Behold, I am making all things new!

Texts: Acts 11.1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21.1-6; John 13.31-35

‘I am making everything new . . .  The old order of things has passed away’.  These are the words of the one who sits upon the throne of heaven in John’s apocalyptic vision.  John writes for a church that is being persecuted under the tyranny of Rome.  It is crying out with a grief and pain that echoes that of Israel under the Pharaohs in Egypt.  What the seer has to say is meant to create a new hope for all who weep.  He imagines a completely new world, a new universe, where the apparent gap between the present reality and the promised peace of God is finally and completely bridged.  God will himself come to dwell with his suffering people and every tear they have ever shed will be wiped away and the thirst of all who cry out for justice will finally be quenched.

This is a bold theology, a theology that many a self-proclaimed ‘realist’ is likely to decry with words that echo Karl Marx’s critique of religion as nothing more than an ‘opiate’ for suffering people.  Is the hope of the Seer false?  Is his theology merely a panacea for pain rather than a genuine cure?  Not, I think, if one also believes in the truth of the Easter proclamation that ‘Christ is risen’.  For in the writing of that other John, John the evangelist, we find an Easter hope that actually begins in the midst of reality as it is, the reality of suffering, pain and injustice.  ‘Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him.’ (13.31).  This is John’s way of saying that the transformation of the whole creation from a dark place of suffering into a bright place of blissful peace is beginning right now with something that will happen to Jesus.  But when is it beginning?  Well, read the verse before this one.  ‘As soon as Judas had taken the bread, he went out.  And it was night.’  According to John, the transformation of the world begins not with Easter morning and with shouts of resurrection, but with the betrayal of Jesus by his friend Judas in the dead of night on a very ordinary Thursday.  This is where the transformation begins.  Here. With betrayal and failure and the departure of all that is good and true and noble.  The transformation begins then, in the midst of failure, the failure of all those moral codes that rule our society, our religion, our hearts.

That this breakdown can be not only an ending and a loss, but also the chance for a new beginning – a revolution, indeed – can be seen from the story of Peter’s vision at Joppa that we read in Acts.  Here we find out how the earliest church of the Jews learned that God loves the Gentiles too.  But it was a difficult lesson.  It was a lesson that the church could only learn with great a deal of pain and disorientation and loss.  For at the time of Jesus, Peter and Paul, most self-respecting Jews believed, deep down in their marrow, that it was only the people of Israel who were beloved of God.  Other races or ethnic groups, the 'gentiles' as they were called, had not been 'chosen' as Israel was, and were therefore unworthy of inclusion in God's family.  This understanding was carried into the earliest Christian church, which clearly believed that God's message of salvation in Christ was for the Jewish people only.  But all that is changed by a vision Peter saw one day in the trading city of Joppa . . .

Peter's vision was absolutely decisive for the earliest churches.  It showed them that Jesus had died not just for the Jews, but for everyone on the planet.  It also showed them that the most important matters of faith were not doctrinal purity and ethical legalism, but unconditional love and the works of compassion that flow from that love.  It's very instructive, I think, that the Spirit was given to Cornelius before either he or his family signed any doctrinal statement or made any promises about the ethical life.  God, at least, simply accepted them as they were.  Peter says of that experience, 'if God gave them the same gift as he gave us, who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to think that I could oppose God?'

Nevertheless, it seems there are a lot of folks around these days who want to oppose God's universal love.  And they invariably do it in the name of some kind of moral code that has not yet been broken by the gospel of transformative love.  There are some who do it more obviously.  People like those in the neo-Nazi movement, who believe that God's earth is only for people with white skin and an Anglo-Saxon or Germanic background.  Consequently they persecute and terrorise anyone who is Asian, Hispanic or black.  Or the right-wing extremists of Christian America who believe that Christian faith and being homosexual are mutually exclusive options.  So they set up programmes to 'rescue' gays from their sin.  Or, worse still, they form gangs who wander the night streets looking for vulnerable young men to harass.

But there are others who oppose God's universal love in less obvious ways, which are nevertheless just as damaging.  This week the nation has celebrated ANZAC day.  ANZAC day celebrates a collection of myths that enshrine a particular moral code, a moral code that considers it a great good that a man or woman should sacrifice their lives for the glory of the nation.  The ANZAC mythology also says that it is a good thing, a thing to be memorialized and celebrated, that a man or woman should sacrifice the prohibition against killing another human being for the glory of the nation.  People who do this, so the ANZAC code of morality tells us, will be treated as heroes.  They will be given medals and honoured in parades.  Now I know very well that this is not ALL that ANZAC day celebrates.  I know very well that there is a legitimate mourning for fallen and traumatised comrades there in the mix as well.  But consider for a moment the terrible contradiction that recognition sets up, both for soldiers and for the nation.  On the one hand, the solider is told to kill other human beings, and to do so for the glory of the nation.  On the other hand, the soldiers who do so are then condemned to live with the terrible horror of what they have done for the rest of their lives.  Today the guilt and depression of that heart of darkness has been psychologised as ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, but that name erases as much as it reveals. It erases the fact that even the most prestigious medal and even the most honorific parade cannot take away the simple fact that to kill another human being is to disown life itself, ANZAC morality notwithstanding.

Contrast the injunction to kill another human being for the glory of the nation with the compassion we are called to by Christ.  'A new commandment I give you' says Jesus.  'Love one another as I have loved you'.  The Greek word agape, here translated 'love' is probably being connected by John with a Hebrew word, hesed, meaning 'unconditional compassion or kindness'.  Compassion means, of course, to 'suffer with' someone.  And love in the agapic sense means to care for someone without condition.  So the love which Jesus calls us to exercise is a love like his own: an unjudging, unconditional compassion for all who suffer in whatever way.  It's the kind of love exemplified in our time by Mother Teresa, who cared for the social outcasts of Indian society, even though that meant breaking the very fabric of Hindu morality.  Such love perseveres beyond the boundaries of our various moral codes.  If any such code gets in the way of love, it must be broken!

The kind of love Christ calls us to offer is far from sentimental or traditionalistic.  It is very costly because it is a call to share the darkness of any who are hurting even to the point of shattering our most persistent notions of what is virtuous and just.  This is a very motherly kind of love.  A mother simply loves the ones she has given birth to, even if they pierce her heart, which they inevitably do to one degree or another.  A mother keeps loving even if her children go places and do things she would rather they didn't.  A mother keeps loving even when the pain of sharing her child's confusion and mistakes is very great.  So the call to love is a call to imitate the motherly love of God.

On this day which celebrates Easter, the ending that is a new beginning, let us learn this lesson: that the love of God is a shattering of the moral codes by which we live in order that we might be open to a world that no longer needs or depends on such codes.  Let us learn that the unconditional love of mothers actually provides us with a powerful picture of the transformative love of God in Jesus Christ.  For it shows us how love can plant a seed of hope in even the darkest of places, the darkest of times.  It reveals how such love may start a revolution that is eventually able to turn gentile-haters into gentile-lovers or betrayers of Christ into lovers of Christ.  In this we might even come to see that the hope of Christians is a real hope, a hope planted in the bedrock of what happened to the Christ who shared in our humanity. He was shattered on the cross, broken on the moral codes of Romans and Jews.  But when he was shattered, so were their codes, and ours!  For he rose to show us that the code of God is love, and therefore none of the ways in which we divide up the world into the virtuous and the less-virtuous will ultimately prevail.  Because Christ is risen, a new order has begun.  It is not yet entirely here, to be sure.  But it is coming.  It is coming!

Garry Deverell

This sermon was preached at St Columba's in Balwyn on the 5th Sunday of Easter, 2013.

Mark's Baptism of Jesus

Texts: Genesis 1.1-5; Psalm 29; Mark 1.4-11

Today the church celebrates baptism within a social and cultural environment where the rite has been largely sanitised of its dangerous and subversive qualities.  In the churches that allow the baptism of infants the rite is all-too-often reduced to a quaint and pleasant little naming ceremony.  Friends and relatives gather in their finery on a bright Sunday morning; the child’s forehead is wetted with a few tiny drops of water while his or her godparents are content to make promises they can neither comprehend nor keep.   In the so-called ‘baptist’ churches, on the other hand, the rite is often reduced to its pre-Christian tribal meanings, i.e. baptism as a rite of passage into responsible adult membership of the tribe or congregation.  Unfortunately, neither of these practices is adequate to the baptism undergone by Jesus, the baptism that is paradigmatic for Christians.  For while the baptisms of the tribe pander to social and anthropological needs, the baptism of Jesus models the rather contra-cultural action of God by which the baptised person is torn away from his or her ‘natural’ tribal roles in favour of a way of life which actually subverts and calls into question the most common paths by which we journey through life.

The confession that makes us genuinely Christian in the sacrament of baptism is infinitely more difficult than the choice to fulfil the symbolic law of tribe, society or culture. For, in theological perspective, the impossible journey towards the joy of salvation goes by no other way than by a rather traumatic encounter with God who was in Christ.  For it is the view of the New Testament we can never become who we truly are apart from the interventions from beyond either self or tribe that we call creation and redemption.  Christian baptism is not, therefore, any easy thing to undertake.  It is not something that everyone can or should do as a matter of course.  Far from it.  If it is genuinely Christian, baptism should be difficult and painful.  For in baptism we admit that it is neither ourselves nor our tribe that gives us life in all its fullness, it is God.

When a human being comes face to face with this truth, there is a breaking down and a loss.  Like the man on death row in Tim Robbins' film Dead Man Walking, who for most of the story protests his innocence and holds himself together by the sheer wilfulness of his fantasy.  And yet, when death is imminent, he can hold himself no longer.  Death comes like a paschal angel and exposes the lie on which his life has been built.  He collapses, he falls apart before our eyes.  There is weeping and a disintegration.  But finally there is the truth, a truth which is finally able to resist and overcomes his fantasy as from somewhere or somebody else (indeed, in and from the face of his prison chaplain), and he claims this truth as his only hope of joy or salvation.

To confess or avow the truth which comes from another, rather than from ourselves alone, is painful in the extreme, for here we touch the raw wound of that founding trauma that most of us spend our whole lives running from.  The founding trauma who is God.  “In the beginning,” says the Book of Genesis, the universe was a void and formless waste.  It was a watery Nothing.  But over this dark Nothingness the Spirit of God brooded, and that Spirit spoke.  “Let there be light!” and there was.  This is a story about the making of the world, certainly, but it is also about the making of the human self.  It tells us that the Self is never itself without the traumatic intervention or presence of another.  The call or voice of this other summons us from the womb-like Nothing of infinite solipsism into the real world of consciousness, inter-dependence and relationship.  Thus, we are called to ourselves by an intervention, a creation, an interrupting trauma that leaves its mark on us forever. 

In this, says Slavoj Žižek, Christianity and psychoanalysis are agreed:  that the first event is the traumatic arrival of another, and that most us spend our lives running away from this event, pretending that we can found ourselves, or make our own salvation.[1]  Ironically, the way to healing is to return to the founding trauma, and find there a God who is irrevocably for us, who longs for and promises our liberation. For those who are baptised, this constitutes a return to the violence of the cross, that sacrifice to end all sacrifices in which is revealed, as René Girard has said, a God who asks for the worship of mercy rather than sacrificial appeasement.[2]  This is not to say that a return to the founding trauma can be accomplished by human beings in and of themselves.  For a trauma is exactly that kind of event that cannot be in/corporated or re/membered.  Yet, and this is the hope and grace of baptism, God is one who makes the return possible from the side of divinity.  In the Spirit, God makes of Christ the saving link between the founding trauma and the event of baptism, so that our baptism ‘into Christ’ becomes a real submersion of the self in the yet more real  selfhood of Christ in his accomplished humanity, the only humanity finally competent to perform the unique mercy of God.  So here, in baptism, the human self is both lost and recovered more wholly than ever before; trauma is transfigured into joy.  Joy, of course, is a vocative language, a language of prayer.  Its primary motivation is neither to constitute the other as a version of the same, nor to reduce the transcendence of the other to a particular appearance.  Joy simply celebrates the always-already-accomplished fact of the other as the salvific centre of itself.

In this, as with the prisoner in Dead Man Walking, we catch a glimpse of the absurdly paradoxical hope inscribed in Christian baptism.  For baptism is not only a letting-go of the fantasy-self, the lie of a self that is its own law and judge, but also the arrival of another self, a truer self given in love by God.  Such arrivals are inscribed everywhere in Mark’s story, literally everywhere.  The river in which Jesus is baptised is the Jordan.  It is the river that, in the memory of Israel, marks their exodus from the land of slavery into the land of promise, their transformation from a loose collection of tribal nomads into a federated nation with a land and a holy vocation given by Yahweh.  The baptism therefore recalls that God is one who liberates, who takes a broken people to his breast and gives them both a new name, and a new purpose.  Note, also, that the baptism of Jesus is placed by Mark alongside a memory of the exile in Babylon.  Isaiah interpreted that event as an intervention by God to change the people’s hearts.  The city’s nobles had become obsessed with their own power and prestige.  They had forgotten the claims of charity and mercy, and so God destroyed the city.  In that context, the baptism of Jesus can be read as a renewal of the work of God in human society:  after destruction and exile comes forgiveness and a new covenant, the advent of a new relationship between God and the people of God’s affection.

Still, the most potent trace of joy’s arrival, in Mark’s story, is when the heavens are ripped open as Jesus comes out of the water, and the Spirit of God descends upon him like a dove.  Again, one does not necessarily understand these symbols unless one knows the stories of the Hebrew Bible.  There one reads of a God who dwells in a holy of holies, an ark that is placed behind a curtain in the innermost chamber of the temple.  Only the High Priest, or some specially appointed leader like Moses, may approach God there, and usually only once per year at Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  To my mind, the theatre of these Jewish rituals is about the irreducible otherness of God, the danger of assuming too close a familiarity with God.  God is in heaven, hidden behind a veil that we may not open from our side.  Yet, here in the baptism of Jesus, the veil that separates God from ourselves is not simply put aside, but ripped to pieces.  Furthermore, it is done by God, from God’s ‘side,’ if you like.  In the Spirit, God actually leaves the holy of holies in heaven, and comes to dwell within the heart and spirit of one who is not simply a prophet, but a Son, a beloved one.  No longer is God to be understood as the other beyond us, beyond our being in the heavens.  From now on God is to be understood as the other who is Christ, a human being who walks amongst us, who speaks our language, who shows us what God is like as a child reveals the form and character of his or her parent. 

To put all this another way, what Mark proclaims about what happened to Christ is also something that may happen to all of us.  After the collapse and breakdown of the false self that is part of a genuinely baptismal avowal, God promises to come to us with the gift of a new self: a self forged within by the cruciform activity of the Spirit who was in Christ and now bears, forever, Christ’s form and character.  In the Spirit, Christ himself comes to us as the love and vitality that empowers us to put off the old and embrace the gift of the new and truer self.  Paul said it perfectly in Galatians:  ‘Now I live, and yet not I; it is Christ who lives within me.  The life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me’ (2.20).

To conclude, then, Mark’s story confronts the common-place understanding and practice of baptism in two ways.  First, it tells us that there is no such thing as a Christian baptism without the hard and soul-destroying work of confession and repentance.  In the first centuries of the Christian church, this was taken very seriously.  Several years were given over to the catechumal learning of the faith.  Through a process of action and reflection, the catechumens wrestled against the demons of both self and tribe; and they did so in the power of a newly arriving self, symbolised for them in the mentor or sponsor who was, themselves, a figure of Christ.  Second, the story tells us that baptism will bear its human fruit not because of our own will or determination, but because God is faithful.  The Father sends the Spirit, the Spirit of his son Jesus, to hollow out the old self from the inside out, and replace it with a selfhood of God’s own making and design.  In this sense, baptism is not simply about the ceremonial occasion itself.  It is rather a parable and a ritual performance of the Christian life as a whole:  a calling and a pledge to leave the false self behind, and to wrestle always to find the truth about things which is God’s gift to everyone who asks for it. 

Baptism, then, is a destroying and a building.  It is the Christian life.  It is a promise from God that may only be received and performed by means of a human promising: to walk the way of the cross by which trauma is transfigured into joy.

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[1] Žižek, On Belief , p. 47.

[2] René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (London/New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 210.