Trinitarian Mission (Part 2)

John 17

Fodder

So, Trinitarian mission.  If, when attempting a conversation involving the uncharted waters of the Trinity we are to avoid any mention of food or arithmetic, what are we (humble laymen and women that we are) to talk about?  How about with the words of Jesus himself, the perfect image of God (Colossians 1:15)?  We’ll use John 17, seeing as I’m still feelin’ fresh from last weeks Bible Study.

John 17 is the last chapter in an epic four chapter-long Jesus throw-down message.  These four chapters (14-17) are epic for two reasons: 1) because of what Jesus is saying and 2) because of when he is saying them. 

1)   Jesus is spelling out for his core group of disciples what things will be like and who they will be after he conquers the world and returns to the Father.  Though the world will indeed be conquered by what He’s about to do (16:33) it will also be hell-bent on persecuting any and all who follow in His footsteps (15:18-16:4).  Following Jesus means obeying his commands (14:21), and his command to them is to love one another (15:17).

2)   Jesus says all this during what he calls “the hour” (12:23).  Judas, the devil, and some soldiers are literally on their way to arrest Jesus during these four chapters (14:30), giving a profound sense of urgency to the whole scene.  These are truly Jesus’ last words to His followers.

The entirety of chapter 17 consists of Jesus praying a prayer, which brings together and fills out themes and ideas from the previous three chapters.  Instead of focusing on the entire chapter I’d like to highlight select portions, combined together and shown below.

17 After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed:

“Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. 2 For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. 3 Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. 4 I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. 5 And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.

10 All I have is yours, and all you have is mine. And glory has come to me through them. 11 I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one.

15 My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. 16 They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. 17 Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. 18 As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. 19 For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified. 20 “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one — 23 I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. 24 “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.

26 I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”

I’d like to begin by highlighting the end of verse 11: “may they be one as we are one”.  Verses like this are responsible for the death of thousands of trees and octopus to supply the paper and ink needed for the thousands of books and articles devoted to the verse’s unpacking. 

Let us unpack a little.

Firstly, it should be noted that the thrust or underlying motive for these words of Jesus is missional.  That is, Jesus isn’t telling the disciples how they are to live and love for their own sake, but for the sake of the world that He means to redeem.  He commands them to love one another and even seems to make this command central to his entire programme, but not simply to form a private community hidden from the eyes of outsiders.  The opposite is true.  His prayer is not for them to be out of the world but to be in it, guided and protected by the providence of God (v. 15). 

 The church does not exist for her own sake.  God’s plan for the church extends beyond a private me-and-Jesus relationship.  He means for us to exist, to be little Christ’s, in the world.  That the church loses her identity when she loses her missional existence is true on the corporate and individual levels.

Second, we must be sure to understand Jesus’ definition of love.  Jesus’ love, like his peace, is not of this world (14:27).  The greatest love of all, says Jesus, is exemplified when someone lays down his life for his friends (15:13).  True love is sacrificial. 

For the average American Christian this definition of love, if not totally trite, at least feels very normal.  We have heard it a thousand times.  But we shouldn’t forget the scandal it is.  Friedrich Nietzsche, an infamous German philosopher, described Christianity as “the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion… the one immortal blemish of mankind”, and said this precisely because of the way Jesus defined the word “love”.  In a world where power is worshipped, Jesus’ words and actions can aptly be described as Nietzsche has done.

To further the scandal, Jesus does not merely say that this love is for humans alone, or that the love available to us is less because of our creaturely status.  No, Jesus roots this love in the Triune God himself.  He claims this love characterizes who God has been for eternity.  Literally, in 17:24, Jesus claims the Father has loved the son this way “before the foundation of the world”. 

And here is some fodder for our Trinitarian understanding and subsequent conversations.  There it is, in Scripture, in “plain language” (16:29).  “Triune God” means “God who is Love”.  “Triune God” means “God who is Community”. 

And we, little Christ’s filled with the Spirit of this Triune God, can practice this love and community right now.

In fact, we are commanded to in the name of Jesus.  The degree to which we practice this love, by the power of the Holy Spirit, while being in the world, is the degree to which we are a part of the holy, universal church.

Trinitarian Mission: loving one another with the love of the God who is Three, in full view of the eyes of the world, so that the world may know who Jesus is (17:21).

This is the mission of the church.

Trinitarian Mission (Part 1)

Defense of the Trinity

If you’ve begun reading this post pat yourself on the back.  You saw the word “Trinitarian” in the title and still chose to click the link.  I almost changed the title to something less intimidating (almost anything without the word “Trinity” in it) but deliberately did not.  The word is hardly heard in lay-Christian vocabulary today and when it is it almost always seems to be accompanied by an apologetic hesitancy, as if the word were reserved for “theologians” (as if there could exist a Christian who isn’t a theologian); as if the Trinity was so hopelessly abstract that there were no hope of casually speaking of it it without sounding either arrogant or ignorant. 

Where does this fear come from?  Obviously the word “Trinity” is simple enough- the Wachowski brothers had no problem allowing Neo’s girlfriend to be named “Trinity”.  And it certainly does not come from Scripture.  I have never heard anyone hesitate to speak on John 14-17 because of it’s strong Trinitarian streak, or of Philippians 2:5-11 (an especially popular Scripture) because of it’s portrayal of the supra-rational concept kenosis.  Actually the opposite is true.  These passages are a couple of the more popular New Testament passages in the church today.  And, in defense of the Trinity, I’d like to point out that it is precisely because of their overt Trinitarian-ness that they are so loved. 

Common fear of the word “Trinity” comes from the training we’ve received from theologically shallow church leadership, who have allowed us to associate the word with the question of how three persons can be one God.  The question is not invalid in and of itself, but like most things, becomes problematic when it becomes our fixation.  My personal experience is that the great majority of conversations about the Trinity depend on the chemistry of eggs or water, or elementary level mathematics, typically the equation 1+1+1=3. 

Though the enquiry into our God’s likeness to eggs or water or math equations can be entertaining, it is not only marginally helpful at best to knowing more about who our God is, but is ultimately unbiblical.  By “unbiblical” I mean outside of the way that God is concerned with revealing his Triune self through his Word (though I have heard it said that one infinite+one infinite+one infinite=one infinite, but I couldn’t personally verify the math J).  By “unbiblical” I mean the Bible doesn’t seem to give any consideration to the questions we often get stuck on, while being incessantly concerned with who this God is: love, humility, servant and Lord, to name a few. 

In defense of the Trinity I’m using this blog post as a street preacher uses a soap box, and would like to nobly remind anyone who cares to listen that everything we love in our Scriptures we love because of it’s direct or indirect Trinitarian-ness, and hope in Part 2 of this post to provide some new fodder for our hopefully-increasingly-common conversations about our God who is a love/service-centered eternal community- in other words, about our Triune God.

breaking it down- 1st peter 1:16 (part 2)

"be holy, because i am holy"

holy: the English language contains few words abused as often as this.  In Scripture “holy” is one of the most powerful adjectives used for God, so powerful that it at times becomes terrible (Isaiah 6:3-5).  In fact “holy” is a term reserved, in Scripture, for God alone, and nothing in Scripture is deemed holy without a direct connection with Him.

Somehow “holy” has mainly become used to describe special four-letter words.  And just when the common-usage of “holy” seems to be close at all to the word’s true meaning it has a negative feeling to it, as when someone is described as having the attitude of being “holier than thou”.  Normally when this phrase is chosen to describe someone the intention of the person doing the describing is not good, and so the word “holy” comes really to mean “stuck up” or “arrogant”. 

You might think there is hope for this four-letter word in more pious circles, where being “holy” is actually something worth striving for and one of the standard descriptions of God.  Yet even here only 50% of the word’s meaning, power, and terror are usually tapped in to.

The fancy way of stating our error, the error of the pious, when we read the word “holy” in 1^st peter 1:16, is that we read the word only in the negative sense and either forget or do not know that it has a positive sense as well.  A sophisticated, complex diagram should help clarify.

                         Negative Version                                         Positive (Actual) Version


        "do not be bad, because i am not bad"                        "be holy, because i am holy"

Notice the difference: one speaks of not doing something while the other speaks of doing something.  The problem, as shown above, is that our understanding of 1^st Peter 1:16 is too often limited to the negative sense.  This really is a damaging problem when we consider that there is a positive sense to the concept; if the negative sense of holy means it closes certain things off from us, the positive must mean that it opens up others.

The same is true with the idea of repentance.  Many an altar call has included a brief lecture on the Greek word metanoia.  It means turning away from something, a change in orientation.  But if metanoia (often translated as “repentance”) means turning away from something it also means turning towards something else, an infinitely exciting thought when we consider that it means turning towards an infinite, loving, creative God, implied in John the Baptist’s calling card: “Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is close at hand” (Matthew 3:2).

All this considered, holiness must at least mean a “change of outlook or spiritual metamorphosis, an enlarged vision of the dimensions of human life”, in the words of Northrop Frye (italics added). 

Holiness is the quality of that life whose had the shackles of sin (as the old hymn goes) thrown off, the life that has literally been freed and is growing boundlessly outward, into that freedom, by the power and grace of the Holy Spirit, the third member of the truly free Triune God.  The holy life is one that has been opened up to the reality defined by this Triune God, where love reigns and insecurities, skeletons-in-closets, addictions, and even death, do not.

Now this Lord is the Spirit

 and where the Spirit of the Lord is,

there is freedom.  And all of us,

with our unveiled faces like mirrors reflecting the glory of the Lord,

are being transformed into the image that we reflect in brighter and brighter glory;

this is the working of the Lord who is the Spirit.

2^nd Corinthians 3:17-18

This verse takes us to part three of 1^st Peter 1:16, where we will dive head first into the image that we reflect in brighter and brighter glory.

breaking it down- 1st peter 1:16

"be holy, because i am holy."

The Bible is full of statements thick with meaning and complexity like the one above.  Before we dive into them, and before we ever dive into Scripture, it’s important that we know that we will never fully understand everything that Scripture has to say.  This is because it is divine, a vehicle through which the infinite intersects with the finite.  But the infinite comes to us, has entered our level of reality, and so we can and are meant to understand some of His message to us.  Though we cannot understand all of His message, we can understand enough of it to adequately respond.

We will move through the verse a word/proposition at a time beginning with…

be: not “do”.  Today (in our modern, western society) we hardly know the difference, so that we read this verse as if it actually said, “do holy things, because I do holy things.”  God, who Peter is (technically) quoting, knows the difference between the word “be” and the word “do” and would have said “do” if he had wanted.  Obviously God didn’t mean to use the word “do”, and so it is wrong of us to read the verse like he had.

Not that we replace the word “be” with the word “do” on purpose.  Instead it is something we do without even thinking about it.  In fact it is something we do without getting the opportunity to think about it.  This is because we live in a time and place where the word “be” has ceased to have much value.  And this is because we live in a time and a place where be-ing (the verb form of “be”) has ceased to have much value.  It is true that this disintegration of the two concepts (“be” and “do”) is being challenged in those parts of our culture that are becoming exposed to Eastern ideas and thoughts, but these also are in need of correction.  In these areas the tendency is to err in the opposite direction.

God (through Peter) is after much more than our actions.  He is after our heart, our generator, our battery, from which our actions flow, so that holiness starts not with doing holy things, but being holy.  This can be a strange concept to get our heads around because it still uses verb/action language, still sounding like “doing” things.  Perhaps it is.  Maybe the point is that the “doing” needs to be deeper than we think. 

The doing side is indeed important.  Anyone who has read James knows this.  But the point is that being and doing are two sides of the same coin, or the two parts of a fountain; there is the source and that which springs from the source.  If you want to change what comes out of the fountain it would be ridiculous to stand at it’s mouth and pour a bunch of dye to change it’s color, or if you wanted to turn it into a coffee fountain it would be absurd to pour instant coffee into the stream as it leaves the source.  No, you would go to the supply, the heart of the fountain, and change it.  The same is true when we flip the James’ argument; faith without works is dead, but works without faith is equally dead.

So be before you do, if you want your doing to matter at all.  And if you’re wondering how to change the source, or if it’s possible, take comfort in the fact that it’s what Jesus is after in every single person he has ever encountered.  He clearly has faith that it’s possible and seems to think that he is capable of performing such a surgery.  If you still don’t believe just ask Him, I dare you.  But don’t ask with empty words or actions.  Let your asking start with the orientation of your heart, the core of who you are.  That’s what prayer is, after all.

Believing is Seeing (Part 2)

It is possible to walk with Jesus day-in and day-out for twelve months, to see him perform signs, to hear him preach on the biggest stage in all of Palestine during the biggest time of the year, and not hear a word he is saying, not see a thing he is doing. 

            The story of John 5:1-9 is offensive to some.  Jesus walks past hundreds of sick and maimed and heals a single person.  The Scripture shows Jesus having compassion on this single paralyzed old man.  But what about everybody else?  That must mean that he didn’t have compassion for hundreds of people, right? 

No, actually.  The response of the crowds and the disciples to the time when Jesus shows compassion on the thousands sheds some light on why Jesus does not heal everybody, how it is that our belief would not be stronger “if only we could see him”.  We are given a dramatic example of what people had been seeing when they saw Jesus. 

            One of the most beautiful things about Scripture is that it tells the story not only of God’s interaction with mankind, but the story of man’s response to God’s action.  John 6:1-15 is as much about Jesus’ compassion as it is about everyone else missing it.  In their search for Leonidas they came across Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter, who everyone loves and follows (except the leaders), who has powers of healing and apparently can multiply food.  Sounds like an unbeatable general in the making.  He can heal his troops and feed entire armies (five thousand men, remember) in the blink of an eye.  And this is what turns the table on our reading not only of John 5:1-9 but our reading of anything Jesus does.  The question is no longer “why didn’t Jesus heal everyone”, but “why did Jesus heal anyone?”  He knew full well that his actions would be misinterpreted.  He knew full well that everything he did and said would be misinterpreted, misconstrued, and distorted. 

            But the Father always has a plan.  Everything God does has purpose.  And everything Jesus did makes sense in light of the Cross.  Everything he said and did was pointing to it; the turning of water into wine pointed to the new life that his death and resurrection would bring to the world; his words with the woman at the well in chapter four spoke of the nature of eternal life that was coming; his healing of the paralyzed man and the feeding of the five thousand were concrete expressions of the new life signified by every word and action up to that point- and everything points to the Cross, the epitome of God’s Word to the world, when Jesus, the Word (John 1:1), who spoke and did so much, finally falls silent with a wordless cry (Mark 15:7), when the heart of God is literally, literally poured out (John 19:34). 

            We see in the feeding of the five thousand, in every action and word of the Word, Jesus the Christ, the perfect image of God.  And the image is of a God who literally pours out his heart, in blood and water, for the world.  The challenge for the world, in response to the action of this God, is to have faith.  We see in all the Gospels that simply seeing, with our eyes, is not the way to faith, that our faith would not be any stronger were Jesus to stand in front of us and begin to speak.  We are left with the task of knowing that Jesus is always in the room (Acts 17:27-28), that anything is possible because Jesus Christ was raised from the dead.  We are left with the task of living in Truth that already is.  And so it is faith that we need, not sight.

Believing is Seeing (Part 1)

Jesus is a crazy guy.  It turns out that you can walk with him, literally, for years and still not know who he really is.  You can, literally, spend every day and every night with him for years straight and, in the middle of such a “life season” or “trial period”, still believe him to be King Leonidas.  In fact that is almost exactly who the crowds and even his closest disciples believed him to be by the time we get to chapter six in the gospel of John. 

            OK, so “King Leonidas might be a slight exaggeration.  But the exaggeration really is slight.  The Jews of first century Palestine, those who populated the crowds that follow Jesus in John 6 and the time period in which the story takes place, all expected their Messiah to be a powerful military figure.  Their Messiah would be the one to lead Israel against the Romans, the one to free God’s people from the yoke of the pagans.  And this expectation or, better yet, the eagerness for the coming of this prophetic figure was at an all-time hi during the first century.  An example of the fire in the hearts of these ancient Jews would be any video clip from the Libyan rebellion against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.  The Libyan rebellion is not an exact parallel of the situation of first century Palestine but does suggest what the climate of Jerusalem was like under Roman rule.

            Imagine the kind of individual it would take to lead a rebellion like the one in Libya.  Chances are your mind conjured up, if not Leonidas himself, some sort of ethnic variation of the famous Spartan (always with a beard, of course).  Actually all you need to do is change John 2:16 to “THIS IS SPARTA!” and Jesus starts to seem pretty dang ripped.  But let’s get back to John 6.

            Actually, to John 6:1-15.  The feeding of the five thousand was perhaps the greatest sign performed by Jesus during his ministry, hence it’s being the only miracle recorded by all four gospels.  All of the gospels have subtly different chronologies but in John the feeding of the five thousand take place at least twelve months into Jesus’ ministry.  We know this because the Passover festival was and is celebrated once every twelve months and verse four tells us the time of the Passover was near when this sign took place, the second time in the gospel that the Passover has appeared so far.  John does not specify the amount of time that lapsed between John 2:13 (the first mention of the Passover) and the stories preceding it.  We will take the conservative route and say that by the time the feeding of the five thousands occurs not only have rumors and stories about this Jesus guy been circulating towns and hills of Palestine, not only have thousands seen him heal and preach in the temple in Jerusalem, but at least twelve men, whom Jesus called his disciples, have been at Jesus’ side virtually every hour of every day since Jesus asked them to follow him.  Such was the relationship between a Rabbi and his disciples.  Class was not in session during select hours of select days of the week.  Rather, class was never not in session.  One learned from one’s Rabbi by watching and listening to everything he did and said.

            The feeding of the five thousand was truly incredible.  A careful reading of verse ten reveals that only the men were counted.  The customary way to estimate or count a large crowd was to count the men.  If you figure (conservatively) that every other man had a wife and a child then it is highly likely that there were at least ten thousand people on this great grassy plain. 

For all its grandeur the feeding of the five thousand ends as a tragedy.  The crowds are amazed at the powers of Jesus and try to forcibly capture him and make him their king.  For all his efforts people have yet to see and hear who Jesus is.  Verse fifteen ends with an important detail, “Jesus, as he realized they were about to come and take him by force and make him king, fled back to the hills alone” (New Jerusalem Bible).  That he was forced to flee alone, without his posse following at his heels or protecting him, means that his posse was on the same page as the crowds who saw not Jesus, the Lamb of God (1:29), but King Leonidas.  

Like A Child

Alone in the wild.  A reality show in 2010 bore this name.  It featured the story of Ed Wardle, a born-and-raised wilderness man.  Ed has spent his entire life in love with nature.  But Ed’s love for nature is much more “hands on” than most.  In Orange County (let alone Southern California) it is not uncommon to hear “love for nature” equated with “appreciation of sunsets”.  Nothing is wrong with the equation, sure.  But it fails to really describe people like Ed.  See, Ed has climbed Mt. Everest twice.  And been on an expedition to the North Pole.  His astonishing resume can be viewed here, but let it be known that Ed is, quite frankly, unnatural. 

            Naturally, Ed had always dreamed of living alone in the wild and wanted to prove to himself that he could, if necessary.  The National Geographic Channel decided they’d like to give Ed the opportunity.  And wanted him to film it of course.  Alone In The Wild was born.  Ed was given the task of surviving alone in the Yukon Territory in Northern Canada for 3 months, living off the wildlife he could legally catch.  The story was compelling while it lasted.  Ed called it quits 5 weeks short of the goal.  But the 7 weeks of footage really were remarkable.  He lost 28 pounds and became literally sick with loneliness.  That majestic, beautiful wilderness which had always drawn Ed to such fantastic heights (literally) became cold, cruel, and dispassionate.  In a singularly powerful moment Ed confesses that nature, in all its beauty, could care less whether or not he starved to death.  The greatest teacher is life, after all.

            What would Ed have thought if he had read Psalm 19:1-4 while sitting in such a dismal classroom?

1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. 
2 Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. 
3 They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. 
4 Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. 
In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun.

Mr. Wardle may have reacted any number of ways.  Dying of hunger, going mad with loneliness, because of a river’s refusal to provide fish, of an unseen predator always lurking in the dark, from any and every noise completely lacking any trace of human causation, it doesn’t take the imagination of a Nick Fetner or a Jordan Benedict to know how Ed would have felt were he to read that the thing killing him was also glorifying God.  He may have questioned the psalmist; his character or life experience.  But the psalmist didn’t write this poem out of ignorance.  Exposure to weather was a little more widespread 3,000 years ago in the Middle East than it is today in the West.  Ed may have questioned the nature of this god; a god who is glorified by a thing capable of such fatal apathy as nature must be just that- fatally apathetic. 

            Despite the incredible distance between the experience of people who lived so wildly 3,000 years ago (or Ed today) and the rest of modern western society, a certain peculiar proximity between the two peoples does exist.  In fact the parallels are quite obvious.  Ed exposed himself to a world that could literally take his life at any moment.  It would not ask his permission.  Were a bear to smell the dead porcupine hanging next to Ed in that tree it would not have asked for a leg of porcupine.  The bear (and this thought tormented Ed all night) would probably have eaten Ed himself.  And that’s pretty much how it works.  By now some of you may already know where this is going.  It almost goes without saying that life in America over the last several years can be described in very similar terms.  Bears may not have haunted us in the night, but millions learned the implications of living in a world where the majority of capital is controlled by the minority.  A few bank owners behave like humans and the global economy is thrown into a nosedive that no one can see an end to.  Millions learned that saving up for retirement, like hanging a porcupine in a tree, does not guarantee that the bear won’t eat you AND your porcupine. 

            But there is good news.  We are not alone.  The machine or bear or whatever shape it happens to take does not have the final say.  Actually, it has already been defeated.  In actuality, the victory is ours (1^st Cor. 15:54-57).  We, as His children, no longer fear bears or machines (Lk. 12:4-5) because, in all truth, they cannot touch us (Rom. 8:37-39).  Our Father can literally, morning after morning, cover the earth around us with provisions (Ex. 16:4-5).  But we choose death when we turn our cares from Him to His provisions (16:20, 27).  It was with Mt. 6:25-34 in mind that a wise man once said, “God cares for tomorrow, and if man cares about God, then his tomorrow is also taken care of.”

            The good news is appalling when circumstances are the dominating filter through which it’s received.  But good news is good news, even when it’s salty.  Ed Wardle learned a hard lesson out in the Yukon Territory about the love of his life.  But his love did not turn to hatred.  His love actually grew.  Ed was humbled.  He realized that, ultimately, he is not in control.  The will of the Father is that His children would know this and more: to be His children we must act as His children, having faith like a child (Mk. 10:13-16), completely vulnerable and dependent on our Father for everything.  This is good news, that the One in whom all things exist (Rom. 11:36) is also the giver of life itself (Jn. 5:21), that if our hands reach out to receive instead of to grab our Father will give us His kingdom (Mk. 10:13-16).  May we stand in this truth for heaven’s sake.