An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Resurrecting Creation

A sermon on John 17: 1-5 by Nathan Nettleton

Anybody who comes to believe in the resurrection and ascension of Jesus is in for a very confusing time. Once we accept that Christ is risen from the dead and ascended to the Father, all bets are off. Nothing is quite as we thought it was. Basic understandings of the way things are are turned on their head. Some of the fundamental laws of the universe have to be considered not so fixed and unchangeable as we thought. Although I don’t agree with them, I do have a fair bit of sympathy for the many modern Christians who have concluded that the resurrection is a purely spiritual reality and that the physical descriptions of it are only symbolic metaphors attempting to describe an intangible reality. For them it is important that the scientific laws of nature remain unbreakable and that God does not engage with the world in ways that breach those laws. God made the rules, they say, and God would not break them. The universe is orderly and explainable and consistent. We might not have it all worked out yet, but if we did, it would clearly be so. I very much understand the attraction of that. I even want to believe it, much of the time. But the more I have sought to know and follow Jesus, the less convinced I have become about such theories. It doesn’t make it any easier to make sense of it, and anybody who comes to believe in the resurrection and ascension of Jesus is in for a rather confusing time.

The way faith in the resurrection forces us to rethink everything can be seen in the Biblical records themselves, and one of the examples of it appears in today’s reading from the gospel according to John. I think I’ve spoken before in a couple of Christmas sermons about how the early Christian thinking about Jesus kept pushing the starting line further and further back. The earliest gospel to be written, the gospel according to Mark, begins its story with the baptism of Jesus at the hands of John. Matthew and Luke both conclude that to explain him adequately you need to go back further and consider his conception and birth. And John, the last to write, thinks even that is not adequate and that to fully understand who Jesus is, we need to go back before the foundation of the world and see that Christ was with God in the beginning, and through him all things were created. And this comes up again in today’s extract from John where he records Jesus as praying, “So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.”

Now this might easily be thought of as nothing more than a bit of esoteric speculation for the philosophers and theologians, with little or no practical relevance for ordinary followers of Jesus and the ordinary concerns of living out our faith in daily life. But I want to suggest tonight that if we look at why the early Christians found themselves rethinking the origins of Christ, we might see that it is very relevant indeed to the way we regard the world and go about living out our lives in it. You see, I have become persuaded (and I am indebted for this insight to the outstanding theologian, James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, New York: Crossroads, 1998, p. 94-102) that it was the experience of the risen Christ, and the ways that that experience turned everything they thought they knew on its head, that made them conclude that their rethinking of everything had to go all the way back to creation. The basic order of the universe is not as we thought it to be, therefore we have to rethink the origins of the universe.

Now the most important thing about this, for us and our discipleship, is not the origins of the universe. It is the experience of the risen Christ and how that changes everything. It is that that will change us, but by looking at why that experience rewrote the book on the origins of the universe we may get a deeper insight into the transforming nature of that experience and so be more deeply transformed by it ourselves. I know that sounds a bit like I’m running around in circles here, and I am, but bear with me. I think it will be worth it.

What the experience of the risen Christ does is completely upend our understandings of who God is and how God behaves towards the world and its inhabitants. And it is then on the basis of that upended understanding of who God is that we realise that if God is the creator of everything and we had completely misunderstood God, then we have probably completely misunderstood the kind of world that God would have created. What kind of world you think you live in affects nearly everything you do. If you think the world is a kindly place, entirely full of honest, self controlled and respectful people, then you won’t bother locking your doors when you go out, you won’t think twice about leaving your wallet and your phone visible in your unlocked car parked in a public place, and you won’t be concerned if your daughter gets blind drunk and goes home with a group of footballers late at night. But if you don’t think the world is that kind of place, then you might respond differently. So if we have misunderstood the kind of world God has created, it will probably matter in real and everyday ways.

Now, the basic view of the creator God, before the resurrection, was that God was a God of order and justice. The image of bringing order out of chaos was one of the dominant images of the way God created the universe. And perhaps you can immediately see the connection to what I was talking about before about the attractions of a view where the resurrection has nothing to do with the physical reality of the universe. Order is all important. A God of order sets everything in its place, and so long as you know your place and abide by the rules, you will be able to get along just fine. The disciples are still struggling with this up until a moment before the ascension because their question about Jesus restoring the kingdom to Israel is based on an assumption that everything has its proper God-ordained place and Israel’s proper place is on top, and if things have got out of place, then of course a God of Order would want to reestablish the proper order of things. A God of order is, of course, also a God of justice who will ensure that there are consequences to be paid by those who are responsible for any disordering of the universe. The God of justice is the one who keeps a record and who will bring punishment and vengeance upon those who deserve it. If God is a God of order and justice, and the world is created by such a God, then there can be no doubt that at least in the long term, there will be a pretty accurate relationship between what we deserve and what we get. Such a God would not forget and could not let justice go undone. That would break the laws of the universe.

So even if anyone had comprehended what Jesus predicted about his own resurrection and expected him to come back from the dead, they would have expected the resurrection to be a triumphant vindication of the suffering messiah and a devastating slap in the face for those who had him killed. If a God of order and justice raises the messiah from the dead, then the judgement has begun and God’s enemies are in for it. That’s what we would have expected. But the resurrection of Jesus didn’t produce an exultant messiah gloating over the humiliation of his enemies at all. It produces an infuriatingly merciful and generous messiah who reaches out to his betrayers and his deniers and his executioners all alike with the scarred hands of gratuitous love and forgiveness. This Jesus seems to have no interest in reestablishing a right order or a cast iron justice. This Jesus upends every system of divine order and just pours forth love and grace and generous mercy with an outrageous abundance that knows no limits or bounds or sense of decency. And everyone who had some sort of investment in a predictable order and a righteous justice — which is pretty much everyone of us — is offended and scandalised and outraged. Those who thought the kingdom was to be restored to Israel are offended because Jesus is just as loving and merciful to the gentiles as he is to the Jews. And you are offended because that person on the other side of the room who so pisses you off with their inability to measure up to the standards you hold dear turns out to be infuriatingly loved and cherished by Jesus and he wants you to sit down alongside each other and celebrate his mercy to you both equally. And everyone who insists that the world should be fair and just and predictable is scandalised because grace and mercy are always so unfair. It is not fair that the prodigal son be loved as much as the faithful reliable son. It is not fair that the workers who came to the vineyard at five in the afternoon be paid as generously as those who started work at nine in the morning. It is not fair that God would be just as enthusiastic about saving Ciaphas or Pilate or Judas or Peter as Mary Magdalene or James or me or you.

But such a graciously unfair and disordered world is just what is revealed by the resurrection of Jesus. When he seeks no vengeance or vindication but only forgiveness and reconciliation, all bets are off. The world has been turned on its head. Everything we thought we knew about God and the world turns out to be wrong. And if it is wrong now, then surely it was always wrong. And so the early Christians recognised the need to reinterpret the whole history of the world and God’s engagement with it. And without going into endless detail, the upshot of that is that they conclude that Jesus is not revealing a change in God, but that Jesus was always there, even before the foundation of the world, and the truth about what kind of world we live in and what kind of world God has created is revealed in the disorderly gracious love and mercy of the risen Jesus.

And that makes all the difference in the world. If you were to think that all Jesus represents is God temporarily putting on hold the demand for justice and retribution, then you could simply put it on hold too and smugly wait for the apocalypse when the divine fury will be unleashed and everything will be violently and savagely put right again. And you could go on merely tolerating instead of loving those enemies, because they’ll get theirs, and you’ll be vindicated. Or will you?

But the risen Jesus has revealed that God is not like that. You might as well get used to the world not being fair and get over expecting that you will be vindicated and the truly evil people will get what’s coming to them. Jesus has reached out his scarred hands to embrace them too. And that’s pretty bad news if you were the one righteous person who was waiting for your crown of vindication on judgement day when the divine order was restored. But if you are like the rest of us, and know that you’ve never managed to measure up or be consistently loving and righteous, then this is outrageously good news, for the Christ who shared God’s glory before the world existed, has finished the work of revealing the disorderly merciful God, and is being totally unfair in welcoming you to share his glory in the kingdom of heaven. And as confusing and disorienting as it is, the news can’t get much better than that!

0 Comments

Add a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.