Lent #5: Busting Eternity, Breaking Our Minds

This Sunday, something quite amazing will happen. Much of the portion of the world formerly called Christendom, and a good slab of the part that was formerly not, will join together to celebrate an event which defies all logic, science and expectation: the resurrection of the dead.

We will give each other hollow chocolate eggs, or perhaps painted egg shells, representing what? The emoty tomb, and new life. But whose new life? Jesus', of course. And that in itself is problematic, because the resurrection of Jesus is one of the least understood, least examined and least accepted truths in human history. There have been numerous credible works done on why it almost certainly happened, and I have read many of them. But ask me, arme with a lie detector, whether or not I live like it happened, and I will admit, shamefacedly, probably more than a bit anxiously, that I don't. And nor do most of us, Christian or otherwise.

This Sunday, however, we won't just celebrate Jesus' resurrection, though that alone should be challenging enough for us to remember. No, the New Testament made something abundantly clear in how it spoke of Jesus' resurrection: that, if Christ, the true human being, was raised from the dead, then we too would be raised. And, for the early church, this was a deeply transformative belief because it meant that they no longer held on to this life, but to the life that was to come. This is one if the central concepts if the letter to the Hebrews which I am currently reading in my own devotional time: the life to come in Christ is so glorious that we should willingly endure all things in this life in order to make it to the finish line, found in Christ. This idea pervades much of what the Apostle Paul wrote too - and it is something which I am deeply, deeply reluctant to do.

Now, there are multiple reasons people might have for denying that Jesus rose from the dead, most of them variations on the theme that 'the dead simply don't rise from the dead'. Tom Wright has commented in his wonderful work on this topic, 'Surprised By Hope', that this may be a legitimate response but it needs to be made knowingly, consciously, not as a default or passive response.

I personally do not have that option. I have looked at the evidence and have been convinced. I have known the risen Christ and had Him dwell in me. The evidence makes no logical sense of our scientific categories, but it stands there on its own merits, demanding to be heard.

Wright, at the end of his discussion of the topic, issues this challenge:

In so far as I understand scientific method, when something turns up which doesn't fit the paradigm you're working with, one option at least, perhaps when all other have failed, is to change the paradigm - not to exclude everything you've known up to that point, but to include it within a larger whole.

This Easter, confront with me this truth: Jesus rose from the dead, and so will we. Don't dismiss it as blind illogic; a belief which has transformed much of the world at least deserves to be examined on its own merits. So confront it as truth, and see what happens. You'll need a new paradigm to contain what happens, if it even can be contained. It will mess with your head; let it. It will throw your whole life up into the air; let it. The early church, for centuries, let this truth transform them, and they said that the life they gained was far better than the one this paradigm shift forced them to accept. Listen to them. It will hurt, and I will certainly be hurting this Easter. But I'm going to ry and let it run its course in me and see what happens. I may lose everything, but I may also gain so much more in the other side.

Time For Us To Leave?

I rediscovered Larry Norman's music for some reason early last year. I don't remember what prompted me to listen to him, except perhaps the fact that I was trying to track down Geoff Moore's version of "UFO" and, failing to do so, settled for the original.

But I wasn't settling at all. Having grown up on a compilation of contemporary versions of Norman's songs - One Way, released by Forefront Records in 1995 - I had been fairly convinced that the originals would be too daggy for words. I was wrong. The years that had interceded had made the 90s pop schtick of most of the covers from "One Way" a little less than ideal for my ears, but I loved folk, and Larry Norman, I discovered, did too. I went from "UFO" to "Why Don't You Look Into Jesus?" and "Righteous Rocker #1" and "The Great American Novel". I didn't like everything I heard, but I liked most of it. Larry was sort of equal parts Bob Dylan and a more rebellious Keith Green. This was, to my mind, a very good thing.

There's only one problem with Larry: his theology of the end-times. Perhaps it was the way people thought in the 1960s - my parents suggest to me that it was - but there is a fairly pervasive sense, in many of his songs, that the end of the world is looming and that Jesus and the rapture are only seconds away. We know, of course, that this wasn't the case, but it's a little hard for a child of the 80s and 90s like myself to really get why he would have thought this way. Songs like "If the Bombs Fall" help, I think; Larry, like everyone else in his day, lived with the semi-regular threat of nuclear war and other similar catastrophes. Global politics seemed, to him and to others, to have gone mad. His most distinctly eschatological song, the famous "I Wish We'd All Been Ready", captures what Larry saw to be the mood of his day with its opening line:

Life was filled with guns and war

And everyone got trampled on the floor.

The song has remained something of an anthem for - generally American - dispensationalist thinking, the sort that made the Left Behind books such an immense success. This video set to Norman's song demonstrates this phenomenon quite well:

Now, I only recently realised that, having grown up in a moderate Brethren church in rural Australia, I was exposed to my fair share of dispensationalist thinking without realising. It shocked me to learn that, for many theologians, the concept of a literal rapture seems both spurious and unbiblical. I suspect that learning the lyrics to "I Wish We'd All Been Ready" and feeling deeply moved by it at a fairly young age also had quite a bit to do with this thinking. I'm not here to critique the theology of such an interpretation, partly because I'm still very early in my thinking about it and partly because I don't think this is the place to do so. Certainly N.T. Wright has done a pretty good job of at least laying the groundwork for a solid theological challenge to it, and I'm not going to try to regurgitate his ideas here.

But it does strike me that, much as I love Larry Norman's music, there's a line of thinking which goes very well with a rapture-oriented perspective, which is the mindset conveyed in the final line of an otherwise very subtle Norman song, "The Outlaw": "And I think we should get ready 'cause it's time for us to leave". What's wrong with this kind of thinking? I suspect it views the world primarily as something we should be seeking to escape from rather than working to redeem. It fails, in fact, to fully grasp what Jesus was praying for His disciples, and for the church, when He said:

"My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one." (John 17:15)

Now, this does not mean at all that Jesus wants us to stay in this fallen world permanently. There is a very real sense in which Jesus will deliver His followers from the pain of separation from Him. But will He snatch us out of this earth and take us to a celestial kingdom, or will He invade and transform the earth, making it what it was always intended to be? Interestingly, I have long believed the latter, but have still not quite grasped what that means for my thinking about the rapture. But I'm open to being challenged in it, and think it might be wise to begin with these questions posed by Wright in his article:

We might begin by asking, What view of the world is sustained, even legitimized, by the Left Behind ideology? How might it be confronted and subverted by genuinely biblical thinking? For a start, is not the Left Behind mentality in thrall to a dualistic view of reality that allows people to pollute God’s world on the grounds that it’s all going to be destroyed soon? Wouldn’t this be overturned if we recaptured Paul’s wholistic [sic] vision of God’s whole creation? (N.T. Wright, "Farewell to the Rapture")

What, I wonder, would be the implications of living like Jesus wanted us to stay here and invest in this place, painful as it is? What would it mean for us if we knew that our home here was being redeemed, not destroyed? I suspect we might start living a lot more like Jesus, because we would have to love this place just as much as He did. We might even have to start dying for it, instead of waiting for our ticket out.

The World, the Flesh and the God Made Flesh (Advent #3)

John 1:1-18

I have spent a lot of time with the famous prologue to John's Gospel over the past few weeks. Somehow, I don't seem able to get past it. Each morning, when I have my morning devotional time over breakfast, I come back to what is perhaps the strangest opening to any of the four gospels, yet also perhaps the most rich of them all.

Yes, it is certainly rich, but it is also extraordinarily difficult to get your head around. Much easier to think about God as distant, or simply as human; much easier to settle for either extreme, rather than the strange, arresting, confusing fusion of the two that John so unequivocally presents.

A Unitarian friend of mine, whose beliefs exclude the possibility of Jesus being God, once said that he interprets the "Word" of John's prologue as being the plan of God, rather than Jesus. I had never come across this interpretation, and for a time it challenged me. But close inspection of the passage makes such a reading impossible. The Word is a person, the same as God yet somehow distinct. The Word does contain in it the wisdom, the clear, logical communication at the heart of God, but is also much, more more. The Word - lofty, sublime, beyond us, the creator of all things, yet...

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

How do you ever get your head around that? The Creator of the world, dwelling among us...An N.T. Wright sermon that I read this morning commented wisely on how much this truth challenges our very worldview, one which, for instance, likes to keep the secular and sacred apart, one which often would happily prefer to declare that there isn't a sacred at all. Quite apart from being the first sermon I have come across to truly fit the term "antidisestablishmentarian", it raised for me an important question: how much am I willing to let God infiltrate not only the public sphere of society but in fact every sphere? Because that is what He has done. Him coming to earth doesn't just mean comfort for the poor or divine understanding in our suffering, though it does certainly mean those things too. And it was not just a means of attaining salvation; if Jesus only came to earth to die, His thirty years on earth would seem a little redundant. No, though all of these things are crucial to our faith, there is something else that the incarnation shows, which I will certainly be trying to think about this Advent.

The incarnation shows us that God is utterly, intimately, uncomfortably, involved in our lives on earth. He has come to be here; He dwells among us. Are we prepared for that?

Autumn Leaves Revived

Well, autumn has hit Brunswick East, and probably other suburbs of Melbourne too.

Autumn is a funny sort of season in my fair city: it's more often a sequence of unpredictable, bipolar shifts between summer and winter, rather than an intermediate stage. Each extreme takes turns, until winter begins to be more dominant and eventually takes over altogether until some time between September and November (it changes each year). But, unpredictable though autumn tends to be, it's probably the most glorious time that Melbourne has to offer. The trees that line my street are, on cue, letting their half-green, half-golden leaves drop to the ground, and there are few sights more cosy and Melburnian than a street filled with fallen leaves. So I suppose it's the kind of time when, cliched though it is, you'll want to be listening to this jazz standard, performed here for your benefit by Stan Getz:

But when I strolled down my street early this afternoon, it occurred to me that autumn leaves, beautiful as they are, have actually died. Limited as my French may be, it's good enough to know that the original title of "Autumn Leaves", "Les Feuilles Mortes", means "The Dead Leaves". So, when I admire their beauty, I am essentially admiring the beauty of...well...death.

Now, I suppose we can take a poetic approach to the whole thing and say, as e.e. cummings said of a sunset, that if things have to die, they might as well do it beautifully. But isn't this attitude symptomatic of our death-ridden world, rather than necessarily true? We accept death as a reality, so we figure we should be stoic about the whole thing. But do we have to? Not many ages or cultures before us have felt the need to accept death. Chinese emperors drank mercury to avoid it. Alchemists devoted their lives to thwarting it. Death is horrible, and there's not much use pretending it isn't. No-one, when they die, looks like a falling autumnal leaf. In fact, if we're going to look at it that way, a much better musical description of the whole phenomenon might be the angsty - but strangely hopeful - reinterpretation by emo band Thursday, "Autumn Leaves Revisited".

In some traditions, death is seen as the beginning of something new, a necessary stage, a means to an end. This, to me, seems a much better way to think about it, and that is actually how the Christian faith views death - or is at least supposed to view it, though how we truly understand the whole process varies dramatically across the Christian church; and between professed beliefs and lived ones often, sadly, exists a vast chasm.

This is why, on searching the web for various things on returning home - versions of "Autumn Leaves" to link here, podcasts I might enjoy listening to over lunch - I was pleased to find this video of Bishop Tom Wright, a man who I always appreciate even when I don't agree with him.

The video is, naturally, very brief and very simplistic in how it represents what is, I'm sure a much more complex theory than we're getting here. There is, for instance, little or no reference made to actual Bible passages, something that I am sure Bishop Wright gives in his book, "Surprised By Hope", which I must read one day. But it is not an idea that is unfamiliar to me, nor is it quite as revolutionary as the presenter would have us think. That said, it is an idea that few Christians, I think, daily consider or apply in our lives: that God is most of all concerned with the renewal of this world rather than yanking us all out and taking us to heaven. The real life, he suggests, that we are heading for is the restoration of our world to what it should be.

Tom Wright calls it "life after life after death". I call it "autumn leaves revived", because, when I think about a new creation (an idea that baffles me as much as it's baffled almost anyone else in human history), it occurs to me that, beautiful as I find autumn leaves, when the new creation comes we'll be amazed to find that even they seem ugly compared to the beauty of the new leaves that replace them.

No offence intended?

I read these words by the wonderful N.T. Wright recently and they seemed appropriate to put out into the webosphere on this fine, sunny Christmas Eve:

"I was once preaching at a big Christmas service where a well-known historian, famous for his scepticism towards Christianity, had been persuaded to attend by his family. Afterwards, he approached me, all smiles.

'I've finally worked out,' he declared, 'why people like Christmas.'

'Really?' I asked. 'Do tell me.'

'A baby threatens no one,' he said, 'so the whole thing is a happy event which means nothing at all!'

I was dumbfounded. At the heart of the Christmas story in Matthew's gospel is a baby who poses such a threat to the most powerful man around that he kills a whole village full of other babies in order to try to get rid of him...Whatever else you say about Jesus, from birth onwards, people certainly found him a threat. He upset their power-games, and suffered the usual fate of people who do that." (Tom Wright, 2004, Matthew for Everyone Part 1, 13-14)

It's certainly true that we've managed to make the Christmas story quite innocuous. Nativity plays and carols about how "the little Lord Jesus no crying he makes" make it all very demure and comforting, when at the time it was anything but.

Which is not to say that Christmas should suddenly become a deeply unsettling time, and that peace on earth and goodwill to all men should not be encouraged. Any celebration that causes people to come together with their families, to be more loving, generous and charitable than usual, has to have at least some good in it. Yet it seems that, by missing the controversy of Christmas, we also miss the real joy, and the real power. Christmas, grasped fully, is the best news we can imagine. Christmas, grasped fully, makes every day of your life one of generosity and love.