N.T. Wright - The Puzzles of the Cross

well ladies and gentlemen welcome it's very good to have you here you and the good news is we do not have to go back to Wickliffe for coffee the coffee will be served in the Monson room which is immediately opposite there which Stefan is already labeled the monsoon room which which seems appropriate in the circumstances particularly one welcome to Professor Tom Wright who's our lecturer for today and tomorrow Tom and I go back a very long way and as you will know he's the writer of many and voluminous books Exhibit A here's here's one here one I have some friends who she had a very very difficult pregnancy and had to be in bed for most of the nine months of the pregnancy and during that time because of they might saying she's better that the bed broke and it they had to prop up with a leg of the bed for her to lie on it for the rest of the nine months that they used Jesus in the victory of the God to do that and and they asked me to tell Tom that they'd found his book very supportive at a difficult time his books are indeed parents of water in all sorts of way and he's going to be speaking to us for the next two days on the victory of the cross thank you my clan you Michael would have something funny to say about me I wasn't sure which of his voluminous supply of jokes and he would actually bring out on this occasion I've actually heard three different variations of that one but it's like it's like the synoptic problem yeah like the synoptic oh absolutely absolutely and they may or may not any often be historical nevermind join me when you're in a moment of prayer as we begin this particular series gracious Father it's good to be together and we thank you for bringing us here through long journeys and short through all sorts of difficulties no doubt and we pray that you will enable us in the course of these this week to leave behind us just for the moment the things which press heavily upon our minds and hearts in order to focus upon the one thing that is needful and we pray for wisdom and skill again in handling scripture and handling some of the great truths of our faith that we may all of us glimpse afresh the full depth and power and Majesty that was unveiled on the cross so be with us we pray in Jesus name Amen one of the things one normally does when one is given a microphone to wear and told to put it on is to switch off one's mobile phone because otherwise the mobile phone interferes with the system as you probably know the reason I hadn't done that until now and I'm about to do it when I've read you this is that this morning when I woke up as I usually do wearily I check the email see what's come in and here is a message overnight from somebody who I don't know who says I'm attending a church that doesn't believe in penal substitution at all because it suggests that God dealt with violence with the use of violence I which I totally understand I originally come from a such-and-such church so I have a reformed background I understand that churches can overemphasize penal substitution but in my understanding scripture penal substitution is still necessary to a correct understanding of the gospel is this something I should be concerned with people write me like this all the time solely and should I attend a church that doesn't believe in God's just demands for sin that is met in the sacrifice of Jesus of the cross on the other hand this church has an amazing amazing push for social justice environmental protection loving our enemy etcetera and I want to stay around to learn from them how they genuinely follow Jesus thank you for reading and I thought well there we are - my text of the week and not quite but one element of it let me quickly switch this off lest worse occur and I get more angry messages from people saying how can you possibly say dot which I also do get sometimes because I wanted in this first lecture to sketch a little bit for you something of why I think some sort of reappraisal of what we say about the cross is necessary for probably for most of us most of the time certainly for some of us some of the time certainly for me I've written about many other aspects of the Christian faith over the last who I don't know 35 or 40 years by the way I was it was very moving for me to be in Wickliffe Chapel this morning because I was a student at Wickliffe Hall from 1971 to 1973 so I sat in those pews and looked at those stained glass windows and maybe been back two or three times since actually into that Chapel so it's oh my goodness this is like walking back into the house in which you were born and it was it was moving and I don't think I ever heard as many jokes in the course of my two years as we had in 10 10 minutes this morning but there we are I somehow wickley wasn't so funny in those days mmmm but I have been puzzling about this precisely because of the sorts of issues that this to me until today unknown correspondent raises that there are many different ways in to glimpsing the cross and actually the New Testament offers many different ways into glimpsing what's going on on the cross and different churches have seized upon different ones and have said this is what we have to say and then sometimes as one church has got more and more strong down one line others have said wait a minute we're not so happy about that you seem to be missing something out or you're not doing it right and one of the puzzles that I had when I was Bishop of Durham was that there were churches in my diocese which were like the two that this person describes that on the one hand there was some who were saying the thing that we've got to do is to tell people that Jesus died in their place on their behalf he suffered for their sins and they need to believe that so that they will then be saved and will go to heaven and there were other churches that were saying wait a minute we're reading Matthew Mark Luke and John and we're seeing Jesus doing all kinds of neat things and healing people and feeding the hungry and looking after those who are lost off at the margins and so on and that's the Jesus we follow that's what we want to be doing and then with that theology you sometimes have a sort of puzzled like a sort of balloon saying think Scott what a pity he died so young in other words we want to follow him doing all that what was his death about and we don't want to emphasize it because that implies that we don't really care about those issues about feeding the hungry and housing the homeless and all those all those wonderful things and it's almost as though you could divide churches into Gospels Christians and epistles Christians it doesn't of course come apart so cleanly but sometimes that's how it seems when you talk to people about what their church is there for some people will emphasize we are following Jesus in living the kingdom bringing the good news of the kingdom to places and people that really badly need it and there are others who say well the main thing is the kingdom in heaven and how we get there and so Jesus died for our sin so that that's how we could how it could be and there are two other problems which kind of fan out from that and one is the one that I think of as because I wrote the book with this title called the surprised by hope problem that some of you will know my book surprised by hope and actually I get more emails and letters about that book than all my others put together whether it's ever been used as a bed stand I'm not sure but it's used to use so many things and the thing that really grabbed me 10 or a dozen years ago when I was doing the work that led up to my big book on the resurrection and then to surprised by hope as a spin-off is that so much of the Western Church over the last thousand years has been dominated by the image of Heaven and Hell that you have for instance in Michelangelo's famous Sistine Chapel wall I have this extraordinary memory of this may sound pretentious the last time I was in the Sistine Chapel it was a big ecumenical service I was an Anglican observer at a big meeting and and so I was sitting on this little observers bench and next to me was a Greek Orthodox archimandrite from Athens and as we were sitting waiting for the event to begin he looked at the two side walls of the Sistine Chapel one of which is pictures of Moses the other riches pictures of Jesus and he said these I understand and these I understand and then he pointed at this great Last Judgment scene with some Souls going to hell and others being to said this I do not understand that is not how we do escort ology in Greece at which point the procession came in with the Pope and the Cardinals and the ecumenical patriarch - it was quite a service and I never got to ask my Greek friend so how do you do eschatology it increase if you don't do it like that but I think I know part of the answer that the Greek Orthodox and many of the Orthodox churches emphasize resurrection and new creation the whole world being renewed that doesn't mean they're Universalists how they then do final judgment for those who finally say no some maybe but some some aren't but they don't do it like that's more like what CS Lewis does in his book the Great Divorce where the whole new world is this wonderful glorious more than real life as it were new creation where everything is more real than it is in this present transitory world and how if it's there at all is a tiny thin and substantial little place down a crack in the floor so slight and irrelevant that it can't blackmail the glorious new creation into saying because we're here you can't have this new world and Lewis is wrestling with that I think you wrestle that all is Christian life actually but for me the New Testament is all about new creation and the new creation which began when Jesus of Nazareth came out of the tomb on Easter morning and it isn't basically about quote going to heaven when you die unquote I say that almost in a whisper half expecting something to get up and walk out of the room and so I thought I was coming to a Christian conference or whatever and the New Testament has remarkably little to say about what happens to people immediately after their death okay today you will be with me in paradise Luke 23 I'm going to prepare a place for you John 14:1 as you other passages Paul saying in Philippians 1 my desires to depart and be with the Messiah which is far better but the great emphasis is not on what happens immediately after death but on what happens ultimately which is new creation Romans 8 first Corinthians 15 revelation 20 20 or evolution 21 22 a new heavens and a new earth joined together forever Ephesians 1:10 God's plan from the beginning was to sum up in the Messiah everything in heaven and on earth my friends this is temple theology the temple is the place where heaven and earth come together Ephesians is the book which says God has created a new temple and it's called Jesus the Messiah and then by the spirit it's called all those who belong to Jesus we are to be heaven and earth people already here and now it's tense it's difficult it's dangerous but we are to anticipate there by the time when heaven and earth will be together forever as I was falling asleep from my long journey yesterday I was thinking for some reason of that glorious old hymn this is my father's world do you know that him we lived in Canada for a while and they sing it a lot there for some reason it's not known in this country as far as far as I'm aware the third verse which is sometimes mutilated by people who don't like some of the victorious language but it the third verse goes like this and this is my father's world oh let me never forget that though the wrong seems oft so strong God is the ruler yet this is my father's world the pete'll is not done Jesus who died will be satisfied and earth and heaven be one that's the vision it's not the first two verses could be a sort of sentimental look at the trees and flowers and isn't this a nice place sort of thing but the third verse is brutally realist yes this is a wonderful world but there is evil and suffering and sorrow and decay and death in it but Jesus who died shall be satisfied and earth and heaven be one that's the vision of eschatology which we have in the New Testament that's the goal but if that is so then all our theories of the cross which are so often designed in the Western world just to make sure we go to heaven have to be rethought because if the goal is this entire new creation and if somehow the cross is instrumental in that then the meaning of the cross is not less than we thought but it's a lot more how do we put that together do we have to put it together I mean after all you don't have to know the theory of cooking in order to enjoy a good meal I am one of the world's worst cooks I grew up at a time when the women to the cooking and the men do the washing up afterwards and that's still more or less how it is in our family so DIF my wife is tired and fed up and has cooked quite enough meals this week thank you very much then we have poached eggs which I can do them but you don't have to know the theory of cooking in order to enjoy a good meal but unless somebody in the household knows how to cook then you're going to have a lot of indigestion or a lot of ham sandwiches or possibly both so that you don't have to know all the details of atonement theology in order to be overwhelmed with the love of God in Christ that's how I came in as little boy age maybe saying I don't know exactly when and I just have this very clear memory of one day when I was about that age suddenly being overwhelmed with the sense of God loving me so much that Jesus died for me I have no idea what him we'd sung or what verse I'd heard read in church or whatever it just suddenly hit and that memory has never left and the present sense of that has never left me but the Kreutzer the cross has a power independent of theory but in the church people have to know the theory otherwise you'll get the spiritual equivalent of either indigestion or ham sandwiches or possibly both you can see this power in so many things that happen which some of the stories we know some ways I'm new to us perhaps in the year 2000 the so-called millennium though that was a bit dodgy in itself the National Gallery in London under the directorship of Neil MacGregor who then went on to work at the British Museum for 15 years and as now moved on from there Neil is a practicing Christian and he said for the Millennium were going to have an exhibition seeing salvation and the whole national gallery was turned into this great basically Christian exhibition and most of the paintings and artefacts for this seeing salvation exhibition were of course about the crucifixion and the critics in the sneery British National Press you who don't live in Britain you may not know our press whichever personality type it was that Michael mentioned before our press is very very good at sneering doesn't celebrate things that sneer they said why do we need to see all these horrible pictures of somebody being tortured to death 2,000 years ago how can that possibly be a message of hope for the general public I'm happy to say ignored the media and came in droves people went twice they went five times they kept on because there was something in those pictures which just says yes something bigger than theory is there and people just needed to be bathed in that something then a much more sharp edged and and sad image at the moment some of you will know one that the last artifact that Neil MacGregor bought for the British Museum before he left went to his new job which tax in Germany was a lamp a Doozer cross man produces a little island near Sicily in the Mediterranean and there was some migrants coming from Eritrea and elsewhere desperate to get to Europe people smugglers using grubby little boats and the smashed and hundreds were drowned and an artisan a man who worked on the island of Lampedusa desperately trying to save people and then took some of the wood from that smashed boat and made it into a cross and then other people said will you will you do another one and another one the Pope carried one of those Lampe Doozer crosses when he went to have a service in commemoration of those victims and Neil MacGregor asked that same craftsman if you would make a lamb purdue's across so that he could put it in the British Museum as a sign that the suffering of God in Christ on the cross somehow is the only message the only image that will do to hold the pain of the present world before the love and hope of God again you don't need a theory for that for some reason for some reason it just works as a focus to hold together the pain of the world and the love of God and then my third my third example which I wish I knew if any of you know the story better than I do and know the name of the person in question then do tell me afterwards but the story is told this is preachers trick the story is told of a rem catholic archbishop who described three young teenage lads for a laugh going into church and pretending to confess to also going in one by one into the confessional and confessing to all sorts of lurid horrible sins and the first two having done this had a laugh and ran away sniggering and the priest got the third lad after he'd done his turn and he didn't let him go he said I'm going to set your penance for these sins that you've heard that you've confessed said I want you to go up to the other end of the church with his big image of Christ on the cross he said I want you to look at the face of that figure and I want you to say you did all that for me and I don't give that much and I want you to do it three times and he said the young boy went up you did all that for me an idea and then you did a second and then he couldn't do it the third time he welled up and the archbishop said the reason I know that story is that I was that young man the theory isn't necessary what is necessary is this encounter this sense of something much bigger than theory much bigger than ourselves much bigger than anything we can imagine so there's a puzzle how on earth and we need this all the time with skeptics sneers or just puzzled Enquirer's how can the death of one man 2,000 years ago mean any such thing and so people go to the New Testament say well Christ died for our sins fine okay what's that mean died for our sins how do we put that together and when we say that there's apparently bewildering range of ideas the New Testament talks about sacrifice it talks about redemption which is a metaphor from the slave market talks about justification which is a metaphor from the Lord do these all belong together are they simply different random ways of trying to get our fingers on something that's going on and so back to my correspondent so many churches either say we have this theory this is what you have to believe and this is the only safe way to preach the gospel or they say no that's a violent image we don't do violence today once you start talking about God doing violence then you unleash all kinds of demons which have poisoned our world and continue to do so what matters is God's love and God's love for the outcasts and we have to embody that and so on and so on and so on and then we notice that the New Testament says the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures 1st Corinthians 15 verse 3 Paul summarizes the basic gospel the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures that he was buried that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures what does it mean in accordance with the scriptures and in this Bible and many others there are little notes in the side of other Bible passages that you might like to look up which might be relevant and this will give I didn't check this before but I can pretty well guarantee this will give at that point two or three nice references yes here we are Isaiah 53 Hosea 6 - Jonah 2 1 as it's raised on the third day but the only reference it gives for according to the scriptures is ours our fifteenth now as our 53 yes that's a very important passage but the point about saying according to the scriptures isn't I can find a couple of proof texts for this it's there's an entire narrative there's an entire story running through from Genesis to chronicles in the Hebrew Bible or from Genesis to Malachi in the way we order the Bible's the Old Testament in in English translations and it's that entire narrative which makes the sense it makes and here's the puzzle then there's almost nothing in that entire narrative about going to heaven when you die that's not what first century Jews were interested in for me one of the great are har moments when I was doing my initial research on the New Testament the late 70s around the time Michael and I first met was reading Josephus the Jewish historian and Josephus describes in great detail what's going on in Jerusalem in the 40s and 50s and 60s and it's horrendous stuff and ends horribly I mean it's a very very unpleasant ending to the Roman Jewish war sixty-eight nine seventy when Jerusalem gets destroyed but Josephus is describing what people are debating and discussing and where the pressure points are and how they are retrieving their scriptures in order to fuel what they're thinking and it's not discussing about what you have to believe in order to go to heaven they if they're devout Jews of whatever sort they know that God will look after them that God will bring his new age God will do the new things sooner or later the question is when would he do it how will you do it what sort of people do we have to be in the present time to be part of that great plan for God's great renewal they talk about the present age and the age to come the rabbi's go on talking about it later and the age to come will not be sitting on clouds up in the sky somewhere the to come would be like CS Lewis's vision like this one only gloriously moreso a world full of justice and peace as our 11 Habakkuk 2 many other passages the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea I've said it a thousand times how do the waters cover the sea the waters are other sea somehow God intends to suffuse the whole creation with his love and Israel in the first century was clinging on to that as things got worse as pagan armies and empires had closed in on them and the question comes was that missing the point and have we in the Western Christian world got hold of the right point namely that the aim actually is to leave this world and go to heaven when we die and if so how does the cross enable that or is it the Western Church since the Middle Ages that's got it wrong and do we have to revise our view in the light of the new testament new creation new heavens new earth how does the cross address that because let's not make any mistake about this in the New Testament again and again people make it clear by 6:00 p.m. on the first Good Friday the world was a different place nobody knew maybe the Centurion at the foot of the cross glimpsed something of that you know truly this man was the son of God who knows what he had in mind who knows what mark wants us to think he had in mind etc etc but Jesus on the cross says according to John it's finished it's done it's accomplished the work is complete Paul in Colossians 2 says on the cross he disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them triumphing over them what it looked as though the principalities and powers were celebrating a triumph over him what was that about the Gospels are all very clear something happened on the cross as a result of which it isn't just a new possibility opened up so that now there's an option that people can take up if they want it's that the world is a in place and if it doesn't look like that we need to adjust our spectacles and so the question presses why did Jesus die what do we say about it I once believers are not taught Sunday school when we were in Montreal my wife was teaching the grade six Sunday school somebody wanted her to move to the grade four because that teacher had dropped out and she said to me would you like to do the grade six and I said I've never taught anything under the age of 17 before how do i and she said here's the syllabus and I looked at it it was pretty much what I was teaching my first year undergraduate so I thought okay I'll do that and we went part of the syllabus that year was to go through the Gospels and for them to get their hands dirty a bit with some of the text and some of the issues and towards the end when we were getting towards the getting towards the cross I was class of about maybe 15 kids bright and I okay I want you each to write down on a piece of paper why did Jesus die what's your answer to that why did Jesus die and it was roughly split 50-50 and it wasn't a male/female thing or anything like that but when they read out their answers about half of them gave me the historical reasons he died because the Romans were worried he was leading a revolution he died because the chief priests didn't like what you did in the temple whatever and the other half gave me the the theological solutions he died so that we go to heaven he died because of our sins he died to save us and we spent a very interesting hour putting those two sets of answers together because here's the puzzle and we'll meet this again in the second lecture this morning the Gospels Matthew Mark Luke and John do not seem to give us very much in the way of what we have traditionally thought of as atonement theology the Gospels don't seem to be saying by the way here's the theory they tell us the story the story which Michael plugged us into which begins Matthew 26 and onwards begins with the plot and Judas and with the woman in the house of Simon the leper and then moved swiftly on through the events of the Upper Room and the Last Supper and through the events of the arrest in Gethsemane and the trials or whatever they are and then the scourging and the torture and so on in all of that is their entertainment theology some people have said well basically no and what you have to do is to find the odd verse here and there like John 3:16 God so loved the world that He gave us fine okay mark 10:45 okay the Son of man came to give his life as a ransom for many right those are signs and clues but is that it is this as it were historians a bird's eye what you'd have seen as a fly-on-the-wall sort of account over which we then have a bit of theory in the form of a couple of verses but in order to get a proper atonement theology you have to go all the way to Paul and to Hebrews is that how it is good friend of mine described the puzzle as he said a lot of Christians regard the Gospels as the sort of optional chips and dips that you have at the beginning of a nice evening before you then go to the table where you get the red meat of poor line theology recognize yeah that we can so easily use the Gospels as illustrations of lots of other things rather than is actually telling the story of how and why all this happened because maybe we've been looking for the wrong thing Jesus himself doesn't seem to say very much about the meaning of his death he does a little bit does talk a lot about the kingdom of God and here's this is back to that problem of the two churches if you like you have Kingdom churches and you have crossed churches cross churches emphasized Jesus died for our sins and will preach on that whether it's Christmas or epiphany or Lent or Easter or essential it's always about Jesus dying for us is now great people need to know that but what about the kingdom of God what does that mean and if you read Matthew's Gospel and read kingdom of heaven don't be misled in Matthew's Gospel kingdom of heaven is a reverent Jewish Way of saying kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven is not a place called heaven where people go when they die it is the rule of heaven on earth that's what Jesus taught us to pray we prayed it in our scenario together thy kingdom come on earth as in heaven Jesus says at the end of Matthew 28 all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me I have often said especially when I was preaching in Durham and elsewhere we in the Western Church are quite good at imagining Jesus having all authority in heaven we kind of like that idea and we'll go there and share it with him whatever that means no he says and on earth we've hardly begun to imagine what it might mean that Jesus has all authority on earth in fact we've often said no we don't want to go there that's a dilution of the gospel we're not interested in earth we have to leave earth and go to heaven welcome to the world of plagiarism I read a critique recently of something that I'd written in which some about the notion of exile and somebody this critic had said well exile is alright as an idea because basically we as humans are exiled from our true home in heaven and I went back and looked at the texts and I thought no the person who articulates that idea most clearly is Plutarch at the end of the first century he's a middle played honest he's not a Christian the New Testament doesn't say we humans are exiled from our home in heaven Paul says at the end of Philippians 3 our citizenship is in heaven and from it we await the Lord the Savior Jesus who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body what does it mean our citizenship is in heaven many people in Philippi were citizens of Rome they did not expect one day to retire and go back to Rome that wasn't the point Rome was already over full and underfed and desperately didn't want all those wretched Colonials coming back again no thank you the point of being a Roman citizen in Philippi is that you are to be an agent of Roman civilization in northern Greece Paul doesn't say we're citizens of heaven so we'll go back there one day thousands of preachers have preached that from that text that's not what the text says he says from it we await the savior and the doctrine of the second coming in the New Testament is not as I'm sure you know about Jesus coming back hovering in midair and then taking people away again as many who believe that it's about Jesus coming back to transform and rule and reign so that earth and heaven may be one so the theories which have developed there is no earlier doctrine there is no early there is no one single early doctrine of the cross the early fathers use all sorts of ideas and images to try to get at this extraordinary dark mystery of the meaning of the cross a lot of them stress what I just said before that on from Colossians 2 on the cross Jesus won the victory over all the dark forces of the world and we need to have some sort of understanding of the dark forces whether sitting on letterboxes or not in order to understand what was going on when Jesus died but then many have played off against that one way or another the idea that somehow he was our substitute he stood in for us he took our punishment and different theories of representation and how that might work have come and gone but those are obviously the two big theories which today as any day one still finds put into an either/or scheme that's either a victory Christmas Victoire Jesus that my book of Managed Michael waved around Jesus and the victory of God people have said oh I suppose that means you take a Christmas Victor or theory of the atonement well yes I do but not to the exclusion of substitution rather what I see in the New Testament is a fusion of the two but we'll come to that but then what about sacrifice here's another great puzzle III have never killed an animal with my bare hands and I suspect that probably 90% of you the same would be true so most of us are completely detached from even the sheer physicality of what it was like day by day week by week month by month when people in Jerusalem and in the pagan temples around the world brought animals for sacrifice and somebody killed them and did stuff and so on but for many years people because we've been detached from the actual the actuality of sacrifice we have allowed our imaginations our theological imaginations to project onto sacrifice and sacrificial terms all sorts of ideas which actually don't belong there because when you look at laviticus when you look at the way in which the sacrifices are spoken of in later Jewish texts and the way that the rabbi's refer back to them even though the temple are then been destroyed they are not talking about people who deserve death somehow trans transferring their guilt and their thence their punishment on to the animal that is sacrificed for one thing the animal is not killed on the altar in ancient Hebrew sacrifices some many many pagan sacrifices yes the animal is killed on the altar but in Israel the animal is killed elsewhere and it's the blood the sign of life which is presented on the altar for another thing the one moment in the Hebrew calendar when sins are confessed over an animal that is precisely the one animal that is not sacrificed it's the scapegoat that is driven out into the wilderness I know there's a lot of debate about this but it is at least more complicated than we have imagined you can't simply say is here we have sacrificial language in the New Testament and we know that's basically about the animal substituting for the worshipper there is in some cases a sense of substitution but it is much more complicated than that and you can't simply transfer the one to the other rather we need to remind ourselves that sacrifices take place because at the end of the book of Exodus they have constructed the tabernacle and the tabernacle is the place where the sacred presence of God the divine glory has come to dwell along with the people in the wilderness despite their sin with the golden calf the tabernacle is the place where somehow heaven and earth have come together there is a sort of narrative arc I'll come back to this in a minute from Genesis 1 and 2 to Exodus 45 ever read the Pentateuch like this Genesis 1 and 2 is the creation of a heaven and earth reality which is a temple John Walton and Wheaton College is very good writing about this at the moment then that heaven earth reality is then fractured with human rebellion and sin and idolatry and empire Empire in Genesis 11 and God starts his renewal project with Abraham and there is a sense already with Abraham that maybe God's presence will somehow graciously come back and be with his people we don't quite know how and then the story goes on until after the Exodus remember what Moses says to Pharaoh again and again is not let my let my people go so they may go to their promised land let my people go so that they may worship me and they can't worship Israel's God in a land dominated by Egypt's gods they have to go out into virgin territory as it were and their God establishes the covenant and they build the tabernacle which is a micro cosmos a little world if you read Josephus his description of the tabernacle and the temple it's like a little mini creation a little Garden of Eden a place where God and his people can be together again that's a dangerous place to be if you're a central and rebellious and hard-hearted people which the Pentateuch makes it clear they still were and so the only way this can happen is if they are purified if the furniture is purified if everything to do with the thing is purified and because impurity is basically about death is basically about corruption and decay everything that denies the goodness of God's creation the lifeblood of the animal is the thing given by God to purify so that in fact God may dwell with his people that's where it's all going so we have the victory over evil we have substitution or some form of it we have sacrificial ideas but it's not as easy as we usually think to put them together and of course we have the theory that Jesus died as an example I remember John 80 Robinson who wrote that book of mind goes totally blank honest to God thank you 1963 he wrote a subsequent book called but that I can't believe and one of the things he said he couldn't believe was any idea that Jesus somehow took our punishment on the cross or anything like that and his chapter on the cross was called was a title from a pop song of the time which was that's what love will do that's what love will do in other words an exemplary reading of the cross the idea that on the cross Jesus showed us greater love has no one than this to lay down your life for your friends and Jesus did it that's the example and and that but you know that that's true first John says if God loved us that much we ought to love one another absolutely let's again and again in the New Testament be kind to one another tender-hearted forgiving one another as God in the Messiah forgave you yes it is an example it only works as an example if something else is also the case if I see a close and dear friend lets us say Michael for example I'm falling into a river and I jump in risking life and limb to save him that's a wonderful act of love yes because he needed saving so it becomes an act of love but but if Michael and I are just walking along the towpath and in order to show him how much I love him I dive into the river no that doesn't mean anything at all it's not an act of love unless it's doing something that needed doing so the theory of the example by itself really won't work the problem I think for many of us today is that we are the heirs to the 16th and 17th century and in the sixteenth century I'm not a sixteenth seventeenth century scholar but I've studied bits and pieces here and there there were two things which really weighed heavily on the Reformers hearts that they had to get rid of one was purgatory it's hard for us now to imagine just how much purgatory was dominating the horizon the mental and emotional imaginative horizon of people in the 16th century from the medieval period everyone knew they thought they knew that when you died you would go into a terrible place called purgatory you stay there for a long long long time until your sins had finally been purged until you'd finally been punished sufficiently for them purgation and punishment and only the very various sacred whew the real utter saints would escape that and go straight to heaven so it's a it's a scheme you get in Dante of course you people go to the inferno the people go to hell that's just there but anyone who's going to heaven except a very small select few will have to do time in purgatory first and the Reformers said no they said no on the basis of Scripture and thank God that they did but they were giving scriptural answers to medieval questions that's the problem and that the argument they made was our sins have already been punished in Christ and therefore God will never demand punishment for them again and they said in Baptism faith and then in death itself any purgation that is required is achieved so that that won't be required of us either so I have expanded this many times it's there in in several of my books but you read Romans 8 nothing in all creation will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord and if you insist on saying no no no I'll still have to do time in purgatory first he then actually what you need is not a theologian but a second psychiatrist because why are you clinging to this when God has done it on the cross so yeah that that is hugely important and so they emphasized those aspects of the death of Jesus which would help them deal with the other thing was the mass the idea that in every Eucharist mass call it what you will the priest was Rhys AK rifice in Christ and the Reformers partly because they saw all the abuses to which this led and there were many they said now no no they went back to Roman's 6 and said F a pax once and only once once for all Jesus died once he does not die again and what they were doing was emphasizing the question that I raised 10 minutes ago to Mary go something had happened by 6 p.m. on the first Good Friday which does not need to be done again yes absolutely vital all our Eucharistic theology has to start at that point but those key questions of the time it seems to me over conditioned the way that they read the scriptures and in particular they never graphed interesting car Bart makes this point about Luther and Calvin and cars a car Bart's a great Luther and Calvin fan and scholar he says they never really sorted out their eschatology they never really figured out the stuff in the New Testament about new heavens and new earth so that to this day people in those traditions still think of salvation in terms of leaving this place and going to a place called heaven just not what the New Testament says and so as a result different theories have developed and I've been in correspondence with various people about this recently but I'm interested particularly in what people hear when they hear the cross explained in sermons and so on in church and again and again what people hear and it's sometimes because people say it and it's other times because despite the fact that the preachers and theologians do their best not to say this this is still what is owed what is heard is that at the beginning God set up the human race with a moral challenge a test and exam here's a high bar that you've got to jump over and it comes in the form of you're going to live in this garden because not to eat this from the fruit of this tree and are they going to keep this moral challenge or aren't they and the answer is of course they don't and so what does that mean so they're out of fellowship with God well yes does it say that we'll sort of but that's not quite the point but so that then they lack righteousness they lack the moral where does this come from the idea seems to be if they had jumped over this moral bar they would have achieved a moral standing call it righteousness if you like which would then mean that God would say okay you're in you're it you're good is that actually how Genesis 1-2-3 works I don't think so and yet huge theories have been developed on this sometimes called with the wonderful phrase the covenant of works that God establishes a covenant works with Adam and Eve they fail the covenant works is repeated on Sinai I the Jews fail and then God comes in the person of Christ and he keeps the law perfectly he does everything healed and so he has a store of righteousness which can then be imputed reckoned Passover whatever to those who belong to him however you define that now there are many different meanings to the phrase covenant of works I'm not a 17th century specialist either so I am not familiar with all the different wrinkles and turns and twists there may be some here who are please put me right afterwards but what I'm talking about is the low-grade version of this that many people in many churches just think is the gospel that God set as a moral test we all failed it Jesus passed it we cling on to his coattails and somehow that's all right and of course this way of putting it focused on the cross as Jesus taking our punishment and then somehow supplying us with what we need to get into heaven in the end this breeds the reaction which I read from my correspondent this morning that many people in many churches look at that and say that's not a good picture of God what many people here as the gospel is God was standing over the big stick here's this moral challenge you keep it or else or else and then at the last minute somebody else stands in the way and takes the rap in our place it happens to be God's own son and the preacher says there you are that that's how it worked and many many people in our world have reacted sharply against that that is of course a caricature and when I've said this sort of thing I get two reactions on the one hand why is theologians and wise preachers say I've never preached like that I know I would never teach that and I said no of course you wouldn't but then the other reaction is lots of people around the room nod yeah this is what we've heard this is where we know a lot of folk are it may be a misunderstanding but this this is a picture a pagan picture of a bullying God a God who demands blood and doesn't much mind whose it is and a God who while he is doing it says oh by the way I'm doing this because I love and there are many people in our world who've been abused physically mentally whatever and often the abuser will turn round at the end of the day so you do realize I love you and there are lots of people in our world who say I know that person and I hate him and that's why many react strongly against that and go back to the Gospels and there they find Jesus who is quite unlike that who's having a party with sinners so that's the Jesus I want to follow and this is the the trap into which I think a lot of late 20th early early 21st century Christianity has fallen so how then do we tell the story how do we tell the story of the hope of Israel how do we tell the story in such a way that when we get to Luke 24 we understand remember how Luke 24 works the story of the two on the Emmaus Road we had hoped that he was going to redeem Israel Jesus doesn't say what a silly idea redeeming Israel that's not the point the point is to save you from your sin so you can go to heaven no Jesus says it's happened but not the way you thought because beginning with Moses and all the prophets he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself what does that story look like what did Luke have in mind what did Jesus have in mind there's a whole lot of stuff I could drop in here just to contextualize it but I skip it you can read it it's in various places crucifixion we need to remind ourselves and many people where cross it around their neck or earrings or whatever I'm sure you all know this the cross is an instrument of torture not a piece of jewelry the cross was not just an instrument of torture it was a way of degrading people it was a way of not only killing them but sneering at them rubbing them out you think you're someone we're going to show you leaving them to rot when Spartacus led the slave revolt about a hundred years before Jesus day day and they lost the last battle 71 BC the Romans killed a lot of them in the battle but they crucified 6,000 of them put them on crosses all along the road between Rome and Capua that's about the distance from London to Birmingham or Philadelphia to Washington DC every 40 yards roughly another half dead half alive corpse being crawled over by mice or flies or rats or whatever and anyone walking down that road would think I may not like being a slave but I sure as anything don't want that it was a way of humiliating people put them outside a city gate because everyone will see is that when they go by that's what they were doing with Jesus the cross had a social meaning it meant we are superior and you are inferior it had a political meaning it meant we have conquered your territory and we're keeping it that way it has a theological meaning in the Roman world it meant Caesar is Lord and any of your local gods and goddesses are just worth that much in the Jewish world the Jews didn't use crucifixion except for one horrible exception in 88 BC but the Jews knew perfectly well what crucifixion meant Jesus grew up under the shadow of the Cross around the time he was born there was a rebellion and the Romans crucified thousands in calorie forty years after his death the Roman Jewish War there were so many crosses around the walls of Jerusalem that they'd cut down all the trees and had to import timber from somewhere else that's why the olive trees you see today in the Garden of Gethsemane are post ad 70 olive trees olive trees live forever unless you cut them down so that the ones in Galilee we think are still the originals that the boy Jesus probably played under the ones in Jerusalem all went and nobody in that world would look at somebody hanging on a cross and say and say he did that for me or he's doing that for our sins what does that mean what does it mean to say that the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures I've already hinted at the great biblical narrative of creation and new creation you see it in these great arcs you see it from Genesis 1 and 2 to Exodus 40 as I said you see it from Genesis one or two two Deuteronomy 30 in Deuteronomy 32 Paul tells the story like that in Romans 9 and 10 a story that arcs across from Genesis to Deuteronomy you see it then in the greater arc that lands you up in Isaiah you see it in the greater arc that lands you up at the end of Chronicles or the end of Malachi a sense of a people called to be God's means of rescuing the world the people of Israel but who are themselves in need of rescue I've explored in several of my books the way in which the biblical narrative works like a set of Russian dolls I was in debate with her fellow scholar last week who was kind of raising his eyebrows at that and saying who ever thought anything so silly but I stick to it God called humans to be his means of making his world fruitful and flourishing Adam and Eve were not called in order to have a moral test to see whether they could leave Eden and go to heaven instead God said get on with the job be fruitful and multiply and look after my world they're given a task a garden Adam names the animals what's this about it's about bearing the image of God hang on Genesis 1 is a temple I said heaven and earth coming to you what if you're building a pagan temple what's the last thing you put into the temple of the image so that worshippers can know who the God is and so that the power of the God is unleashed into the world around humans were put into God's world to be image bearers angled mirrors to reflect the power and love and grace and wisdom of God into the world and reflect the worship and praise of the world back to God longest arc of all to the book of Revelation by your blood you ransomed humans for God from every tribe and tongue and people and nation to make them and priests to serve our God okay kings and queens okay sidebar every time I mentioned Kings in the presence of Americans they say we got really Kings 250 years ago and my response is always yeah you got rid of George the third and you got draw two the first instead you know because actually you're your president is much more like an ancient monarch than anything that we had cetera as we we don't need to go round those tracks okay we just sort of hold off on that one so the idea of king if you want to know what the biblical vision of monarchy has read Psalm 72 read Psalm 72 the king is the one who listens to the cry of the poor and needy and makes sure that they are looked after the king is the one through whom God's delight in his world comes to birth again and again in his creation kings and priests kings that is the ones who share God's rule over the world priests the ones who share the worship of creation and presented before God that's what it means to be image bearers and so the primal sin is not sin itself but idolatry worshiping something other than God in Romans 1 people say well Romans 1:18 to 3:20 that's all about all humans have sin well it sort of is but it doesn't begin with that it begins with a Sabir with ungodliness and only ungodliness produces addict here injustice romans 1:18 the wrath of God is revealed against idolatry because when you worship that which is not God you're humaneness starts to deconstruct and you produce injustice in the world and then all kinds of sinful ism it isn't that God creates a world and sets a high moral bar and says if you can jump over this you're in my special people and I'll take you off somewhere else it's God wants his world to be fruitful so he creates people in His image to do that job for him now then when that goes wrong God calls Abraham Abram as he is Abraham as he gets renamed later on and God makes promises to Abraham that correspond to the command to Adam in you and in your seed all the families of the earth will be blessed and he has grace for you when God wants to start the family that will rescue the world when God wants to set up a territory like a New Eden he calls a childless nomad isn't interesting third it must be all of grace but he calls him knowing that Abraham and and the narrator's of Genesis know this perfectly well read the Pentateuch again and again they rub your noses and then the books of Samuel and kings they say this even about David and Solomon of course they do that these people who are carrying the promise that God will rescue the world are themselves people in need of rescue the prophets say it again and again this is not as people sometimes accuse me of saying this is not a sort of Christians sneer at the Jews oh we think the Jews robbed now it's something that the prophets themselves say and that the New Testament grieves over Paul grieves over it the people who are bearing the promise themselves need that promise for themselves and the result is exile and the exile from the land again and again and again we are told is the result of idolatry and sin idolatry and sin therefore you're exiled from the land which God promised your ancestors and that exile corresponds exactly to Genesis 3 the Exile of Adam and Eve from the got and the narrators must know this and here's the problem when you worship that which is not God you give to the idol your worshipping whatever it is something of the power which you as a human being should have been exercising the god-given image bearing power to bring justice and healing and hope to God's world you're handing that over to the powers whatever we call them however characterize them and those powers will use that power to walk your humaneness and that of the world around you ty dolla tree works we are supposed to be creatures of god-given power and responsibility and authority and that's a hard task that's the real bar if you like to jump over and we say no that's too hard we will worship this Idol is looking at me a nice time on this front we will worship that god or goddess because they'll do something for me that I won't have to bother and the gods and the goddesses say thank you very much we will take that power borrowed usurped power and we will use it and so a world full of idols is what God then has to deal with and that's what's happening at the time of the exile and at the time of the exile great prophets arise who say God will overthrow the pagan idols and rescue his people and thereby rescue the whole world that is the story the Scriptures tell and when the early Christians say the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures that's what they think was going on which is enough for the first hour we will take some time for Q&A and we will then come back to the Gospels in the second hour what I suggest we do we are going to have some Q&A time before coffee you have I'm sure desperate for coffee and that'll be in 25 minutes time I'm going to suggest as you each turn to your neighbor and say for two minutes what you find found puzzling worrying heretical exciting dramatic different and then when you've said it to one another we can have some Q&A together so okay have a buzz for two minutes with ourselves

Channel: Wycliffe Hall

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Keywords: theology

Id: _X6m-g5Omnw

Length: 60min 13sec (3613 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 24 2016