For those who want a change from the Gospel

Easter 3 – Psalm 30

One of the most common questions which Christians and not-yet-Christians alike struggle with is the problem of suffering. For Christians who have somehow picked up along the way the idea that God is there solely to make life nice for them, and will instantly get them out of trouble should something bad happen to them, the onset of suffering feels like a faith-shattering smack in the face. And Non-Christians who have kind of assumed that God is supposed to be nice and kindly can use experiences of suffering, both their own and those of others, as proof positive that God can’t be there after all, because if he was nothing nasty would ever happen.

So it is a bit strange that the Bible doesn’t really give us a clear coherent theological answer to this most severe of problems. It does give us plenty of reflection on it, notably in the book of Job, but even there the ultimate answer seems to be ‘Man up and get on with it – God can do what he wants’, which you may or may not think is that helpful. So if we do want to find some kind of answer to the problem of suffering, we need to dig deeper. Psalm 30 is one of the places we might begin our excavations.

The heading probably is not original, and does not refer to the original composition of the Psalm, but is likely to be a liturgical instruction for when it might have been used. In fact the suffering is alluded to, rather than described, so we don’t really know what dire circumstances the psalmist found himself in. It’s almost as if he’s saying that it isn’t the specific circumstances which matter; it is the general principles about how we cope with suffering in the light of God’s purposes. Whether the problem was some severe illness (v.2) or an enemy attack (v.1), or even a rebuke from God himself (v.5) doesn’t seem to matter. So what might some of those principles be?

First of all, he acknowledges that life is a lot smoother when things are going well (v.6-7), and that the temptation to complacency is strong. Even then, though, it is wise to see the good times as precious gifts from God. When that favour and protection seems to slip, dismay is an appropriate response (v.7) I’m very grateful for the times in my life when I haven’t had to ring for the fire engines: I need to learn the discipline of thanksgiving for those times.

Secondly, he realises that suffering will come, and that it might not be all instantly made OK. V.5 isn’t saying, I don’t think, that God’s help is always instant. It’s a realisation that in comparison to the lifelong blessings of God, on the grand scale of things our pain is temporary, a principle echoed by Paul in Romans 8. Following Jesus doesn’t make us immune, but it does give us resources to help, until we reach that day when tears, crying and mourning will be no more, and our resurrection life will seem like waking up from a bad dream.

So is pie in the sky when we die the only real answer to suffering? No, the psalmist says, we have resources for the here and now. The whole tenor of the Psalm is about praise for the God who has delivered him from his sufferings, literally turned things around, rescued him from death and restored joy to him, not after he has died but because he didn’t. As with last week, it is easy to see why the Church reads this as an Easter Psalm. The turning point was that he called out to God (v.2) – the Hebrew word refers to a scream of anguish rather than a polite prayer. There were two results of this cry for help. God rescued him (v.3, 11), and he pledged himself to heartfelt praise (v.1, 12). The suffering evidently restored his perspective, and taught him not to be complacent but to make praise a constant way of life.

But there are two more elements in this Psalm which are worth mentioning. The first is what we might call ‘blackmail’, which sounds bad but is actually a feature of several Psalms, and also of the prayer life of Moses. Here it comes in v.9 – Lord, this my reason for wanting your help, because if you don’t step in you’ll be missing out on my praises. Your reputation will suffer. We may find this idea a bit strange – trying to twist God’s arm so that he’ll do what we want – but we have to acknowledge that it is a common part of OT spirituality. And finally note the corporate elements which come through strongly. Because of what God has done for me, I invite the whole community into worship (v.4). In our individualistic culture we like to keep things to ourselves, but this joyful exclamation of God’s rescue provides an encouragement to the whole community to praise. This is testimony to others as well as praise to God.

One last word – I’m always aware when I write or speak about suffering of the danger of appearing glib, particularly to any in the audience who are weeping in the middle of the night of suffering, and waiting, perhaps for years, for the morning rejoicing to come. This is of course not an attempt to deal with the myriad questions and doubts which plague us during those long dark hours, but rather an affirmation that there will be a rescue, a solution, and accompanying joy, whether in this life or the next, and that from the eternal perspective our current sufferings, awful though they are, will seem as nothing. You might not want to hear that now, but it remains true.

The Mind of Christ

Part 1 – Introduction to Culture

Glossary:

Culture: ‘The way we do things around here’. The unquestioned set of assumptions we have about life and how everything works.

Worldview: The way in which we see the world and understand how it works. Divided into three different areas:

Metaphysics: the big questions about life, the universe and everything. For example: Is there a God or not?

Epistemology: how we know what we know. From where do we get the information to answer the big metaphsyical questions? For example: How do I know where there is a God or not?

Ethics: How should I live well in the light of my metaphysics and my epistemology? What is right and wrong, and what dictates what’s right or wrong. For example: if I conclude that there isn’t a God, because I can’t see any empirical evidence, what does that say about how I should live my life?

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Easter 2 – Psalm 118:14-29

I’m back, fully recovered from Covid and having had a lovely few days in the sun to recuperate. So here I come a-blogging once again, and a-podcasting too, as I begin my new series on ‘Culture and the Mind of Christ’, elsewhere on this website.

I spend a large amount of my time when teaching (and quite a lot in my blogs and podcasts) insisting that OT passages are not simply there to be read as prophecies about the NT, but must be read for what they are, or what they were in their original contexts. My students hear me saying, ad nauseam, that ‘a passage cannot mean anything which the original author did not intend his original hearers to understand from it’. But this Psalm creates some difficulties for that principle, since it is one of the most widely quoted in the NT, and indeed in the Church’s liturgy. So it will be hard to read it without any reference to Jesus and his resurrection, although we must try.

Ps 118 is the final of a series of Psalms, from 113 – 118, known as the ‘Egyptian Hallel’ psalms. The word ‘Hallelujah’ – ‘Praise the Lord’ – appears frequently in this mini-collection, and Rabbinic tradition tells us that these Psalms were all about the first Passover, and were apparently sung by the Israelites as they were escaping from Egypt, although it is very unlikely that they were composed that early. Psalm 118 in particular faces us with two important questions: what is the Psalm’s genre, and who is the ‘I’ who speaks through much of it?

In fact the Psalm shows a wide variety of different genres. It is clearly an act of corporate or national thanksgiving – that theme runs right through it. But there are also elements of invitation to praise (v.1-4, 29), and personal testimony (v.5-14). It is also about confidence in God, by someone who has been in real danger but who has been rescued, but then, in v.19-21 we have what sounds like an entrance liturgy, similar to that found in Ps 24. There is a cry for help in v.25, and a concluding litany of praise, in the context of a procession to the Temple (which would be very anachronistic had the Psalm been composed in time for the Exodus!) So all in all it is a right mess, and it’s really hard to identify it with one specific type of Psalm.

But what a beautiful mess! Maybe that’s why it proved so fruitful to the early Christians when they were reflecting on Jesus’ life and death. The crowds on Palm Sunday (echoed maybe in v.27) quoted from v.26 as they hailed Jesus’ triumphal entry to Jerusalem. But this same Jesus became the rejected cornerstone of v.22 who nevertheless was counted as vitally foundational to the whole edifice of faith. It is likely that this Psalm was associated with the Jewish Passover celebrations, and also with the Feast of Tabernacles, which celebrated the fruitfulness of harvest and the goodness of God, so again it is easy to see how Christians would have come to associate these words with Easter.

But the really perplexing question is about who is speaking in the first person passages. ‘I cried to the Lord’ (v.5) ‘They surrounded me on every side’ (v.11) and so on throughout the Psalm. No doubt the early Christians heard these words as those of their Lord, threatened to the extreme by crucifixion, but rescued by the Father on the third day. But originally they must have reflected the dangers which the nation had faced, and were perhaps voiced by the King as the leader of national celebration. So we come back to where we started – who is this Psalm meant to be for?

I think it is easy for us to degrade the original meaning of OT passages by claiming they are merely prophecies about Jesus (as so often happens with Is 7:14, or with Is 53) and had no real purpose and meaning before the Christians suddenly got it. There is a subtle difference, though, between that approach and Christians finding that the experience of Jesus is so clearly illustrated by ancient words that they couldn’t help but quote them. They saw in Jesus a further example of God’s rescue of the desperate, his bringing of new life and his defeat of evil played out before their eyes in Jesus. This Psalm invites us to put ourselves in the place of the ‘I’ speaker and give thanks for the rescuing power of God, thus renewing our confidence in him.

What have we learnt? Deuteronomy

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Lent 3 – Isaiah 55:1-9

This chapter comes right at the end of Deutero-Isaiah’s call to the exiles in Babylon to prepare to return to Jerusalem, to their home and their rightful place in the home which God had first promised and then given to them. Their own sin and rebellion had cost them this land, but now that has been paid for (40:2) and they are free, hopefully sadder and wiser, to come home. In later Judaism this whole unfortunate episode became more than mere history: it was a powerful symbol of the individual believer’s journey to find rest in God, and of what that final homecoming would be like.

I have recently been teaching a module which contained some comparative religion, taking on the belief of pluralism that it’s all the same God really, and we’re each free to choose our own path and customise our own ‘truth’. In particular we were considering what the idea of ‘heaven’ looked like in different faiths, from merging with the cosmos as a drop of water loses itself in the ocean, to the slightly more basic promise of 72 virgins. Between those two extremes lies Christianity, where heaven is often described as an eternal church service, with endless worship-songs. I must confess on a really bad day I sometimes wonder which I would really choose, given the option! But in fact there is another picture of the afterlife which is very prevalent in the Bible, and which is featured in our passage today – that of the banquet. In fact food and spiritual nourishment are very often to be found together.

The land to which Israel is invited to journey is portrayed in terms of its culinary riches, including milk and honey. When the spies first set foot in the Land they can’t but be overwhelmed by its riches, symbolised in the massive bunch of grapes gathered from Eshcol. In Proverbs 9 two symbolic women, Wisdom and Folly are contrasted, and Lady Wisdom is described as having laid out a huge banquet. She invites anyone who desires her wisdom to come and eat freely. By contrast Folly is portrayed as a slut who invites people to sin and shame. And several times in the book of Isaiah there is a picture of God setting out his buffet and inviting all the nations to come and learn at his table. This imagery continues into the NT, where several of Jesus’ Kingdom parables concern feasting, and where the Eucharist provides an appetiser for the feasting in the Kingdom which is to come at the end of history.

So what exactly is the deal with this food/wisdom/homecoming imagery? What is it about good food which seems to provide such a rich symbol of all the good things which God has for us? How about these suggestion?

Food is essential

That goes without saying, of course. When people are really down on their luck, it can be because they lack the basic fuel for living, as we are seeing daily on our TVs as people in Ukraine continue to be besieged. It has long been a successful military strategy to cut off from people the basic food and drink which we all need. By contrast God has been portrayed as the host at a great all-you-can-eat buffet, whose generosity provides all we need for thriving, including wisdom.

Food is fun

Yes, we need to eat to live, but there is a whole nother level where food becomes a great leisure activity because eating, and often trying new things, can be a lovely experience. Fellow curry fiends might have been through that stage in your life when you set out to discover how far up the heat order you could get. That feeling of my first Phall was truly something I’ll never forget, on several levels! Wisdom it may not have been, but there is something about good food which keeps calling us back for more. Truly wise people how little they really understand, and how much more there is stretching above them.

Food is corporate

Have you ever done this, or is it just us? Friends come to stay. They arrive, unpack, have a cup of tea; you chat, and then finally the evening meal is ready. You sit down, raise your glasses and say ‘Welcome!’ They’ve been here a couple of hours now, but it’s when you sit down to eat together that the stay really starts. That’s a picture of meals as homecomings. Our Eucharists are meant in one sense to be frustratingly small nibbles, because we join in to remember Jesus but also to look forward to the banquet when we shall finally be welcomed fully and completely into the presence of God.

… but be careful!

Whilst this picture of the heavenly banquet is a rich and tempting one, the NT reminds us that this kind of food needs to be consumed carefully. There are a couple of references in 1 Corinthians to the wrong kind of knowledge which merely ‘puffs up’ or bloats us. Jim Packer, in his classic book Knowing God warns us about this wrong kind of feasting, which becomes nothing more than an excuse for sticking in our thumbs and declaring ‘Look what a good boy am I!’ Those of us with teaching gifts constantly need to watch this: ultimately all we receive at God’s bountiful table needs to be geared, as is Is 55, towards inviting others to the feast.

revjohnleachblog will be taking a break for a week or two as I recover from Covid, take a holiday, and have my PhD viva. But in Arnie’s famous words, ‘I’ll be back!’ Keep your eye on social media!

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Lent 2 – Genesis 15:1-21

There are probably many things you want from God, and, I’m guessing, many which you haven’t received, despite your yearning for them, perhaps over many years. But this passage about unanswered prayer isn’t quite in the same league as that. It isn’t just about something Abraham and Sarah wanted: it is about something which God had promised. Back in Genesis 12:7 God had specifically promised a new land for Abraham’s descendants. As far as they were concerned this was nothing short of a promise of a miracle, because they had never been able to have children (Sarah is the first of several significant women in the Bible who were unable to conceive) and now they were getting on and well past the normal child-bearing age.

Genesis 15 begins ‘After these things …’ There had certainly been quite a few ‘things’. Abraham had continued his travels, had lived in Egypt as famine drove him there, had seen Pharaoh plagued, moved into the desert, fell out with Lot, then rescued him. He had met with the mysterious Melchizedek, and disputed with the King of Sodom. He had been through so much, but God’s promise had still not been fulfilled. This is the nature of his interaction with God in our reading. This wasn’t merely about God not answering prayer, or answering it negatively. This was about God breaking his promises. We might from time to time feel peeved because God hasn’t given us something we want, but when he has promised to but then reneged on that promise, things move onto a whole new level of hurt.

It is interesting that God breaks the angry silence, and allows Abraham to speak out his pain. He seems more concerned that a slave will get his inheritance than he does about the lack of a child, but underlying this is a serious beef with God – you promised something to me, so where is it? Or will my slave get it instead of me? What an indignity that would be!

So God reiterates his promise, and spells it out very clearly – your heir will be your natural son, not an adopted one. And Abraham believed him. He chose to believe what God said over the natural circumstances, which is a pretty good definition of faith. All the evidence points one way, but I choose to believe God instead. But then comes the supplementary question: I do believe this, but how can I know? Faith is one thing, but knowing is something very different. I love the somewhat cynical definition of faith as ‘believing what you know isn’t true’, but the saying has a point. How do we turn faith into knowing? That’s the $64,000 question.

Well for Abraham faith moved to knowing because God moved from a promise to a covenant. The Hebrew literally means ‘cutting’ a covenant, and it was the custom then literally to cut an animal in half, and walk through the blood and guts between the two halves. It was a bit like ‘cross my heart and hope to die’. If I ever break this covenant, may I be cut in half just as this animal has been. God, invisible as so often in smoke and fire, passes between the two piles of bloody meat, and makes the solemn deal: I will give all this land to your (I can hear it in italics: your) descendants, all of this land, or I’ll die. At least until the next chapter, where Abraham takes things into his own hands and decides to help God out, he seems satisfied that God’s promise will come to pass.

Our lectionary omits some key verses, 13-16, which it is important that we put back in, because in this prophetic look into the future God subverts any idea that Abraham’s prayer will be answered any time soon. Your offspring will be given this land, but not before 400 years of slavery and oppression. You think you’ve had to wait a long time to have your promised son? Well that’s nothing compared to the wait before this promise of mine comes to birth.

This is a strange passage, but I reckon it does tell us two important truths about unanswered prayer. Sometimes we don’t get what we want so much because God has never said we will get it. That isn’t so much unanswered prayer as unfulfilled wishful thinking. In an age when ‘the word of the Lord is rare’ we find it hard to hear his promises to us, but we can’t complain if something we fancy doesn’t happen. If God hasn’t promised, who are we to ask? But even when we know he has spoken, it’s human nature to want it now. God needs to remind Abraham, and perhaps us too, that he works on a different timescale from us. Frustrating, I know. But a really important lesson for us to learn.

Succession Planning – Numbers 27:12-23

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Lent 1 – Deuteronomy 26:1-11

The last time I preached on this passage I called it ‘Harvest Festivals for Dummies’ or something like that. It was indeed Harvest Festival, and I explained that the passage contained God’s instructions as to how they were to celebrate Harvest, taking their firstfruits to the Temple, saying the creed, offering their gifts to God and rejoicing at his goodness. But why on earth are we reading this during Lent? Surely that’s a time for going without, for being generally mournful, for taking up some extra penitential Bible Study or something. What are we to make of a Harvest Festival passage as we begin Lent? The answer maybe is to remind ourselves that it’s all about grace.

Let’s have a look at those instructions again. Note first that they are for people who have arrived in the Promised Land. This isn’t about the arduous journey (which, by the way, is being explored in my ‘Wilderness Years’ podcasts elsewhere on this blog site). It’s for those who have made it. We often see Harvest Festivals as a great evangelistic opportunity, when those perhaps on the way towards God and faith can be tempted along to church for a more community-focussed event. But for Israel, it was a celebration for those who knew their God, who had journeyed with him for some time, who had some history among his people, and had seen his action in their lives.

Then there is this motif of ‘firstfruits’. Israel would have celebrated two harvest festivals. The first was when the very first of the crops appeared, the second some time later when all was safely gathered in. the second was about thankfulness to God for his provision, but the first was a declaration of faith in God that the full harvest would surely follow the first pickings. We may have settled in the Kingdom; we may know a relationship with God through Jesus, but what we see now is only the very first bits of what we believe God has in store for us. We may have known something of God’s peace, his joy, his presence, his healing, his blessing, but these are the mere tasters for what we believe by faith is coming for those who love him.

Then comes the equivalent of our Creed. We go to the place of worship and declare what God has done for us. It’s corporate (‘We believe …’) rather than individual, and it spans history as well as that answered prayer last week. Creeds are one of the most underrated parts of Anglican worship, I discovered during my research, but they are powerful reminders of the actions of God for us and for our salvation, and a real chance to count our blessings. They also, interestingly, allow us to count our cursings too, as the bad times are remembered along with the good. Slavery and oppression at the hands of Egypt are an important part of the credal statement, because they were important parts of the people’s history. This is no rewriting and whitewashing of history, but faces times of grief along with times of blessing.

Finally the gifts are offered amidst rejoicing, the kind of rejoicing which shows the hospitality of God and welcomes others into our family circle. Whilst this is a great menu for Harvest Festivals, it can also teach us some powerful lessons about the more penitential season of Lent. Of all the seasons of the Church Year, Lent is perhaps the one where we are most likely to feel that it’s up to us. We must stop eating chocolate; we must read the Bible more, or go out on a cold evening to some study group; we must generally try harder. This passage reminds us that we can no more try hard to be better than a farmer can try hard to grow crops. Yes, there is some work to do in preparation, but it is God who gives the growth. Maybe Lent is more about giving thanks for what God has already grown in us, and looking forward to what he will do in the future than it is about trying to make things happen by ourselves. One church leader told his people ‘You’re not sinless, but you are sinning less.’ And maybe it’s about reminding us that all is grace. We don’t deserve it, and we can’t force it, but God is at work in us anyway, and one day, when we arrive and settle in our Promised Land and see him face to face, we’ll realise that it was and always has been about his grace.

Have a grace-filled Lent!

As Zealous for God as he is – Numbers 25