2nd Sunday before Lent, Yr C, St Mark’s, 11.2.07
Gen.2,4b-9, 15-25; [Ps 65]; [Rev 4]; Luke 8.22-25, running a creation
theme.
Alternative Collect: Almighty God, give us reverence for all creation and
respect for every person, that we may mirror your likeness in Jesus Christ our
Lord. (1462-47 = 1415)
The prayer we have prayed today has
outlined our being called to three things: reverence for creation, respect for
people, and to mirror God’s likeness, all three of these as we live in the
Body of Christ. Let’s see if we can put some meat on the bones of these three
things by my telling you a personal story.
Nearly 47 years ago in the summer of 1960 Dorothy and I, with
our baby son Stephen, came to England so that I might start my doctoral studies
at the University of Nottingham. At this point I had been ordained for three
years, and I had become convinced that many people found themselves on the
Christian treadmill with little or no sense of really going anywhere.
So I wanted to find out what the scriptures of the Old and
New Testaments had to say about the role of man in God’s plan: to put it
bluntly, what are people supposed to be good for? Over the years I found three
things, with these three things being related to each other and all of a piece.
By 1962 I had found the first piece: Son of God. This is
Israel’s calling. In Exodus the LORD says to Moses, "Go tell Pharaoh to
let my son go." When I looked at what a son means in the Old Testament,
especially in the family, a number of things became clear.
Firstly, a son is anyone acknowledged as
such by the father, as God’s voice calls Jesus his son at his baptism and as
God has called us in our baptism. This is unlike the Greek and Roman world where
sonship was always thought of in terms of who was the biological father. I think
this explains why in the Book of Acts Jesus is spoken of as Son of God only
twice, and both times by Paul in synagogue where it would be heard with the
Jewish biblical understanding.
Secondly, in Hebrew there is the idiom in
which to say ‘Son of’ means to have the quality of, as a ‘son of iniquity’
is an iniquitous person. Thus Israel’s calling as ‘Son of God’ was to show
forth God’s character as in the book of Leviticus, ‘You shall be holy as I
the LORD your God am holy’. In short, the son is to be a chip off the old
block.
Thirdly, in the family the son was to learn
all things from his father and be obedient to him. In the book of Deuteronomy if
he refused to be obedient to his parents, he was to be stoned to death by what
we might call the town elders. In summary, Israel’s calling, Jesus’ calling,
and our calling as God’s children is to show forth God’s character through
total dependence upon God and obedience to his will. This is why in John’s
gospel we find Jesus saying ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’.
Fourth and finally, to have a child was very
precious. For example, when the rabbis discussed what to do during a famine,
they said, "Make sure there are no more babies so there won’t be more
mouths to feed." But some rabbis made an exception for the childless
couple. They could continue to try for a baby even during a famine - perhaps God
would bless them with a child. When Jacob’s sons need to take Benjamin down to
Egypt, Reuben tells his father that Jacob may kill Reuben’s two sons if he
does not bring Benjamin back safely. Reuben’s sons represent his whole future.
And this shows the depth of meaning of John 3.16: "For God so loved the
world that he gave his only son." – It is this depth of being loved and
valued by God that we entered into when we were baptized and made his children
in Christ.
By the end of 1963 when we were up in County
Durham, where I was curate in charge of a daughter church, I had nailed down the
second piece: the image of God. This morning we have heard the older creation
story in Genesis 2, but it is in the later story in Genesis 1 that God says,
"Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness" and
then says "So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he
created them, male and female he created them." This means that men and
women, boys and girls, equally are the image of God. In the ancient world rulers
would show that they owned and ruled in a territory by setting up a symbol of
this, either a statue of themselves or an inscribed pillar. Thus the Genesis
narrative says that God has created a visible symbol of his ownership and
sovereignty, a symbol that doesn’t simply sit in one place but walks about on
two feet, namely, human beings. Whatever lies around us, wherever we go, belongs
to God for his purposes. With this established, God then gives humankind the
vice-regency over the creation, that is, he puts the whole of creation into our
hands to be used according to his will.
There is a lovely story about Rabbi Hillel
the great Jewish teacher who lived a generation before Jesus. One day he said to
his disciples, ‘I am going to take a bath to the glory of God.’ His
followers were puzzled and asked him how on earth would taking a bath glorify
God. He answered, ‘You know how the Roman emperor’s servants honour him by
washing and polishing his statues, well, I am going to go wash and polish the
image of God.’ We are, indeed, the visible symbols of God’s ownership and
sovereignty.
By 1970 when we were in Lichfield at the
theological college, and I was working with our students on Paul’s first
letter to the Corinthians, I began to grasp the third item when I asked myself
why Paul says, "Look at you brothers and sisters. When you were called not
many of you were wise, powerful or wellborn." I kept working on this
question while we were in India until I had fully answered it and I have been
dotting the ‘eyes’ and crossing the ‘tees’, so to speak, ever since. In
fact, I preached on this here at St Mark’s almost exactly a year ago today. In
brief, what I ended up with was an ancient and very widespread
wise/powerful/well-born model for human beings that runs through the whole of
the Old Testament.
Thus, for example,
in the 8th century BC the prophet Isaiah, speaking of God’s coming
judgement says (3.1-2): 'For behold, the Lord, Yahweh of hosts, is taking away
from Jerusalem and from Judah stay and staff, the whole stay of bread and the
whole stay of water [there goes the well-being] the mighty man and the man of
war [there goes the power] the judge and the prophet, the diviner and the elder’
[there goes the wisdom].
In the same
century the prophet Micah addresses every individual human being in terms of
power, wisdom and well-being when he says, "What does the LORD your God
require of you but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your
God?" (6.8).
This
three-fold pattern of wisdom, power and well-being runs through the Old
Testament and straight into the New, and it is used by Paul, Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John to present who Jesus is and what our calling is in Christ.
For example, in Mark Jesus is given
well-being when God calls him his son at the baptism, he is the one given
wisdom, at the transfiguration on the mount when God tells the disciples to heed
him, and he is powerful in his powerlessness in the cross when the
representative of Roman might, the centurion, says, "Truly, this man was
God’s Son".
Every time the emphasis is
again and again that these qualities come only through dependence upon God, as
Jesus has depended upon the Father.
And so back to
today’s prayer:
As God’s image
in Christ we stand before the creation as mirrors and ministers of his shalom,
his peace and good order. As God’s sons and daughters in Christ we are to show
forth to all people God’s love, his very nature. And we can do this only as we
grow, in deepening dependence upon God’s love, into that fullness of humanity
that we see in Christ Jesus.