often heard in Christian circles, but in fact it is a phrase for which you will search in vain in the Bible. In Old Testament times people related to God through a ‘covenant’ – you do this, and I’ll do that.
You live righteously; I’ll enter into relationship with you, so that I’ll be your God, and you’ll be my people. Nothing unconditional there. And of course Jesus comes along and makes it worse: you don’t just have to live without unrighteousness; you mustn’t even think it!
So the love of God in the Bible appears to be conditional, and to accept the heresy that it isn’t has dire consequences. It’s a very short step from that to the idea that we can do whatever we like, and live however we want, and God won’t mind at all, because he loves us unconditionally. This of course chimes in with that greatest value in our culture: tolerance. Whatever I do is just fine, because God soooooooooo loves me.
So am I saying that God doesn’t love us? Did the father of the prodigal son stop loving him while he was partying far away? Well, it depends what we mean by love.
When I was very young and silly, I fell in love. It was with Sophie Marceau, the French actress off of a Bond film, Braveheart etc. I was besotted with her: I particularly loved her ears. You could say that I loved her: I certainly had those feelings for her. But the tragic fact was that she didn’t love me back! In fact, sad to say, she totally ignored me. Actually I suspect she didn’t even know that I existed!
So was that love? If love is a feeling I have for someone, I certainly had it for my Sophie. But if love is a mutual relationship – this wasn’t! I believe this idea of ‘unrequited love’ is a much more helpful one in thinking about God than that of unconditional love. I don’t believe that the father ever stopped loving his son. He ached for him to come home, he longed every day for that return. But the relationship could not be re-established until the son repented, came home, and lived righteously. Until then his father could love him till he was blue in the face, but all it did was hurt him.
So I’m concerned about a gospel which says to people ‘God loves you unconditionally’. In fact God’s love in the Bible is always for those who are his, those in relationship with him, and never for the general public. He wants to love them, but most of time his love is unrequited, as people ignore him, or have no idea of his existence. Certainly he doesn’t tolerate their self-centredness, arrogance, violence, cruelty, and disregard for creation. He wants to love them, he longs for a relationship with them which is mutual and based on righteousness. But if they’re not interested, his love is unrequited love.
So am I saying that we have got to earn God’s love by way we live? Only if I’m righteous will God love me? Yes and no. A holy, pure, perfect God can’t be in relationship with anything impure, so we do need righteousness. But Paul explains that a new kind of righteousness has been revealed. We don’t earn it: it is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.
How can righteousness be given? How can someone give me justice, uprightness, truth? Surely that’s about how I choose to live? No – the gospel says we are given the righteousness of Jesus, the sinless one, and that it is put onto us, like a white robe which covers all our unrighteousness, bentness, dishonesty, and unfairness. When God looks at a Christian, he looks at us through Jesus, and he simply can’t see beyond his righteousness to our sin. It isn’t about trying, it’s about believing and receiving. When we decide to love back the God who first loves us, but perhaps with unrequited love, we enter relationship with him, and he gives us righteousness.
But then the paradox, of course, and why this is important for the start of Lent as well as Valentine’s Day, is that we then spend the rest of our lives working to become more righteous, more closely to live up to righteousness of Christ which God puts on us. That’s why we see Jesus fighting for his life against the temptation to be unrighteous. That’s why Lent calls us to strive for greater righteousness, not so that God will love us, but because he does.
Job Part 3 – Three friends and two gods
Some reactions to suffering from the Book of Job:
Job himself:
Death-wish
I’m not making this up!
Just make it stop!
I’m innocent – I don’t deserve this!
Confusion
How can I prove I’m innocent?
Everything is pointless
God is capricious and cruel
God is inaccessible
You’ve already made up your mind about me
God is a bully
God has tricked me!
There are two different gods
Self-doubt
Maybe I do deserve it
When you’re dead you’re dead
Why won’t God come and talk to me?
Those observing:
Sympathy
Shock/horror
Shocked silence
Pull yourself together
Making light of his suffering
I have a word from the Lord for you
If I were you …
You must have some secret sin in your life
This is really God blessing you
Accusation
Rudeness
Over-simplification
God must be right, so just fess up
You’re not a very good Jew/Christian
If God really gave you what you deserve …
Who do you think you are?
Just have faith
God can do what he likes with you
Job Part 2 – All Going Pear-shaped
Job 1:1 – 2:10 from the hungry? Lifegroup at St Swithin’s Lincoln.
Job Part 1 – Introduction
Part 1 of our hungry? series on the book of Job. (Apologies for the dreadful sound quality – I have now got a new mic so things should get better from here on)
Through the Bible in Just Over a Year – 2 Corinthians
According to Acts 18 Paul first visited Corinth around 50AD. After writing our 1 Corinthians Paul paid a second visit, around 56AD, which in 2:1 he describes as ‘painful’. So what caused this pain? We get some clues from the second (or rather third) letter. He begins as usual with praise, but in a somewhat backhanded way he thanks God for his compassion and care during painful times.
It appears that people in Corinth are questioning Paul’s authority because they have doubts about his apostleship. Evidently some people had begun teaching that only those who had physically been chosen by Jesus to walk and talk with him for the three years of his earthly ministry were the real deal. Paul was an upstart, and as such who did he think he was to tell them off about the ways they were living their church life? In addition he appears to have changed his plans and not visited them when they were expecting a visit, which served to prove that he was fickle and unreliable. So a great theme in 2 Corinthians has to do with Paul defending his credentials as an apostle. He emphasises his sufferings for the gospel (1:8ff, 6:3-10), his lack of financial gain from his ministry (2:17), and the fruit of his ministry in changed lives and planted churches (3:1-6).
He then attempts to lift their eyes off such pointless arguments and instead focus on the glorious truth of the gospel and the hope of resurrection life. Of course there will be trivial arguments while we are still here on earth, but we need to focus on a bigger reality. In 6:3-10 Paul recounts the number of ways in which he has suffered for the sake of Christ, but has remained resilient through it all.
In spite of this conflict, though, Paul can rejoice that his words have not fallen on completely deaf ears. The ‘sorrowful’ letter which he had written to them (7:8) did seem to make a difference, even though it upset them at the time. In a church where we don’t really like to do conflict Paul reminds us that hard truths can lead to repentance.
Paul then becomes more practical, and deals with generosity in giving, although he is soon back on his self-defence, recounting again the cost of his ministry and his equal status with ‘proper’ apostles. The book ends with a section warning them that he will continue to be hard on them if they don’t listen to his teaching, but that this harsh discipline is to build them up, not tear them down.
2 Corinthians is not an easy or comfortable book, but it reminds us of what is at stake, and raises questions about the place of godly discipline and hard words in God’s church today. Maybe we’re all just a bit too nice, and the mission of the church is weakened as a result. And maybe the lack of suffering for the gospel, at least in the comfy Western church, shows that we might not be trying hard enough to stand out from the culture around us. Discuss!
OT Lectionary Oct 11th Trinity 19 Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Regular thoughts on the oft-neglected Old Testament Lectionary passages
All three of today’s readings are in some sense about finding (or not) God. Hebrews 4 assures us that we always have complete access to God through Jesus our High Priest, while Mark 10 reminds us that even when we find him we might also find him too demanding, such that we want to lose him again. But poor old Job has a more basic and fundamental dilemma – he can’t find God at all.
A psychiatrist in a famous joke is trying to convince a delusional patient that in fact he isn’t dead. After much fruitless discussion he has an idea: he asks his patient if dead men bleed when cut. ‘Of course not’ came the reply. ‘Dead men don’t bleed!’ So the doctor grabs a nearby scalpel and plunges it into the patient’s arm. Seeing the blood starting to flow, the patient declared in alarm ‘I was wrong – dead men do bleed!’
Job is sitting in the ash heap, bereaved, afflicted and apparently abandoned by God, and as if that isn’t bad enough he has three friends trying to help him by telling him that it’s all his own fault, as we sometimes are today by well-meaning prayer ministry team members who have had it revealed to them by the Lord in a word of knowledge that there is some secret sin in our lives which is preventing us from getting healed. The ‘comforters’, annoying though they are, can’t on one level be blamed: they are upset because their friend’s suffering refuses to fit in with their world-view where all suffering has to be the direct result of personal sin. So they try to force Job to admit his guilt by browbeating him to confess it all, to agree with them that dead men do bleed after all. Difficult thought this proves to be, it is even harder for them to give in and admit that innocent people do suffer.
Job, though, is convinced of his innocence, which of course you could be in those days before Jesus came and complicated it all by saying that to think about it is just as bad as actually doing it. He knew only too well that he hadn’t committed adultery or anything like that, so his friends’ attempts to convince him that somehow he must have done were, understandably, rather annoying to him. So what he needed to do was to get things clear with God, who, he had every confidence, would agree with his take that in fact he was innocent. The problem was that God was nowhere to be found: wherever Job looked, there was nothing but absence.
You may have experienced something like this at some time in your life, and it can be mildly comforting to know that even this sense of complete abandonment has biblical precedent. But the key verse, I think, and the nearest we’ll get to a happy ending for a few chapters yet, comes right at the end of our text. God has terrified Job by his refusal to show up and vindicate him, yet (v 17) ‘I am not silenced by the darkness’. Anyone who has known severely depressed people will know that silence is the hallmark of despair, but Job has not yet got there. While he still has the strength and will to rant against God, he is still alive, and, paradoxically still has hope. It is when we decide simply to ‘curse God and die’ that we are really love. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
OT Lectionary Oct 4th Trinity 18 Genesis 2:18-24
Regular thoughts on the oft-neglected Old Testament Lectionary passages
At the end of the first account of creation in 1:31 God surveys his creations and declares that it is all good. But here, for the first time, in 2:18, God sees something which is not good: the solitary life of the man. So begins the story of Eve, of marital relationships, and of family life, about which Jesus has much to say in the gospel reading for today.
This passage is, of course, something of a red rag to the bull of feminism, but the language is carefully used to avoid any kind of pecking order (in spite of what later exegesis has made of it). The Hebrew ‘ezer (help) is almost always used of help from God, and thus denotes help from a superior above, rather than the aid of a junior assistant. But this might go the other way, and exalt the woman above the man, so it is qualified by the word which the NIV unhelpfully translates as ‘suitable’ for him, but which actually has the meaning of being ‘alongside’ him. So mutuality is the name of the game.
The naming of the animals demonstrates this same kind of mutuality with all creation. Naming implies dominion, but also care and respect, rather than domination. Those of us who have kids name them, and however bizarrely some might go about this task, it is still done out of love and reverence. Names can be used cruelly, but this is not the intention of living parents.
The divine surgery uses an unusual word for the anaesthetisation, almost always used of God’s action on humans, and often for a period of divine revelation. But the result is a companion for mutual enjoyment. It is interesting that in the first account of creation in Genesis 1, the man and the woman are commanded to be fruitful (1:28), but there is no such command here. The sexual union which they are to enjoy seems to be completely divorced from procreation, but rather seems to be just for fun and pleasure. The final verse emphasises this: their life together was literally ‘shameless’.
This is a passage which is often used in the battle over appropriate sexuality, and of course Jesus uses it, in today’s Gospel reading, to speak about the danger and harm of divorce. The repeated emphasis on ‘male and female’ has been used heavily by the anti-gay-marriage lobby, and it is difficult to see how it cannot be taken as normative about what ‘marriage’ is, as indeed it has been for millennia. Whatever one thinks about gay partnerships, it is surely difficult to call them ‘marriages’.
But to sidestep this controversy, the passage has been seen as a foundational one for understanding God’s purpose for married relationships. They are to be based on mutual love, care and respect, they are to be shamelessly intimate, and they are meant to bring lifelong joy and companionship. In the next chapter we are going to see how it can all go wrong, and we are still living with those consequences in many tragic marriages today, where one partner or the other attempts to dominate or harm the other. We ignore God’s purposes at our peril.
Through the Bible in Just Over a Year – 1 Corinthians
Paul first visited Corinth, a major city and seaport of Greece, around AD 50, and planted a church there. As usual he began preaching in the Synagogue, but was rejected there and moved to the nearby house of a Gentile convert called Titius Justus, which became the HQ of the new congregation. When in 51 AD the Jews tried to prosecute Paul, the new Roman consul ruled that the dispute was an internal Jewish matter, thus ensuring that the church, like the Synagogue, had the protection of the Roman authorities.
Although we only have two of them, there were actually three letters written to the Corinthian Christians: 1 Cor 5:9-11 speaks of a letter written previously. It seems also that the first four chapters of our 1 Corinthians were ready to dispatch when Paul received a further communication from the church, to which he replied in chapters 5 – 16. Our 2 Corinthians followed later.
The church was one which had some severe problems at its heart. Paul needs to address them on issues such as division and party spirit, Gnosticism, law-suits, immorality, family life, financial giving, the Eucharist, what love is all about, gifts of the Spirit, especially tongues and prophecy, and what happens when we die. The Corinthian church was one which did everything to extremes, from worship to incest. So it forms a pretty good agenda for any teaching series on Christian living today, in a society where many of the same issues remain hot topics.
1 Corinthians is the second letter from Paul which we have encountered on this journey, and we can immediately see a great contrast. In Romans he was setting out his stall, expounding the theology on which his preaching would be built if the church accepted him as their ‘missionary’. But here he is much more responsive to their agenda: several times we get the phrase ‘Now: about …’ they have clearly sent him a list of issues on which they want his opinions, and he goes through them systematically, dealing with each in turn.
The book is a rich store of purple passages. Chapter 13 on love, which you’ve heard at so many weddings, has nothing to do with marriage, as its context makes clear, and chapter 15 is well-used for funerals (and also the church crèche, which is dealt with in v 51). The teaching on the Body of Christ, which the church rediscovered in the 1970s, has revolutionised our lives, and of course the stuff on spiritual gifts has been used either to prove or disprove the appropriateness of charismatic renewal, depending on your point of view and interpretation. But there is much more in there which can still speak to us today, and which will reward further reading and study.
As (nearly) always Paul begins with heartfelt praise for the Christian community, its serious problems notwithstanding. Perhaps he gives us a glimpse of how God views his church today: horribly compromised, deeply divided, pretty ignorant, but on the way to glory, and providing a shining testimony to Christ. I sometimes wish I could see the church of which I am a proud part more as our Father sees it.
Image: “GR-korinth-bema-akrokorinth” by Bgabel at wikivoyage shared. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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