Category: The text as critic

 Some went out on the sea in ships;
    they were merchants on the mighty waters.
²⁴ They saw the works of the Lord,
    his wonderful deeds in the deep.
²⁵ For he spoke and stirred up a tempest
    that lifted high the waves.
²⁶ They mounted up to the heavens and went down to the depths;
    in their peril their courage melted away.
²⁷ They reeled and staggered like drunkards;
    they were at their wits’ end.
²⁸ Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble,
    and he brought them out of their distress.
²⁹ He stilled the storm to a whisper;
    the waves of the sea^[a] were hushed.
³⁰ They were glad when it grew calm,
    and he guided them to their desired haven.
³¹ Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love
    and his wonderful deeds for mankind.
³² Let them exalt him in the assembly of the people
    and praise him in the council of the elders.

Today I sat in the car and watched a troubled sea. My first trip out for a week after being quite unwell, another episode of bodily weakness possibly brought on by living beyond the limits of what is sensible for someone my age; equally it may well have been one of those random things that happens. Either way, I need to start acting my age, it seems, one of those days, maybe……

But through the murk and gloom of a sea roiled and rolling in a wind neither wavering nor weakening, and painted more than fifty shades of grey by rain thrown in messy freehand rather than spread evenly from some invisible palette, came a large container ship slowly making its way to the harbour entrance. It was like watching a documentary based on Psalm 107, the section about "merchants on the mighty waters." With the Psalms open on my knee, I read those words, 107. 23-32, and watched the skill and courage of a crew arriving at "their desired haven". Then I took the photos.

This is a Psalm for people who have tales to tell; who have been hungry and somehow food has appeared, who have been sick but somehow they got well again, whose lives have been closed in, and their bodies, hearts or minds imprisoned one way or another, but have recovered their freedom, who have sailed stormy waters and against the odds, or so it seems, made it to a safe place once more. And as I sat there watching this ship aim for the narrow harbour entrance and slip thankfully into the shelter of those bastion walls, I was aware I had just watched Psalm 107 enacted and performed for my benefit. Because reading the Psalm I had unwittingly said the prayer that I as much as anyone needed to say, "O Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever. Let the redeemed of the Lord say so…"

The Psalm has four case studies of when life seems to fail – hunger, sickness, loss of freedom, danger to our future – but these four examples are framed by the heart cry of gratitude for the steadfast love of the good God (v1-3) and a beautiful poem at the end about what such steadfast love looks like in lives no less complicated and unpredictable for any of us. And it finishes with the no nonsense advice to consider, to think seriously, to take into full account in any assessment of who you are and where your life is right now, to remember not to forget "the steadfast love of the Lord".

And sitting at the North Sea front at Aberdeen, in a howling gale, rain battering the windscreen, book of Psalms on my knee and reading aloud the words of this Psalm as the boat arrived at harbour, I was taught again to do precisely that, "to consider the steadfast love of the Lord who brings us to our desired haven… and raises up the needy". The Psalm writer isn't saying everyone will want to do this; but he is blunt enough to say "Let the redeemed of the Lord say so". If they don't, who will?

Gratitude is the emotion we seldom feel whenever life is taken for granted. In a culture where self-sufficiency is maturity, independence and self-determination a life goal, material prosperity considered the best security, and the selfie the ultimate personal statement, gratitude for the sheer gift of being alive, and gratitude for all the gifts we neither made nor deserve but which make our life possible at all – well gratitude is blindingly conspicuous by its being silenced beneath the din of lives lived selfward.

I an thankful for this Psalm; I am thankful for this ship and that it reached safe harbour. But I am also thankful for those experiences that remind me to be thankful, those times when life isn't going so well for me, or those I care most about. Because undergirding, underwriting, this life I live, is the steadfast love of the Lord whose goodness endures forever, and who will bring us, like that boat, to our desired haven.

The past few days I've spent some study time exploring the story of Jesus in the house of Martha and Mary. You know the one – Martha banging pots, rattling dishes and cutlery, checking oven, swearing at the beeping microwave, piling everything in the dishwasher, trying to set a table while stirring a sauce, checking the recipe online, and Mary sitting at Jesus' feet. It isn't fair. Even less fair when Martha complains to Jesus and gets a telling off for getting so worked up.

What's that about? Well it's a long story trying to explain this short story. Martha is the one who welcomes and invites Jesus, assuming that for such an important guest everyone will muck in and get on with what needs to be done. Usually Mary and Martha are a team but this time Mary is sitting, all ears on what Jesus is saying. One of my favourite paintings is the Vermeer Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. It's in the National Galleries in Edinburgh and it's now a regular stopping place if I'm in the city and it can possibly be done.

This painting sent me chasing for other visual interpretations of this story and there are a lot. And they all tell the same story, but often with variations of how the scene is interpreted. Is Jesus annoyed or gentle? Is Martha criticised or consoled? Is Mary lazy or is she doing the right thing? Is conversation more important than food on the table when it comes to hospitality for a hungry guest? Does Martha miss the point, does Jesus overlook Martha's practical kindness or indulge Mary's fascination with the radical teacher from Nazareth? How has Mary chosen the better part and the one thing necessary? Does that mean that all those practical souls whose kindness and friendship is expressed through their own nature as doers of the word, are to be told what they are doing isn't the way to love God? As if those who pray and read the Bible are more in line with what God wants than the person who bakes the bread, drops in with the casserole, misses the prayer meeting to take someone for a hospital appointment?

Yes, I know. Mary was listening to the word, and Martha was clattering in the kitchen. No amount of working, doing, activity is a substitute for prayer, devotion and looking after your soul. But Martha, if she ever gets a fair hearing, might want to say, "Well no amount of praying and Bible study and worship songs are going to feed the proper hunger of the body – give us this day our daily bread is, for a baker, a command to use gift and energy in feeding others." The word activism is a good put down word, usually used by those who want to be super-spiritual and dismiss the spirituality of those who like Bezalel in Exodus 31 was gifted by the Spirit with the practicalities of hand and mind to get the job done.

Annette Everett created a beautiful statue of Martha and Mary standing together, back to back, the sculptor's way of saying that contemplation and action, listening and doing, being with Jesus and working for Jesus, are both required in the model disciple. This, and Vermeer's painting are interpretations in which Martha isn't put down, but helped to see that all the effort in the world isn't a substitute for attentive listening to what the guest actually wants, needs and expects. Hospitality is not to foist the host's agenda driven approach to making the guest feel welcome; it is to pay attention to what the guest says, to offer first the gift of presence and that precious time needed to get a good meal on the table.

There is a rich and varied tradition of how this story has been used in the church down the centuries, across the world in different cultures, and often as a co-opted script to put women in their place! That's another story, but reader beware and be aware, Luke in telling this story has Mary doing what a man does and a woman is never expected to do in Jesus' time. And Martha's activism (a word too often used in a pejorative dismissal of people's hard work) is described as diakonia, ministry, service. Together these two women contain the rich diversities of Christian ministry and devotion to God, the love of neighbour and God, the practical kindness that prepares food and the attentive listening that receives the gift the guest brings.

Such a rich story.

I'm still reading, marking and learning in the Epistle of James, and taking time to inwardly digest a text that is nourishing and therefore not fast food. James is writing "in the name of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes of the Dispersion". So in the very first verse he uses a word that tells us who we are as followers of Jesus, whether we live now or 2000 years ago – we are exiles, dispersed people, a scattered community.

I've long felt that the biblical story of Exile has important parallels for Christians trying to live in our 21st Century culture where faith commitments and religious privilege are no longer the assumed context for our daily living. Christian values, practices and moral patterns are now minority interests, one option in a plethora of other chosen lifestyles, value systems and relational commitments, which have equal validity and powerful promotional claims in a post-Christian, media soaked, inter-connected society.

So when James says his letter is for those who feel displaced, who live away from home, whose identity is constantly under pressure, whose cultural roots are planted in alien soil, then it just may be that his message takes on particular urgency and poignancy. A recent study of Global Diaspora might help us understand why it is that Christians struggle to survive in our society, and are tempted time and again to take the lines of least resistance, and to settle for being non-radical in our discipleship. Here are some of the realities pointed out in that study of what it means being an exile, being dispersed and away from where we are most at home. Each of them is energy sapping, vision reducing, hope impairing, and thus diminishing of life possibilities:

• separation from homeland (alienation from an increasingly anit-Christian culture)
• life on the move (living with rapid paced change)
• erosion of identity as a people (Christian community)
• living on the periphery when power is at the centre (end of Christendom)
• loss of cultural roots ( the things that matter most to Christians matter least now)
• refugee status (citizens of heaven locked into ways of life hostile to Christian values)

Now the New Testament scholar Joel Green then points out that James himself identifies key features of dispersion and exile:

trials of every kind (1.2)

testing of faith (1.3)

humiliation (1.9)

temptation (1.12)

distress (1.27)

conflicts and disputes (4.1)

victims of hostile treatment (5.4,6)

a life of wandering (5.19)

However, James says something early on that is crucial for our survival as Christians amidst all this negative sounding talk – "Count it all joy when you face various tests…". Why? Because suffering trials and tests brings endurance and then maturity. Joy isn't happiness; it's much nearer confidence, a trusting attitude to life that isn't based on only good things happening to good people, and behind all that, James urges a recognition that God is a particular kind of God. James 1.16-18 "Every good gift, every perfect gift, comes from above. These gifts come down from the Father is the creator of the heavenly lights, in whose character there is no change at all. Or in an older translation, "in whom there is no shadow of turning."

So exiles in a time and a place, a culture and a society, struggle to exist where following faithfully after Jesus is neither easy nor popular. But, says James, they are those who have a strange, durable joy, because the God who gifts us life and whose gifts sustain our life is faithful, constant, unchanging. No wonder these verses are embedded in hymns of the Church:

"Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father,

There is no shadow of turning with thee;

Thou changest not, thy compassions they fail not,

As thou hast been thou forever wilt be."

Bishop Handley Carr Glynn Moule was one of the most effective expositors of the early Keswick holiness teaching. He grounded the Keswick experience of sanctification as an experience of full surrender to Jesus as Lord in careful exegesis of the New Testament, enriched and guided by a moderate Calvinism, and after his own experience of a new grace and power, that theology became an articulation of his own spiritual experience. 

You can trace the transition by reading his earlier commentary on Romans in the Cambridge Bible, (1879) and comparing it with his later commentary in the Expositor's Bible (1894). I remember reading these two commentaries in parallel when I was writing about the courteous but principled disagreement between two fine Anglican Bishops, Ryle and Moule. For Ryle the idea of a final or continuing victory over sin and inner spiritual conflict was contrary to the clear teaching of the Bible and the universal experience of Christian struggle against sin as a lifetime of conflict, frustration of intention, and struggle towards holiness. For Moule, whose earlier commentary affirmed that same experience of inner contradiction, he had moved to an experience which, after his full surrender to Christ, affirmed the victory that only Christ can give to the soul which is surrendered fully to the indwelling Lord, crucified and risen, whose life is now lived through the experience of the regenerate soul by the power of the Spirit.

These were the days when Anglican Bishops argued with passion on Pauline theology, christian existence and the crucial distinctions in Christian experience that made all the difference to how we understand the Gospel. And did so with Bible in hand and with the orchestra of theological tradition and biblical exegesis in full symphonic performance.

All of which brings me in a roundabout way to Moule's earlier wee commentary on Romans. It's 270 pages, six and a half by four and a half inches, and fits nicely into an anorak pocket! Does anyone wear anoraks now? OK, a jacket pocket. Reading through it again as my daily devotions I came across the Bishop's quaint comment on Romans 1.12. This is where Paul, in full rhetorical and diplomatic flow says,

"For I long to see you that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift, to the end you may be established; that is that I may be comforted together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me."

Here is Moule, his language that of a Victorian church statesman:

"The tact of the apostle is only an exquisite combination of sympathy and judgement; he speaks the true word, in the right place, and from the heart. It would be shallow criticism indeed which would see here only an ingenious religious compliment. To the sincere Christian teacher nothing is  more real than the reflex aid he [or she] receives among Christian learners." page 55 

Now that last sentence should be written on the door of every theological college classroom! The best teachers are learners and good learners are brilliant teachers.

Moule's stately Victorian language lends gravitas to one of the key pedagogic dispositions of the teacher – lifelong teachability. I haven't checked, but I'm not sure I'd expect to find Moule's application of Paul's rhetoric in some of the contemporary Romans heavyweights, but I'm repared to be corrected by those willing to go look. For now, I'm grateful to God for 'the reflex aid I've recieved among Christian learners.'

I love biblical commentaries. I don't mean only that I like, value, use, buy, read, browse, collect commentaries. I mean all of these and added into it a glad amazement at the inexhaustibility of the biblical texts. A definition of a good commentary is hard to formulate – so much depends on the kind of reader and the kind of commentary. So, is Gary Smith's commentary a good one?

Well according to one Amazon reviewer called Shandy, mostly yes but with a serious caveat. I leave you to read the whole review and tell me what you think of the caveat.

Another excellent commentary from the NIV application series. Good exposition of what the prophecies meant to those who first heard them in Bible times. Original ideas for how the messages of the ancient prophets help us in our lives today.
Gary Smith presents some challenges to the Bible believer, such as his powerful argument of the importance of the "Lament" in the life of the Christian.
My only criticism of the book would be that Smith urges Christians to become political activists on behalf of the poor and oppressed. This seems to go against Christ's example of refusing to become involved politically (e.g. refusing to be made king, or become involved in protests against heavy taxes) as his mission was first and foremost to preach the good news about God's coming kingdom on earth, where oppression will be destroyed once and for all.
With our world being ravaged by earhquakes, tsunamis, wars, famines and terrorism, Micah's prediction of a righteous king from Bethlehem – Jesus Christ – ruling over a worldwide kingdom of peace is as relevant now as it ever was.

This was accessed here

Dear Readers, on the strength of Shandy's caveat, I will buy Smith's commentary and soak up every instance of being urged to become politcally activist in the pursuit of justice and righteousness and mercy.

Incidentally what on earth did Micah mean by "He has told you O people what is good; and what does the Lord require of you? But to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." How do you act justly in an unjust society? How do you love mercy in a politcally ruthless society?By amongst other things, being politcially activist, that is, acting in ways that arte for the common good, and out of a commitment to Jesus, who was crucified for reasons of political expediency and religious convenience.

This wee book on Jonah cost me £2.50 in 1977. I bought it because I was speaking at a Conference in Kilcreggan on mission. Back then Missiology was an up and coming area of major theological attention and grew into an essential discipline for research, reflection and forward looking ecclesial praxis. I hadn't long finished reading through Let the Earth Hear His Voice, a massive document produced at the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, 1975.  Three  years later J Verkuyl's Introduction to Contemporary Missiology appeared as an early introduction to a more serious and structured approach to missiology as a serious doctrinal imperative in its own right, and an area of study requiring urgency, imagination and courage to challenge the more superficial or outdated theories and practices of evangelism and missionary activity. 

Back to Jonah. I had just spent £6.25 on Leslie Allen's commentary on Joel, Obadiah, Jonah and Micah, and was fascinated by Jonah as a missionary who wanted to give evangelism a body swerve, whose reluctance to preach mercy was ruthlessly obstinate, and whose entire body language was an enacted "No" of defiance, poorly disguised as justified protest at the scandalous softness of God!

So when I read Fretheim's theological commentary (by the way the current very fruitful attention to theological exegesis is not as recent or as innovative as is often claimed in publishers' blurb – Fretheim et al were doing it decades ago) I was intrigued by the playfulness and literary enjoyment of a commentator who understood irony and the subversive persuasiveness of an anti-hero. All the way through the book Jonah is a missiological liability. He doesn't want to preach repentance and mercy; he says yes but walks in the opposite direction; he prays a Psalm of repentance that reads like pious obedience but is more a wheedling negotiation with God; then when he does preach, his words are unadulterated pessimism; and his response to the Ninevites repentance is anger, resentment and a suicidal sulk.

The story of Jonah is a brilliant exposition of obedience through gritted teeth, a servant of God who thinks he can manage the universe better than the Creator. He sits beneath his gourd plant, hoping against hope that the Ninevites will be offered no hope, no mercy, no future. He is angry with God because God is slow to anger; he is critical of God because mercy is the best outcome of judgement; his sense of proportion is so skewed that he is moved by the tragedy of a withered gourd tree, and unmoved by the thought of annihilation on an urban scale. And the book ends in one of the best jokes in the entire canon – leave aside the 120,000 people, what about all the animals. Weigh it up Jonah – one gourd bush or an entire city. Where does the burden of mercy rightly fall?

Here is one of Fretheim's best comments, a comparison of Elijah and Jonah: "And Elijah asked that he might die, saying, 'It is enough. Now O lord take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.'" The difference between Jon ah and Elijah is striking. Elijah was in despair over his failure to turn the hearts of the idolatrous people of Israel. Jonah was in despair over his success…Jonah has become angry because God has refused to pour out his anger. Jonah will be angry if God will not be."(p. 122)

No wonder God asks the incredulous question, "Are you right to be angry". In the 21st Century world where religious anger is often clothed in lethal violence, or simmers into a resentment of 'the other', whoever 'they' are, Jonah comes as an ironic subversion of all devotion to God that uses God's judgement as an excuse for our hatreds, justification of our prejudices and confirmation of our presupposed rightness. Because however right we think we are, there is always the danger that we feel so right that rather than accept the reality of God's eternal love and mercy, we remake God in the image of our own prejudices and begin instructing God in the dynamics of anger, punishment and judgement.

"God was in Christ breconciling the world to himself, not counting their tresspasses against them…."  Go and do likewise! The Gospel remains subversive, generous, outrageous, scandalous, unbelievably merciful, incredibly forgiving, and the God made known in Jesus remains the God who throws extravagant parties for every sinner who repents, and who even comes looking for the Jonah-like elder brother, out there sulking because God has no favourites.