The Scriptures, the Cross, and the Power of God, N. T. Wright, SPCK, 2005

It's Lent (for the information of 'non-liturgical' folks). During this time - the forty days before Easter Sunday - Christians have traditionally practised fasting and other acts of penance. The three traditional practices are prayer (justice towards God), fasting (justice towards self), and almsgiving (justice towards neighbor).

Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, has written a marvelous little book examining what happened from Palm Sunday to Easter as narrated in Matthew and John. Both Gospels understand Jesus' last week as the climax of the entire biblical narrative. 'The Scriptures and the power of God' are revealed paradoxically in the human weakness of Jesus. And these events are crucial for the rescue and remaking of the world.

But the religious leaders of Jesus' day do not understand 'the Scriptures and the power of God' (Matthew 22:29). (My comment: they still don't. The Jesus Seminar people, for example, do not understand the integrity of stories told and re-told by people in pre-Gutenburg cultures; and Westerners generally do not understand the power of 'spirit' as those in traditional cultures do... More of that later).

The scriptures (or 'the Bible' as Tom Wright sometimes puts it) give us the grounding for resurrection-hope; the power of God assures us that it will come.

These sermons must have been heavy-going for their listeners, so they're probably better studied in print, than heard. And they are certainly worth studying...

Some 'ponderables':

* Evil isn't something 'out there', it's something which has infected all of us, God's people included; so that if we knew our business we would turn all the more quickly from shouting 'Hosanna' to praying for mercy (p. 7)

* [There is an erroneous] idea that Jesus only ever said the same thing once, so that similar stories or parables must be parallel developments from a single original... Jesus, as a wandering teacher [would have] said similar things over and over again, no doubt developing them this way and that as he went along (14)

* Resurrection is [Jesus'] way of talking about a new bodily life *after* 'life after death'... as opposed to people who believe that God will destroy the present world and take them off to a spiritual 'heaven'... so [Jesus-followers] are likely, in the name of that God and the hope of that future, to work for God's justice here and now in advance (25)

* When ancient Jews said 'heaven' they didn't mean a place far off up in the sky. They meant God's sphere of reality, the place where God lives... 'Heaven' isn't a purely future entity. It is God's sphere, as 'earth' is ours. And... God's sphere and ours *intersect*. They overlap, they interlock, and sometimes they even merge (33-34)... Torah, like Temple, is a place where heaven and earth intersect; and if you've fulfilled Torah completely, you won't need the Temple (35)

* The Scribes and Pharisees play roughly the same role within first-century Judaism that the media play in our world - they pontificate at a distance, safe in the knowledge that their own lives are unlikely to be held up to the same scrutiny (44)

* [What is the most] frequently repeated command in the Bible? 'Don't be afraid' (69).

Bishop Tom Wright has what theologians term a 'high Christology'. Examples:

* Holy week [witnessed] the central and unrepeatable events which form the hinge upon which the great door of cosmic history has swung open at last (p. 8)

* Destroying and rebuilding the Temple was an inescapably royal thing to do... It is the son of David who declares the Temple redundant, and thereby draws on to himself the divine purposes for which the Temple had stood for a thousand-year advance symbol (16)

* ... The scriptures, to which Jesus goes back repeatedly, since he believed they were reaching their climax in him; the power of God, not confined to the glory of heaven but, in Jesus, bringing God's kingdom on earth as in heaven (33)

* Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and indeed Easter Day itself is now the place where heaven and earth meet (36). The Temple is redundant because the reality to which it pointed - the meeting of heaven and earth, and the sacrifice which is the gift of heaven to earth and the worship of earth for heaven - has now been clothed in flesh and blood (38). Torah was [also] the place where heaven and earth met, as they now meet climactically and for ever in Jesus and his cross (39)

* God calls the world to account... this God [who] is revealed fully and finally in the Servant, in the Jesus who was obedient to the death of the cross (48)

* Jesus' crucifixion is the still point of the turning world, the moment when heaven and earth are drawn together as their Lord hangs between them, the day when the Red Sea of sin and death was defeated by God's mighty power so that all the Lord's people could pass through (55)

* Jesus goes to the cross as the climax of the long story of confrontation between the creator God and the principalities and powers of the world (60). The son of God appears as the true Image of God, and the world is so corrupt in its rebellion that, rather than recognize the true creator God reflected in this Jesus, it must get rid of him, must blot out the reminder of who God really is, must do anything rather than be confronted by the one whose love will stop at nothing to reconcile creation to himself (64)

* For John, Easter is the rebuilding of the Temple, the place where God's sphere and ours intersect, where God meets with his people in grace and mercy and delight. When we say 'Alleluia, Christ is risen', we are not saying 'Something very strange has just happened which provides a happy ending after all the sorrow of Holy Week and Good Friday', we are saying that the dwelling place of God is with humans, that he has come o be with us, and made us his people, and that God will wipe away all tears from all eyes (77)

Alleluia!

~~~

Rowland Croucher

April 2006

(For the first eleven studies on Jesus visit http://jmm.aaa.net.au/catalog/section/jc1.htm )

(Review copy purchased from Ridley College Bookshop - http://bookshop.ridley.unimelb.edu.au/bookweb/ )