september 09, 2007 [pm]
"Cosmic Jesus"
Colossians 1:15–20
(To read the Scripture, click here.)
This past week the world mourned the passing of renown Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti whose ringing, pristine pipes set a standard for operatic tenors of the postwar era. Likewise departing this world last week, albeit to less notice, was Dr. James Kennedy, for 48 years the pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Popular on radio and television, Dr. Kennedy founded Evangelism Explosion, a method of sharing your faith akin to the more famous Four Spiritual Laws, though based instead on Five Gospel Points, one for each finger. Evangelism Explosion is best known for coining the haunting question: “If God were to ask you, ‘Why should I let you into My Heaven?’ what would you say?” I reckon Dr. Kennedy now knows the answer.
I remember as a teenager being part of an evangelism team at our church that used Evangelism Explosion tools. We’d glean the visitors’ cards folks filled out on Sunday and then follow them up with our own visit during the week. We knocked on this one door where a nice Southern gentleman invited us in, and we proceeded to give him the five fingers followed by the pointed question about why God should let him into heaven. The gentleman turned visibly ungentlemanly. Bible Belt Southerners don’t much appreciate folks insinuating they don’t have their eternal ducks in a row, especially after they’ve visited your church. Who were we to question his Christianity? Gathering up all his righteous umbrage, he responded to our evangelism with a finger of his own, leaving no question as to where he thought we could go after we died. I guess you’d call that the explosion part.
Had Dr. James Kennedy been a Jewish rabbi instead of a Christian pastor, the evangelism explosion questions would have been more specific, though no less explosive. In the Talmud, an early AD commentary on Old Testament Torah and Jewish religious life, “when a person appears before the heavenly court for judgment, God asks four questions: Did you conduct your business affairs honestly? Did you set aside regular time for Torah study? Did you work at having children? Did you look forward to the world’s redemption?” In his book entitled Jewish Wisdom, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin notes how the first question asked in heaven is not, “do you believe in God?” but, “were you honest?” While for Christians such a question suspiciously implies a salvation by good deeds, remember that Jesus, a Jewish rabbi himself, made clear that “not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do the will of my Father who is in heaven.” As his brother James affirmed, “just the body without breath is dead, so faith without deeds is dead faith.”
That was last week’s sermon: What you believe is not what you say you believe. What you believe is what you do. Christianity rightly emphasizes the role of faith alone in the salvation equation, but saving faith always shows its colors. Faith, hope and love are not lofty theological ideals but earthy, ethical practicalities. Paul prays for the Colossians to be “filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work.” The goal is not merely getting to heaven or possessing a tight and right theology, but living a righteous life on earth as it is in heaven now.
This emphasis on ethics reveals the gospel’s Jewish underpinnings. As with Judaism, ethics sits at Christianity’s core. In the Talmud’s heaven entry exam, being honest is followed by studying Torah. Judaism teaches that only through studying Torah does a person learn what it means to be truly moral. The third question concerns having or adopting children through whom to pass on the work of perfecting the world while the fourth question has to do with hoping for and working toward this very perfection. Rabbi Telushkin writes how Judaism imposes on Jewish people (collectively) the obligation to redeem the world. This was Israel’s vocation. When God called Abraham to be the father of many nations, it was with a view toward drawing all wayward people into right relation with Him. Israel was to shine God’s light of righteousness, justice and peace as an enticement for all the world to see. But what do you do when the light flickers like a dimming 40-watt bulb? What do you do when people chosen to redeem the world need redeeming themselves? As another rabbi once quipped, “Jews are just like everyone else, only more so.” The Old Testament bears this out on every page.
The coherence between right belief and behavior is known in Jewish tradition as wisdom. “Everyone who hears my words and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock,” Jesus said, “the rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.” Wisdom shows up throughout the Bible in various forms: proverbs, stories, parables and sayings. Yet it also shows up in person: In Proverbs 8, wisdom calls out, “O simple ones, learn prudence; O fools, learn sense. I dwell with prudence, and I find knowledge and discretion. The fear of the LORD is hatred of evil. Pride and arrogance and the way of evil and perverted speech I hate. I have counsel and sound understanding; I have insight; I have strength. I love those who love me, and those who seek me diligently find me. My fruit is better than gold, I walk in the way of righteousness, in the paths of justice.”
Such words we would expect to come out of wisdom’s mouth, but as Proverbs 8 continues, there’s also this: “The LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth. When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he marked out the foundations of the earth. Blessed is the one who listens to me.”
The language of Proverbs 8 echoes in the passage read from Colossians tonight. Paul, also a Jew, recognized that personified Biblical wisdom was in reality a person—Jesus himself—the very means whereby the failed vocation of Israel would be successfully accomplished. What Israel could not do God does in Christ, representative Israel, the seed of Abraham, the incarnate Torah, the one through whom orphans would be adopted as God’s children and the world would experience its true perfection. Jesus is the wisdom of God.
The problem of course, for the Jews of Paul’s day as well as for the Christians in Colossae, was squaring the folly of a scandalized, out of work carpenter strung up as a criminal with divine wisdom. It just didn’t make any sense. How can you die defeated and humiliated on a cross and declare victory? Appropriately, since God’s wisdom defies human logic, Paul responds to the dissonance not with detailed apologetic logic, but with poetry. The French philosopher Simone Weil once remarked how only two things truly pierce the human heart: beauty and affliction. And in this poem to Jesus, Paul pierces our hearts with both.
It’s a familiar passage, often read at weddings and funerals as a sublime summation of Christ’s true identity: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over everything, the one through whom all powers we created and to whom all powers submit. Paul’s ethereal language encompasses the vast expanse of the cosmos, exalting Jesus to his rightful place alongside the Father. But then in a somewhat unexpected pivot, Paul descends from cosmos to congregation. He goes from singing about Jesus as the fundamental force of the universe to Jesus as the head of the church, a disappointing denouement when you compare the elegance of the heavens to us pedestrians in the pews. Yet Paul’s swivel is intentional. Far from the all-too-human institution, embattled and embittered, Paul portrays the church as the vanguard of new creation, the intersection of heaven and earth, the hope of humanity and the epitome of God’s creative and redemptive work. Just as Jesus is the image of the invisible God, so the church is the image of the now invisible Jesus, his body here and now, the true Israel, a light of righteousness, justice and peace for the nations.
Right. I know what you’re thinking. The church? We’re the light of the world? C’mon, take look at us. Go ahead, take a look. You are looking at the hope of humanity? Scary isn’t it? It is hard to square the folly of a bumbling bunch of hypocrites with the perfection of the world. But such is the wisdom of God for whom failure is victory and loss is gain. Not that we like being labeled as losers. Which is probably why we tend to parade our successes as a light to the world: the accomplished scholar, the profitable businessman, the prize-winning athlete, the award-winning author, the parent of behaving children, the recovered addict, the patient restored to health. There the ones who get to give the testimonies. Not that this is a bad thing, but if we’re not careful, we’ll end up communicating the message: “Come to Jesus and you’ll be successful too. Let’s not talk about the person who prayed to God but died anyway, the person who came to Christ and lost everything, the person who believed in Jesus only to have their life get worse, the ones who for Christ’s sake endured hardship and failure. Who wants to hear about them?
Yet they are more of what the wisdom of God looks like. Wisdom smarts. It’s disgrace for the sake of grace. It’s Christ’s descent from firstborn over all creation to firstborn from among the dead was a mortifying move. “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Christ,” Paul sings, yet the end game was pure humiliation. The Almighty Lord who dwells exalted and above all things humiliated Himself in order to dwell among the humiliated, among widows and orphans, among the least and the oppressed. Yet the reality of God’s humiliation is even starker than this. God does not humiliate himself only for the sake of the oppressed, but for sake of their oppressors too. God humiliates himself in order to enter into the condition of the guilty. In Jesus, God does not die a natural death, but rather the violent death of a guilty offender. At Golgotha, Jesus suffers the suffering of injustice; but he also suffers the suffering of condemnation. The spotless lamb is the black sheep; the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world by taking on the sins of the world. Your sins and mine.
This is the wisdom of God. It’s how the world gets redeemed. It’s how perfection happens. It is the defeat of Jesus that marks his victory; his failure that signals our reconciliation to God, his surrender that ends the war and makes peace. “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior,” Paul will go on to assert in verse 21, “But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation.” However note that Paul does not mean that Christ’s death replaces our death. Instead, Christ’s death enacts our death. It executes it for us. Yale theologian Miroslav Volf calls it inclusive substitution. What happened to Jesus has happened to us. He was condemned, we were condemned. When he died, we died. We were crucified with Christ and in that death, our death in Christ, the sins separate from the sinner. Our debts get paid and peace gets made.
“God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” Note that God is the subject rather than the object of reconciliation. We do not make ourselves right with God. He makes us right by crucifying us in Christ and then raising us in Christ—the other side of inclusive substitution. “God raised us up with Jesus and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ,” Paul wrote to the Ephesians. “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Therefore, since we die and rise in Christ, God no longer counts our sins against us because they are gone. This is how Paul can have the audacity to assert that the church is the body of Christ on earth. Christ as our head makes a wise life possible.
If God were to ask you, ‘Why should I let you into My Heaven?’ what would you say? The right answer is something along the lines of “because I believe in Jesus Christ, who died and was raised for my sins.” But to believe in Christ means to be like Christ. What you believe is what you do. In a world where corners are routinely cut to pad the bottom line and lies are the grease of career advancement, to believe in Jesus is to conduct your affairs with honesty and integrity. In a world where high self-esteem is the highest virtue and learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all, to believe in Jesus is to regularly study Scripture and heed what it teaches, even to the loss of self and the humiliation of loving your enemies. In a world where it’s never too early to enroll your infant in violin and ballet and where the wrong kindergarten could mean a rejection letter from Princeton, to believe in Jesus is to raise your children to not be motivated by selfish ambition or dependent on success for their identity? In a world where war rages and poverty abounds and climate changes and money does all the talking, to believe in Jesus is to strive for peace and justice and stewardship and simplicity.
If that’s what believing in Jesus looks like, what will you say when God looks at you? You’re probably thinking: I’m doomed. But please remember that while your salvation is through Christ alone, your life as a Christian is not lived alone. Jesus didn’t die to make us into a bunch of individual little Jesuses, but to craft us into one collective body of Christ. In Christ, we are together the embodiment of God’s wisdom, a community in whom reconciliation to God had already taken place, so much so that we are now freed to live it out and proclaim its reality, no matter how foolish it seems.
