Transcription
All right, friends, all right friends. Um, honestly, I've been doing this pastor thing for a little while now, and I've had smoother transitions. So this session is going to be really, really fun. We're going to have a conversation. I am seated between two of the more influential biblical scholars alive today, and I'm Tyler, so we should have a great time.
One sincere request, and I mean this with all sincerity: both Tim and Tom are making a calculated risk by talking entirely off the cuff in front of a room of several thousand folks. So I want to ask you to not post anything that is said on social media. I don't mean that as a joke; I mean it with total sincerity. We're going to workshop ideas about the Holy Spirit in front of you, and that is a great gift that you're being offered. So please don't take advantage of it by saying, "Tom Wright smoked a pack of cigarettes in the Athens airport," and tweet it or something. Please, simply receive and process what is being offered to you personally without needing to share it with everyone who isn't in this room. Cool. I just remembered while saying that that we're live-streaming this, so I guess never mind. You were… yeah.
Every year, our Holy Spirit conference seems to take on a personality or a theme of what the spirit is doing among us, and it's never planned or anything like that; it just seems to emerge. Likewise, throughout church history, there are different traditions that are talking about experiences with the same spirit, and yet the spirit seems to take on personality within different traditions, expressing God, expressing himself in common ways among common people that are unique to that tradition or that denomination or that group of people. But we're still talking about the same Spirit. Tim, you and I were sharing with me just yesterday an insight about how we see the same thing take place on the pages of the New Testament. Could you share a bit of that with us?
Yeah, it was an observation about the portrayal of the spirit of God in the New Testament in the different… you know, kind of blocks of the New Testament that represent different apostles. So, you know, the New Testament isn't a monolithic, homogeneous collection of writings; it comes from different key leaders within the earliest Jesus movement of people who encountered Jesus. Um, and so we have this amazing account called Luke-Acts as a two-volume work, um, that comes, you know, in tradition from Luke but is connected closely to the Apostle Paul, at least in tradition. Uh, and we also have the letters of Paul, and we also have the Gospel of John. And so these do represent the same Jesus and the same Spirit, but through these different human experiences of all of those same events. And so I was talking with Tyler; it was interesting that if you just look at the teaching about the spirit in The Gospel according to John, and specifically the what's called The Upper Room discourse—this is the long talk that he has with the disciples in John 14-16—and then the long prayer in chapter 17, the way Jesus describes the spirit has a real clear set of traits: it as a comforter, as a teacher, as one who convicts, corrects, and as a spirit of truth. The common denominator is relational, kind of word, communication-centered. There's no mention of signs and wonders in Jesus's speech about the spirit in John 14-16 or 17, and that's really striking. If you go to the letters of Paul or you go to the Gospel of Luke-Acts, where signs and wonders and demonstrations of power are really front and center…
Yeah, for instance, at the very end of Luke, when Luke talks about the promise of the spirit, Jesus says, "Go to Jerusalem and wait, and you will be clothed with power from on high."
Yes, that's right. And then…
Yeah, Day of Pentecost, there's the fulfillment of that—an expression of the spirit's power, a violent wind—and then, of course, we have essentially like a 30-year volume of signs and wonders that pours forth from there. And the letters of Paul are very diverse, and, you know, Tom, I've been learning most and best from Tom for most of my educational life about the spirit in the letters of Paul. But Paul, as it were, covers the whole spectrum of manifestations of the spirit he encountered: wise organizational leaders in the house churches, and he saw that as a manifestation of the spirit called administration, I think it's how it gets translated most. Um, and he also saw signs and wonders, and he saw teaching and prophecy as manifestations of the spirit. So here's the basic point: that even in the portrayal of Apostles and their encounters with the spirit in that first generation, there's already a unity and diversity in the experience among the apostles. And that was just an observation that I just found fascinating and exciting in new ways, and so I said it to you and thought you would think it's cool.
Yeah, so I did, and I do. So every year the Holy Spirit conference seems to take on a personality, and this year the theme of comfort is emerging, and that guides us to The Upper Room discourse where we see the comfort of the spirit displayed. And yet the way that the comfort of the spirit is displayed is quite interesting. At Bridgetown, we summarize our mission as: be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and do what Jesus did. And if you want a map for the conversation we're about to have—and this is an unfair minimization because these things all interplay with one another—but acknowledging that just as a map to kind of guide us, we're going to talk about being with Jesus as the experience of comfort from the Holy Spirit; we're going to talk about becoming like Jesus as the beautiful riddle of union with the Father, Son, and Spirit; and then doing what Jesus did as the ministry of the spirit as truth. So that's what we're about to talk about. Let's start with comfort.
Professor Wright, Tom, you mentioned that one in your teaching this morning. One way that you have understood the comfort of the spirit is—you mentioned the loss of a friend—and the way that we can be helped, this continuity that you described the spirit having within our mortal bodies to bring about resurrection could provide comfort, maybe even in the experience of grieving the loss of someone that we love. Can I just ask you how… like, what is going through your mind at the funeral of a close friend that is bringing you comfort in that moment?
Yeah, it's a great question, and thank you for that. And, uh, there are already at least three things that Tim said which we could follow up, but I'm going to be good and follow this question that I've just been asked, um, at least for the moment. Um, I, when I think of this particular friend, and it's quite an extraordinary thing because this guy only died just over a month ago, so it's still very fresh. But grief is a funny thing; many of you will know only too well what I'm talking about, some of you much more than I do because I haven't had a huge amount of grief in my life, even though I'm quite old now. But grief comes in waves and attacks you when you didn't expect it, and you suddenly, in the middle of doing something else, you find yourself in floods of tears and think, "Why? Why am I… why is this happening?" And the answer is: it's just coming back at you because of all the memories, all the stuff, all that's going on.
For me, I go first not to those Upper Room discourses in John, but to 1 Thessalonians 4, where Paul says, "I don't want you to be grieved like those who don't have hope." In other words, grief is okay; it's hopeless grief that the Christian has to avoid. Some Christians think that when they go to a funeral they shouldn't be grieving; we should be happy because he's or she is with the Lord. And the answer is no; you grieve. Not to grieve is to deny love. Grief is the shadow side of love, and when you grieve you are loving that person while missing them, and missing them terribly because you know that on this side of your death you're not going to see them again. But because of the… the comfort then comes. Paul in 1 Thessalonians 4 has the comfort coming because he says we're not going to be separated ultimately when Jesus comes back, when the new heavens and new earth happen. Paul uses a lot of interesting metaphors there which um, people have taken in various odd, um, faux literal ways, but the point is that then we won't be separated; there will be a whole new world in which all the loves that we've had, all the loves that have been of God in us, will be revivified and will be celebrated. But the way that that happens—I was arguing this morning—was… this morning seems a long time ago… was… that's jetlag for you. Jetlag is a form of grief as well. We won't get there… it is because of the belief that the person I have loved and lost, the Holy Spirit was deeply at work in that person, shaping them. And I believe that in a prayerful friendship the Holy Spirit was moving between us and enabling us to help one another and learn from and grow together and so on. And since I believe that the Holy Spirit is holding my friend in life in the nearer presence of Christ and within the mystery of the Trinity, then yeah, it's terrible that he's not around; it's horrible that I can't phone him up. I regularly want to send him emails, and I think, "Well, actually, that'd be a silly thing to do, and it would just… make things worse for his wife who would pick them up," and so on. But that's what grief does. But in the middle of that, I thank God that the spirit who indwelt him is holding him in life, and that same Spirit, please God, is indwelling and shaping me. So that doesn't give comfort, i.e., "Oh, so grief doesn't matter." No, the grief does matter; that's real; has to be acknowledged; has to be worked through prayerfully, etc. But there is the comfort through that. I hope that makes sense.
Yeah, it makes sense. Let's talk about the practical expression of that. You said it has to be prayed through. You also talked earlier today about lament, and even yesterday when we were chatting I asked you how you were attuning to the spirit most at this moment in your own journey, and you said it's the practice of lament.
Well, yeah. And so lament, as I'm hearing you, it is both a vocation of the church because we are lamenting that creation is not as it should be, right? And it is a vocation of the individual because we are lamenting the wages of sin, yeah, yeah, which is that life is not as it should be, i.e., grieving the loss of a friend at a funeral. So what, practically speaking, does it look like to faithfully lament as an individual?
Oh, my… I think one of the first and most important things that it does is it sends me back to the Psalms. I haven't done the numbers, but I'm guessing that maybe a quarter of the Psalms are Psalms of lament. Tim, you probably know the statistics, and I don't.
Well, about one-third.
And you were just a touch off, but who's counting? And, and I mean, from the tradition that I come from, praying the Psalms day by day has just been a lifelong thing that I've done. I don't know where I would be without them. And so again and again and again, I, in my regular reading and praying of the Psalms, sometimes I come to a Psalm of lament on a day when I'm feeling great and when my life is really going well, and then I make a practice of putting myself in the position of, say, somebody I've seen on the television in the wrong part of Ukraine or Gaza or wherever it is. Or I remember particularly when the pandemic struck, and it was terrifying because another very close friend of mine got extremely sick in the early days of the pandemic and very nearly died; he was in hospital for some weeks. And, uh, because I'm very close to him, I just felt that terribly. And I remember thinking, "It's because what's going on right now is a call to lament." And I think the pandemic brought that home to me around the same time as, because I just had a significant birthday and was feeling my age, I remember thinking, "Maybe I ought to be thinking a bit more about the lament for the fact that I'm not going to be around that much longer." Hopefully there will be some years still left, but we all have to face our own mortality. And, uh, so there's a sense in which learning to deal with that can be helped on its way through the Psalms, through the facing of specific things. And then since then—that was five years ago, I suppose, the pandemic when it first hit anyway—then we've had this terrible war in Ukraine, and now we've had the terrible thing in the Middle East, and there's lots of other terrible things going on around the world as well. And I've realized that there are many times when in praying the Psalms all you can do is just say, "Ah, why are you so heavy, oh my innermost being, and why are you so disquieted within me? Put your trust in God, because I will yet praise Him," even when you don't feel like that. So it's the discipline of going through those Psalms and then just holding it in the presence of God without being able to see what the solution is. And that's why I love Psalms 44 and 88 especially, because they say, "Hey, this isn't as it should be; what are you going to do about it?" And the Psalm does not come around the corner, as some of them do, to a point of resolution. And that's important as well. And I think that's a certain sort of hard-won maturity to be able to say, "There we are; we're just going to stay here and lament, and maybe weep over what's going on without necessarily being able to tell what God… what to do." And I think… I think you're right; that's part of the vocation of the church is to be the people in whom God's lament… you know, in Genesis it says the wickedness of human beings was so terrible that it grieved God to his heart. You know, there's stuff going on which still grieves God to his heart. And should the church just say, "Oh well, God's great; that's fine; he's got it all in hand," so we can sing and whistle and go about our business? No. We, if we are the people of God, indwelt by the spirit of God, we should be sharing the grief of God's heart.
It's come home to me very powerfully this last few years that God incarnate, Jesus of Nazareth, the word who became flesh, one of the things we know for sure about him because the early church would never have made this up, his weeping at the tomb of his friend. You know, this is God incarnate weeping at the tomb of… even though he knew he was going to raise him from the dead. You know, and… and to share that moment, I think, not to hurry on and say, "Oh well, that's all right, because…" etc., that's really important.
Yeah, so even in this experience we're talking about the now and not yet.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We're talking about… we grieve with hope, yeah, because we believe in a bodily resurrection and life everlasting, but we still grieve. But we still grieve because we are not yet experiencing all of that. And out of that grief—and I think we may want to go there in a minute—but there is then the impetus towards, as we're grieving, "Is there something that I or we or my church or whatever could be doing in this situation?" And the answer may be just praying, or the answer might be, "You need to write a letter to so-and-so," or "You need to join a lobby group that's pushing on this one." And that takes us to John 16, though we may not want to get there quite yet.
Yeah, let's slow your roll a little bit there, Tom. So, so before we go there, I want to go to the… to the hope, to the grieving with hope side of the equation. You did a beautiful job of talking about this continuity and the fact that heaven and earth are being reunited and that we will experience a mysterious bodily resurrection whereby we live with Christ forever. But there are some questions that are prompted there. I agree with you that there's the idea of the soul—this kind of Platonic invasion of the biblical mindset—and yet Jesus does say some confusing things at the beginning of John 14, like, you know, "The way to where I'm going, my Father's house has many rooms." If we have a bodily resurrection here on earth, what is Jesus talking about there?
I'm tempted to say… I'm sure Tim's got a better answer than this, but let me just do a little riff on that. The phrase "my Father's house" occurs twice, I think, in John, maybe more, but I've got these two in mind: that one that you just quoted from John 14, which is in John 14:2—"There is plenty of room to stay in my Father's house"—the previous one is in John chapter 2, when Jesus is in the temple, driving out the money changers and the animals who are being sold and bought and so on, and Jesus says, "Don't turn my Father's house into a market." The phrase "my Father's house" is a temple phrase, and we modern Western Protestant Christians, particularly, we tend… we have tended to marginalize the temple. You heard me last night, I think, say we shouldn't be doing that; this is really significant. But the key thing is Jesus sees God the Father as already building the new Temple, the new Temple which, as we find throughout John but also in Paul, is the human beings in whom the Holy Spirit is going to come and dwell. And I'm not sure I can parse all of that out from John 14 straight off the top, but there's something going on there which means that we have misunderstood the text if we think that it simply means, um, Jesus is saying, "I'm going off to heaven; I'm getting a place ready, and you can come and join me," because it's very clear later in the chapter he's quite explicit that if anyone loves me they will keep my word, and my Father and I will come and make our home with that person. Um, so that it isn't about us going to be with Jesus somewhere else and that's it; it's about belonging to God's people in the present, and that that's okay despite the fact that Jesus himself is going away. And that that will then mean that Jesus and the Father will come through the person and work of the spirit and make their home with us. It's complicated. John 14:1-16 are among the densest texts in the New Testament, and so much Johannine literature seems to go this way and that, and… and we just have to stay with it and… and wrestle. But that's… that's where I am at the moment with that.
It's great. Let's play tennis right now. Let's… let's… let's send this ball back and forth. So your observation was in the Gospel of John the phrase, "the house of my Father," is used first in the pivotal… like, program settings story in chapter 2, where it refers to the temple. But then John whispers in the ear of the reader, I think from a post-resurrection standpoint, and says the temple he was talking about was his body.
Yeah, so we're on this, right? So in my mind that is hugely significant, then, for… then the next appearance of that phrase in John 14—"In the house of my Father there are many rooms, dwelling places"—is it King James? Its mansions.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yes. One of the… one of the many misleading, deeply misleading phrases. I mean, the Greek word there does not mean a place you go to live forever; it means a temporary dwelling place, pitching your tent while you're on a journey somewhere else. So let's just follow the logic real quick: if I've been introduced to the temple, oh, as a building in Jerusalem, the Jesus was claiming—and then John whispers in our ear—was pointing to the reality of God in flesh in… in the person of Jesus, then let's… like, try that on as a definition for what he says in John 14—"In the house of my Father there are many places to take up residence"—and I wouldn't tell you if it wasn't the case. And then he talks about this period of time where he's going away, and then, like you were just noting, he picks it up right back down here in verse 23: "If anyone loves me and keeps my word, my Father will love him, and we, my Father and I, we will come to that one and…" Well, and here's the word again: "take up residence, make that person a dwelling place." So all of a sudden you're like, "Wait, wait, wait, hold on. Are the dwelling places in Jesus because he is the temple, or is it about them taking up residence in me?" If those seem like opposites of each other… and I… I… I have too many things… I have a mug of tea… I've… the device… and I want… but I want to… the way the way John has designed that section of speeches is that 14 through chapter 16 is kind of a… I think a triad, a three-part structure. We've never talked about this, but then 17 comes as like the plus one, like the boom, the extra thing, the extra sauce. And in the extra sauce, the final lines of John 17 are just so cosmic and mind-blowing, 'cause he's like, "Father, you know what I am in you, and you're… and in me, and what I really desire is that we go be in them so that they can be in us." Like, what? What? That's great. But there's no… there has to be a bookend, yeah, to this… almost a riddle. It's almost as if these opening lines of 14 are a riddle that you've got to walk through it, and then you get to 17; it's the mutual indwelling of divine and human in the Son and then in the Spirit. And this is one way to talk about that for this window of time, post-Resurrection, pre-new creation, is a dwelling place.
Yeah, that's… that's great. What do you think about that?
I… I… I love that, and I need to follow it through because so much of the Bible as a whole, but especially John's gospel, is precisely like a great poem which doesn't reveal all its secrets in each line; it's not a series of mathematical formulas which you can just draw down one by one; you have to live with the flow and see how it all works out. The thing that strikes me particularly—I'm interested in your view on this—is that when John has brought the reader to Jerusalem with Jesus for the last time—in John, Jesus comes and goes to Jerusalem quite a bit—but in chapter 12 he really arrives. And anyone who knows any of the three synoptic accounts—say Matthew, Mark, or Luke—knows that when Jesus arrives in Jerusalem is when there's a big bang in the temple. However, this has already taken place in John. And when we arrive in Jerusalem in John's gospel, instead, John gives us this amazing scene where suddenly we go off to this upper room where Jesus celebrates the meal with his followers, and it's not exactly a quiet place because the Satan is there in the person of Judas who is going to accuse Jesus, and Jesus has all sorts of warnings. But it's a place which is then rather like the temple itself. And I was thinking about this: some of the Psalms which talk about the psalmist longing to go and be with God in the temple, but the temple is where God comes to dwell in the midst of his people. So the sort of to and fro of Temple theology in the Old Testament is that the primary thing is God is coming to dwell with his people, and then the secondary thing as a response is that people go to the temple in order to be in the presence of God. And that's not a contradiction; that's just how the logic of having the temple in your midst works. I suspect that something very like that is going on here: that the primary thing is Jesus, who, as you say, he speaks of the Temple of his body, and it's there from 1:4—"The Word became flesh and pitched his tent in our midst"—but then, as a result, wherever Jesus is, and Jesus is with the Father, then we want to be there with him, like the ancient Israelites going to the temple. And I suspect that out of that… out of that… you know, may seem logically contradictory, but actually it makes a whole lot of sense, um, in terms of how then the mystery of the Trinity actually enfleshes the temple theme.
Can I ask you a question?
Of course.
Um, so I think one pattern in the Hebrew Bible that's really been astounding me is the way that images of up and down, ascending to heaven, the heavens, because there is a theme what… right throughout the Psalms: God's throne in the heavens from which he looks down upon the sons of Adam. So God's dwelling place in one sense can be talked about in the skies; it's above and beyond all. But yet he's also in the temple, which is down here on the earth. And so you have this up and down language of divine presence spanning the up and down. But then when it comes to the Tabernacle, especially in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, the language is all on a horizontal plane, about going inside and outside; it's like on a 2D or a 3D plane, yeah, and being near is about being in the divine presence versus being out, like exiled. And so there's… it's almost as if the biblical authors are offering us two ways to think about the divine presence: there's an upness that's close, and there's a down that's away. But then you just flip it on its axis, yeah, and you can think about it on a horizontal way. And there's different poems and stories in the Bible that maybe might use one of those and not another, but they're actually all trying to get at the same reality. And it seems like the apostles just know this, and they can just work back and forth. And so Hebrews can talk about Jesus ascending up on our behalf, and then in the next breath he'll say, "Therefore, let's go near and inside to be near the holy place," and you're like, "Wait, do I go up or do I… again, where am I? Where am I going?" And the point is these overlap; they're really all talking about the same thing.
I think that's absolutely right, and we today often use language like different dimensions, and… and I've often used that and… trying to remind myself that it is still a metaphor—different dimensions of reality. And physicists talk about reality having either four or 24 or how many… um… different dimensions there are in reality, but as though there can be different realities which coexist in the same space but which are not all immediately permeable to one another or visible to one another. Um, and I think we… we can broadly understand that whichever metaphor you use for that, we shouldn't imagine—as some… flat-footed earlier theologians did—that all the ancients had a three-D universe in mind where God lived upstairs, bad things lived downstairs, and we were sort of poised in between them. There may well have been some simple folk in the ancient world as in the modern world who did think of it like that. I mean, who knows what ideas get into people's heads and which metaphors people take literally? You know, some people take all the metaphors so seriously that you don't pull their leg in case it comes off in your hands.
But… I didn't make that one up. I don't believe…
Now, I could tell you got excited when you started to share it.
Yeah, you knew it was going to land well.
Absolutely. Yeah. But… but the… the… these are ways of saying that God is… is mysterious, but wants to be present. Right from Genesis 1, God comes into the garden and says, "Adam, you around here somewhere?" Um, you know, and what's… what's that about? There's a sense of presence and absence and mystery and challenge. And then when they are kicked out of the garden, uh, God somehow is still around, and Abraham, um, you know, knows God, and God visits him, but that's mysterious and challenging too. So that's why I think the temple theme itself is so important. I mean, Solomon, when he builds the temple, he says in his prayer, "Heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I've built?" And Stephen picks that up in… in his speech in Acts 7. In other words, at their best, the ancient Israelites and Judeans knew perfectly well that the temple was a symbol of the Living God wanting to dwell in the midst of his people, but it was… so as a forward pointer to a greater reality which hadn't been arrived at yet. And Jesus is saying, "We are now exploring that greater reality."
There's so much more that we could get into with this, and we might. However, I want to take a hard left really quick. Okay. So one of the primary phrases that's repeated over and over and over in the Upper Room discourse is… the Apostle John is pretty unique in referring to the Holy Spirit as the spirit of Truth. "When the spirit of truth comes… when the spirit of truth comes… when the spirit of truth comes." And one of the vocations that John points out that is unique to John about the spirit of Truth is that when the spirit of truth comes, the spirit will convict the world. And I wonder if you could break down for us what that unique vocation looks like and how we participate in it as those indwelt by the spirit.
Can we add color? And it's just by adding the… the three things that Jesus says the spirit will convict the world about: truth, sin, about sin, righteousness, and justice, judgment.
That's right. Yeah. So why those three? Why those three?
Oh, my good… we're supposed to go… many, many times I've gone back to the commentary scratching my head and saying, "Why those three?" And how does that apply? It's a… like the whole of the farewell discourses, it's very, very dense, and you need to sit with it and tease out because again and again in John's gospel Jesus doesn't say what we expect him to say. People ask this question, and he answers that question which is the question they should have asked but hadn't gotten around to thinking of it. And… and that's… that's really confusing to the reader. Um, but… but it's… um… it's like… and I've used this image somewhere else from C.S. Lewis's science fiction trilogy, the middle volume, _Perelandra_ or _Voyage to Venus_, when an angel appears, the angel is like a beam of light, but the beam of light which is the angel appears to be at an angle to the room which… which the hero is sitting in, and then he realizes that actually it's the angel that is upright and that his world is on a slant. And it's as though Jesus' answers to questions are the uprights, and we… we think they're odd and oblique because Jesus is actually saying, "This is the question you should have asked, and here's the only answer that you're capable of having at the moment." So… but just… just… just briefly about that… about that moment there… I've said many times when I used to read John 16 and think, "The spirit will convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment," I wasn't sure what those three meant, but I knew that the world had lots of bad people and bad things going on, and that the spirit needed to convict people, and I would think, "Yeah, bring it on; I want to see that happen." And then it was… certain point in my gradual maturing, if that's what it's been, um, I realized that when the spirit comes, the spirit works in and through God's people. So if the spirit is going to convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment, it means that it is part of the vocation of God's people, in the power of the spirit, to speak truth to power. That's why it's the spirit of truth, because when the truth comes, you realize that sin is basically a way of lying, a way of lying with your whole personality, a way of telling untruths—the world is not actually like that. Um, sin and righteousness, which is actually a forensic term about God putting the world right—that the world thinks it can get itself right, but when the spirit comes, the church should be enabled to say, "No, that's not the way to put the world right." And then judgment: people think, "Oh, what we need is for somebody, some strong person to come in and sort out that mess," and the answer is no; the ruler of this world is himself or herself going to be judged. And somehow the church, in the power of the spirit, has to recapture the vocation of being the means through which—and it's a very risky and difficult thing—the means through which the spirit can do that. And… and the whole truth thing… you know, we live in a postmodern, nihilistic world where truth has been deconstructed so that it's now "my truth" and "your truth," and… and everyone just tells it the way they see it, and… and nobody really seems to care. But… but the point about truth is that it's about New Creation. Truth is rooted in the goodness of God's creation, but the creation has been flawed and spoiled by sin. But in the new creation which begins with Jesus and the spirit, Jesus' followers are to be truth-tellers in the power of the spirit to tell the truth the right way and to bring truth to birth through their words in order then to hold the world to account for its shabby, off-beam stuff that's going on all the time. Sorry, that's a bit of a sermon, but let me… let me try to translate for a second because I think you're upending some important misconceptions, and I don't want it to…
Okay, so number one: the role of the Holy Spirit is not to—as described in John chapter 16—to convict the individual believer of their personal sin; that's not what's going on.
No. I mean, the spirit may do that as well, but that's not what is being talked about. What is being talked about is… but rather to make the church—what you were terming last night as—a working model of Heaven on Earth, which is so foreign to the world around us that our life together is itself a convicting force to the world because it has come out of alignment with creation.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And therefore, in order for us to join the mission of Jesus as it's being described here, we have some work to do, yeah, just put it mildly. In terms of… it isn't just, "Hey, let's speak out against injustice"; it's, "Let's learn to relate to one another justly; let's learn to be the community which demonstrates that to the world." I mean, the good news is that over the last 2,000 years the church quietly has been doing that, not usually in its grand official pronouncements or in its… its high-blown leaders or whatever, but ordinary Christians on the street doing kingdom of God stuff, doing Sermon on the Mount stuff, is itself… holding the world to account. And that… that's not to be sneezed at.
No. And speaking truth to power becomes a lot easier if you're already demonstrating truth to power, right? Like, this is why… often times I experience preaching as trying to convince people Jesus is worth considering and then telling them how all the great things Jesus can do. When I read the Gospels, I experienced Jesus preaching as showing people he is worth considering, 'cause this guy was paralyzed and now he's tap
Fruitful as you simply remain in me. Then he says, "Oh, and also don't be surprised if the whole world hates you." Absolutely, yeah, yeah, because it's because you are an agency of conviction. Yeah, right. And that means that if we are living the way of Jesus together with one another, we should probably be prompting the sort of responses that Jesus prompts in the world—to be a magnetizing comfort to so many and a threat to others. Yeah, absolutely.
I'm reflecting that I'm uncomfortable with what I'm about to share, just because I don't want anyone to be under the illusion that this is something I've arrived at consistently in the practice of my own life. But in the Gospel of John, it is very clear that Jesus is able to stand before probably the least influential person in Jerusalem, like a blind man or paralyzed person, and then stand in front of the most influential person in Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate, and relate to them as if with a deep sense of care and love. But it's very clear that he's just really not attached to any of the things that either of those people have attached their well-being or their identity to. It's as if it freezes him. I was just thinking about that moment where Pilate says, "Don't you realize I have the power to kill you?" And Jesus is like, "Well, not actually, you don't. It's actually not a power that you have. But if you want to pretend that you have that, that's fine, but you should know that I'm the one who's going to give my life, and I'll pick it back up again when you're done with me." He's so nonchalant in how he treats him, but yet he's able to treat the paralyzed body and the physical disability nonchalantly by just reversing it and healing its power. There's something about Jesus's ability to detach from the things that we normally attach so much value to—things that slant our view of reality and leave us upside down. But at the same time, the whole point is that God becomes flesh in a way that is very attached to the physical world. So it's that balance of attachment in love to the people, the places, the communities, the crises, and the problems, while also remaining simultaneously detached enough to remain mostly in the Father's Love and not in the crisis of the moment. Yeah, yeah. How do we balance those two? I think that's what I'm meditating on.
I find it really comforting that Jesus's detachment before Pontius Pilate comes on the heels of Jesus wrestling with it in the garden in prayer before he modeled it in the courtroom. So, if to live as Jesus's faithful witness in the world I have to wrestle my anxiety out through the night with the Father in prayer, I'm actually practicing the way of Jesus every bit as much as the public display in the courtroom. And I find that deeply comforting. Yeah, that is—we were given a glimpse of both.
Could I add one footnote to what Tim said? We haven't had this conversation before, and we're coming at John 19:1 slightly differently. When Pilate says, "Don't you realize that I have authority to have you killed?" Jesus says, "You could have no authority over me unless it was given you from above," in other words, from God. Which I take to be an affirmation of the essentially biblical and Judaic view that God the Creator wants his world to be wisely ruled by human authorities. Even when the human authorities are not ruling wisely, they still deserve respect because God wants order, not chaos. But then he adds immediately, "Therefore the one who delivered me over to you has the greater sin." In other words, God wants his world to be ruled wisely, and he will hold rulers to account. That's the point where the hint is to Pilate: so watch out what you're doing with this God-given authority. That's where I think that plays back into John 16: that Jesus, in good biblical Judaic fashion, believes that God will one day call the whole world, and especially its leaders and rulers, to account. But then it's the church's job, in the power of the Spirit, to anticipate that. That's a bit of inaugurated eschatology—what God is going to do by holding the whole world to account at the end, the church has to learn how to do in the present. For the last 20-50 years, the Western church has largely backed off because the secular world has said, "No, you go and teach people how to say their prayers and go to heaven; we will run the world." And the church is okay with that—we'll go and hide in a corner. Many other places in the world—I think of a past friend of mine in Tehran, Iran; I think of folk I know in China who are living out the gospel in the face of oppressive governments—they know much more about this than we Western Christians do. But that's the dynamic: God will hold the world to account; in the meantime, God wants there to be wise authorities. And, as Paul says in Romans 13, the powers that be—God wants his world not to be anarchic. Anarchy is always even worse than tyranny; tyranny is pretty bad, but anarchy is even worse. But precisely because God wants it to be ordered, he will hold it to account, and the church has to anticipate that.
Happy with what he said. Let's tackle the one layer we haven't yet, or I should say the one layer that we've discussed that we haven't tackled yet in this time: this "we." We began to talk about union, about this way that we become like Jesus by being brought into the fellowship of the Father, Son, and Spirit that Jesus is describing, which prompts a whole lot of questions, like logical questions in the mind of the believer: things like, "Well, if I am to be one with my brothers and sisters, and we are all the bride collectively of one bridegroom, but we're also going to experience an individual bodily resurrection, how does that work?" Like, "Well, what's supposed to be in my mind if it's not—I'm a floating blob in a heavenly bliss place one day in the sky and clouds somewhere?" What is supposed to be in my mind that is giving me tangible hope for the life that is truly life when Heaven and Earth are reunited?
Can I just throw one little Hebrew Bible layer in there? Then I want to hear what your thoughts are, Tom. The authors of the Hebrew Bible are so focused upon the sequence of family generations and the way that children replay, always with a twist, the behavior of their parents and their grandparents over and over in these cycles of individual lives and the cycles of a few generations, and then of the whole family of Israel, and then the whole family of Adam and Eve. These texts come from—and Jesus shared—a view of the unity of the human family that I think modern Westerners just find very difficult to inhabit that way of seeing the world natively. So there is already, I think, just in the way Jesus saw the world, a deep unity to the human family in the world that makes it—I don't know—predisposed, easier for him to be talking about us being one in him, but yet that doesn't mean assimilation into him; that you know, after death we're all translated into the one and we cease being who we are. The biblical authors have a lot more nuance in their thinking about these things, but they don't work in the categories that we tend to think of, and it's been a long wrestling match for me trying to think like Jesus did on this matter.
Yeah. I mean, when God made the world, God made an incredibly diverse world full of extraordinary things like butterflies and elephants and goodness knows what in between. And God just seemed to relish saying, "Let's do one of these and just watch what we're going to have now." This rich ecosystem which God creates—we know there are flaws and failings in it, and we humans have contributed massively to that—but in principle it's a world of rich diversity which does have a unity, even though even the greatest scientists can't always explain how that works. And it has different layers of meaning. If you think you can say, "Well, there are humans here and non-human animals there," yes, there is a distinction, but then ask anyone who has a close relationship with a dog, for example, or a horse—seriously, or a horse. I do not have close relationships with either dogs or horses, more's the pity. Because when I talk to people who do, these can be quite extraordinary. C.S. Lewis says somewhere, "A human with a dog or with a horse closes a gap in the universe." That's a nice Lewis phrase.
Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I told a story about my new dog in my talk. Okay, okay, okay. And Thursday night… this theme that's emerging here—you just gave cosmic meaning to my relationship to my dog. Excellent, excellent. Well, I mean, you know, the points at which we sense a sort of unity with everything—from a sunset or a rainbow through to a plant or a tiny little insect that we may be studying—and we have this sense of belonging. My wife and I have this with the seashore as well, with the coast and the waves and so on—a sense that we actually belong in this environment. And that doesn't mean that we're assimilated into it or it into us; it's just that we are part of a larger family. And I think family is—today most people come from families that have one or two or three children at the most. I come from a family of four; my wife and I have four kids. My mother's father was one of fifteen, of whom most grew up to old age and had children and grandchildren themselves. And when there's a family like that, everybody knows they are very different people, very different characters, but they are a unity; there is a family likeness. So I don't see any problem in God doing that on a larger scale and saying every one of us is unique and has a special—people often talk about—has a special angle of reflection. If you are reflecting God's glory into the world, what the world sees when it looks at you is just a slightly different bit of God's glory from when the world looks at the person next to you, and so on and so on. Multiply that up by all the human beings that there have been—it's glorious. But then this whole theme of unity and differentiation is the big challenge. I was saying to some other people yesterday that's the challenge of the Western world at the moment, and it's focused particularly—if I dare say—on America right now. James Davison Hunter's new book, *Democracy and Solidarity*, he's expounding the problem which exists with the American slogan of *E Pluribus Unum*—out of the many, one—because it's falling apart, and we all know it's falling apart. And we grieve over that, but the church as well is struggling with issues of unity and diversity. And at what point do we say, "Never mind the diversity, let's all just be one"? And at what point do we say, "No, no, no, there are significant differences and we mustn't blur the lines"? And it doesn't surprise me that the church is wrestling with those issues because we are told we are to be groaning at places where the world is in pain, and the world is in pain at that point right now, so we shouldn't be surprised that we are as well.
So from all that, I want to say that this picture of humans being part of Jesus' extended family—Paul has Jesus as the oldest brother and the rest of us as all younger siblings in Romans 8:29 following—that that makes so much sense that we are one and yet gloriously different, and God relishes the difference and wants to use that to display his glory in a thousand different ways. Interestingly, the Church Father Origen, at the start of the third century, who was a Platonist, found differentiation really difficult; he thought that was a major problem—that actually everything should have been basically the same—which is about the Platonic ideal of the one as opposed to the biblical vision of this glorious riot of color and noise and difference which nevertheless all should work together.
Tom, you just drew attention to the cute feel of this moment in Western culture on both sides of the Atlantic. But I know you also taught me most and best about the acute issue—the same issue, just another iteration—at the very birth of the Jesus movement. As soon as it expanded beyond the cultural borders of Israel, the Israelite/non-Israelite cultural divide was the forefront culture war, as it were, happening. And Paul reflects that exactly in Galatians, but actually it goes even earlier because in Acts 6 there's the dispute about the Hebrew and Hellenistic-speaking—in other words, Aramaic-speaking and Greek-speaking—widows, etc. And there's differentiation going on, and the apostles say, "We've got to nip this one in the bud; we are all one family." So I guess if that's the moment where we are now, yet that has been the same issue from the very beginning.
Yeah, and you know, I'm trying to make up for all the gaps in my education in church history, but this is not the first rodeo, so to speak, on this issue. So I wonder if what it's—not like a problem that you solve—but that every generation actually has to, as it were, face this set of issues in their time and their place from the ground up. And you can learn from the past, but that will not in any way give you the clean answer sheet for what any church community has to do in its time and its place. That, by definition, the tension is, by definition, the journey that the Spirit has to take every church community on in every time and place. That's great. Do you think there's something to that? No, not a bug; it's a feature of the journey. Sure, it's—but this is Ephesians 4—you know, that there is one body and one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism. Therefore, God has given a multiplicity of gifts—some to do this, some to do that, some to do the other—not so that you can go off and invent different churches, but in order to sustain and refresh the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. And that's always the struggle. Which is why, incidentally, in the debates about St. Paul that have happened over the last 40 years or so—the so-called New Perspective on Paul—the resistance to the idea that what Paul is really concerned about is the coming together of Jews and Gentiles is because the Platonic fad of Western Christianity thinks that's really not important because what is really important is that our souls need to go to heaven, so it really doesn't matter whether we worship together with these people and those people or not. And Paul says, "No, absolutely not. What matters is we are one body in Christ."
Who will eat at each other's tables. Yes, that's exactly right. Absolutely. Let's end. If that mic drop deal… this has been really fun. Thank you guys so much. Let's thank… thank you, thank you, thank you.