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Preaching recently on Romans 8.1-11, about being set free through Christ and by the law of the Spirit of life, I prepared a prayer in which together we give thanks for the love of God in Jesus Christ.

What does it mean that a Christian lives in a world like ours, knowing the eternal and inexhaustible love of God? It means trusting the love of the crucified and risen Lord, and acknowledging our human weakness and dependence on the presence and grace of God in Christ.

What kind of prayer at least begins to give words to an incalculable debt cancelled at infinite cost? And what is it we give thanks for, and to whom? 

This prayer is intentionally offered in words weighted with gratitude, spoken with hushed wonder, and offered as worship which is the fusion of love for God and a life of obedience in the service of Christ, 'The Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

 

Prayer of Thanksgiving for the Love of Christ, with Response: 

Into our world of darkness came Jesus, the Light of the world

Thanks be to God for Jesus, God's wonderful gift,

The Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me.

 

To hearts that are hungry comes Jesus, the Bread of Life.

Thanks be to God for Jesus, God's wonderful gift,

The Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me.

 

To those who are anxious and afraid, comes Jesus the Good Shepherd

Thanks be to God for Jesus, God's wonderful gift,

The Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me.

 

To those who feel life is going nowhere, comes Jesus the Way, the Truth and the Life

Thanks be to God for Jesus, God's wonderful gift,

The Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me.

 

To those who are thirsty for truth and new purpose in life, comes Jesus the Living Water.

Thanks be to God for Jesus, God's wonderful gift,

The Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me.

 

To those afraid of life, losing hope, struggling to hold things together, comes Jesus the Resurrection and the Life

Thanks be to God for Jesus, God's wonderful gift,

The Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me.

Lord Jesus Christ, our Saviour, receive the gratitude and prayer of our hearts.

Spirit of life and freedom, give us the energy to live for you in the freedom and joy of Christ.

Creator God, send us out into this God-loved world to be channels of your love, agents of your compassion, and conduits of your peace.

Amen

 I know. We all have our particular interests. So allow me to mention how happy I was to find that James Denney's battered old commentary is still on the shelves in Aberdeen University library.

Old commentaries are not obsolete because they are old. It depends on the writer and the type of commentary. Denney's Thessalonians is his series of preached sermons at Broughty Ferry Free Church, published in 1899 with minimal alteration.

Denney's sermon manuscripts are written in small neat writing, usually 5-7 pages, and almost never a correction evident. Preaching to his congregation about God's love and Christian love he told them, and reading the minute books during my research, I learned that the good people of the church needed to be told!:

"We love because he first loved us. In whatever degree love exists in us, God is its source; it is like a faint pulse, every separate beat of which tells of the throbbing of the heart; and it is only as God imparts his Spirit to us more fully that our capacity for loving deepens and expands. When that Spirit springs up within us, an inexhaustible fountain, then rivers of living water, streams of love, will overflow on all around. For God is love, and he who dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him."

Now, yes, I will want Weima's commentary for solid and at times quite inspiring exegesis of the Greek text. F F Bruce is always still worth reading on the Thessalonians, and Gordon Fee is also within reach. But for sheer pastoral passion and homiletical force, Denney holds the floor, and deserves still to be consulted as an exemplar of pastoral theology in the service of a believing community. Oh, and by the way, as a believing critic, Denney was fully in control of New Testament critical scholarship and immersed in the New Testament text and history, and as learned in German criticism as his contemporary P. T. Forsyth – together two of Scotland's finest exponents of a theology of the cross.

Anyway, great to see his sermons to a suburban Free Church congregation, alongside the more mainstream volumes more usually found on the shelves of a University library

Monday

John 20.24. “Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came.  So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”

We don’t know why Thomas wasn’t with the others when Jesus appeared to the disciples. He was one of the first outside the inner circle to be told Jesus was risen, but not to have seen Jesus himself. What the disciples said to Thomas has always been the core truth of Christian witness. “We have seen the Lord.” Crucified and buried, and now risen, Jesus is the living presence of God, The resurrection is the evidence that God keeps his promises, and they are all fulfilled in Jesus, God’s Yes!

Tuesday

John 20.25 “But Thomas said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

Forget the dismissive nickname ‘doubting Thomas’. Grief carries a powerful payload of broken hopes. This strong minded, passionate man was working through loss of his life’s centre, not helped by claims that Jesus wasn’t really dead. He insists on evidence of sight and touch. Faith is not, and cannot be, a way of evading the searing realities of human loss, aching sorrow, and the hard facts of life. Thomas insists on seeing and meeting Jesus. Thomas’s persistence shows us that faith is born in a living relationship with Jesus. He too needs to hear God’s Yes, and in the presence of Jesus.

Wednesday

John 20.26 “A week later his disciples were in the house again and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”

For Thomas, a week is a long time of not knowing. But he’s back with his friends, and Jesus comes to be with them. For the second time we are told the doors were locked (19&26). Grief does that, locks the doors in a defensive move to give our mind and heart time to come to terms with things. But the risen Lord is not deterred or excluded by doors of fear and defensive mistrust. He stands amongst us and speaks the blessing, “Peace be with you.” These are powerful words of purposeful love. He is not here to rebuke unbelief, or mock their fear, but to heal hearts and restore trust.

Thursday

John 20.27-28 “Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”

The best commentary on these two verses is 1 John 1.1-4. Read them, as Thomas’s testimony. They are written on the other side of doubt, as the shared experience of those who found in their grief, loss and buried hopes that the Word of life came to them, risen and present, always and everywhere. For Thomas, though his doors were closed, Jesus came and stood beside him. Faith is the recognition of this One who knows us deeply, completely and lovingly: Our response? “My Lord and my God.”

Friday

John 20.29 “Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

These are forward-looking words. And they include us. True, we have not seen Jesus the way the first disciples did. Our faith comes from the Spirit of God opening our eyes to see the truth of who Jesus is, and what God has done through the death and resurrection of the Son of God. Faith is not some kind of worked up credulity, it is the gift of God, the movement of the Spirit opening our eyes to the Light of the World, and opening our hearts to the God who so loved the world that he gave his only Son.

Saturday

John 20.30-31 “Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book.  But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

Peter, the Beloved Disciple, Mary, Thomas – people like us, confronted by events we can only imagine. Peter too scared to go into the tomb, John (who I think is the Beloved Disciple) whose love overcame his fear, Mary blinded by tears, Thomas blinded by grief. One way or another we have all been in those scary places where faith seems to desert us – and in our sense of abandonment the Risen Lord comes to us “that we may have life in his name.”

Sunday

1 John 1.1-5  “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.  We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.  We write this to make our joy complete.”

Forty or fifty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, this letter was written by John. Looking back in wonder at something the world had never seen before and which changes forever the way the world is. John insists, “We have seen with our eyes”, and “this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.” Our joy is complete!

At a difficult time I wrote out in thread the Hebrew script for 'Shalom'. It is a beautiful word, gathering into itself a rich cluster of other words – welfare, well-being, peace, harmony, health, contentment, security, goodwill. It presupposes friendship, or the wish for friendship, based on trust and sustained by faithfulness.

I often finish an email with my own version, "Shalom the noo!"

This morning the news brings this word back to mind, as a prayer, as a word repeated in the presence of God as intercession, in a world where intercession between nations seems to have failed and to fail again and again.

When I finished the script for Shalom I had no idea what would provide the background. Until I read again Isaiah 35, which has long been a passage that is itself stitched into my way of thinking. It's hopefulness and sense of purposes beyond our own, and a power beyond the political powers that shape so much of our world. The promise of streams in the desert, crocuses in blossom in the desert, and a path, indeed a motorway to travel towards shalom.

So that's what I stitched, a river, the first crocuses, a wilderness with 'recovered greenesse', and right at the heart of it those lovely Hebrew letters formed to spell out 'Shalom.'

So we pray for the peace of the nations, and if words are hard to find, offer the word 'Shalom', the desire of the heart for all that the word contains to grow into reality in our own times

I've never bought into the easy, and quite lazy, naming and shaming of the apostle Thomas as 'doubting Thomas.' He's the disciple who argued they should all go to Jerusalem and die with him. For whatever reason he wasn't with the gathered disciples when Jesus first came, stood amongst them, said 'Peace be with you', and proved he was alive.

When Thomas said he wouldn't believe till he saw and touched Jesus, he was asking for no more than had already been given to the others. Incidentally, Thomas didn't say he needed to hear Jesus, though it was hearing, not seeing that opened Mary's eyes. 

I think the clue to understanding the resurrection stories in John lies in the imagination applied to the text, and demands of us far more psychological understanding than we usually bring to our interpretations of what happened. Centre, front and inescapably there, in the consciousness of all those who loved and followed Jesus is the combination of shock, grief and loss.

Peter couldn't face going into the tomb. If Jesus was still there and dead he didn't want to see him. If Jesus was indeed risen then Peter wasn't ready to meet him. The Beloved Disciple did go in, saw Jesus wasn't there and believed – but he still had no evidence and Jesus was elsewhere. Mary simply thought Jesus body was stolen. It's not only tears that blur her vision; grief closes down her perceptions, the defensive inner denials that are grief at its most raw. Until Jesus spoke her name.

Then there is Thomas. Passionate, courageous, intelligent and realistic Thomas, not to be taken in by the wishful thinking of others. What is telling about John's telling of the story is that Thomas who had demanded to see, and touch and invasively poke the wounds of Jesus, did none of these things when the time came. Jesus invited Thomas to touch the evidence, but Thomas is far ahead of such needs for proof. His confession, "My Lord, and my God." are the crowning words of faith in the entire Gospel and of John's art as a storyteller of the Gospel. 

The Gospel of John starts with "In the beginning was the Word", the creative, light-shining, life-giving Word. And Thomas saw that Light of Life.  "And the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, full of grace and truth," and Thomas was persuaded and won by that same grace and truth. Throughout John there are signs of Jesus as the Word of God, water into wine, the feast of the 5,000, the raising of Lazarus, and now Thomas was seeing in the risen Jesus the new wine, the bread of life, and the resurrection as promised.

The words of the Word, and the signs of the Son of God, are concentrated and connected to this One who stands this side of resurrection and says, "Peace be with you." John draws us, his readers, into and through the story, to this point, when finally and fully Jesus is addressed in the fullness of his deity, "My Lord and my God." That is the cry of recognition from hearts that believe the deep truths that intersect in the story of the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness doesn't get it, cannot extinguish it, and recedes before the Light of the world.

Painting is by Fra Angelico, Mary Magdalene and Jesus. 'Noli me tangere'. 

 

"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control." (Galatians 5.22-23)

I've read those words hundreds of times, it might be thousands. Most times I've prayed them as I read them. Often, too often, they have been prayers of confession that whatever fruit there might be is unripe, maybe even unformed.

And yet. Such a description of moral formation and character construction was never meant to be an exam paper, a set of criteria with which to demonstrate our failures and supplement our existing feelings of guilt and shame.

As with everything else in Christian experience, the fruit of the Spirit is sown in grace and harvested in the life of those who are in Christ, who live by the Spirit, and whose first confession is of grateful praise for the love of God in Christ. 

Paul's letter to the Galatians is a charter for Christian freedom. The heart cry of Paul to these new Christians is "For freedom Christ has set you free…for you were called to freedom."(5.1,13). Paul is not guilt-making or using shame as a lever when he lists the fruit of the Spirit. Like the good pastor he is, he is encouraging the Galatians to stand firm in their freedom in Christ, and to trust the work of the Holy Spirit to weave the strands of Christ-likeness into the tapestry of their character.

The fruits of the Spirit are listed in contrast to 'the works of the flesh'; and that list is much longer, describing the attitudes and actions that threaten every possibility of community. What makes the difference in Christian character is the great reversal, the freedom from works of the flesh, the call of freedom to a life lived in Christ, and the promise of the fruitfulness of life in the Spirit, in the community of Christ, and in our witness to the world.

In what I've always thought of as the pivotal verse in Galatians, Paul describes our existence in Christ as cruciform in shape, enlivened by faith in the risen Christ and in Christ's faithfulness: "I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." (2.20)

The fruit of the Spirit displays the character of Christ crucified and risen, as his life is lived in us and through us by the power of the Spirit. In Romans 5 Paul says exactly how and why this is so: "Hope does not disappoint us, for God's love has been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. (Romans 5.5)

The last thing Paul intends by listing the fruit of the Spirit is that those moral dispositions should be a further check-list of our failures. They are to be looked for as the natural outcome of God's gifting grace, Christ's reconciling love, the Spirit's liberative power. 

Instead of seeing the fruit of the Spirit as mere aspiration, what we'd like to be but never will, or even worse, as a hit list of our chronic failures, take to heart Paul's advice to another group of Christians whose behaviour was at times far from exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit: "He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion until the day of Jesus Christ." (Philippians 1.6)

We are called to live into the freedom of Christ, to walk and live in the surrounding environment of the Holy Spirit. Crucified with Christ, and living by faith in the faithfulness of Christ, knowing that the Son of God loves us and gave himself for us, we live in Christ and Christ in us, and the fruit will appear.   

 

 

 

 

Monday

John 20.15-16 “He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).”

The way someone who loves us uses our name is, quite literally, unforgettable. Mary’s grief had closed her eyes to the possibility of Jesus’ resurrection. Speaking her name opens her eyes, and unlocks new possibilities of hope, joy and a future. To believe Jesus rose again, to really believe it, is to look on the world with new eyes, through the lens of resurrection. In such a world, with God, all things are possible.

Tuesday

John 20.17 “Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Of course she wants to hug Jesus, and to hang on to him, in that most human gesture of relief and new hope. But the risen Jesus cannot be tied down, limited by space and time, and the realities of everyday life. For the believer in the risen Jesus, the resurrection is the reality that now shapes and refreshes the colour of every other reality. “Heaven above is softer blue, earth beneath is sweeter green / something lives in every hue, Christ-less eyes have never seen.”

Wednesday

John 20. “Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her.”

This is the first eyewitness testimony to the resurrection, and it is a woman who tells a truth that reconfigures creation and announces a new creation. “I have seen the Lord!” In Greek, three words that declared life had changed forever. “Death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered.” The last word belongs to God, and it is a word of life that banishes death’s finality, of light that overcomes darkness, of love that has refused to take no for an answer. “In Christ all God’s promises are yes.” Yes!

Thursday

John 20.19a “On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 

When we’re scared we lock doors; either physical doors to keep harm out, or closed eyes as we hide the outside world and hope to stay hidden from harm ourselves. Fear is a deeply embedded emotion we all recognise, a source of anxiety that robs life of joy and peace. So what does Jesus say to the locked up and locked in disciples? Jesus the shepherd of souls, meets their fears with words of psychological precision. “Peace be with you.” As he promised, “My peace I leave with you…let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me.”

Friday

 John 20.19b “After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.”

Thomas wasn’t the only one who needed proof, who had to be convinced. In the aftermath of their anguished witnessing of Jesus’ crucifixion, the unmistakable evidence of his death by Roman execution, the disciples now witness the wounds, the identity marks of their Lord, the Crucified Nazarene. That word overjoyed is an understatement; Luke says “they disbelieved for joy.” This news is both too good to be true, and too true not to be believed – then lived into for the rest of their lives.

Saturday

John 20.21-22 “Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”  And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” 

This is John’s account of the disciples’ Pentecost. As at the creation God breathed into the first humans, so Jesus breathes upon them the promised Comforter, the Spirit who will enable and direct them, energise and teach them the things of Jesus. They are commanded to receive the Giving Gift, the Spirit of Truth, the Paraclete, who will be by their side no matter where they are, as the “Lo I am with you always.”

Sunday

John 20.23 “If you forgive anyone their sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”

These difficult words about who can and should be forgiven, are words spoken to disciples commissioned to preach the good news. Only God forgives, and the basis of forgiveness is faith in Christ, and trust in the faithfulness of Christ as Saviour and Lord. To hear the Good News of God’s invitation to life, and to reject it, is an act of self-judgement, a refusal of mercy because there is no sense of being in the wrong. Forgiveness is an act that saves a relationship, enables reconciliation, and makes the heart right. That is God’s work and gift, to whoever sees in Christ their own sin crucified, and God’s love reaching out to them, to ransom, heal, restore and forgive.

Grace is a hard word for Christians to take seriously. In the past couple of weeks I have heard that blessed word used and misused and even implied but absent. The problem seems to be the radical nature of grace, our too easily yielding to the temptation to put conditions on the unconditional, our inability to take a gift at its true value, let alone at its face value. Grace is a word that requires a humble heart to understand it. As soon as grace is critically analysed, coherently rationalised and carefully explained, we betray what P T Forsyth calls our 'lust for lucidity', and therefore give in to our all but irresistible attraction to name, control, comprehend and encircle mystery with our thoughts.

Grace isn't so easily domesticated. But in much that passes for evangelical spirituality there is an alarming absence of grace as the source and resource of all Christian living. Even the great slogan 'justification by faith' can be so triumphantly trumpeted that its champions forget it is condensed, compacted theological shorthand, which once it is allowed the expansiveness of the gospel of Jesus Christ, is found to contain realities of much greater dimensions than a polemical formula has any right to hold – to merely begin with, love, grace, reconciliation, that trinity of divine attributes gathered into the true shorthand of the Gospel of the love affair of the Triune God – "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God, and the Communion of the Holy Spirit", and that rich eternal life of God, overflowing in creation, redemption and renewal of a fallen world.