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On Tuesday we spent the day at the Highland Wildlife Park, an extension of Edinburgh Zoo, set in the spectacular Landscape between Kingussie and Aviemore. From as far back as I remember I was around animals on various farms in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire. I know, cows and sheep, pigs and hens, horses and dogs and cats – they're hardly the most exciting beasts on the earth. Yes, but.

In those first fifteen years of life I was around animals, and learned to respect and care for each creature that shares our space, and has as much right to life, food and shelter as we have. I remember my first visit to Edinburgh Zoo with the school. I was probably about 8 or 9. We went on a bus and were led in singing songs about animals by Mrs Proudfoot, the music teacher and Headmaster's wife – in 1959 that was the designation.

Elephants, lions, tigers, buffalo, giraffes, penguins, polar bears, monkeys. Here's where age becomes a giveaway. I was seeing in colour and real life, animals I had only seen in black and white on our first TV. A very young David Attenborough on Zoo Quest, and Armand and Machaela Denis On Safari, and various other documentaries made book pictures come alive. 

I've never lost my fascination with animals, and have never had to be persuaded of animal rights. Later as a Christian I came to think much more deeply about the issues of animal welfare, care of creation, and where my inbuilt resistance and opposition to all forms of animal cruelty originated. This has nothing to do with ideology. Two reasons will suffice, one a story, the other a theological conviction.

The story first. I was alongside my dad as a boy of 8 when I was shocked at the way the farmer's son (a young man by then) used a stick to hit the cows to get them to go into the byre quickly. Dad never, ever, used a stick on 'the beasts' as he called them. He confronted the farmer (who was actually a kindly man himself) and demanded that nobody used a stick on cows that were part of the herd he was responsible for looking after, and keeping healthy. The farmer didn't see it that way, and with no hesitation my father told him, either the sticks went or he did. The farmer tried to reason, that sometimes you had to, and his son didn't mean anything by it.

The result was my father gave in his notice and started to look for another job. That kind of stubborn, obstinate, some might even say unreasonable opposition to inflicting hurt on animals, has never left me. It's a conviction born out of witnessing my father using the only lever he had to prevent what was then an acceptable level of pain to force animal compliance. I'm proud of dad for all kinds of reasons – but I still remember his principled outrage to his employer, and his refusal to compromise or negotiate on the use of a stick on a cow.  

The theological conviction that now entwines with such life experiences, came later. Care for creation and all its creatures has grown and strengthened with every decade of my time on a planet rapidly reaching critical depletion. My understanding of God the Creator, and of this natural world as entrusted gift, is enough to fund both compassion for animals and resistance to both animal cruelty and the uncontrolled laying waste of the earth for commercial gain and economic power. So wherever there are those who are working to conserve and care, to protect and preserve, the beauty and diversity of our natural world, my sympathies align with little need to argue the case.

So, back to the Highland Wildlife Park. It doesn't have a huge range of projects, but as a place to watch and wonder at the marvel that is an animal, it is both fascinating and poignant. Pride of place goes to the pair of snow leopards, who recently gave birth to two cubs. But the snow leopards will be for another post. They have a special place in my worldview! The Amur tiger is magnificent, awesome, and one of a disappearing species.

He wasn't for coming out of his den since it was near feeding time, so the photo does no justice to the size and power of this dangerous endangered masterpiece of muscle and size. The photo was taken through three separate steel fences, so I guess that confused the zoom. But for all that, the elusive and hard to get photo of this vanishing tiger is an image that speaks of the terrible consequences of human greed and fear, and of that strange hostility to whatever is greater and more powerful than ourselves.

We control a beast like this with steel fences, and constrain the movements of a body made for jungles and trees, and destroy the freedom to roam and survive on its own. And for good measure, we have virtually erased her habitat so that the future of the Amur tiger is at best precarious and at worst already closed. 

 

A walk in the woods in the Highlands at dusk. There is a poignant beauty in a dilapidated structure that has lasted the seasons, that once was someone's pride and joy, that has given shelter, and to God's smaller creatures may do still, and whose purpose now is to keep standing, and leave the occasional traveller wondering what it was once used for.

But whatever its previous use, the sight of a building on its last legs touches into something deep in us, our need for shelter, the protection of a place, the comfort that is given not only function, but by familiarity. This small shed sits in a forest in the hills, and through decades of winters its wood has weathered as season's timber,  wind, rain and snow each year taking their toll as the wood warps, nails rust, and roof and walls bear increasing weight with less resilience year on year.

Yes the obvious parallel with human ageing, and yes, with my own growing old. For all the bland optimism and feel good memes about 70 being the new 50, and you're only as old as you feel, and age being only number, and the assumptions that we can stay ahead of this the ultimate numbers game, for all that, this shed shows more realism, and seems content with its own mortality, and its place in time. 

There's something about Qoheleth in an image like this, its mixed messages of decay and defiance, a place of shelter still despite the ravages of time, the hopes and purposes of human building which affirms the future and gives meaning to the present. I'm content to have seen this chapel where the prayers were in the building of it, and its value persists beyond usefulness. And for now, that's not a bad way of thinking of ourselves growing old! 

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I first read that promise of God, "Even to grey hairs I will carry you…" And those climactic verses of the greatest poem of God's protective intimacy, "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life…." And all of this brought on by a walk in a Highland dusk, and an epiphany from a shoogly shed silently singing, "I'm still standing…"!

 

Within the next six months or so three new commentaries will be published on Paul's Letter to the Romans. One of the indulgences of semi retirement (am I allowed to use that word 'indulgence' when writing about Paul's diplomatic letter that precipitated the theological crisis of the Reformation and gave birth to the slogan 'justification by faith?) – in any case, having the freedom and time to read mostly what interests me, I now regularly read biblical commentaries. So three new commentaries on Romans is a bit of a cumulative event. (September 2021, IVP, 544 pp)

The forthcoming Tyndale commentary on Romans is by David Garland. He has already produced a number of highly rated commentaries, most of which I've used, and one, on Second Corinthians, I have read through. The new Tyndale will replace the compact, sensible and loved commentary by F F Bruce. I look forward to working through this replacement, which will be twice the length of its predecessor. (September 2021, IVP, 544pp)

Frederick Dale Bruner's commentary style is very different from the standard approaches of academic historical-critical, rhetorical and literary commentary. His two previous commentaries, on Matthew and John, are each a massive vade mecum of history of interpretation, exposition, exegetical reflection and pastoral comment. His commentary on Romans is similar in style and very different in scale. The Gospel of John came in at 1270 pages, and Matthew in 2 volumes totals 1470; Romans will be 232 pages. That will make it much more manageable, and it will be interesting to find out who his main conversation partners have been from the Romans commentary hall of fame. I have my own favourites, but will enjoy someone else's selection of significant voices. Given the ferment and flux in Pauline studies in the past 40 years, this must have been a master class in distillation. (Oct 2021, Eerdmans, 232pp))

In the Spring, and before Easter, Michael Gorman's theological and pastoral commentary on Romans will be published. Gorman is one of the leading contemporary Pauline scholars whose work over 20 years has increasingly focused on "participation and transformation, cruciformity and new life, peace and justice, community and mission." (text from publisher's advance notice)

It would be fair to say many of us have longed for work like this from Professor Gorman. Amongst other things, this commentary must have compelled Gorman to re-examine and consolidate much of his work to date in the light of a definitive text that is redolent with the very themes on which he has spent his academic career. If similar treatments of 2 Corinthians and Philippians were forthcoming, that would certainly sort out future birthday and Christmas gifts – as we say in Scotland, "If I'm spared!"   (March 2022, Eerdmans, 352ppp))

As it is, I look forward to diving in at the deep end of the pool that is Romans, a kind of baptism into the text, to emerge the better of the swim.  

 

     

A long time ago now, I came across references to A J Heschel in the early writings of Walter Brueggemann. For 40 years I have read both these men, each in their different ways virtuosi in their interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. Brueggemann is for another post. For now I want to say something about Heschel's classic volume on The Prophets. 

I used to have a battered paperback copy, and one day I found this robust hardback copy in a used bookshop. The price was reasonable, but I would probably have bought it even if the price was unreasonable. I was reading some of it again today. It confirmed what I've thought for some time; Rabbi Heschel's own writing is informed by the poetic and prophetic, and is fuelled by pathos and passion.

Inside the front board is an ex libris label, with the name Stanley Gevirtz. I decided to go chasing this previous owner and this is what I found. He first studied drama and literature and became an expert in Semitic poetry, its syntax and style. He was "an outstanding classroom teacher and captivating public lecturer, whose public delivery bordered on the poetic."

That description can equally apply to Heschel, and I find it a poignant connection between these two remarkable teachers that they crafted sentences by using words the way a jeweller creates a setting and selects and positions the stones to their most startling effect. 

The Prophets is a rich book, quite unlike other treatments of the Hebrew prophetic consciousness. For example, Gerhard Von Rad's volume, The Message of the Prophets, has its own deserved reputation, but as an historical critical study that seeks to do justice to the theology and rhetorical traditions of the Hebrew prophets. It remains essential reading.

But Heschel is something else altogether. The most famous chapter in the book became set reading in many Protestant seminaries in the mid 1960's – 'The Theology of Pathos'. Years before Moltmann's The Crucified God, and the revived interest in post-Holocaust theology of in divine suffering as a serious and essential corrective to an exaggerated theology of divine impassibility, Heschel wrestled like Jacob with the theological nexus of tragedy, suffering, covenant faithfulness, steadfast love, and the witness of the Hebrew prophets to the passion and pathos of God.

Coincidentally I recently read an essay on the covenant between God and Israel, and how covenant theology is an essential dimension of Christian atonement theology. Amongst the insights pressed by the author was the relational basis of covenant, and in investment of faithful loyalty on both sides to ensure the integrity and durability of that relationship. Heschel's treatment of divine pathos takes with utmost seriousness the nature of divine love, mercy, judgement and wrath. God suffers when the covenant relationship is broken, and divine faithfulness is exploited, and trusting love becomes divine heartbreak. 

Here are the last words of Heschel's astonishing chapter:

"The divine pathos is the unity of the eternal and the temporal, of meaning and mystery, of the metaphysical and the historical. It is the real basis of the relation between God and man, of the correlation of Creator and creation, of the dialogue between the Holy One of Israel and His people. The characteristic of the prophets is not foreknowledge of the future, but insight into the present pathos of God."  (The Prophets, page 231) 

The bibliophile in me treasures the footprints of those who have gone before me in the journey through a book like this. That wee label inside the front board, tells me where the book was bought; and the Ex Libris tells me who bought it. Stanley Gervitz I have no doubt curated this book with respectful care. This scholar of Hebrew poetry, handled the magnum opus of the Rabbi who walked to Selma with MLK, who was frequently caught up in protesting the Vietnam War, and who wrote the classic work that expounds not only the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible, but also the aching, hopeful heart of the Holy One of Israel. 

 

“I have constantly had occasion to wish and suggest that the attitude and approach of the younger generations of Protestant theologians to the period of the Church that is just past might be rather different from that which they now often seem to regard, somewhat impetuously, as the norm – misunderstanding the guidance they have received from me.

I would be very pleased if they were (to put it simply) to show a little more love towards those who have gone before us, despite the degree of alienation they feel from them…

We need openness towards and interest in particular figures with their individual characteristics, an understanding of the circumstances in which they worked, much patience  and also much humour in the face of their obvious limitations and weaknesses, a little grace in expressing even the most profound criticism, and finally, even in the worst cases, a certain tranquil delight that they were as they were.”

Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century,  quoted in Hancock, Karl Barth’s Emergency Homiletic.

A series of Thought for the Day, for this week, based on Isaiah 55

Monday

Isaiah 55.1 “Come for water, all who are thirsty; though you have no money, come, buy grain and eat. Come, buy wine and milk, not for money, not for a price.

Three times we are invited – ‘Come’. Sometimes we are so concerned to exalt the power of God and his sovereign call, we forget that God’s love doesn’t compel our love. He invites us to come to Him for all that we need. Money, our capacity to pay our own way, doesn’t matter. God already offers what we need – if we come.

Tuesday

Isaiah 55.2 “Why spend your money for what is not food, your earnings on what will not satisfy? Listen to me and you will fare well, you will enjoy the fat of the land.”

Sometimes we don’t know what’s good for us. We think we do, but we make wrong choices. We yearn to be satisfied with our lives, content, safe, and nourished. Isaiah warned the people of God that they can only be satisfied by the Creator who made them. Instead of pursuing ‘what is not food’, pray “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Wednesday

Isaiah 55.3 “Come to me and listen to my words, hear me and you will have life. I shall make an everlasting covenant with you, to love you faithfully, as I loved David.”

When Jesus poured wine and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood”, he had in mind verses like this. Through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, God has made an everlasting covenant to all who come in faith and trust. Once again, this is the God who says “Come to me, and listen to my words.” This is the God whose love has the strength of an everlasting covenant. We have God’s word on that!

Thursday

Isaiah 55.6 “Seek the Lord while he may be found, call to him while he is close at hand.”

Isaiah is the poet and prophet whose life work seems to have been issuing invitations on behalf of God. Many of us who have been on the road of faith for years can be tempted to think we have ‘found’ God, and no longer need to seek Him. True enough, in one sense. But we will always find ourselves in hard places, or times when hope is low and light is dim. He is near, call upon him; seek God because if you ask you will receive, if you seek you will find, and if you knock – doors open.

Friday

Isaiah 55.7 “Let the wicked forsake his ways, and the evil their thoughts: let them return to the Lord, who will take pity on them, and to our God, for he will freely forgive.”  

This verse isn’t about other people; it’s about us. Read it alongside these words: “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” (I Jn.1.8-9) Forgiveness is always God’s preferred option.

Saturday

Isaiah 55.8-9 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

We can never out think God. Whatever is happening in our lives God knows more about it than we ever could. Our horizons are limited, our line of vision restricted. But God sees the end from the beginning. Faith is to trust when we can’t see, and to go on hoping in the God whose thoughts out think us, and whose ways are always faithful. In the death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s thoughts display heaven’s wisdom in finding the One way of salvation we would never have thought of!

Sunday

Isaiah 55. 10-11 “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”

Isaiah is the poet and prophet not only of invitations, but of promises. He describes a cycle of blessing under which all who seek God flourish. Rain and snow, the watering of the earth, the sowing of seed and the baking of bread – God’s promises are like that. Life-giving, dependable, a continual cycle of blessing and flourishing. God’s words are sent for a purpose, – and they are words of blessing, creation, fruitfulness and life.

Amongst the books that would make up any single bookcase of the books I need to have easy and frequent access to is Jesus Through the Centuries, Jaroslav Pelikan. I used it as a textbook and based an entire module around the title. It is a selective but authoritative and diverse guide to the multitudinous approaches to portraying the figure of Jesus. Every single artistic attempt inevitably portrays the artist's own assumptions, cultural imagination, historical context and religious tradition.

This particular image was displayed on screen throughout the sermon this morning, which was on Mark 4.25-31. You know, that bit where Mark tells us Jesus was asleep, on a cushion!? I love that detail, Jesus making himself comfortable and sleeping through a Galilean squall until he was awakened by the panicky noise and hurt hollering of his disciples.

The service had begun with Psalm 107.23-32. Only when you read that passage do you realise that Mark's description of Jesus the storm chaser and wave calmer reveals him to be more than an exhausted carpenter turned Rabbi. "So they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he brought them out of their distress. The storm sank to a murmur, and the waves of the sea were stilled." (Ps 107.28-29) No doubt about it; this passage is right in the foreground of Mark's telling of the story. And the disciples' question, "Who is this that even the wind and sea obey him?" is as theologically loaded as they come. 

For us in worship this morning, the contrast of the disciples' fear and Jesus asleep on a cushion, faced us with the reality of our own fears, and the reminder that Jesus wasn't asleep because he didn't care. In the storm, Jesus in in his element. What the disciples feared most could only happen to them with the permission of the calmer of storms. That for mark is the game-changer. The disciples' question has only one answer – this is the one who comes into the world as the saving presence of God, the one who announces and begins to demonstrate the reign of God.

Oh there's more to think and wonder about, but that one question, "Who is this?", goes on whistling and roaring in the mind long after the wind is silent and the waves are gentled. The picture my Monica Lui Ho Peh is an astonishing capture of that nano-second just before the divine fiat that transforms chaos into creation is spoken. Perhaps the truth is that when fear is at its strongest and our hope at its lowest, the one asleep on the cushion is neither complacent nor unaware. But yes, perhaps faith has an essential energy of desperation when, like those disciples, we shout in God's face and ask for deliverance.

To read Mark 4.25-31, then look at that picture on screen is to discover the power of visual exegesis, and to recover the theological precision of art. Sometimes I am helped by text and image, exegesis and art, perplexity and prayer, and the comfort of knowing that sometimes I'm just as scared, and just as slow on the uptake, as those first followers of Jesus who faced their worst fears, and left us a story about how to face our own.         

This what I wrote as a pastoral letter for our church this week. 

Afghanistan, Haiti, and Yemen. These are just three places where human crisis and suffering are on a scale that makes us feel helpless. Effective aid will require international co-operation, and long term commitments towards peace-making, humanitarian aid and new partnerships to empower people to build a better future.

We are still struggling with the uncertainties of the pandemic even at the personal and local level. It’s very difficult for ordinary folk like us to make any big difference to the huge problems our world currently faces. That’s why it’s important that we take time to read and consider information that comes to us from reliable sources such as BMS World Mission or Tear Fund. What seems to us to be a global problem beyond our help, becomes much more local, personal and immediate when we read and hear stories of families and individuals caught up in horrific circumstances they had no part in creating.

As Christians we believe in the dignity, value and significance of every single human being created in the image of God.

So when we see the bewildered faces of starving children in Yemen, in each one we see the face of one dearly beloved by God. And we pray, Lord have mercy

When we watch footage of rescuers scrabbling with bare hands in the rubble of what used to be a thriving town in Haiti, we realise that an earthquake on the other side of the world has reverberations that reach across humanity to our heart, if not the ground on which I stand. And we pray, Lord have mercy.

 The people of Afghanistan have borne so much over decades, and once again their country is a place of chaos, fear, anger division and fast disappearing hope. The political fallout will come, but leave aside the recriminations and blame games, and focus on the face of this frightened child, and that weeping woman, these young students whose futures have just evaporated, those older faces lined with suffering and eyes in which hope fades, again. And pray, Lord have mercy.

Whatever else the church of Jesus Christ is for, it is for what God is for. As the Body of Christ we are called to embody the reconciling love of Christ. We are agents of God’s purpose of making right. We are builders of peace. In our faith and worship we stand beneath the cross of Jesus the place of mercy and reconciliation. In God-given hope we stand at the empty tomb as witnesses to the good news of new hope. As proclaimers of the outbreak of new life in Christ, we stand as believers in the defeat of death by a Love stronger than sin and death and hell.

But what does that mean, practically? What can we actually do that will make much difference? The obvious answer is that we pray, and we will do that. Below is a prayer for Afghanistan. Make it one of the ways we affirm and focus our concern. This coming week we will pray this prayer, before we ever get to praying for ourselves and our own daily and even pressing concerns. To love our neighbours as ourselves should at least mean we will pray for them with the same persistence, faith and intention as when we pray for ourselves.

We can give money. There are various agencies now predicting a humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. Tear Fund is a recognised evangelical mission agency who have a widely recognised track record in using emergency relief funds strategically and effectively. https://www.tearfund.org/campaigns/afghanistan-emergency-appeal

When many people contribute what they can, that collection of modest merciful intentions becomes a funding resource that can save lives. The apostle Paul spent the last year or two of his life taking up a collection to take to Jerusalem for famine relief. From the letter he wrote to Corinth come words that raise money from finance to faithfulness. “God loves a cheerful giver!” Giving money to help save the lives of people we have never met is a deeply Christ-like thing to do. It is generous, loving, not looking for a return other than the wellbeing and valuing of others.

We can train ourselves in compassion. What do you do with those images on TV of desperate people falling from planes, of traumatised children and shell-shocked and shattered communities? Switching off from others’ suffering by switching channels or scrolling past isn’t really an option for followers of Jesus the suffering servant who died for the very sins that give rise to so much human anguish. Prayer for those who suffer is a refusal to scroll down past what makes us uncomfortable. Below is the prayer I mentioned earlier. Use it in coming days as the news unfolds, speaking to the God who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself and trusting the one who was rich but for our sakes became poor.

 

PRAYER FOR A TROUBLED WORLD. (from Tear Fund)

God of love and light, the world feels dark today. Tragedy looms large. The air is heavy with grief. The tears of the people of Afghanistan.

The tears of the people of Haiti; the tears of the people of so many places – it is a tide of anguish. A tide of loss.

Yet we will not despair, for we know that you are God. We know there is no darkness so great that light cannot overcome it. We know that love never fails.

Let light pour out upon the land – upon Afghanistan, upon Haiti, upon all the places that weigh upon our hearts. Let their cries for deliverance be heard.