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Pentecost 15
22/9/2019

1 Timothy 1:1-7, 18-19a
Psalm 16
Luke 16:1-9

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In a sentence:
Scripture speaks of God’s honouring of us, and calls us to the honouring of God

‘Fake news’ has been no small part of the news over the last few years.

Whatever else can be said about it (not least that it is scarcely a new phenomenon), the most insidious form of fake news is that which we might have reason to believe is correct. It might not likely be believed that the candidate for election is a child-sacrificing Satanist, but be quite believable that he is philanderer or has manipulated some public process for personal gain. Believability is an important element of ‘useful’ or effective fake news. It has to be a report not only that we might want to believe but that we can believe.

We begin our reading of 1 Timothy today by considering the strong majority conclusion in critical scholarship that the letter was not written by Paul, and dates from perhaps as much as a century after Paul’s death (with a similar conclusion with respect to 2 Timothy and Titus). The reasons for this conclusion include the language in the letter, and the emphases and the context to which it seems to be written, all of which differ considerably from those in other letters of Paul.

Our point here this morning is not to test the theory – we’ll take it for granted. More important is to ask what it might mean for the reading of the letter and of the Scriptures as a whole. In particular, the question of authority presses forward – the authority first of the letter itself and then of a Bible which contains such fake news. For if it is fake, it may be untruth of that more dangerous type: close enough to what is possible that we might believe it to be true. There was a Timothy, and there was a Paul – a very, very important Paul. What that Paul might have said to that Timothy, then, is itself very, very important. It would seem to matter, then, whether or not Paul wrote this letter.

Indeed, this is a significant historical question, in the sense that historians are right to do the kinds of things historians do to establish as closely as possible what is the case about historical records.

Whether or not Paul wrote the letter, however, is not a very important theological question. For we must also take seriously the way in which the Scriptures are used in the Churches – or, at least, ought to be used. We noted, for example, that the prophet Hosea was not writing to us but to eighth century Israelites. We believe there to be continuities between ourselves and them but we also know that there are great differences. And so we ‘translate’ and ‘interpret’ in order that we might hear God speak to us in our own ‘here and now’. If it is Hosea we use, it is not quite Hosea we hear.

In the same way, if Paul did write to Timothy, he was not writing to us, and so we seek to read between the lines to understand more how Paul’s exchange with Timothy might matter to us. This is part and parcel of our not being in the ‘thick of things’ so far as the texts of the Scriptures are concerned.

The rumoured ‘fakeness’ of such a letter as Paul’s to Timothy – its ‘pseudonymity’ – is not, then, merely a ‘literary’ conclusion, as if the matter rested only on analysing the language and context for comparison to that of other letters in Paul. Rather, pseudonymity borders on being a theological requirement of a biblical text. This is because every text ceases to be what Paul said to Timothy or the Galatians or the Corinthians, and becomes a text addressed to us – independent of the historical personage of Paul.

All Scripture is, theologically, pseudonymous in this sense: we read it ‘as if’ we were the ones addressed by the text, and ‘as if’ our reading of the text is the address to us of the real or purported author. There is, then, a sense in which – as forgeries – the pastoral letters of Paul perfect the Scriptural principle. They demonstrate precisely what is required of us as we hear and speak the gospel: they write new Scripture from the authority of the old.

To suggest that Paul might not have written the Timothy letters (among others) is, then, simply to observe that the Bible itself already contains precisely the engagement with gospel truth that we ourselves enter into each time we open it. We read Scripture to discover what God might be saying to us here and now, and we see that the Bible itself contains texts which are doing just that. The pastoral letters are traces of how the gospel was already being addressed to a time and context quite different from that of its original speakers – Paul – and hearers, Timothy.

But in this these letters are crucial because, in the end, it is the ‘from…to’ address of Scripture which matters: ‘From Paul, apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God…to Timothy, loyal child in faith…’:

There is a hint about this in the name ‘Timothy’. While we are confident that Paul had an apprentice named Timothy, at this distance (that is, the distance between the man and his name appearing in the Scriptures), the very name ‘Timothy’ becomes more significant than the man himself. The name is a compound of two Greek words, the ‘Tim-’ meaning ‘honour’ (timé) and the ‘-thy’ meaning God (theos). Timothy is either ‘one who honours God’ or ‘one honoured by God’. (In the letter the name appears three times: at the very beginning (v.2), where Timothy is identified as the ‘to’ of the letter, at the end of the introductory section (1.18), and then at the very end of the letter (6.20) – ‘Guard, O Timothy, what has been entrusted to you’.)

It was an accident that the man Timothy had this name but it is useful for the purposes of reminding ourselves what the Bible is: it is a word about honour from God to the one addressed and about the honouring of God in return.

That two-way honouring has its content revealed in the opening chapter of the letter. First, there is God’s honouring in the gift: ‘Paul, sent by Christ Jesus, to Timothy, loyal child: grace…mercy…peace.’ The ‘to’ of Scripture always proposes this first, even in the wrath of the prophets. Grace, as mercy for peace, is the gospel regardless of the context.

And then, consequent upon the gift, is the exhortation, our honouring of God: rise, stand firm, ‘take hold of the eternal life to which you are called.’ This, too, is always present: the law by which the grace takes form. This is what the gift ‘looks like’.

Whether the ‘real’ Paul wrote this letter to the ‘real’ Timothy does not matter here. In the gift and in its consequence, we are all ‘Timothy’. We are honoured by God in grace, mercy and peace. And we are called to honour God: to take hold of eternal things in lives abounding in love which springs from purified hearts, cleared minds and sincere faith.

Let us, then, be ‘timothe-ic’. Let us live from God’s honouring of us, and live towards it in our honouring of each other, to God’s greater glory and our richer humanity. Amen.

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Pentecost 14
15/9/2019

Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28
Psalm 14
1 Timothy 1:12-17
Luke 15:1-10

Sermon preached by Andrew Gador-Whyte

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God loved the world in this way, that he sought us, his lost sheep, at the risk of losing everything else.

God loved the world in this way, that he turned up the whole house for the sake of a single coin, that he pursues what adds nothing to him so that he may share with us in his unreasonable joy.

God loved the world in this way – that in Jesus he called us his friends and neighbours so that our lives might become a feast over what only God recognised as infinitely valuable.

God loves – which is to say, God’s will is oriented freely towards the other, embracing what he has made in its own integrity. God searches relentlessly for us in our alienation from one another and from him. God seeks us out in our weakness, our brokenness. God desires to embrace each person, incorporating each back into the communion that has been lost.

God desires us freely. God reaches out to our broken humanity in mercy. The form of God’s mercy, revealed in Jesus, is solidarity. God’s solidarity with us is an invitation to us to respond. Our response of love that his solidarity makes possible is repentance.

In today’s reading from Luke’s gospel, Jesus tells two parables to those who object to his fellowship with sinners. God has arrived, and welcomes money launderers with his surprising joy. And for others whose sin is to judge swindlers who are coming to trust God, he welcomes them too to share in his joy. Let nothing stand in the way of God’s grace – neither our despair of God’s mercy for ourselves, nor our attempts to manage others’ relationship to God’s mercy.

Jesus’ familiarity with those alienated from God’s people is not a cheapening of God’s righteousness. Rather, it is to reveal the righteousness of God over and against the righteousness that we place in the way of our neighbour’s healing.

In eating with sinners, Jesus makes communion possible not by toleration, but rather by solidarity. Not by denying what has ruptured our relationships, but by inviting us to one table. There we recognise the unity that comes from another, that judges our ruptured state. There we recognise the unity that impels us into the distinctly unglamorous work of asking and giving forgiveness, perhaps of giving up the need to be right that so pervades our culture.

Repentance is opening ourselves to God’s healing judgement. It is allowing God to meet us where we are, in love. And it is the recognition of how much we have attempted to live independent of his love. Repentance is allowing ourselves to have our feet washed by Christ. It is coming to receive our neighbour’s imperfect service as pure gift.

The Church is a repentant community. Repentance is the pattern of life Christ has given us. Like a bell ordering the hours of our work and prayer together, repentance is to be what structures our life, a constant invitation. Living together in the Church is taking God on trust that his mercy is always at work restoring our relationships, turning our will towards him, through what is ordinary and mundane and real. Liturgically speaking, repentance looks a lot like simply turning up, simply sticking with the rhythm of the Word, simply opening your hands to the gift that transforms us.

Repentance is standing in the line to the table of our common need, receiving forgiveness on behalf of our neighbour and for our own dire need. It is a life of prayer that refuses to despair of the mercy of God.

In baptism we have been given to one another as a forgiven people. To be washed is to be immersed again in the reality of a broken world, but to know it afresh as the place that has become the place of our healing. To be sanctified is to be drawn under the waves together where one has gone before us, with us, on our behalf.

To say that we are a forgiven people it is not to claim that sin is behind us in the streets outside. It is to say that we are given to each other in the particular awareness of having been met by the risen Christ. When he greeted us in the garden, his risen presence made visible our complicity in our neighbour’s betrayal. And yet, even before his presence is judgement, it is, above all else, reconciliation. His risen life, revealed to us with the wounds we have dealt him, is above all an assurance of our incorporation with our neighbour into the resurrection life we share.

On the cross, Jesus himself has become the lost sheep and the lost coin. On the cross, we who were lost have been found by God. We who have been met by the risen Christ have come to recognise our implication in his betrayal and death. We have come to see that in Jesus, God has become the outcast, the accursed. God has identified with us in our alienation, in the brokenness of our relationships, in the failure of trust in which we are enmeshed. God has made his mercy known by sharing our life in Jesus, by eating with us, by solidarity.

Through fellowship with him, we have received the gift of a life lived in complete trust in God. The joy of growing into absolute dependence on God. The joy of becoming slaves to the love of Jesus Christ. The joy of recognising our neighbours and ourselves as forgiven sinners. The joy of connecting others with the love of God, the God who searches unrelentingly to restore people to life and communion.

Through fellowship with him, we have received that paradoxical joy of coming to see with clarity how our lives have been marked so comprehensively by fear, by evasion of responsibility to our neighbour, by avoidance of dependence on our neighbour. That paradoxical joy of repentance.

God loved the world in this way, that in Christ he searched in the wilderness, swept all the rooms of his house until he found us. He has searched us out, even to the point of meeting us at the depth of our weakness and alienation. However lost we are, we will be found in Jesus Christ. And he calls us his friends and neighbours, that our lives might become lives of joy for the lost whom he carries home. Amen.

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Pentecost 13
8/9/2019

Genesis 3:1-4
Psalm 43
James 3:3-10
Matthew 26:69-75

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of slavery, (therefore)….

“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour”

Each of the previous four commandments tells us what we should do. Now, in this ninth commandment, we are confronted not so much by the duty of deeds as by that of our words – what we say of, to, and about one another. In this respect, it connects with the third commandment: “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” If, there, God seeks to protect his own name from dishonour, this ninth commandment seeks to protect the good name of every person whose desire it is to receive such a gift.

The need for true words, therefore, requires that we reflect how often we take for granted the miracle of human speech – that ambiguous faculty which distinguishes us from the animal creation, which can only growl, bark, neigh, hiss, moo and twitter. To state the obvious, language is the basis of every human enterprise. We use it to persuade, to inform, to entertain, to encourage, to curse, to depress, to enlighten, to deceive.

We have a graphic description of the power of the tongue for good or evil in the letter of James. Like the writer of the letter, we do not have to search hard to see contemporary illustrations of the power of the tongue to injure. False witness against individuals in the institutions of business and governments; false witness against neighbouring countries; false witness in and against churches, synagogues, and mosques – the power of the tongue is incalculable, not least in changing standards of judgement.

Ours is indeed an age at the mercy of intellectual hostilities, so that it is increasingly difficult, even in complete innocence, not to serve the lie to a far greater degree than we imagine. However well we may have thought we have negotiated the other commandments, it is certain we will have well and truly come to grief with the words “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour“. Over and above the casting out of the blatant lie, consider the reach of the commandment when, as deliverer or receiver, we are implicated in the all too human desire to be first with a good, though doubtful, story, or to trade rumour with an air of innocent regret.

Here, as in so many other things, it remains true that if false witness is to be cast out, there is need for much more of that fundamental reorientation which Jesus called repentance. The call for truthfulness, and the consequent necessity for repentance, makes plain that in a world where truth is not the single object of human desire, Jesus was bound to be rejected – “bound” in both senses of the word. His cross reveals ultimate human treachery with regard to truth. Here the truth dies, victim of false witnesses, of the tongues of slanderers, light obscured by darkness, even at the very centre: “Peter began to curse and to swear ‘I know not the man’.”

The powers of darkness which rise up to extinguish the light of truth so close to home demonstrates the cowardice of the outright lie. Here false witness is obvious. But rarely do we find ourselves faced with such clarity of choice. Most often honouring truth confronts us with genuine ambiguity.

In this respect, we might all benefit from a better understanding of how the very notion of truth has been redefined in Jesus Christ. And it is this. When he speaks and acts, truth is as much alive as is life itself. However scandalous it may sound to those secure in legalistic definitions of truth, he makes the truthful word no longer a simple given. The ministry of Jesus, above all, is witness to this reorientation, which is to say that his word and deed always takes into account the particular one being addressed. Where he is, truth is literally “embodied”, no longer detached from immediate life. Now truth is made personal, liberated from being simply a general maxim of easy application – which is how the Pharisaic mind, then and now, understands what counts as truth.

Consider this by way of illustration.  Some-time in the 1930s, it is said of Dietrich Bonhoeffer that he was present with a friend at a political gathering sufficiently small enough for individuals to be recognised. When all present gave the Nazi salute, the friend resolutely stood with folded arms. Bonhoeffer hissed: “Put your hand up you fool; this isn’t worth dying for”. Only when we take account of the subsequent brutality of his death does the sophistication in knowing when an “apparent” initial bearing of false witness is trumped so decisively by the ultimate cost of “true” witness.

The dangers which are involved in this realisation of the truth as living – and they are considerable – must never persuade Christians to abandon it in favour of appeal to some formal definition, like Christian “principles”. Properly understood, there is no such thing as Christian “principles” at all. Transformative realities such as “Faith, Hope, Love, Grace, Mercy, Peace” – these are not “principles”. Although they are nouns, each is actually experienced as a verb. This means that each becomes in practice an explosive event, even a miraculous event, capable of overturning every established status quo.

This is what it means to speak of truth as living Truth. Notice how this positive understanding of freedom is actually the shape of the commandment. The apparent negative injunction is to “not bear false witness against the neighbour”. As we know, when two negatives are joined, we have a positive. So, joining together “not” and “false” becomes a positive imperative: “Speak truth”. This means that our speech will always need to be “truth in relationship”, and therefore must always be particular. This recognition means that the hardest tasks we have are assessing what truthfulness requires in particular situations. Doctors presumably have this problem in knowing what to tell terminally ill patients. Or again, suppose, hypothetically, that the playground bully taunts a fellow classmate in the hearing of others with the accusation, overheard from parents, that her father is an alcoholic. It is true, but the child denies it. Her answer must indeed be called a lie. And if she had more experience of life, she might have found a way around it. Yet her lie contains more truth, that is to say, is more in accord with reality than would have been the case if she had betrayed her father’s weakness in front of others. The family has its own secret, and is entitled to preserve it.

The fact is that “speaking truth” does not mean the disclosure of everything that exists. After all, were we to read on in the Genesis text, we hear of the serious consequences which follow our assumption that what we call good and evil are safely under our control. The “false witness” of the serpent certainly appears to be right: “You will not die” by this serious endeavour. Well perhaps not, but it all depends on what death means. But such is the nakedness now revealed that even the fig leaves we grasp from the tree are not enough camouflage. Instead, we hear how God himself makes clothes for both Adam (humanity) and Eve (life) (Genesis 3:21). In picturesque form – remembering that the two names in Hebrew mean humanity and life – this merciful gift announces that in a fallen world God is happy for many things in life to remain concealed. If it is too late to eradicate evil, the goodness of God at least makes provision that it be kept properly hidden.

Consequently, “bearing false witness” has considerably deeper implications when it takes on a proper human face offered to us in the gospel. It is, of course, possible to bear false witness by refusing to bring to the light of day things that ought to be exposed. Equally, it is possible to bear false witness by intentionally bringing to the light of day things which ought to remain hidden. The wisdom to know the difference is an illustration in practical terms of what it is to own Jesus Christ as Lord.

The gospel tells us how this freedom has been readily resisted from the very beginning, Jesus announces liberating truth to those who lived by the “false witness” of a religious tradition reduced to a formula; rejecting his offer, their only option was to “pick up stones to throw at him” (John 8:59).

Fortunate then are we if, in this as in all things, we allow the church’s confession of Jesus as the Living Word to so fashion the commandment. When this happens, truth will not only have been declared; it will actually have become a life giving promise – a promise that will set everyone free.

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Pentecost 9
11/8/2019

1 Kings 21:1-19
Psalm 13
Acts 4:32-37
Matthew 21:12-13

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of slavery, (therefore)….
You shall not steal

What can one say about stealing except to offer moralistic commonplaces?

Perhaps just this, and it is really the only thing that we need to hear: what is new about the commandment is that it understands: “You shall not steal” – an injunction as old as civilisation itself – now to be heard as a requirement of divine justice, not of worldly expediency. We seldom, even as Christians, get much beyond worldly expediency when moral questions are at stake. So, it is a good thing to be reminded that the commandment is about something much more significant than “stealing is wrong” or that “crime doesn’t pay”. At a much more profound level, exodus from Egyptian slavery is not to be the occasion for assisting the deprivation of others. This why “not stealing” is about the justice of God.

No better illustration of such condemnation is to be heard, and no crime is more condemned, than the famous parable of Naboth’s vineyard in which Queen Jezebel both murdered Naboth, and then confiscated his vineyard. In similar fashion, this Hebrew teaching on the implications of theft reached its later culmination when Jesus overturned the money changers’ tables. Frequently invoked by anti-pacifists, this story is somewhat more complicated than is often supposed. These tax collectors were respectable travelling temple officials responsible for raising a tax for the upkeep of the temple. The tax consisted of a half shekel to be paid in a particular currency, hence the need for moneychangers. The tax, which Jesus himself happily paid, was levied on all Jews over twenty. But now these officials had become secular opportunists, setting up shop in the Court of the Gentiles to which access was free. Not only were they inflating the going rate, they were effectively requiring an admission charge to the very temple presence of God. Stealing indeed!

As we have worked through the commandments, we have found ourselves confronted by a series of claims upon different aspects of the common life of the covenant people. We have seen that all the commandments aim at protecting God’s image, either in its association with God himself, or in relation to its reflection for a sustainable human life. Each has claimed our obedience, service and witness in the midst of family life, through the intimate relationships of sexuality and marriage, and now the warning of the temptation of theft, primarily in the realm of economics, but suggestively open to wider extension. A moment’s thought reveals that in a complex society stealing encompasses much more than the economic. Theft in various guises is, it seems, the perennial potential human condition. At the personal level, think of the experienced power of theft when expressed by innuendo, or worse, impugning of others their reputation, their professional competence, or their social desirability. Or consider how the scope of modern electronic technology has given rise to what we call the theft of “intellectual capital”.  Theft’s territory is legion, for it is many.

But clearly theft is most apparent in the realm of economics. “It’s the economy, stupid”, a sentence now made immortal by a President of the United States. As if illustrations from history are not replete enough, closer to home the last election confirmed that within the human heart there is a deep sense of aggrandisement, constantly on guard against personal diminution of wealth. As we well know, anxiety about possible loss invariably accompanies wealth, whether that wealth be static or increasing. In this respect, sociologists have taught us the phrase “upward mobility”. That clearly will have diverse connotations. When applied to middle class aspirations it will mean something quite different from its desired anticipation by the permanently constrained economic poor – whether at home or abroad.

The cliché, “nothing succeeds like success”, is grotesquely true with regard to money. It may be the case that while water left to itself always flows downwards, despite the political claim to the contrary, it seems that money always flows upwards to those who have it. The science of economics, and the practice of politics, may dispute the morality of this situation, but it appears to be an intractable problem.

It was against precisely this situation that the claim of this commandment had to be re-asserted time and again in the history of Israel. Prophet after prophet reminded the nation that the fact that such things should happen in the life of Israel contradicted everything required of the people of God. This eighth commandment, therefore, is primarily directed against the robbery of the poor by the rich. For modern society, it is, ironically, the other way around. Convention understands stealing to mean the robbery of the rich by the poor.

It is a sobering thought that while robbery is never condoned in the Bible, on page after page judgement is called down on the rich, who in far more subtle ways than house-breaking, take away the rights of the poor. An important present-day Old Testament scholar makes this summary comment of the then social mandate: “The poor are to receive their rights not as a form of charitable hand-out, but as a fundamental means of preserving the life of the nation and most important for its safety. It is more important than large battalions and powerful allies that the nation should allow its weak and helpless members to share in the freedom and justice given them by the hand of God.” This is said of a community which lived 3000 years ago. It could well be the social welfare policy of a political party today without changing one word, especially if it is heard as the charter to remedy the scandalous situation endured by asylum seekers. But all the more, now, spurred on by global instability, it is not merely a matter of economic distribution, but more insidiously, that of the possession or absence of natural resources, most specifically, soon to emerge, that of water. Climate change will ensure that water theft will prove to become a matter of justice without parallel, witness on our small local scene, the Murray/Darling basin fiasco.

But the most compelling reason why the concept of stealing is enlarged in the Bible is that the commandment is addressed to a people who have all equally shared in the redeeming love and purpose of God. Covenantal brothers and sisters have not been liberated from Egyptian bondage in order to lie starving and exposed.

Mindful that it is easy to preach a shortcut to Utopia through someone else’s property, how far is it possible in the midst of modern society to bring to bear the economic challenge we find encapsulated in this commandment? It is obvious that with our modern economic structures we cannot go back to the ideal pattern of earlier days, not least to the remarkable situation which saw the cancellation of all debts every fifty years.  But what of the Pentecostal experience?: “All that believed were together and had all things in common and sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all as each had need”. Far from being some form of primitive communism, here there is no compulsive law or theory behind this sharing of possessions and wealth. It is an affair of the heart, a generous outpouring in conformity to the outflowing redemptive generosity of that community by which the acquisitive tendency of the human heart has been strangely, suddenly, and decisively reversed, producing dramatic economic results.

Is this word describing a Christian community any longer a word capable of being addressed to the culture? It is surely a real, if not an entirely promising question, given society’s increasing and absurd demand that religion be merely a private matter. But were this to happen, there would be the beginning of a life lived in the power and light of this new order of things.

Today we really haven’t all that much choice in the matter. Global crises will ensure that we will need to learn as a matter of supreme urgency to obey this eighth commandment “You shall not steal”. Otherwise, we may conceivably arrive at that extreme condition in which the poor – whether they be near or far – having seen the commandment rejected by the affluent West, may find obedience to the seventh commandment: “You shall not kill” difficult to achieve. Who would have thought that there might be such an alarming connection between these two commandments?

But such is the realism, the urgency, and the warning attached to the command of the God of the covenantal promise: “I have brought you out of the land of slavery, therefore…. You shall not steal”.

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Pentecost 7
28/7/2019

Hosea 2:1-7, 14-23
Psalm 15
Revelation 22:1-15
Matthew 16:13-23

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In a sentence:
The healing grief of God raises the dead and restores the lost

Recent statistics on the impact of domestic violence in our society indicate – among many other things – that each week a woman is killed, dozens of women are hospitalised and police make about many hundreds responses to domestic violence incidents.

Our recent awareness that this is part of our culture is the context within which we hear of what sounds like a violent ‘domestic’ incident between God and Israel, in which Israel is cast in the role of humiliated wife.

The parallels are not easily dismissed. Violence is rarely ‘mere’ violence – violence for the sake of violence. Violence is – to the perpetrator – just as all sin is: necessary, unavoidable (see last week’s sermon). ‘See what you made me do’ is the title of a recent study of domestic violence. The abuser calls his victim to recognise that ‘you made me do this’. This casts his violence as a necessary response to her and so he cannot be held responsible for it.

And part of the point of Hosea’s second chapter is, surely, ‘You made me do this’.

More distressing than that, the fact that such a dynamic of necessary violence could be read out of Hosea as Scripture lends divine permission for abuse in our own relationships: this is how some Christian communities have justified violent ‘discipline’ in Christian families. It is sad that, even in this place, it might need to heard that such violent and non-violent abuse has no place in the church of God.

Do we not have here one of Scripture’s ‘texts of terror’ (Tribble)? Any reading of Hosea, then, requires of us a careful [bracketing] of his language, even as we seek to hear in it the full depth of the divine accusation, punishment and promise which it would give us to understand.

To this end, we will treat tody’s passage from the very heart of Christian confession – that Jesus is the Christ – and proceed by identifying [whore] Israel with Jesus. The rationale for this is clearest in seeing where it leads us.

Of course, the impiety of speaking of ‘Jesus the [whore]’ will cause most of us to side immediately with Peter: ‘God forbid it! This must never happen to him’ (cf. Matthew 16.22). But what must never happen? Peter means that Jesus must never be – as Hosea explicitly prophesies for Israel – stripped naked, exposed as on the day he was born, made like a wilderness, turned into a parched land and left to die of thirst (cf. 2.3). And yet do we not see precisely Jesus on the cross here? Israel’s prospects, as described here by Hosea, are no more or less than what led Jesus to cry, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ (Mark 15.34).

Perhaps we want to object that the reason for the abandonment is different. Jesus suffers ‘innocently’ and for a higher cause whereas Israel is guilty, so that only Israel is ‘really’ judged here.

Yet this is too simple an account of the relationship of sinfulness to innocence – as mutually exclusive realities. Sin is not only moral failure, whether the failure of an individual or of a whole community (if the latter is even possible). Sin is no less effect, in the sense of ‘ripple’ effect. The sin of one in a relationship of two effects (delivers) two sinners, not one. Sin is always relational and so its effect is not only on the guilty one but also on the innocents to whom the sinner is joined. This is why we baptise ‘innocent’ infants; their innocence is corrupted by having chosen the parents they did; it is also why Hosea allows that the children of the unfaithful mother will are also condemned (2.4).

Into this dynamic of sin comes the ‘innocent’ Jesus.

Yet God does not really give us the innocence of Jesus, as such.[1] God gives us a Jesus who is ‘infected’ by the contagion of sin. This is an infection not from his own culpability but from his relationship to those around him. ‘Became truly human’ – as the Creed has it – means that he experienced what we all experience: living in a body, with other bodies, subject to sin-tinted death. (St Paul writes that God made Jesus ‘to be sin who knew no sin’ [2 Corinthians 5.17]; the verse continues, ‘so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ [2 Corinthians 5.17; cf. Galatians 3.13]).

What is important for the moment is that the outcome is the same, innocent or not. All – including Jesus – die the death of sinners, abandoned by God. The guilty [whore] of God and the crucified Jesus end up in the same place; the third verse of Hosea 2 could have been a kind of gospel Midrash on the crucifixion.

If we can, then, identify Jesus with Israel here on account of their common fate, how does this help? Having rejected a misreading of the innocence of Jesus, we now need to bring it back in appropriately.

The innocence of Jesus stands as a sign of God’s willingness to give up divine innocence, divine purity. ‘Go take for yourself a [wife of whoredom]’, God commands Hosea, ‘For that is what I have done’. The marriage metaphor serves here to speak not only of the divorce in Israel’s turning away; it speaks also of the ‘two-become-oneness’ which marriage entails: what happens to Israel happens to God. That Jesus is innocent is not to say that he is not sin-affected. It is to say that God’s being affected by sin is not a barrier to God’s desire for us.[2]

The death of Jesus on the cross is the revelation that God is willing, so to speak, to be contaminated by sin and all its effects. Put differently, the divinity of this God is not ‘above’ death but ‘through’ it. The rupture of this marriage is a tearing into two of the one – a kind of dying of Israel and of God. Not only Israel’s but God’s very being is torn here, and so also with the cross.

Yet, this is not very helpful if all we hear is that God, in Israel and in Jesus, is willing to go down with the ship. It remains unhelpful despite how often such a word is offered as a ‘pastoral’ response to suffering – that God suffers with us. That we all drown – God included – is only half of the word of God. If we stop here we have only the comfort that God dies with us, which is not much comfort at all.

The only reason we find anything of real value in the death of God with Israel and Jesus is the resurrection of Jesus. For here is revealed the mystery which is this God.[3] 

There is a death in God which we might speak of as the death of God but it is death as death’s ‘sting’, death’s effect (1 Corinthians 15.22; cf. Hosea 13.14). This sting is the pain of separation and not the mere ending of God’s or some other’s life.

The principal separation in the biblical narrative is the loss of the son, the wife, we have been considering here (and which we might even read into Genesis 2 and 3).

We all know this pain: the death which is separation. Whatever fear we may hold of our own death, we feel the death which has separated us from others. The presence of death to us is in our separation from those who make us what we are – a separation which yet leaves us still standing, zombie-like. And so we fear the death which is the life of the survivor, the death which separation is. The God of the exile and of Easter Saturday is dead in this way – torn into two, only half a heart still beating.

The gospel of the resurrection of Jesus (anticipated in the promised reconciliation with wife‑Israel [Hosea 2.14ff]) is that – with this God – half a heart is enough.

It matters that God suffers with us not because misery loves company but because – unlike our grief – the grief of God raises the dead: who was dead is now come to life, who was lost is now found. Our tears barely drip from our faces but God cries a river, which flows from heaven’s throne, across which grows the tree of life (Revelation 22).

Noe of this is to diminish Israel’s apostasy in the time of Hosea or of Jesus, or our own here and now. It is, however, to relativise these failings to each other, with Christ at the centre.

Jesus’ suffering – as part of Israel – is prefigured by Israel’s own in Hosea. So also the suffering of God. We who identify ourselves with Christ find ourselves at the centre of this, suffering in Christ – even as we might be the cause of that suffering.

If we locate ourselves here in the Jesus who suffers all things, and so in the God who suffers and overcomes the death of Jesus, one extraordinary consequence emerges: there is no more sin to commit, no wrong which would make a difference to the totality of sin or the extent to which grace must reach, and has reached.

God’s heart is already broken, the Son is already crucified – cast out as a [whore] – and that is the end of sin, its goal and completion. To imagine that we – with our faithfulness or unfaithfulness, pure doctrine or apostasy, joy or grief, love or fear – could add or detract anything from what is already done is to have heard neither the bad news of the gospel nor the good news.

For what is already done is that the full impact of sin has been felt and, because it is felt by Jesus himself and not by us, sin matters ‘no more’ to us.

What is done is that God has lost, and then won. To our shame, it is indeed in the river of tears of God that we are washed in our baptism, but to God’s glory we now are clean, nonetheless.

[1] ASIDE The innocence of Jesus has, historically, been very important to the church, leading us even to go to the extent that we can speak of an ‘immaculate conception’. This refers not to the birth of Jesus but to the birth of Mary his mother; her conception was such that the contagion of sin was not passed to her, so that she would not pass it to Jesus. On the understanding that sinful character was transmitted through procreation, this isolated Jesus from the full impact of sin.

[2] It is also to say that the innocence of Jesus is not – as some atonement theories have it – a coin of salvation which ‘someone’ has to pay in order that God be satisfied and now able to forgive. This understanding over-reads the important metaphor of the sacrificial victim ‘without blemish’; cf. Leviticus 1.10, 22.17-25; 1 Peter 1.19; Hebrews 9.11-14.

[3] (We considered the relation of the resurrection of Jesus to the promises given to Israel in the two reflections on Hosea 11: June 30 and July 7).