Solemnibus

Jesus was a Jew, and the Jewish people had always thought that they had a special place in the plans of the god who they believed created the world. Many of their ceremonies and laws and buildings reflected this – for instance, their most sacred Temple was a symbolic recreation of an original Edenic paradise, which the creation myth said was ruined by mankind, and which their prophecies said would grow to cover the whole world, one day.

It is against the backdrop of this Jewish story about the universe that Jesus’ life unfolded. When he came of age at 30, he began making extraordinary claims – most of which were very controversial, and many of which were considered sacriligious or even blasphemous. His chief claim was that the propesied blessing of the creator god would come about through himself and his own work, rather than the centrepiece Temple. Perhaps even worse, he alleged that his own Jewish people had failed to keep faith with that creator god, and that therefore they would lose their special place in his plans.

Jesus made both political and religious life so controvesial that the Jewish leadership contrived to have him crucified for rebellion by the Romans. However, this only turned out to be a masterstroke of table-turning. For, after three days, Israel’s god resurrected him to life. This showed beyond all question that the creator had made Jesus the means by which all the old prophecies would be fulfilled – the means by which all the hoped-for blessings would arrive. And so Jesus’ death and resurrection is what Christians celebrate every year at Easter.

After he rose, Jesus appeared to many people, including his group of 12 closest followers, and told them to shortly begin spreading the word of what this meant. These followers became the core of an ever-growing movement. They re-read all the old prophecies and stories of Isreal, and, in the light of the resurrection, realised that their fulfilment had begun. Filled with an extraordinary hope and delight, they began telling everyone – first their fellow Jews, and then their puzzled non-Jewish neighbours around Israel – that Israel’s god had begun the restoration and healing of the world. And they invited the equal participation of all in a new order. They established a memorial meal of peace and fellowship as a central act of their meetings, laying aside former barriers like race, wealth, status, gender, age, customs, and even personal wrongs. They transformed their communities.

In the ancient world, these sorts of forgiveness meals, and the new communities they established, were unprecedented. People simply did not act this way. It was subversive. It threatened the usual methods of acquiring, showing, keeping and enforcing power. It was so dangerous that many of the earliest Christians paid with their lives. They were as religiously and politically dangerous as the Jesus they followed.

But why were they prepared to do this? It is because they had come to embrace the story of Jesus. In Jesus’ life and words they heard the call to a new way of being human, a way that represented the best of humanity and a foreshading of what god intends for us. In the resurrection they saw the defeat of death, and so were prepared, in taking up this new humanity, to die themselves. In their own lives, and by the witness of community renewal, they experienced god’s transforming forgiveness. And if the renunciation of the old way of being human should end in death, so be it. A new way and a new future had been definitively opened.

Captured by the story of Jesus, they trusted the hope of a renewed present and a gloriously transformed future.

And that is why Jesus matters. In him, the whole universe stands renewed, ready for participation by any who would reject the old ways of being human.

That means you and me.

The rise of neo-nazism in Germany

The Rev. John Rogers has given me permission to republish this article, which appeared on the back cover of the recent Faith in Focus:

Hypocrisy & the Holocaust

It has certainly been a week for hypocrisy. The world has been remembering Auschwitz; and well we might. I read very little and watch almost no TV programmes or films about the Holocaust these days – have not done so for years. From reading in my younger years I know what went on. It is enough. It is true, we must not forget, else we will, as is said about all forgotten history, repeat it. But I cannot wallow in misery or violence and horror. It is too much for much me. Besides, having dealt with sin and misery as much as I understand God calls me to do, my duty is to rejoice in the Lord and “dwell on whatsoever is true, honourable, right, pure, lovely, of good repute, excellent and worthy of praise” (Philippians 4). “Let your mind dwell on these things … and the peace of God shall be with you.” And I, and the Jewish people and the whole world, need peace. But peace is the fruit of righteousness as Isaiah 32:17 says so clearly: “The work of righteousness shall be peace; and the effect of righteousness quietness and assurance forever.”

I do not mind that the remembrances were held. It is appropriate. Perhaps even necessary. And while I do not want to dwell on it, and do not think it wise to dwell on it, it must be taught, as all history and the lessons of history, must be taught to each rising generation. But it is the sheer hypocrisy that is so galling. For, for all our determination never to forget and our loud assertions, “Never again!” it has not stopped. And I am not referring to Bosnia or Rwanda or Cambodia. I am referring to us victor nations of the West and our then ally, the USSR.

There is something, to us, so in the face, so bald, so open and gross about the Holocaust that it appals us. But according to one student of the Holocaust on the National Programme this week, it wasn’t like that at all. He said that Auschwitz and the gas chambers actually developed because the Nazis found it too traumatic to kill women and children in cold blood with machine guns. So they turned to technology. I heard once of a newly pregnant woman who went to see her doctor about an abortion. He looked at her eighteen month old whom she had had to take with her to the surgery and said, “Well, why don’t we just kill him. It would be a lot easier and less dangerous for you.” The woman was horrified. But why? In principle, what was the difference between that and what she was asking for? The essential difference was technology and the distance technology places between us and our actions. One is under anaesthesia; it is all out of sight in the womb; we use depersonalising language (foetal tissue). But what we are doing is precisely the same and the horror for the child is precisely the same – dismemberment with a vacuum pump; the burning of saline solution (if it’s still used today; and public concern was expressed this week about children ending up in hospital through accidental burning caused by ingestion of dishwashing powder); or, in the US at least, however the child dies/is put to death in a partial birth abortion as it is held back in the womb when it wants to come out into the light and life of day. Some light!

We have not learned a single thing. “Auschwitz was the greatest mass murder in history,” said this man on the National Programme. It was very great and very horrendous. But even with the total six million, it doesn’t match the abortion holocaust that has gone on and continues since that war. New Zealand kills around 18,500 per year; the average woman in Russia has two abortions for every live birth; 40 million children have been aborted in the last 30 years in North America alone. China? India? England and Europe?

“The heart of man is desperately wicked and deceitful above all things,” says Jeremiah, “who can know it?” None of us, without the light of God shone into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Certainly not this generation that is almost obsessed by a great, very obvious crime in the past and refuses to look at its own heart; that in gross stubbornness absolutely refuses to see that it is hiding enormous criminality under the cover of the white coat in the antiseptic operating theatre. And it will continue “until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high” (Isaiah 32:15). We have work to do brothers and sisters, work on our knees.

This article on the history of child abuse (which I quoted below) really deserves a read. Put your breastplate of intestinal fortitude on, though, because it’s sickening.

The major point I want to make is just what an incredible difference Christ’s kingship has made. Those who wonder, seriously, about the historical worth and effect of the gospel need to read some history. And then be thankful they have the luxary to wonder.

The author (one Lloyd deMause) does not, of course, ascribe the progress he notes to Christ and the gospel of his kingship. Rather, like Marx, his analysis seems to be a version of Hegel’s historical dialectic. But unlike Marx, who thought that the driving force of history and progress was the allocation of capital, this author thinks it is the allocation of childhood benefits and burdens (love and trauma). This is interesting, and maybe even true in a way, but it doesn’t get to the heart of things. Life brings pain unrelated to childhood, and deMause’s system has no sensible or helpful way of dealing with this. The Christian, on the other hand, sees death and resurrection at the heart of reality, and so lives with a profound hope that is nevertheless (or, therefore) fully capable of engaging the world as it actually is: in a constant state of death and resurrection.

Similarly, deMause’s clear evolutionary bias seems to have a teleology (goal or end-game) in economic prosperity and consumption, which is neither exciting nor redemptive. Merely having ‘more stuff of what we want’ is not going to deal with the deep issues of life – especially as some of those issues are particularly exposed only when we have all that we want.

So, while deMause’s article is very useful, it is also flawed. He lives in a society that is heir to (at least some of) the Pax Christos, and thus is subject, unknowingly, to the grace of God. It is Christ and the Spirit, and not merely good parenting (’good’ according to what?) that has made all the difference to our world. Please, read it and see.