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This is a poem for times when we hate, oppose, differentiate on the basis of fear and mistrust, and when we need people who will give credibility again to the God who is love. It was written by George Bruce, a Scottish poet, whose work is deeply coloured and shaped by the North East of Scotland. This poem about Martin Luther King is part lament, part hope and laced with both anger and sadness at the human capacity for waste and the churches' loss of credibility traced directly to the loss of a living and vitalising connectedness to Christ. 

After the Death of Martin Luther King

Mary Oliver is one of the very finest exponents of the prose poem. This is one of her wise and visionary rebukes to those who settle for less than life can be with effort, commitment, sacrifice, risk and an intentional unseating of the selfish spirit that either wants to possess or wants to play safe. Somewhere beyond these is the call of life itself, or perhaps God, daring us to stop playing at living, and start seriously paying attention to what life could be….. this prose poem is about that.

You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life toward it.

(New and Selected Poems, page 136)

There are more commentaries on the Gospel of John than any one of us needs to study it, at whatever point of entry we choose. I have a shelf full of 12 commentaries and about 20 monographs, and that excludes books I've borrowed from libraries over the years. And I am still intrigued by fresh work, new scholarship and all the undiscovered country of this familiar, strange, demanding and perplexingly profound book. Despite all the early scholarly ink and papyrus, the plethora of academic paper and print, the ocean of digital, electronic and online resources, the Fourth Gospel continues to speak deeply and clearly to those who read John's Gospel itself with uncomplicated faith and readiness to listen.

The latest substantial commentary was published a few weeks ago and I am reading it each day Advent through Epiphany. It is readable, learned, thoughtful, written by an author who writes for church as well as academy, and does so out of her own confessional commitment to the Christian faith. That makes her no less a scholar with a critical mind, reverent and respectful of the text and therefore not prepared to short change this Gospel by foreclosing on problems, avoiding questions or claiming more interpretive authority than the evidence allows.

Marianne Meye Thomson has worked on this commentary for 17 years, which is a large chunk of her professional life. In an interview held at Fuller Theological Seminary where she is Professor of New Testament, she spoke openly about the joys, demands and disciplines of writing a commentary. Sometimes those who write commentaries are criticised for not covering all the issues of background, social context, textual developments and pre-history, rhetorical strategy, theology and reception history, while also interacting with the waterfall of monographs and other commentaries. In her interview Thompson conceded there would be those in the academy discontented that the commentary is not a vade mecum of recent scholarship; but her aim is to write for students and pastor-preachers while also making a contribution that other Johannine scholars will also appreciate.

Her approach is succinctly stated: "I have not endeavoured to reconstruct or pass judgement on the historicity of events, words or accounts in John. John;s Gospel is assuredly a selective, interpreted account of some of the things that Jesus said and did; it presents Jesus and his works and words to be the life giving deeds of the one God of Israel for all the world. The goal of the commentary is to illumine the witness of that narrative. (p.23)

This clarification is important, ensuring the reader is aware of the author's stated purposes and intentional omissions. Thompson makes no attempt to carry on a multi-sided dialogue with all the secondary exegetical and historical literature. She seldom engages in prolonged discussion with other commentators except where they add further interpretive clarity to the text in hand. Footnotes are rich in additional information and comment, and are the more valuable for being limited in number, reserved for the more important matters. That said, there are approximately 1100 footnotes, and she spoke ruefully of the large file of footnotes cut from the text to keep the volume within the publisher's word count! Some of us would like to see and follow those scholarly footprints!

There are nine Excurses and each is a richly textured essays on crucial theological and historical issues in John, as for example the signs, the I am' sayings, faith and discipleship, and the one she confesses she struggled with most, "The Jews" in the Gospel of John. Reading the excurses is a mini course on Johannine theology and history. The Excursus on the woman taken in adultery is an exemplary piece of textual criticism in which the pericope is not seen as original, but is nevertheless expounded in an exercise of canonical exegesis. A 23 page Bibliography, and around 82 pages of indices enhance the usefulness of the volume, pointing the reader to further resources and gathering page references to a host of subjects as they are treated throughout the commentary. 

The water into wine pericope is a favourite of mine, and one I have preached on several times and studied and returned to ever since C K Barrett and Raymond Brown showed me what could be done by digging into the Old Testament texts and establishing bridges between John's storytelling and the Jewish and Greco-Roman world out of which such writing came. Her exegesis is laced with cross references to the OT and other Second Temple literature, is written in lucid and imaginative prose with an eye to the theological payload, so that she brings a freshness and, on occasion, a surprising light to bear on an already well worked text. Likewise her understanding of the story of the Temple cleansing is to respect John's chronology in placing it at the start of Jesus ministry, but also to acknowledge the Synoptic account may be the more historically plausible. Rather than seek to harmonise, she works at explaining what John was about, and why the Temple cleansing sets off foundation shaking Christological reverberations. These are two examples of her approach.

I had occasion to preach on John 14.7-11, a typical passage of Johannine theology suggestive of long rumination on the meaning of the Word made flesh, and how the one who was close to the heart of God is the only one who can make God known: "He who has seen me has seen the Father" is a statement that takes the reader to the highest ridges of Johannine Christology, and containining ideas far seeing in their suggestion of a nascent Trinitarianism. Thompson shirks none of the hard questions in exploring the identity of Jesus the Son and his relationship to God the Father. In a couple of paragraphs she unravels John's meanings with the clarity of a scholar who previously published two substantial monographs on God in John's Gospel. She is a reliable guide and a good commentator on the theological landscape of John.

The NTL commentary series is intended to be medium sized, mid range and deal with paragraphs and flow of thought rather than treating the text in the more atomistic, comprehensive and detailed analyses of larger scholarly commentaries, such as Keener, Michaels and from a previous generation Brown and Schnackenburg. This is a commentary which sits alongside its nearest competitors Lincoln, Beasley Murray, Ridderbos, Moloney, and Carson. I would compare it in quality, freshness and usefulness to Gail O'Days fine work in the New Interpreter's Bible.

In her practice of exegesis Thompson has little interest in competing or arguing with other writers for the sake of showing her control of the field. Of course she is often in conversation with other scholars, and there is wide and deep learning informing this volume. Her concentration, however, is on the meaning of John's narrative and witness, which is unbroken throughout as she opens up the message of the Word made flesh, dwelling amongst humanity, and displaying the glory of God. The pivotal verse for her is "In him was life and the life was the light of all people."

Her own translation (a feature of this series) is supported by textual notes, and in working at it she was aiming for idiomatic English, but staying as close to the actual text as possible. She is both modest and sensible in acknowledging that just as John had to select, choose and omit material, she had to do the same in order to keep the commentary within the parameters of the series. In doing so she has produced a commentary that will be of genuine usefulness and stimulus for preachers and students. Scholars will likewise encounter a commentary that has deep roots in both learning and faith, and which offers an engaged and energetic wrestling with this complex, infuriating, comforting, disturbing but intentionally tendentious text. 

Thompson is cautious in the use of criticism but honest about wrestling with the text; ready to offer new conclusions but rarely speculative; her writing is readable, which is to say I am reading it through over several weeks, and at times have been drawn to read on further to follow the flow of a well written exegetical narrative. I've waited eagerly for this book since Thompson was announced as its author. This book was worth the wait. The time taken has resulted in a mature, lucid, authoritative commentary, qualitatively different because the writer has demonstrably lived with, and within, this text.

The story of Jesus turning water into wine is one of the great surprise moments of John's Gospel. John's word for those surprise moments is "sign". The surprise is only the start. John isn't trying to pique our curiosity, like the clever novelist who ends each chapter with a mini cliffhanger. Each of John's signs is like a dig in the ribs of those not paying attention, or one of those pings that says you've got mail.

The Fourth Gospel started with a hymn to the universe, or at least a hymn to the One who spoke the universe into being. The Word that calls all things into being is the Light that lightens every human being, and diffuses a glory that shines with brilliant persistence agaisnt all kinds of darkness. The Word has become human and is full of grace and truth and from that fullness those who receive him are filled with that fulness, and grace after grace after grace.

John isn't one for understatement it seems, but the truth is (and that too is a Johannine way of speaking) to describe the grace and truth and fullness of what God is doing in Jesus needs more superlatives than are easily and grammatically fitted into a sentence. What does it mean to talk about grace after grace after grace; blessing upon blessing upon blessing; gifts that keep on coming? If only John could illustrate, give an example, a sign. Yes quite, a sign!

So there is this wedding and for reasons not hard to imagine, the wine runs out. Wine on tap at someone else's expense isn't likely to last long. But a wineless celebration would be an embarrassment to the hosts and a diminishment of joy. So, Mary tells Jesus, as if she expected him to run to Tesco and bring back some of their BOGOF specials. Or just maybe, because she had more than an inkling that Jesus would know what to do.

And sure enough. As problem solver extraordinaire Jesus tells the servants to fill the huge water jars with water, take them in and serve the guests. The clue to John's story is in the weights and measures implied in the telling. Six stone water jars of the kind recovered by archaeologists who confirm that yes, such jars held 20-30 gallons. All told 180 gallons of water, except it was now wine. 818 litres of wine. In a village where 100 guests would be a big gathering that's 8 litres each on top of what has already been swallowed!

So what is the coming of the Word made flesh like? What is grace upon grace, the fullness from which we all receive. These are great Advent questions, and John gives his illustration by telling of what happened at a young couple's wedding, in Cana. In celebration terms Christ gives more than we can contain, more litres of the wine of the Kingdom than we can drink, more blessing than we can think.

John knows his Jewish Scriptures and those places where there are promises of free flowing wine when the Messiah comes. One of the funniest and happiest texts is from 2 Baruch, and I have a feeling John knew this text, which looks at what happens to vines when the Messiah comes: "on one vine will be a thousand branches, one branch will produce a thousand clusters, and one cluster will produce a thousand grapes, and one grape will produce a cor." Yes I know, what's a cor. It's a measure of 400 litres! Grace upon grace upon grace, from grape upon grape upon grape!

This Advent in a world needing to recover hope and hopefulness, love and loveableness, peace and peaceableness, joy and joyfulness, this story comes like an ancient blessing which looks at the world through the eyes of God in Christ, the Word made flesh, the grace of God come close. There is no denying the darkness, and the forces of evil and violence, the voices of hate and fear. It is precisely into this kind of world that Christians are called to bear witness to the one whose glory we have beheld, full of grace and truth. Of his fulnness we have all received, grace after grace after grace. So the Light shines, in us and through us, and the darkness cannot understand it, has not extinguished it, and will never eclipse it. The good wine comes at the last, as does grace, in quantities we can never imagine.

On and off today I have found myself enmeshed in various social media exchanges about last night's decision to extend British military activity into Syria. In short, to bomb Syria. Some are regretful but supportive; others are uncompromising in their support to bomb Isis off the map. On the other hand a sizeable minority believe it is wrong to bomb anybody, some of them as an absolute principle that bombing is state funded indiscriminate violence that inevitably kills and maims innocent civilians.

Others oppose bombing at this time on the pragmatic grounds that to justify bombing there needs to be a coherent overall strategy that includes but is not limited to the following: i) cutting off Isis funding from banks which begins by identifying these financial institutions, ii) closing the conduits that enable Isis to sell oil (and asking who it is that is buying it), iii) blocking the channels through which weapons are supplied to Isis, some of them so sophisticated they can bring down a commercial airliner, iv) seeking a UN resolution to create and deploy a UN coalition of ground troops. v) dealing with the disastrous aftermath of previous incursions into the sovereign territories of Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya. That is a huge, complex, costly and precariously poised shopping list of elements which might begin to sound like a strategy. 

Add to that list the requirement for a clear exit strategy, a set of recognised criteria that would indicate the need for military action was over, a long term presence and security to ensure political stability and safety of citizens, and no coherent let alone at this stage realisable political serttlement that would come close to satisfying the major players in the region – Iraq, Syria, United States, France, Turkey, Russia, Iran, Israel and now Britain.

All of the above is the stuff of debate, discussion, agonising and exhausting in its intensity, for those who take seriously the cost and consequence of firing modern munitions with their enhanced payloads and blast range, into targets which must have civilians present, and from a height of 35,000 feet and distances measured in tens of miles.

However what I found interesting though not surprising was the diversity of Christian voices arguing about what Jesus meant about loving enemies, what the cross is about, and what the message of the cross in a world confronted with Isis. Claim and counter claim as to whether the Book of Revelation is about God the warrior or the Lamb in the midst of the throne, was given further edge by arguing about whether Jesus was non-violent and even a pacifist, and if not what was the relationship between the ethic of Jesus for disciples and the duties and rights of a state to wage war in self defence and in defence of the weak and oppressed.

Here too there are no straightforward answers, no short cuts to clarity, no privileges of claimed certainty and no court of appeal that can rule definitively on how we should live in the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Even a plain reading of Jesus words about loving enemies, and turning the other cheek, became an exercise in exegetical evasions, qualifications and exceptions. Similarly a reckoning with Paul's fuller and even more specific words in Romans 12 about out-manouevering the enemy by doing so much good the person who sees me as enemy could find no purchase on the levers of the Christian believer on which to compel a reciprocal hatred.

I am not troubled by difference of opinion; I expect that. Nor do I need only to hear what supports and confirms what I already think – I try to hear and to weigh the words of those who think I am naive, radical, unrealistic or plain daft to take Jesus words so seriously. I am however intrigued, and singularly concerned when such discussions and differences are fuelled by our strong opinions and convictions so that we become tone deaf to Scripture, colour blind to green and red and looking for ways of construing Scripture to give our views the green light and wave in front of others arguments and opinions a red light. 

It is at this point something deeply embedded in my own Baptist tradition comes into its own. If only all those interlocutors today could have gathered in an open public space, say the seating area in a shopping mall. Each of them, me included.

And then we had prayed together our fears and angers, our urges to violence and longings for peace, honestly confessing our bewilderment and admitting "Lord we don't know – we think we do, we shout we do, but we don't know." If in that praying we were not trying to persuade each other, win arguments, prove ourselves right, or shrewd, or pragmatic, or tough, or informed – if in that praying, instead, we were humble and determined to hear what the Spirit of God is saying, to seek the mind of Christ, to discern a way for Christians to be faithful to the Crucified and Risen Lord, I wonder what might have happened in our hearts, in our minds, and then what we might do and say?

I don't know. But I wish I'd had the chance to find out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For St Andrew's day I went a walk up Brimmond Hill in Aberdeenshire. Took the camera and too my time, so I waited for the sun to go down, which it does around 3.30 at this time of the year. A couple of photos, and a Scottish paraphrase in celebration of Scotland's saint.

 

The race that long in darkness pined,
Have seen a glorious Light;
The people dwell in day, who dwelt
In death’s surrounding night.

To hail Thy rise, Thou better Sun,
The gathering nations come,
Joyous as when the reapers bear
The harvest treasures home.

For Thou our burden hast removed,
And quelled the oppressor’s sway,
Quick as the slaughtered squadrons fell
In Midian’s evil day.

To us a Child of Hope is born,
To us a Son is given,
Him shall the tribes of earth obey,
Him all the hosts of heaven.

 

 

His Name shall be the Prince of Peace,
Forevermore adored,
The Wonderful, the Counselor,
The great and mighty Lord.

His power increasing still shall spread,
His reign no end shall know:
Justice shall guard His throne above,
And peace abound below

Marilynne Robinson is a consummate artist in at least two literary genres – the novel and the essay. The novels are now beyond the need for recommendation; not to have read them is to have missed storytelling that probes the depths of human experience and persuades the reader of the loveable fragility of human beings caught up in the tragi-comic dramas of their own lives. I expect to read the novels again in the same way I expect to listen to Mozart's Clarinet Concerto again, and drink a Cappucino with a bacon rolldown at the Pavilion Cafe again, and make time to meet with friends and tell the stories of our lives to each other.

The essays are a different genre, but they are written out of the same generous view of the world as the novels. Trying to explain why Robinson is such a captivating writer, and why the best words to describe her writing might include such unlikely c0-descriptors as wise, astringent, holy, old fashioned, uncompromising, compassionate, analytic and discursive, begins to sound as pointless as painting a word picture of Van Gogh's Cafe on a Starry Night. For example to say her writing is holy is misleading, if by that is meant dealing with holy subjects. But it is precisely the right word to describe the concerns and inner life of the writer who sees the world as the theatre of God's glory, holiness and love, and does so without reducing these to mere words, platitudes and other safe but anemic terminology. God is God in Robinson's writing; no domesticated super parent, and no speculative construct rising from the wayward certainties of philosophies like so many kites cut free from their strings.

Reading The Givenness of Things has the surprising effect of wanting to go and read the novels again in the light of the author's confessions of faith, doubt and patience with a God who doesn't suit those who have bought into the consumer customer care culture as the palce where we discover what life is all about. For Robinson life is all about living in the world of creation and people as someone who observes and listens to the heartbeats of life. In her essay on Metaphysics she quotes Calvin; it should be said that Robinson regards Calvin in precisely the way the great Free Church of Scotland preacher Alexander Whyte advised of his students when he told them to "get themselves into a relation of indebtedness to one the great minds of the past." She is not uncritical of Calvin, but she regards him as a safe standpoint from which to view the changing landscape of ideas. He is the measure of theological and cultural movements and developments, and his intellectual and theological hold on the reality of God enables her to test whether these movements and developments are passing fads and fashions, or insights of enduring importance because rooted and grounded in the Christian tradition of scripture and doctrine. 

The abandonment of metaphysics as an essential foundation for human knowing she sees as both tragic and a mistake. She takes with utmost seriousness the poetry of the Johannine prologue and the Colossian hymn (1.15-20) "My Christology is high, in that I take Christ to be with God, and to be God. And I take it to be true that without him nothing was made that was made. This opens on all being of every kind, including everything unknow to us still, and everything  never to be know to us, for which our words and concepts may well be wholly inadequate. So naturally I view cogency with considerable mistrust." This essay becomes a conversation around the nature of God and the revelation of God in Jesus the Christ. The Prologue of John "has nerved me to embrace the thought that the presence of Christ in the moment of Creation would have meant that the nature of Christ is intrinsic to Creation, and an aspect of the relation of God to the world from the very outset. At which point she quotes Calvin who in his commentary on John 3.16 urges the believer to gaze in faith, "fixed on Christ, in whom it beholds the breast of God filled with love."

It is an interesting comparison, the writer of the essays in full theological flow, and the writer of the novels where God is a leading character in the background whose presence or absence impinges on the characters, their choices and circumstances, what they do and what befalls them. And then from the same essay there is this: "I understand Calvin to mean that the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth made manifest what was always true, that there was a love that could only be made known to us through a gesture of such unthinkable grandeur and generosity – over and above the grandeur and generosity of Creation itself." It is worth noting, Robinson describes God with words to often absent from mainstream theologies of whatever hue – grandeur and generosity.

Each of the essays in this volume is similarly confessional, theologically moored in "biblical and traditional theology." It's a mistake to be less than attentive to a writer whose thought range and conversational breadth includes John Locke, Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Descartes, Chrysostom, John Owen, Jonathan Edwards and an array of secondary writers and thinkers I'd never heard of before! The theological vision and framework that informs the essays, particularly the recurring expositions of the nature of God in Christ, are limned and woven through the fabrics of the novels. A close reading of this essay on Metaphysics followed by a re-reading of Lila will be an interesting exercise in hermeneutics, or source criticism, or spiritual autobiography.     

Christians, in obedience to Jesus, convert hate into peace, enmity into love, and doing harm into doing good. Why? Because we are Bethlehem people, we are Calvary people, and empty tomb people – we believe in a love that has entered the abyss and the darkness and has emerged as radiant life giving light.

What we teach and show our children determines the next generation’s loves, hates and commitments. In a world of refugees and terrorists, Facebook and Twitter, war and violent hatreds, Christians are called to be witnesses to the Kingdom of God. We are summoned to pray the Lord's Prayer, not as pre-film advert, but as subversive Gospel, as alternative worldview, as our way of showing we are followers of the crucified King, worshippers of the Lamb slain.

At this time of year, we know that Jesus knows about being a refugee, fleeing from massacre at Bethlehem. Our Saviour met all the world’s hatred head on at Calvary. Our Lord triumphed over hate, violence, evil and death at the empty tomb. Bethlehem and Calvary point to the God in the light of whose Holy Love we view the evil realities and tragedies of Paris. And for Christians the future doesn;t belong with the battle cries of religious power seekers of whatever faith, nor the battle strategists of whatever sides in our world's conflicts, but to a garden where once early in the morning as the sun rose, the Son rose. And power was redefined, the power of love over love of power. Bethlehem, Calvary, a garden – the geography of reconciliation and redemption.

In a world afraid of radicalisation we are called to redeem and convert that word into another kind of radicalisation – of the command to love our neighbours, and that means opening ourselves to the grace of the God, and to that Holy Love which transforms fear into love for our enemies. The cross is where the radical love of God goes to the root of human evil and creation's brokenness and heals it. "While we were still God’s enemies C died for us. In a world awash with fear and suspicion, a world of enemies, hatred, terrorism, refugees and shattered communities, the Christian church, the Body of Christ is called to practice, perform, embody and live out the principles that convert hatred to peace – mercy, neighbourliness, hospitality, peaceable speech, the Golden Rule, and the four imperatives to love, do good, bless and pray for those who are seen as enemy.

If anyone is in Christ – New creation! The Christian is born again, born from above, a child of the Father. Followers of Jesus are lights in a dark universe, lights of the world born to radiate the love of God, to speak forgiveness, to talk not hate speech but love speech. Welcomed by God Christians live out of trust, not fear, practising not rejection and exclusion but welcome and friendship. As children of the Father Christians resist stereo-type and caricature, encountering each person, every other, with respect and dignity because each person is created in the image of God.  Hate is not the last word, it isn't even close – holiness, love, mercy, forgiveness, peace have the higher claim because they speak the nature of God. And underlying all of these, the sovereign grace of the God whose Holy Love is the light that shineth in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

……………………………….

These previous posts on hate are attempts to help towards a Christian way of thinking about the cruelties and tragedies, the atrocities and ccyles of violence that so disfigure our world. They are not so much an answer, or answers; they are more by way of prayerful considerations, thoughtfulness about Christian obedience and witness in an age where if we are not careful hate, mistrust and a toxic siege mentality will create spirals of exclusion, hostility and violence.