Something greater than the temple is here

Here's the sermon I shared at St Andrew’s Basildon this evening:

When his disciples were criticised by the Pharisees, Jesus responded by saying “something greater than the temple is here” and “the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath” (Matthew 12: 1-21). What did he mean?

The Temple in Jerusalem was the dwelling of God with his people. Biblical Scholar Margaret Barker writes that: “A temple stood in Jerusalem for over a thousand years. According to the biblical account, the first temple was built by Solomon about 950 BCE and was severely damaged by the Babylonians about 350 years later. It was rebuilt towards the end of the sixth century BCE by people who returned from exile in Babylon, and was rebuilt again by Herod the Great at the end of the first century BCE. The structure was finally destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, but the influence of the temple and its world has far outlasted its physical existence.”

Barker says that: “The Temple was a model of the creation, and the liturgy of the temple preserved the creation. Genesis 1 was not an account of the historical process of creation, but a record of the great vision granted to Moses and others of how the world is made. In the six days when Moses was on Sinai, before the LORD called to him (Exod. 24.16), he saw the six days of creation, and was then told to replicate these when he built the tabernacle …

The holy of holies represented Day One, the state of the angels … The veil of the temple represented the second day, and the table with bread, wine and incense was the third day, when the plants were created. The seven branched lamp represented the lights of heaven created on the fourth day, the altar of sacrifice represented the non human creatures, and the High Priest was the human, male and female as the image of God … The Second Adam [Jesus] was the Great High Priest, and if we are the body of Christ, we all have this high priestly role.”

What happens with the birth of Jesus is that God himself lives with us in our world. God moves into our neighbourhood and, as a result, the Temple is no longer God’s principal dwelling on earth and the meaning of the Temple is comes to be expressed through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.

Barker explains it like this: “… the world of the temple was the world of the first Christians, and they expressed their faith in terms drawn almost exclusively from the temple. Jesus and his followers opposed what the temple had become; they identified themselves as the true temple, with Jesus as the great high priest.

When Jesus was arrested by the temple authorities, one of the charges brought against him was threatening to destroy the temple and to rebuild it in three days (Mark 14. 58). Another was claiming to be the Messiah (Matt. 26. 63-64). These were two aspects of the same charge, as can be deduced from the Book of Enoch, a text which the early Christians regarded as Scripture. The Book of Enoch described the judgement of the fallen angels, and then how the Lord of the sheep would carry away the old temple and set up something greater in its place (1 Enoch 90. 28-29). This is the reason for the two questions at Jesus’ trial: Did you claim that you would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days? Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One? This same passage accounts for the exchange between Jesus and the Jews recorded in John 2. 19-21: ‘Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?”’ Later reflection led the evangelist to add, ‘But he spoke of the temple of his body’. Jesus was claiming the prophecy of Enoch, that he was the Lord of the sheep who would destroy and rebuild the temple …”

“Jesus was … [the] great high priest (Heb. 4.14) … raised up by the power of an indestructible life (Heb. 7.16) who had offered the final atonement sacrifice to fulfil and supersede the temple rites (Heb. 9.1-14).” Atonement was the ritual self offering of the Lord to renew the eternal covenant and thus heal the creation. This is what Jesus’ death achieved and is the covenant renewed at the Last Supper.

In this way the New Testament reverses the story of Eden and brings Christians back to the original Temple meaning that the “kingdom of which Jesus spoke was the state of the holy of holies, the unity at the heart of all things which secured the eternal covenant … This must be the original context for ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ and for ‘This is my blood of the covenant, poured out for many for the putting away of sins’ (Matt. 26. 28).”

It is for this reason that Jesus is able to call himself the Lord of the Sabbath because at his death the veil of the Temple was torn in two opening the holy of holies to all people everywhere. Meaning that, through his death and resurrection we can enter into the unity at the heart of all things and the rest that God experienced on the seventh day, which the Book of Hebrews tells us, we are still to enter and which is symbolised for us in this life by the sabbath.

Jesus speaks of something greater than the temple being here and the Son of Man being lord of the sabbath almost as asides in his response to the Pharisees. It is easy to overlook the significance of what he says as a result. I hope, in sharing these brief thoughts, I have wetted your appetite to go away and discover more. Amen.

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Neal Morse - Inside His Presence.

'Silence' - Endo, Scorsese, Fujimura, Yancey & Kraus

“My personal encounter in the late 1980s with fumi-e displayed at the Tokyo National Museum led me to read Endō’s masterpiece, Silence,” writes Makoto Fujimura in his new book Silence and Beauty. “As I write this, the novel is being made into a major motion picture by the master filmmaker Martin Scorsese. A good friend of mine introduced me to Scorsese, and my conversation with him compelled me to write this book."

"Only Mako Fujimura could have written this book," Philip Yancey writes in the foreword to the book:

"Bicultural in upbringing and sensibility, he understands the nuances of Japan, and his knowledge of the language sheds light on Endō’s original source material. At the same time, Mako’s years of living in New York have given him a contemporary, global perspective ... Informed by both East and West, Mako guides the reader on excursions into Japanese art, samurai rituals, the tea ceremony and Asian theology, even while relying on Western mentors such as Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, J. S. Bach, Vincent van Gogh and J. R. R. Tolkien."

Yancey continues:

"Shūsaku Endō described Japan as a swampland for Christianity, and missionaries who have served there tend to agree. Other Asian countries have seen explosive growth—the megachurches of the Philippines and South Korea, the massive unregistered church in China—while in Japan, the average church numbers less than thirty. A nation that copies nearly everything Western, from management practices to McDonald’s, baseball and pop music, curiously avoids religion. Most puzzling, as Mako mentions, is that so many values in the culture already reflect the way of the New Testament. Why, then, do so few Japanese convert?

That question troubled Shūsaku Endō too, who ultimately concluded that the failure stemmed from the Western emphasis on God’s fatherhood. Mother love tends to be unconditional, accepting the child no matter what, regardless of behavior. Father love tends to be more provisional, bestowing approval as the child measures up to certain standards of behavior. According to Endō, Japan, a nation of authoritarian fathers, has understood the father love of God but not the mother love ...

For Christianity to have any appeal to the Japanese, Endō suggests, it must stress instead the mother love of God, the love that forgives wrongs and binds wounds and draws, rather than forces, others to itself. (“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing!”) “In ‘maternal religion’ Christ comes to prostitutes, worthless people, misshapen people and forgives them,” says Endō. As he sees it, Jesus brought the message of mother love to balance the father love of the Old Testament.

This insight helps answer a common question about Silence: Why did Endō express his own  deeply felt faith through a story of betrayal? ...

Endō explains that he centers his work on the experiences of failure and shame because these leave the most lasting impact on a person’s life ... The entire Bible can be seen, in fact, as a story of betrayal, beginning with Adam and proceeding through the history of the Israelites, culminating in the cross ... Our only hope is the forgiving gaze of the betrayed Savior, the still point of Endō’s novel."

In sessions that I led in the past at North Thames Ministerial Training Course we explored many of these same issues involved in cross-cultural communication of the meaning of the Atonement by looking at examples of missionary work in Japan through the writings of Endō and the approach of C. Norman Kraus as summarised in Recovering the Scandal of the Cross (Green & Baker, 2000).

Endō's writings depict both the anguish of faith and the mercy of God. A central theme of his writings has been the clash between Japanese culture and a very Western mode of religion. Novels like Silence and The Samurai suggest that Christianity must adapt itself radically if it is to take root in the “swamp” of Japan.

In assessing Christ’s atoning work, Kraus suggests that a Japanese “shame” culture is a less distorting lens through which to read the New Testament than a Western “guilt” culture. The “atonement theory” which emerges from Kraus’s reading centers more on “solidarity” than on “substitution.”

Among the questions we explored in these sessions were:

• What are the cultural factors that Ferreira in Silence thinks have prevented the Christian message from taking root in Japan?
• What other factors in the success or failure of this mission to Japan can be identified in Silence?
• Ferreira says that “the God whom those Japanese believed in was not the God of Christian teaching”. Assuming for the moment that he was right, do you think this matters and why?
• What are the cultural factors in Japan that Kraus takes into account in developing a theology of the atonement for Japan?
• How do these factors influence the theology of the atonement that he develops?
• In your view, is Kraus’ theology of the atonement consistent with the Biblical concepts and images of the atonement? 
• In what ways does your discussion of The Samurai link to Kraus’ atonement theology for Japan? Are there cultural issues that are common to both? Are there understandings of the atonement that are common to both?
• Does Kraus’ theology answer the issues raised by Ferreira in Silence?
• From your understandings of Japanese culture, which of the Biblical concepts or images of atonement would you emphasise in mission to Japan, and why? 
• What factors do you think need to be taken into account when communicating the god news of the atonement in a culture that is not your own (whether this is the culture of another country or a sub-culture within your own culture)?

In one such session we identified the following:

Issues for cross-cultural communication of the Atonement 

• Unholy alliances of politics, economics and religion and no consultation with the indigenous peoples
• Our religion is embedded in our culture - difficulties of disentangling the two (can we do this?)
• Perceived conflict between different religions i.e. Western Catholicism and Japanese Buddhism
• May be exporting our denominational, and other, divisions
• Need for understanding of social structures i.e. hierarchies
• Need for understanding of cultural norms i.e. shame
• Suspicious personal motives and suspicion of motives
• Suspicion of ‘outsiders’
• Shaming or threatening people through lack of cultural understanding
• Causing threat through the undermining of cultural hierarchies
• Concerns over Empires following on the heels of missionaries
• Disruption of a ‘closed’ cultural system through ‘outside’ ideas
• Violence accompanying ‘mission’
• Lack of respect for the indigenous culture and religion
• Discounting of indigenous cultures
• Clash with indigenous religious understandings e.g. Velasco’s passion and the Buddhist sense of ‘not desiring’

Ideas for cross-cultural communication of the Atonement 

• Importance of outsider’s showing care
• The giving of honour to all whatever their place within cultural hierarchies
• The giving of help rather than the bringing of oppression
• Exposure to Christian selflessness across cultural hierarchies
• Recognising the examples of service seen in indigenous peoples e.g. Yozö’s example of dedicated service being an image of Christ
• The experience of cultural rejection leading to identification with Christ
• The stripping away of culture leaving people exposed to revelation
• Identification with Christ through experience of sorrow
• Tapping into a universal sense of longing
• Seeing the universal in the particular
• Drawing metaphors from within the culture
• Salvation as being saved from the consequences of cultural norms and practices e.g. Christ above the “karma of man”, identification with Christ once shamed

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Bruce Cockburn - Tokyo.

Finding a Myth for the 21st Century

Alex Evans' presentation to Modern Church Annual Conference 2013 is well worth a read.

 

In it he tells the story of how he went from "working as a policy wonk, a special adviser in Tony Blair’s government", to "the belief that a 3,000 year old set of myths about covenant, atonement and renewal are actually profoundly relevant to our current moment of crisis and transition – and might even have the potential to succeed where our politics seem to be failing so miserably."

 

He draws on the work of Margaret Barker, in particular, to argue that the eternal covenant’s myths should be read symbolically to "offer remarkably clear explanations of social and ecological breakdown as the result of breaches in the creation covenant, and of atonement as the route towards restoration, in both the social and the environmental sense."

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U2 and Daniel Lanois - Falling At Your Feet. 

Howson does not shy away from the role that Christianity plays in his life and work

It will be interesting to see what the New York art scene makes of the upfront focus on Peter Howson's Christian faith in the press notice for his forthcoming Redemption exhibition at Flowers New York:
"His paintings are not academic or didactic in the style of history painting, but the sublimation of revelatory personal narratives. Religious overtures are proceeded by confession, as intimate details of the artist’s familial and spiritual relationships punctuate the parables of his urban imagination.

Howson does not shy away from the role that Christianity plays in his life and work. Through this spiritual guidance the artist emerged from inner crisis. The dramatic and dynamic paintings of Hades, which make up the majority of this exhibition, depict the struggle to find hope in the dark recesses of existence. They reflect the suffering of a modern war-torn and technologically obsessed world, yet a sense of salvation can be found within. Paying homage to Bosch and Brueghel, Howson crowds his canvases with figures of various shapes and sizes, including many familiar echoes from his previous works, writhing in agony and praying for redemption. This deliverance often appears as a radiant figure symbolizing the painter’s daughter Lucie, another major factor in his road to recovery. In the painting Outcast Howson has used impastos to render a tranquil Christ, surrounded by a group of pariahs in search of atonement. This image could be deemed disturbing for many, however as with a good deal of Howson’s paintings there is a question here as to whom is the real outsider."

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Deacon Blue - Bethlehem's Gate.

Pictures of Salvation

In our first two 'Going Deeper' evening services at St John's, where we have a more in-depth talk or presentation combined with discussion and questions and set within the context of worship, we have used paintings from different periods of church history to unpack different models for understanding the atonement.

The paintings we have considered ranged from a mosaic found in the Archiepiscopal Chapel in Ravenna of Christ stands on a Lion and a Serpent to Marc Chagall's White Crucifixion. The paintings have helped us consider the Christus Victor, Satisfaction, Moral Influence, Penal Substitution, Crucified God, Reconciliation and Scapegoat models.

The upshot has been to realise that the Bible uses many different images to describe what Jesus achieved for us through his death and resurrection. As a result, the salvation that Jesus has brought to us has a depth and a multiplicity of meanings and we can revel in, savour and explore the whole range of meanings that this one pivotal act can have for each one of us.

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Tribe of Judah - Suffering Servant.