N.T. Wright - Paul and The Cross

tom is going to talking a little bit about and some Paul's mooning having spoken about the Gospels so I thought I'd do a flag book for his slight tone Jesus and the faithfulness of God it's just like my friend and use this to prop up Herman or is there in a terrible rush of blood to the head there will be a Brookstone where this evening with some of the tongues but they can reinforce table with summertime's person said oh we just buy some there and you might be able to persuade them to sign that one or two of them have this evening so that's pretty for this evening and I will just hand over to Tom bring this back to a reasonable height thank you yes I remember when when we moved when we moved back to Oxford in 1986 Worcester College bought a house in South Moore Road where Maggie and I and our four children then lived and I remember talking to Mike on the phone and saying it's a very tall thin house and Mike instantly responded there's nothing wrong with being tall and thin so there we are just switching one machine off so that hopefully it won't interrupt the other machines there we are join me will you in a moment of Prayer gracious father we thank you again for the privilege of being able to meet and study in freedom and delight to open your word without fear of people attacking us for doing so we pray that we will be able by your spirit to use this gift these gifts to your glory and that you'll give us wisdom especially as we wrestle with tricky and difficult texts full of wonderful but challenging meaning that you'll give us minds to think and to understand and hearts to love and wills to obey in Jesus name Amen I want just to recap a little what I said yesterday because as I looked back in my mind's eye a sea of rather dazed faces as I was somebody said it's like drinking from a garden hose yesterday well maybe just try to sum up where we got to before we then move into Paul and I've done it deliberately this way around because so many treatments of atonement jump straight into Paul and Paul in categories of what's supposed to be poor line categories and only just glance at the Gospels one or two books that I've seen recently which really don't use the Gospels at all for the study of the meaning of the cross and that just seems to me extraordinary this is half of the New Testament and it's full as we saw yesterday of all sorts of fascinating meaning so I want just to come back and try and draw that together again and then move on into Paul so we saw yesterday something of of the power but also the puzzle of the cross the cross undoubtedly has a power whether we can get a theory for that or not across cultures the fact of the crucifixion and the story of Jesus death is just astonishingly powerful last summer I think it was at the promenade concert some of you will know in London the proms which I think started last night some day they start around now in London these wonderful classical music concerts which run right through from late June through to early September and night after night after night packing or audiences and there they're basically cheap and you can go and you can stand with try the promenade concerts or you can sit and world-class music give you last year I think it was they did a staged version of Matthew's passion by JS Bach with a wonderful American director whose name just escapes me at the moment but who stages and they interviewed him on Radio 3 as a sort of interval talk in this Matthew Passion and without saying I'm a Christian and this is why I'm doing this and I still didn't know for the man is a Christian or not he talked very movingly about the way in which this story like no other story draws together the pain and the puzzle of being human in this world and somehow holds on to it in a way which enables people to gain hope and new possibilities and I thought even if you kind of secularized the story a bit like that that's still a recognition a kind of a hat tip from somebody in the theatrical and musical profession to the fact that you can look around all the other plots all the other narratives even Luke Skywalker and all that stuff but actually Matthew Mark Luke and John the way they tell that story and the way then Johann Sebastian Bach holds on to that translates it into this extraordinary music it's just so powerful that generation after generation come back to us again walking down lorem Gardens this morning I passed the house where my old philosophy tutor used to live and he's a lifelong atheist but every year he used to sing in the passion choir that would put that would sing the Matthew Passion in the Oxford town hall and no particular explanation for that it's just that he find finds and found that an amazingly powerful dori even though as a good Oxford philosopher he was holding on to his atheism for dear life as it were and so that the story has this power but it's often distorted and I suggested yesterday that we have distorted the story of the cross in a variety of different ways and I suggested particularly that we've done this because we have platon eyes our eschatology I wrote that phrase in one of the early drafts of the book on which these lectures are based and my editor said you can't just say that you have to explain what you mean by Platon izing our eschatology and what I mean is that instead of looking at new heavens and new earth something which is like the present world only more so only richer and fuller and more vivid and alive and solid and concrete we have settled for those dreamy pictures about disembodied souls sitting on clouds somewhere I don't know how a disembodied soul plays a harp but that's what people sort of imagine and but people often talk about a timeless world a world beyond space and matter a world where we live left the body behind and simply be pure disembodied spirits or whatever that's what I mean by succumbing to Plato's philosophy rather than to the biblical philosophy of the new heavens and the new earth and that's so deep in our culture in a lot of our hymns in a lot of our popular discourse and people just naturally assume I did after I wrote surprised by hope I was invited to go on the Stephen Colbert Report which those of you in America will know I mean we British a very rude about you Americans we often say that America suffers from an irony deficiency Colbert and Colbert actually was putting the irony back into American culture and it was clear that when he was asking me about life after death and all that even though he'd read the book and he's a very smart guy he was still in his questions lurching back into a question into the language of when I get to heaven or all of that sort of thing and it's just really hard to pull the popular culture round to say we mustn't do that and the result of platon izing our eschatology is that we have this is perhaps even trickier we have moralized our and apology we have said if we are going to be a pure disembodied soul going to be in the presence of God then we have done things that are wrong we have not jumped over the high moral bar that God set us and therefore we don't deserve to be there and so the whole thing about being human gets reduced to have I earned enough moral points to get in and if I haven't what happens about that who takes my punishment or where do I get some fresh moral standing status from and it seems to me of course human behavior matters enormously but just as that Platonic eschatology has displaced the biblical vision of new tech new heavens new earth so the over moralized anthropology turning the question of what it means to be human simply into the question of have I behaved well or badly that distorts and distracts attention from the biblical vision which is of vocation the vocation to be image bearers the vocation to reflect God's glory and stewardship into the world and to reflect the praises of creation back to God now of course if we are being image bearers then of course we will be worshiping the God in whose image were made and we will be behaving accordingly appropriately but what so much of the Western Christian tradition has done is to take the behavioural element and try to make that the whole thing so that the whole thing becomes about me my behavior whether I've done well or badly and if so then what and so on so we've platon eyes dart eschatology we've moralized our anthropology and as a result we have been in danger of and I think actually sometimes we have paganized our soteriology what do I mean by that I didn't spell that out yesterday in the ancient world okay this is heavy for a first thing on Tuesday morning but but it but you you are of age you can take it and in the ancient world there are many many stories about a god or a goddess being angry with somebody or with an expedition or with a city and what the person or the the expedition or the city do is they offer a sacrifice to appease the anger of the god half of Europe ADIZ plays turn on this point it's there in Homer it's there all the way through classical culture and there are many many examples if you want to follow that up Martin Hengel z' book the atonement has a whole string of them and the fascinating thing is as you read these stories of people doing something killing somebody to appease an angry god you realize that yet this is actually where a lot of Christians slide into without even realizing this is a pagan idea not a not a native Old Testament idea the the closest you might get in the Old Testament is of course Isaiah 53 the the sort the forth servant song but the forth servant song is not about an angry malevolent God who's out to get you and so demands blood and so it might as well be this person the whole of Isaiah 42 55 is about the God of Israel as the great sovereign lover of his people and of creation who then is determined to rescue his people and his whole creation and who therefore comes himself in the person of this strange figure of the servant to do for Israel and the world what Israel and the world cannot do for themselves so that to take that as our 53 out of its context in Isaiah 40 to 55 and make it part of a totally different narrative a narrative about a bullying or malevolent God who's angry with people and determined to lash out and he just happens to hit on this person rather than the rest of us that is what I mean by pagan izing our soteriology and again I will say I know that most theologians and most preachers will say well I never preached it like that and again I answer no but that is what a lot of people have heard and particularly when preachers allow themselves the luxury of producing illustration of trying to illustrate this this truth they will often lapse into little narratives which somehow give that impression of this angry domineering bullying God and since that is as I said yesterday an image which is sadly all too familiar from other aspects of many different cultures not any Western culture it's one into which we naturally fall so we've played on eyes Darras khatallah gee we've moralized our anthropology and we've therefore paganized our soteriology and what i'm trying to do it without undermining the things that the bible most truly does say we'll come to some of the detail of that tomb is to tell the biblical story in which we do have a loving powerful wise God and we do have Jesus himself giving himself out of love for sinners and what we've done then is we have focused on what I call this this works contract I'm not going to use the phrase covenant of works because that is too good a phrase I think to to carry what I'm trying to say we've made it simply a deal which God has struck with humans you're supposed to be morally well behaved guess what you haven't been and so God is going to do this funny mechanism with Jesus and somehow that's alright and that as I say is a low-grade distortion of the vocation to be the royal priesthood and that in Revelation 5 remember which I quoted yesterday that the whole celebration of what Jesus did on the cross is to make humans back into the royal priesthood for which they were made royal that is sharing the stewardship of the Creator God over his world because God made his world to work properly when humans are in charge of it but the humans who are to be in charge of it are the humans who will be worshiping the true God and so able to reflect his image the royal priesthood is the true vocation and what holds us back from this therefore is not just sin but idolatry and this is really really important because if you moralize your anthropology it simply becomes a question of here's a bunch of rules have I kept them or not on how many and so what and so on whereas in the Bible sin is what happens when you're worshiping gods and goddesses other than the one true God when basically you're worshiping parts of creation forces as we call them within creation rather than giving your total allegiance to the one God and the problem then is not just that idolatry is a special kind of sin but as I said yesterday when you worship anything whether it's money or sex or power or whether it's some other person or some being or some company or whatever it is when you're worshiping anything other than the God in whose image you're made you give to that force that power that subhuman part of creation the power which you yourself ought to be exercising as part of your royal priesthood you make it over to the powers and the powers will say thank you very much and they will take over and they will then rule you so that you find yourself living in ways which actually you think why am I doing this this is not really how I should be whatever because you've been worshiping that which is not God and when whole societies do this it becomes exceedingly dangerous and if those of us who've lived through half a twentieth century don't recognize that then we've been blind indeed because it's been awful lot of it around and so the problem again and again the problem is not we've sinned oh dear how do we get to heaven well fortunately Jesus died so now it's all right the problem is that God wants to restore his creation God's plan is to make his creation thrill with his own outpoured love and life and to do that through why is renewed restored worshiping human beings and the question of the cross is how does the cross deal with that total problem of idolatry and sin and in the Gospels as we saw yesterday we see the whole story of creation and the whole story of Israel rushing together at this one point the story of how Israel's narrative comes to its goal the story of how evil somehow gathered together in one spot remember that quotation of Psalm 2 in Acts chapter 4 Herod and Pilate symbolizing the whole wickedness of human pagan rule gathering together to do whatever God's plan had purposed to take place there's a deep mystery there obviously but then particularly it's the story of how Israel's God Himself is revealed in power in glory and above all in love that's the story John's Gospel tells so vividly of how the word became flesh and dwelt among us tabernacled in our midst and we gazed upon his glory this is what it looked like when Israel's God came back in person and as I meant to say yesterday but didn't but to sum it up Jesus drawing together his own vocation on the night he was going to be betrayed Jesus wanting to explain to his followers what his death was going to mean he didn't give them a theory he gave them a meal he didn't give them a theory he gave them a meal and the meal carries the theory but the meal is the thing is the reality which the theory helps you understand rather than the other way around and so often in Western thought of the last few hundred years we have assumed that the real thing is to hold the right thoughts in your head and the meal is just a trigger to help you do that well I'm all in favor of right thoughts goodness I'm an academic I'm a theologian that's what was supposed to be about is thinking thoughts clearly but one of the thoughts that we have to think clearly is that thought is not enough this is about real human life because it's about God and creation the real world and so Jesus quasi Passover meal becomes a meal which is also about the forgiveness of sins as I said yesterday these two strands are drawn together and we see that specifically in to go back there one more time Isaiah 42 55 where this vision of Israel's sins being dealt with so exile being over so Yahweh Israel's God coming back in glory with the valleys being filled in and the mountains flattened and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it you know I had sung in Handel's Messiah dozens of times before I ever thought what's that passage about and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and it's about Israel's God himself coming back in person and in power to do everything that is required how is that what's that going to look like when it happens I quoted yesterday as I 52 six following your Watchmen lift up their voices and shout for joy because in plain sight they see Yahweh returning to Zion but then as that great poem of Isaiah 4255 develops we get the picture of the servant the Serb behold my servant Israel in you I will be glorified but Israel as a whole has failed and there's a tension in the poem because Israel is the servant and yet now the servant seems to be one who stands over against Israel because Israel as a whole can't do it until finally we realize that this servant seems to be one person doing solo what no one else could do but there's another theme which runs in parallel with that in Isaiah 42 55 which is the arm of Yahweh the arm of the Lord God's powerful arm behold the Lord comes with power and his arm will rule for him and he will feed his flock like a shepherd gather the Lambs in his arm and gently he'll lead lead the mother sheep the arm of the Lord is both powerful and loving and we'll do it's a way of talking about God doing in person what needs to be done and the Lord has made bear his holy arm he's rolled up his sleeves to do what needs to be done until again this theme comes to its climax in Isaiah 53 who would have thought says 53 1 that he was the arm of the Lord the theme of the powerful rescuing restoring arm of Yahweh and the theme of Israel as Yahweh's servant somehow seemed to merge together again that blessed theological words because because this is this is poetry of course and it's not spelled out because like so much of the Bible it gives us in poetic form something that forces us to do some work to figure out what's going on but it is as though that's another great theological phrase it is as though these strands of meaning finally come together and what is promised that Yahweh will do himself with the Watchmen shouting for joy because they see em returning to Zion is the same thing as what the servant will do in suffering and dying and being wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities and so on and the results the results in Isaiah 54 is immediately the renewal of the Covenant and as as i-55 is immediately the renewal of creation that instead of the thorn will come up the myrtle the reversal of the curse of Genesis 3 the reversal of the curse on the vineyard in Isaiah 5 it's just such an extraordinary poem Isaiah 42 55 I sometimes um set it almost like a doctor prescribing medication when people email me as they do and say they've got this problem or these depressions or whatever and I always say to them I cannot be your pastor at long distance if you have suffering from this you need to find somebody close to who can look you in the eye and sit with you and weep with you and pray with you but I often say but if you want somewhere to start just try reading Isaiah 40 to 55 straight through and then do it again tomorrow and then do it again the next day do it every day for a month and just see what it will do to you because there are depths of power and meaning in that poem which are like few other passages at least in the Old Testament so what we're dealing with in the Gospels is the retrieval of all this extraordinary Old Testament theology in the form of the narrative of Jesus of Nazareth a retrieval of a story which is about this one human man but is about the story of Israel coming to its climax the story of evil doing its worst and the story of Yahweh Israel's God doing what it almost always promised and that story takes the form of a pass of a narrative which is also an atonement narrative do you see how all this comes together and how actually musical and poetic illustrations are probably the only way to do this in one of the things as a writer I'm always jealous of musical composers because as a writer it's very difficult to say more than one thing at a time you know one wants to but you just have to say it sequentially one thing then another thing than another thing if you're a composer you can actually make them all work at the same time like the end of Mozart's Jupiter symphony where all the themes come rushing together and you realize the whole symphony has been concentrated into this moment sorry if you don't know that but it's always impressed me with just the sheer ability of music to say so much simultaneously in which flat prose just just can't can't do it so with all of that as a lengthy introduction and recapitulation I want to turn to Paul and I'm well aware that there are many other passages of the New Testament which we could look at we could do a whole week whole month on Hebrews we could do a whole week on 1st Peter we could spend more time in in the book of Revelation and we could obviously spend much more time than we have done in the Gospels but I want to look at Paul's letters and the first thing I want to say and when we get to Roman's which now look so it's going to be in the next hour I've got some handouts of text because I'm very much aware that even if you have brought a Bible with you which probably not very many of you have sitting in these little seats with these little desks that you have trying to take notes and hold a Bible on your lap is awfully difficult so we'll give these we'll give these out when we get to Roman's but I want to give you a bird's eye view of some of the key moments in Paul's theology of the cross and in this are to try at least to cover some of the main bits from Galatians and elsewhere every time Paul talks about the death of Jesus he says it's slightly differently he doesn't have one formula which he puts on again and again and again like an old gramophone record he he is always making a particular point arguing a particular case and it's remarkable when you think that this is going on within 25 years of Jesus crucifixion though way in which the cross becomes that the narrow gap through which his theology keeps on passing whatever it is he's talking about he comes back through the cross as it were and out the other side and for Paul it's quite clear again and again the goal of the whole thing is new creation with renewed humans playing their full part within that new creation Paul never talks about people going to heaven when they die the closest he comes Philippians 1 when he says my desire is to depart and be with the Messiah which is far better but by the end of Philippians 3 it's clear that the real goal is when Jesus restores the whole creation and gives his people new bodies to live within that new creation and this is of course the great climax of Romans 8 which we'll get to later and all of this is attained by the death and resurrection of Jesus and as we quoted yesterday first Corinthians 15:3 the Messiah died for our sins in accordance of the Scriptures he was buried he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and was seen by people and so on so died for our sins what does that mean it's easy to say what did that mean and how did they get to that point as it were it's interesting that later on in 1st Corinthians 15 in verse 17 following he says if the Messiah is not raised your faith is futile and you are still in your sins that's a very interesting line particularly because it sounds almost as oats a throwaway remark which reveals to us how Paul's mind works when it comes to the cross and the resurrection because if Jesus has not been raised then death has not been conquered but if death has not been conquered we have no reason for supposing that his death actually dealt with sins but if if if he was raised from the dead then this can only be because the power of death has been taken away which must mean that the power of in itself has been broken because of the inextricable nexus between sin and death and let me say it again in another way it isn't that sin is so horrible that God wants to kill people for it it's that sin is a way of saying with your whole person I don't actually want to be an image bearing human being I don't want to be the genuine article the real human the royal priest that I'm supposed to be I don't want to be like that I'm turning away from the source of life and I'm trying to get energy from for my humaneness what remains of it from other sources so that there's an ontological link between sin and death when you worship that which is not God you're humaneness deconstructs bit by bit little by little if you continue to worship that which is not God your humanist will deconstruct more and more completely so that sin and death are not related in the way that an arbitrary lawgiver says if you do X Y & Z then I will punish you by giving you this fine or imprisoning you for a week or whatever it's not like that there's an ontological relationship but if the Messiah has been raised this is the sign that his death really was for sins so that the resurrection is the seal on the dying for sins message at the beginning of the gospel Messiah died for our sins and therefore later in 1st Corinthians 15 first Corinthians 15 22 28 if the Messiah has been raised as the firstfruits of those who fallen asleep in other words as the beginning of the general resurrection Jesus is raised first and then all his people are raised later when he comes back that's that's how Paul puts it the Messiah the beginning and then at his coming at his parasya those who belong to him will be raised then this means that his victory which he's won is ultimately going to be the victory over all the forces of darkness ultimately death itself death is the last enemy and the last enemy will be destroyed and that's first Corinthians in a way first Corinthians 15:22 28 is one of those passages which I say to students this is pretty much a summary of a whole lot of Paul's theology each time Paul summarizes things as I say it does come out differently but first Corinthians 15:22 28 is pretty close up and it's couched in terms of the Messianic battle Paul is drawing on Psalm 8 Psalm 110 echoes of son - just these are some of his favorite Psalms by the way and again and again I hope when you read Paul you take Richard Hayes's advice to heart in his famous book echoes of Scripture and the letters of Paul if you just have a one-liner of a quote from Scripture go back and read the whole passage read the whole psalm read the whole of that chapter of Isaiah or Genesis or whatever it is because when you do that you'll find that Paul is drawing down again and again that whole Psalm that whole chapter with this one allusion these are not just proof texts and so Paul has in his mind this theme of the Messianic victory from those great Psalms which speak of the son of David who is also the son of God which speak of the Lord saying to my lord sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool which speaks in Psalm 8 of what it was a human beings that you made them little lower than the Angels to crown them with glory and honor putting all things in subjection under their feet Paul sees this image of the Messiah and the image of the true human being coming true in Jesus he is the one that God had in mind when he made Adam and Eve in His image in the first place he is the one God had in mind when he saw through the prophet Samuel the youngest of Jesse's sons and said here is a man after God's own heart this is this is the one anoint him so that the call of Adam and Eve to be the Royal priests the image bearers the call of David to be the ruler the shepherd of God's people were vocations designed ultimately for God's own use it seems to me that there's actually a deeply Trinitarian meaning going on all through all through this passage 1st Corinthians 15 but many many other passages as well and Paul is retrieving these Psalms and retrieving also echos of Daniel 7 in that passage and retrieving ultimately the vision of Genesis 1 and 2 itself that this is how the Creator God is going to restore his whole creation by abolishing death itself and that's why we are not platanus --tz-- that's why we believe in the goodness of creation and the fact that it's going to be restored now of course I've started with first Corinthians I've jumped into the middle with that because it's such a vivid demonstration of how for Paul the cross dealing with sin doesn't mean therefore we go to heaven it means therefore you are part of God's new creation and you have your role to play within that and that's why at the end of first Corinthians 15 that long chapter about the resurrection he doesn't say therefore sit back and put your feet up because you've got a glorious hope he says therefore get on with your work because you know that in the Lord it is not in vain in other words the resurrection hope means that what we do in the present as rescued by the cross sin forgiven image bearing human beings is somehow already part of God's new creation in ways we can't imagine and in my book surprised by hope I've used the image of the stonemasons in the in the cathedral yard who are told to carve this bit of stone this way and the stonemason is probably a literate doesn't know how the whole of the architecture of the cathedral is working but one day the master Mason will come and gather up all those stones and put them up there on the west front or whatever and the stonemason will see the little bit that he was carving and realize that it means far more than he could possibly have imagined because it's part of this great design that the architect has had all along therefore Paul says get on with your work because in the Lord it is not in vain and all this depends on the fact that the Messiah died for our sins he died for our sins not so that we could escape the world but so that we could be you in humans within the world so that we can be God's royal priesthood and all that I've started at the end of first Corinthians or near the end but it's rooted of course in 1st Corinthians 1 verse 18 first Corinthians 1 verses 22 to 25 the word of the Cross is folly to those who are perishing but to us who are being saved it is the power of God why so because God has chosen to do things the other way round remember I quoted mark 10 yesterday where Jesus says to James and John lists and the rulers of this world do it one way by bossing and bullying people we're gonna do it the other way anyone who is great must be your servant this is the deep truth which makes the sense of the Cross that for Paul God chose not those who are wealthy and those who are noble born etc but those who are weak and nothing and shameful in the world's eyes to put the strong to shame because the weakness of God is more powerful than human strength and the wisdom of God is more the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom and so in the cross Paul sees this extraordinary reversal of all the ways that the world normally works a reversal of idolatry a reversal of normal human power systems the message of the Cross and the fact of the Cross stands in the middle of human history Paul says as a sign that God's way is different from the way we've run the world and it's God's weakness the power of self giving love and that's why 1st Corinthians 2 verses 6 to 8 he talks about the Cross as the victory over the powers he says the rulers of this age didn't understand this of course they didn't it wasn't the way that rulers then all rulers today even haven't helped us Christian rulers today we still lapse into the world's pagan ways of doing power and Paul says if the rulers of this age had understood this they would never have crucified the Lord of glory because crucifying him was signing their own death warrant as he says in Colossians we'll come back to that so pan back from first corinthians and come with me to galatians and you may not be able to remember all of galatians by heart but i would just give you a couple of couple of lines from galatians galatians is short enough for you to learn by heart come on I mean if you were acting in a play you'd learn easily that amount of stuff okay some some of us are not as young as we were and it's easier to remember things than you're young but still some of you here are young and you've still got time learn this down please soak yourself in it make sure you get a good translation or learn is in Greek of course and so Galatians Galatians 1:4 Galatians 1:4 I think Galatians was the first of Paul's letters that we've got to be written I can't prove that but even if I'm wrong Galatians is has this feel of something very fresh and very dangerous and very contested and very very you know what word to use sort of almost brittle that this community is about to go crash and to make a devastating mistake because in Galatia which I take to be in southern Turkey the cities like Akoni Amman Derbe and Lystra which Paul visits in acts 13 and 14 then Paul has preached the gospel and they the people have come to faith and the Holy Spirit has been at work and then some Jewish emissaries of one sort or another have come and they've said well Paul gave you one bit of it but actually if you're going to be part of God's people you must of course get circumcised because that's what the Covenant is all about it's becoming physically part of the family of Abraham and Galatians is written to say absolutely not and the main reason for the absolutely not is the cross is the cross of the Messiah and again in Galatians the cross is not about this is how your sins get forgiven so you can go to heaven it says this is how God has dealt with your sins so that you can be this truly human community this true family of Abraham these people who stand to inherit God's promises and God's promises and inheritance as I said yesterday are not about something called heaven they're about God's whole new creation so Galatians 1:4 Galatians 1 3 and 4 the opening greeting grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father that's a hugely important verse he gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age according to the will of God our Father this is the great plan of God the Creator which Paul sees overarching everything else and these two things go together so many theological traditions have split them up he gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age the representative substitutionary death of the Messiah has affected a release from the powers of evil the present evil age to say it again is seen by Jews then and subsequently in the in the rabbi's as the present time of history when the powers of this world are ruling and everything is bad and it's all dark and deadly and then one day God will launch the new age the age to come ha Olam haba as opposed to ha olam has EV the present age and then everything will be different then justice and peace will fill the earth then there will be new life and so on and the whole message of Paul is that in Jesus and his death and resurrection the new age has come to birth so that the ages overlap and we are living in this overlap of the ages between the inauguration of the new creation with the resurrection of Jesus and the final time back to first Corinthians 15 when he returns to set all things right and to raise his people from the dead so he gave himself for our sins because as we were stressing yesterday if the powers are to be defeated then sin has to be dealt with because the grip that the powers have over us individually corporately globally cosmically is the grip precisely because we have given them our power and so have sinned and our sins keep them in power but if the power of sin has been broken then the powers of the present evil age have been overthrown and the church is supposed to be the people who celebrate that victory and who in their worship and their witness and their life particularly celebrate it say it again the fact that now we live in the new age the age to come overlapping with the present age and we feel that overlap and that tension in our own lives and our own struggles after holiness and unity and the church and the suffering that comes with that and I'll say more about that later God willing and then from Galatians 1:4 we turn over to the end again and again when you look at the beginning and the ending of of many books you can see how the whole thing holds together Galatians 6 verses 14 to 16 Galatians 6 well 1116 see what large letters I make when I'm writing in my own hand it's those who want to make a good show in the flesh that try to compel you to be circumcised so that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ even they don't obey the law they just want to boast about your flesh and then verses 14 15 and 16 this is the verse that that famous hymn when I survey the wondrous cross was was based on may I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world for neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything but a new creation is everything and those who follow this rule peace and mercy upon them even upon the Israel of God so here we have it the Cross is the means to new creation it's not the means to an escape from creation it's the means to rescuing humans from their sin so that then the world itself can be set free from its corruption and decay there's a straight line from there into Romans chapter 8 and so when we come in from either end of Galatians to the middle Galatians is quite a nice example of this but there are many books that work this way look at the beginning look at the end and then look at something which seems to be at the heart we find Galatians 4:1 2:7 which again is a statement a short narrative of what's happened on the cross Galatians 4:1 2:7 Paul is telling a little Exodus story you need to learn how to recognize exodus narratives Passover narratives because they're all over the place in the New Testament some people some scholars say I just don't see it but I'm here you have a story about slaves and God then waiting til the time is right and coming to redeem these slaves and he redeems them so that they can become sons and if their sons then they are heirs my friends this is an exodus story's exactly what happens in the book of Exodus Israel is my son my firstborn Israeli are slaves in Egypt God redeems them from their slavery in Egypt so that they will be his sons indeed and they will inherit their promised land and so he says when the fullness of time had come god this is verse 4 of chapter 4 God sent his son born of a woman born under the law in order to redeem those under the law so that we might receive the adoption as children sons I say sons because that then I know we try to say children rather than sons because we want to make it clear this is gender inclusive but it's imposed Greek it resonates so closely with the fact of Jesus as the Son and hence us as the Jesus people and because you are sons God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts crying Abba Father so you are no longer slaves but sons and if sons then as through God and so this is the story of the cross held just as Jesus himself held it within a Passover narrative the enacted Passover narrative of God doing at last the utter reality towards which even the first Passover itself was an advanced signpost and remember what happened with that first Passover they were rescued from Egypt in order that the Tabernacle in the wilderness could be set up in order that God could come and dwell with his people and lead them to their inheritance and here we have exactly the same thing in this Trinitarian exposition that God the Holy Spirit comes to dwell in our hearts to lead us to our inheritance and so Paul says just like in Egypt this is the revelation of the true God over against the pagan gods in Galatians 4 8 to 11 formerly you were enslaved to beings that by nature are no gods here you have you see you've given them your power you've given it away you're enslaved to these forces within God's world that have been worshipped by humans but now he says you've come to know God or rather to be known by God it's not your knowledge of God that matters ultimately it's God's knowledge of you um how can you then turn back again to those weak and beggarly elements that's a whole other discussion that you want to be enslaved again I'm afraid that my work for you may have been wasted and so he's saying in effect either you have this Passover narrative with the God who sends the son to redeem you and who sends the spirit of the son to guide you to your inheritance either you have that Trinitarian Passover narrative or you have some form of paganism and that again and again has been sadly the problem that the church is faced not necessarily with the problem that the Galatians had about shall we or shall we not get circumcised but this it's hard to tell this narrative wisely and truly and to be shaped as a community by it it's easier to slide back into some form or another of different types of paganism and behind Galatians 4 1 to 7 I'm obviously not giving you a consecutive exposition from chapter 1 to chapter 6 that will be fun but for another occasion and but behind that we have chapter 3 which is all about the way in which the Abrahamic promises have come true Paul wants to say to them you do not have to get circumcised to belong to the family of Abraham because Abraham's promises the promises God made Abraham have come true in the messiah and if you belong to the messiah then you are Abraham's family as according to the promise and in the middle of that a very contested passage Galatians 3:10 2:14 focused on verse 13 Paul talks about the curse many theologians worrying about how to what to say about the cross have gone to Galatians 3:13 where he says the Messiah became a curse for us because it is written cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree and many many sermons and lectures and expositions of the cross have been given taking that out of context and making it mean we're sinners so we have the curse hanging over us the law says you're cursed fortunately Jesus stood in the way took the curse so that now he's shown that the law was actually wrong and the law can be taken away and we're free free from the guilt and penalty and power of sin but that's not the argument that Paul is making that's a classic example of taking the cross out of the sequence of thought in which it's found in the New Testament and putting it in a different narrative entirely what is Paul's narrative it's the narrative of the Torah which comes to its climax in Deuteronomy 27 to 30 Deuteronomy 27 to 30 says very starkly to Israel okay here's the Covenant it's about blessing and cursing if you follow the way that God is leading then you will be blessed and it's a wonderful picture in Deuteronomy 27 but if you don't if you worship other gods and serve them then the curse will come upon you and you'll be cursed in multiple different ways and the ultimate curse will be exile and you will be sent away from your land like Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden of Eden and then Deuteronomy 30 says but there if you return to the Lord with all your heart and mind and soul he will then restore you and so on so Paul is channeling that covenantal narrative and the narrative of the curse in particular in order to say okay God made promises to Abraham that he would save the world through his family in you and in your seed all of families of the earth will be blessed but what's happened to those promises is that the story of Israel has got stuck it's got log-jammed into this curse how other promises going to get out to the world and he says the Messiah has come to the place where Israel had failed the Messiah has come to the point where the curse was meted out the Messiah became a curse for us not in order that we might go to heaven but in order first 14 that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the nations and that we that Stew's might receive the promise of the Spirit that's the Covenant renewing spirit through faith in other words the cross means what it means within the narrative of the Torah the prophets and the writings within the narrative which says God promised to rescue the world through Israel but Israel was deeply ambiguous because as I said yesterday it was not only the promise bearing people but was instantiated the problem with in itself and the Messiah's death means what it means not within this abstract moralistic scheme of thought but within the Israel narrative which has now come to its final fruition and working back through Galatians one of the all-time great Pauline statements of the meaning of the Cross in Galatians two 11 to 21 Paul recounts for the benefit of the Galatians his version of the contratar in Antioch between himself and Peter which was Paul says all about the cross because Peter is saying because some people had come from James and put the fear of God or at least of James into him and that Peter was saying that you can't sit down if you're a circumcised Jew even if you're a Christian you can't sit down and eat with uncircumcised Gentiles even if they're Christians as well you have to have two different tables two different families because we are law-abiding law observant Jews and Paul tells the story of what happened on the cross in terms of his own autobiography not in order to say that he was special or experience was paradigmatic and everyone should have had a Damascus Road experience or something but to say this is what it means when the Messiah was crucified that Israel as a whole dies with the Messiah and rises again into a new sort of life Galatians chapter 2 verses 18 19 vs. 19 20 21 through the law I died to the law so that I might live to God I have been crucified with the Messiah nevertheless I live not all translations get that right the Greek is xoda nevertheless I am Alive there is a new sort of life and it is not my life it is the Messiah living in me and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me he brings it right down to this personalized love he loved me and gave himself for me that's one of the most vivid statements anywhere in Paul of the meaning of the Cross and therefore he says verse 21 I don't know if I the grace of God because if righteousness covenant membership status in God's family comes through the law the Messiah's death was an irrelevance he died for nothing he didn't need to die Paul is there summing up in this vivid personal way what he believes happened on the cross that the whole of human history the whole of Israel's history came down to this Jesus took that entire history and died under it's dead weight in order then in resurrection to launch God's project of new creation and Paul is saying to the Galatians as he said to Peter and if you want to keep the old categories of Jew and Gentile you are saying in effect that nothing was achieved on the cross you're saying that the Messiah didn't need to die because Jews were actually doing fine as they were maybe he needed to die for Gentiles but not for everybody else no the Messiah died as Israel's representative to draw on to himself the shame and the pain of the whole world so Galatians is one of the most vivid statements anywhere of these rich meanings of the cross and no doubt one can put them all into a framework and I've tried to do that in a way but they mean what they mean these statements within that early exhortation of Paul an exhortation about the unity and the holiness of the people of God Galatians isn't about how to get to heaven it's about the church as this new community how to live wisely no doubt with suffering and no doubt with persecution because this new community is going to be a standing rebuke to all other communities it's not just a new religion one more religion to add to all the other isms and was ins of the world it is a new community of a sort that's never been imagined before a community of jeune Gentile slave and free male and female coming together worshiping the one true God and celebrating the fact that the Messiah the son of the one true God has died for sins now there's much more I could say about Galatians I just want to spend a few moments on one or two other key pauline passages and then we'll call a halt and it looks as their romans is going to be the second half today i have to come back in about three years time and finish the rest of the course but in my temple by who knows by then you'll have had a chance to read the book god really and i mentioned i mentioned first corinthians but second Corinthians if you want to know what the cross feels like in Christian experience especially in ministerial experience 2nd Corinthians if you have the courage is the book to read if you have the courage because it's a terrifying book to read if you take it seriously because Paul sees the fact of the Cross edged into his own life and ministry as an apostle that it's not enough just to talk about the cross somehow it's going to happen to you and that this doesn't mean that some terrible mistake has taken place as the Corinthians thought the Corinthians wanted Paul to be a super apostle they wanted him to be a hero figure they wanted him to stride through the world being successful doing miracles and teaching people and planting great churches and instead Paul is a bruised battered and bleeding apostle who's been in and out of jail he's been he's been shipwrecked he's been stoned and so much so that the Corinthians are a bit fed up with him and they've sent him a message he's in Ephesus presumably when he gets the message and they've sent him a message saying if he wants to come back he better resubmit an application you better send her a new CV with some letters of recommendation she got your apostle you you owe your very existence to my ministry but he has to argue his way back and 2 Corinthians is full of irony and passion and pathos because it is about the fact that all of us if we are followers of the Messiah are to be shaped by the cross so you see this at many points in the New Testament you see it particularly in 1st Peter I said I wasn't going to talk about first Peter but let me just say this it looks as though the people to whom 1st Peter is written are saying to themselves well Jesus died for our sins to rescue us fine so therefore we shouldn't have any more suffering to do should we so if we're suffering does this mean the gospel isn't true and he says no it means that this pattern of servanthood this Isaiah theme is now to be woven through the whole community because the life of the Christian community led by its Apostles is never to be this heroic movement I once saw a book on the act of the Apostles called the church marches in and that's exactly the wrong approach this isn't about us cheerfully taking over the world it's about people suffering and being beaten up and so on and if you want to see that particularly second corinthians chapters 4 & 6 in chapter 4 he talks about what this has meant for him and again one of the funny things about 2nd corinthians is that paul is saying a plague on all your rhetoric i don't do all that all that fancy language stuff and then he writes some of the most wonderfully highly charged rhetorical passages like shakespeare Julius Caesar where Mark Antony says I am no orator as Brutus is when he's charming the birds out of the trees and second Corinthians four we have this treasure in clay jars we are afflicted in every way but not crushed perplexed but not despairing persecuted but not forsaken struck down but not destroyed and here's the point first hand always carrying about in the body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies that's that's the center of it all for Paul the one off nosov the cross doesn't take away from the fact that then if we are the Messiah's people our lives will be shaped by the cross in one way or another there are many many different ways that that takes place and there are many parts of the world today as you know where that is taking place in very vivid and dramatic and horrible ways but it's not strange to us also there are many different kinds of suffering and we are all called to go through that in one way or another and that's why when I read the end of 2 Corinthians 5 one of the great statements about the cry I keep saying is one of the great statements about the cross these are all great statements about the cross and about the love of Christ urges us on because he died for all so that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who died and was raised for them then as that paragraph goes on 2 Corinthians 5 verses 16 through to 6 verse 2 and he talks about the fact of the Messiah's death not as therefore we are reconciled with God and that's the end of the story it's the Messiah's death means that we now have this ministry it's back to this business about being the royal priesthood because of the Messiah's death and he says it's several different ways in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us the Messiah's death is the launching of the new vocation this is the very specific apostolic vocation he's talking about but it's the same pattern all through as we embrace the death of Jesus for our sins we find ourselves called to be new renewed humans in whatever way that works out so we are ambassador for the Messiah God making his appeal through us we entreat people on behalf of the Messiah to be reconciled to God then verse 21 for our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin that's the representative substitutionary death of Jesus so that in Him 21b we might embody the righteousness of God what does that mean it doesn't mean that God has lots of righteousness of good moral qualities and has somehow transferred it to us that's the way it's traditionally been read but I and several others have argued at some length be it said in including in that book that Michael waved around before that what the righteousness of God means here is the covenant faithfulness of God revealed in the death of Jesus Paul is talking about the way in which Jesus himself embodied God's covenant faithfulness and now because of his death the Apostles in their suffering in their apostolic reconciling ministry are living embodiments of the fact that God is faithful to his promises and if you doubt that you go on to chapter 6 verses 1 and 2 whoever did the chapter divisions in second Corinthians was sadly at fault here because the thought run straight on then he quotes in verse 2 of chapter 6 he quotes from Isaiah 49 verse 8 at an acceptable time I've listened to you on a day of salvation I've helped you and the line goes straight on I have given you as a covenant to the peoples as a light to those who sit in - this is Paul's vision of his own apostolic ministry and then we can expand that into a vision of the Ministry of every renewed human being in Christ because of the death of Jesus we are called to be genuine humans taking up our vocation in God's world we have abdicated that by platon izing our eschatology jesus died from he said i can go to heaven of course God loves you and is going to give you resurrection bodies when he renews his creation but he's got a vocation for you here and now how can you possibly take up this vocation we consent as you are because the Messiah died for your sins so that you can now be a genuine human being I'm going to give you one more passage which is an example of this and then we're going to break for coffee and we'll have to start getting even further back then I intend it in their mind in Ephesians if he turns chapter 2 Ephesians chapter 2 by grace you have been saved through faith this is not your own doing it's the gift of God not the result of works so that no one may boast this is Ephesians 2:8 9 and 10 and the NRSV which I've got here chickens out of this it says we are what he has made us the Greek is out who got as men poemas we are God's workmanship poema is the word from which we get poem we are God's poetry some of us may be sonnets some of us may be lyrics some of us may be epic some of us may be haiku some of us may just be limericks but but we are God's poetry to speak God's truth to live God's truth into God's new world that's why he has rescued us so that we can be genuine humans to work for God's new creation here and now because what we do in the Lord is not in vain I've gone on slightly longer let's just take a minute and buzz with one another while I have a sip of water and then we'll take some Q&A

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Length: 64min 51sec (3891 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 24 2016