Will you join me for a little Bible Study? The Bible is
truly a rich and amazing book. When we dig just a bit beneath the surface, it
says some surprising things. In this case it will tell us something usually
overlooked about Christmas that, if noticed, can reshape our sense of the
Christian life.
Our family recently gathered on a Florida beach to say the
prayers of Thanksgiving for the Birth of a Child (BCP 439). We were celebrating our new grandson Matthew.
The service began with his 7-year-old brother, Daniel, reading Luke 18: 15-17,
the story of people bringing babies to be blessed by Jesus, the disciples
sending them away, and Jesus saying, “No! Let them come!” The text ends,
Whoever
will not receive the Kingdom of God like a little child
will
never enter it.”
I have looked and looked and cannot find an English
translation that is not ambiguous. A Greek-reading friend tells me it is
ambiguous in the original Greek. Did Jesus mean that in order to enter the
Kingdom of God, we must “receive the Kingdom as a child would receive it” or did he mean that we must “receive the Kingdom as we would receive a child”? We usually take it
to mean the former (childlike faith) but the context of a dispute over how we
welcome children would suggest the latter. How we receive children is what it’s
all about.
How does receiving a fragile child relate to receiving the
Kingdom of God, the reign of divine power? Power and childhood seem utterly
opposite. But look at the lesson from Isaiah for Christmas Eve – another text
where I suspect we miss the meaning – Isaiah 9: 2-7. It begins with a promise
of breaking “the rod of the oppressor.” But this isn’t just the overthrow of
one gang of thugs by another, as usually happens in the politics of the
domination system. Instead of politics as usual, when God intervenes, war and
domination are themselves vanquished. “For the boots of the trampling warriors
and the garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire.” This is
not a violent overthrow but rather the overthrow of violence itself. If
violence is not the means of overthrowing violence -- if as Dr. King said, “Darkness cannot drive
away darkness” -- then how shall this come to pass? Isaiah answers:
“For a
child has been born for us
a
child has been given to us.
Authority rests upon his shoulders
And
he is named
Wonderful
Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting
Father, Prince of Peace.
The kicker here is that the verbs are present tense. It is
not that the child will grow up someday, wield a sword, overthrow Assyria, Babylon,
Rome, or the oppressor of the day, and
establish his dominion. It is that a child is already vested with authority and
honored as the Prince of Peace. A kind of power resides in the child as a child. Some early Madonna-and-Child
icons express this authority of the divine child by showing the baby Jesus
wearing a crown. This is a wildly
paradoxical text. What can possibly be going on in these two lessons?
Isaiah and Luke are showing us how God exercises power. It
is not in our ordinary human way.
My ways are not your
ways, says the Lord, nor my thoughts your thoughts
.-- Isaiah
55: 8
God’s power is not like earthly power. It is really quite the
opposite. We will go into the difference in due course, but first we need to
address the whole question of power. Frederick
Nietzsche launched the most powerful philosophical attack of all time on
Christianity. What he despised about Christians is that we were pusillanimous,
weak, mousey – that we made a religious virtue out of mousiness. As we practice
the faith, we sometimes live up to Nietzsche’s description. A social media clergy friend recently went on
a rant against broad-based community organizing to improve our common life
because he had discovered it involved the building of power to effect positive
change. Christians, he insisted, should
have nothing to do with power – thereby proving Nietzsche’s point. Another clergy person on social media thought
it was presumptuous for people to forgive each other because we have no right
to claim such power (even though Christ commanded us to do so.) However, if we
check our Bible we read that:
God has not given us a spirit of fear, but
of power . . . .2 Timothy 1: 7
For the Kingdom of God is not in word but in
power. 1 Corinthians 4: 20
But truly I am filled with power by the Sprit of the Lord, and of
justice
and of might. Micah 3: 8
Now when the multitudes saw (the healing
miracle) they marveled
that
God had given such power to men. Matthew
9: 8
To
them he gave the power to become sons of God. John 1: 13
You shall receive power when the Holy
Spirit comes upon you. Act 1: 8
The Bible is repeatedly and emphatically clear that
Christians are invested with the power of God to do God’s will in God’s world. When
we confirm a Christian we pray, “ . . . empower
her for your service.” That
power goes back to our very creation. Here I must borrow from our pagan
brother, Plato, who defined “being” as “the power to affect others or be
affected by them.”[i]
That definition remains widely accepted in philosophy today. We exist, we have our being, by virtue of our
ability to be in relationship with others, influencing and being influenced by
them. God gave us our being, with its attendant power, and said, “It is good.”
The confusion arises from the exercise of two dramatically
different (one might even say diametrically opposed) kinds of power: dominating power and relational power.
Biblical scholar Walter Wink traced dominating power back to
the rise of the nation state in antiquity.[ii]
He said the religious foundation of the domination system was the Sumerian creation myth, The Enuma Elish, and made a persuasive
case that Genesis was written to repudiate that view of God and the world.
Church historian Karen Armstrong agrees, attributing dominating power to the
first nation states as a system for an
agrarian society.[iii]
Biblical scholars like Walter Wink and N T Wright are clear that Jesus’ message
was about overcoming sin and the domination system with the paradoxical,
ironic, mischievous, non-violent relational power of love. [iv]
One Sunday recently, I saw a group of young adults standing
on a corner at the intersection of two narrow streets. They were having a
happy, fun conversation. On the street beside them, cars were stopped at a red light. When the light
turned green, the driver of the second car in line did not think the driver of
the first car was moving fast enough, so he blew his horn insistently. The
young man on the corner whose back was to the street turned and waived cordially, saying “Hi-i-i-i!” as if it had
been a greeting. Point made.
Jesus showed us and taught us the exercise of relational power, the art of influencing
others thorugh care, compassion, respect, appreciation. Take the list of
attributes of love cited by Paul in I Corinthians 13 for a good introduction to
the meaning of relational power. Take the life, death, and resurrection of
Jesus as the prototype of it.
Many people resist God because they think of God as a
patriarch exercising dominating power in the world and aspiring to dominate
them and their lives. On the contrary, the ancient Christian understanding of
God is that God is, in God’s very being, in God’s very nature, relational
– not dominating. God does not want to control us. God’s very nature
would make that domination as distasteful to God as it would be to us. God
wants lovers, not puppets. So God seeks to draw us by love. Hence God comes,
not as a dominating conqueror, not as Attila, but as Jesus. Thus an anonymous
poet in the 16th Century wrote:
To show God’s love aright
She bore for us a Savior
The Kingdom of God is not like an earthly Kingdom with
armies, weapons, high walls and dungeons. It is a Kingdom of Love – or if that word is too sentimental, a Kingdom of mutuality in which
we all have power to affect one
another for good, to build each other up – and God happens in that relational
space. God is a field (in the sense of modern physics) in which such
relationships can flourish.
The Kingdom of God does not overpower us like a military
force. It charms us like a child in its cradle. That is why Jesus says we enter
the Kingdom of God by our welcome of the vulnerable and our willingess to be
vulnerable ourselves. We enter the Kingdom by submitting to the power of love. Hence
God manifests at Christmas as a baby in a stable.
Our God, heaven cannot hold him
Nor Earth sustain . . . .
(But) in the bleak midwinter
A stable place sufficed
The Lord God Incarnate
1 comment:
Of course, The Kingdom of God is not like an earthly Kingdom with armies, weapons, high walls and dungeons! Whoever will not receive the Kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it. Read an excellent post by following http://bigessaywriter.com/blog/20-important-lessons-you-can-receive-from-nature!
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