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April 4 - May 28, 2020
The water and the Spirit and the voice: you can see why the early Christians began to associate the event of baptism with exactly that image which St Paul uses for the Christian life – new creation.
chaos moving into order as the wind of God blows upon it.
To be baptized is to recover the humanity that God first intended. What did God intend? He intended that human beings should grow into such love for him and such confidence in him that they could rightly be called God’s sons and daughters.
Christians will be found in the neighbourhood of Jesus – but Jesus is found in the neighbourhood of human confusion and suffering, defencelessly alongside those in need. If being baptized is being led to where Jesus is, then being baptized is being led towards the chaos and the neediness of a humanity that has forgotten its own destiny.
This is very paradoxical. Baptism is a ceremony in which we are washed, cleansed and re-created. It is also a ceremony in which we are pushed into the middle of a human situation that may hurt us, and that will not leave us untouched or unsullied. And the gathering of baptized people is therefore not a convocation of those who are privileged, elite and separate, but of those who have accepted what it means to be in the heart of a needy, contaminated, messy world.
you don’t go down into the waters of the Jordan without stirring up a great deal of mud!
prayer is not about feeling good. It is not about results, or about being pleased with yourself; it is just what God does in you when you are close to Jesus.
‘If you take this step, if you go into these depths, it will be transfiguring, exhilarating, life-giving and very, very dangerous.’
But that is what the New Testament tells us very uncompromisingly: to be with Jesus is to be where human suffering and pain are found, and it is also to be with other human beings who are invited to be with Jesus.
The solidarity that baptism brings us into, the solidarity with suffering, is a solidarity with one another as well. It is what some Christian writers have called, in a rather forbidding word, ‘co-inherence’. We are ‘implicated’ in one another, our lives are interwoven.
The baptized life is characterized by solidarity with those in need, and sharing with all others who believe.
it is characterized by a prayerfulness that courageously keeps going, even when things are difficult and unpromising and unrewarding, simply because you cannot stop the urge to pray.
The prophet, therefore, is somebody whose role is always to be challenging the community to be what it is meant to be – to live out the gift that God has given to it.
It means something much more like a quiet, persistent re-calling of one another to what is most important.
readily forgotten questions in our society. It is to ask, ‘What’s that for?’ and ‘Why do we take that for granted?’ and ‘Where’s that leading us?’
It is a life that looks towards justice and liberty, the liberty to work together to make human life in society some kind of reflection of the wisdom and order and justice of God.
Bible-reading is an essential part of the Christian life because Christian life is a listening life.
Christians are people who expect to be spoken to by God.
Our visual model of Bible-reading is probably still very much formed by the idea of a person sitting alone in a room with a bound volume. But that is a very modern and minority approach to the Bible.
People learned the Bible. They recited it to one another. They
what the Bible is not is a single sequence of instructions, beginning ‘God says to you
The diversity of the Bible is as great as if you had within the same two covers, for example, Shakespeare’s sonnets, the law reports of 1910, the introduction to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the letters of St Anselm and a fragment of The Canterbury Tales. All within the same two covers. And remember that the chronological span of the books of the Bible is even longer than that of the examples I have just given.
The reality is that as soon as you think you know what the Bible is, you turn the page and it turns into something different.
And you have had to look at various characters in the story and try and discover what they tell you about yourself. Quite often with the parables, the question that Jesus leaves us with is, ‘Who are you in this story?’
The Bible is, you might say, God telling us a parable or a whole sequence of parables. God is saying, ‘This is how people heard me, saw me, responded to me; this is the gift I gave them; this is the response they made … Where are you in this?’
they are not there in the Bible because God is telling us, ‘That’s good.’ They are there because God is telling us, ‘You need to know that that is how some people responded. You need to know that when I speak to human beings things can go very wrong as well as very wonderfully.’
the Bible is not simply saying, ‘Here is a story’, but ‘Here is your story.’ Your life began with Noah and Abraham and Moses. Your history goes right back to those beginnings.
Does God really want us to know, in exact detail, ancient Babylonian history? I suspect not. But I am confident that God does want us to know how people in circumstances of acute displacement, living with the fear and the anxiety of a persecuted minority, responded to a hostile state and a pagan power.
‘magic’ book that turns up the right answers to all sorts of rather irrelevant questions,
the historical ground of the New Testament is of crucial importance.
As Christians read the Bible, the story converges on Jesus. The
Christian is bound to say that he or she can only read those Jewish Scriptures as moving towards the point at which a new depth of meaning is laid bare in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
unequivocal obedience and love
that is a lifetime’s work. It is not as if you can produce once and for all a Christ-centred reading of the Bible that tells you exactly how to relate all the different bits to the centre. On the contrary, you keep going round and round, in a kind of virtuous circle.
So reading the Bible is about listening to God in Jesus – which is what Christians ought to be doing in all circumstances anyway.
reading of the Bible involves coming to recognize patterns of faithful and unfaithful response to God in the light of Jesus.
the massacre by Jehu of the royal house of Ahab at Jezreel.
Jezreel is a name of shame in history,
Hosea would have said, ‘I’m sure my prophetic forebears were absolutely certain they were doing the will of God. And I’m sure the tyranny and idolatry of the royal house of Ahab was a scandal that needed to be ended. But, human beings being what they are, the clear word of God calling Israel to faithfulness and to resistance was so easily turned into an excuse for yet another turn of the screw in human atrocity and violence.
Choose and read a story from the Bible, and then ask yourself where you are in the story. Why do you see yourself in that way? And how does that affect what you hear God saying through the story?
