Trinity

This Sunday we shall be looking at the Trinity. It is a difficult and complex topic to get our minds around, but the Bible gives us beautiful pointers to the mysterious beauty of this God whom we worship who is one in three and three in one.

In Genesis 1: 1-3, we read, “1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ² Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. ³ And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”

This shows us the actions of God in creation: bringing order out of chaos by the spoken word and the Spirit who hovered over the waters. Here the Father is the one on whom we focus, but we see the involvement of the Word and the Spirit in creation.

Then in Mark 1:9-11, Mark tells us about the baptism of Jesus in the following words: “⁹ At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. ¹⁰ Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. ¹¹ And a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’”

Again God is involved in this dynamic process – Jesus the Holy Son receives the affirmation from the Holy Father and is filled with the Holy Spirit in order to bring redemption to a fallen humanity. God, Father, Son and Spirit are involved in the great task of saving human beings and restoring us to a full relationship with God. Here the Son is central, but we see the action of the Father and the Spirit in redemption.   

We read in Acts 2:1-4 about the Holy Spirit coming at Pentecost: “2 When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. ² Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. ³ They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. ⁴ All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.”

Once again the action is God’s action. The disciples who are gathered are disciples of the Son who have been brought into a relationship with the Father and are now filled with the Holy Spirit. Here the Spirit is central, but we are aware of the presence of the Father and the Son who send the Spirit upon the disciples. The Father, the Son and the Spirit are engaged in the great enterprise of creating a new community that will take the good news of the gospel to a world that is desperate for that good news.

Pentecost and Pilgrimage

The disciples having waited for 10 days in Jerusalem are now filed with the Holy Spirit. They are transformed and they will, in time, transform the Roman Empire. How did this happen? How did the disciples go from a bunch of people who constantly misunderstood what Jesus was speaking about, who fled in fear when Jesus was crucified to a group who were not afraid to make a stand for their faith in front of a crowd of thousands? Nothing less than the wind and fire of the Spirit.

Think about these symbols for a moment - wind and fire. Think about what happened to the disciples as a result of Pentecost. Wind is not stationary, fire is in constant movement. The Holy Spirit comes on these disciples and immediately they move - out from the room in which they have been holed up in for the last week and a bit. They are filled with the Spirit and they begin to move.

From that time on, whenever they begin to get settled, whenever they think that they can relax, persecution breaks out against them and they are moved. The Christian faith begins its pilgrimage from Jerusalem to Judea and then it begins to cross borders of creed and culture into Samaria. Later, via Peter's vision and Cornelius’ invitation, the Gospel goes to the Gentiles, provoking a crisis in the church: must the church insist that the Gentiles who wish to be Christians must first become Jews or is that not necessary? In a landmark decision the First Jerusalem Council came to the conclusion that the Gentile Christians should simply obey the stipulations of the Noahic covenant. So that Council took the brave step - in obedience to the Holy Spirit - to make sure that the Christian church was comprised of a pilgrim people throughout its history. In line with this, the centre of the Christian faith has moved constantly - from Jerusalem to Antioch, from Antioch to Rome, from Rome to Constantinople, from Constantinople to various European centres, from Europe to North America and in the last century from North America to South America, Asia and Africa. This has been the legacy of the coming of the Spirit, the history of a church on a journey for the last twenty centuries: a pilgrim people journeying towards a new future.

On Sunday we will bless and pray for the pilgrims who will be walking the Compostela. They will stand before us to be blessed before they begin their journey. But we would be wrong to think that it is only these who are the pilgrims. Because of the Spirit of wind and fire that propelled the church out of their safe zone onto that Jerusalem street all those years ago, the Spirit comes today to remind us that we are, also a pilgrim people, meant to be constantly moving, crossing boundaries and following the Lord of the harvest into new fields.

Christ the Intercessor

It is interesting for me to think about the intercessory role of Christ. Immediately we begin to talk about Christ's intercessory role, we must split that work of intercession into two distinct phases. There is Christ the intercessor on earth and there is the continual intercession that Christ makes on our behalf before the Father. 

Both flow from the priestly office of Christ. The former is contained within Christ's work on earth during the incarnation and culminates in his the offering up of himself as a sacrifice for us. The latter refers to his making continual intercession for us before the Father after his ascension.

When on earth Jesus interceded for people, as can be seen in Luke 23:34 (where Jesus prays for those who crucified him), John 17: 20 (where Jesus prays for those who will believe in him through the witness of the disciples) and Heb 5:7 (" During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission").

Since his ascension, Jesus' intercessory role has changed. Still flowing from his office as our Great High Priest, Jesus now exercises this function in heaven, where he is said to appear in the presence of God for us as the writer to the Hebrews says in Heb 9: 12 and 24: ("¹² He did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves; but he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption ... ²⁴ For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made with human hands that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God’s presence").

Jesus now stands before the Father representing us on the basis of his own once-for-all-perfect sacrifice. Thus he pleads for and obtains the fulfillment of all the promises of the everlasting covenant  according to 1 John 2:1 ("My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One"), John 17:24 (“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.") and Heb 7:25 ("Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.").

He is moved with compassion when we are hurt and he feels the pain of our struggle with temptation here on earth because he is both a merciful and a faithful high priest: Heb 2:17 - 18 ("For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. ¹⁸ Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.") and Heb 4: 15 - 16: ("For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are —yet he did not sin. ¹⁶ Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need"). This intercession is an essential part of his work as the one mediator between God and human beings. It is through Christ that we have "access" to the Father according to John 14:16, Eph 2: 18 and 3:12. 

The Ascension of Jesus

The ascension of Jesus is quite an interesting event.

What are we to make of it all. Forty days after Jesus' resurrection from the dead, having appeared to the disciples in a series of surprisingly sporadic visits, Jesus assembles with them one more time. They are filled with a sense of anticipation. Surely this is the moment that they have been waiting for - surely Jesus is going to take the throne of David, summon many legions of angels and lead a heavenly army against the Romans. Then he would be installed in Jerusalem to rule the world as the messianic Son of David and they as his trusted advisers.

Yet, Jesus is just as infuriatingly mysterious as he always has been, telling the disciples to mind their own business and then to wait in Jerusalem for the coming of the Holy Spirit. There are some things here that should catch our attention - for example, Paul tells us that Jesus appeared to some five hundred at one time (presumably on the mountain in Galilee), yet when we read about the group in Jerusalem it had dwindled to one hundred and twenty. What happened to the other three hundred and eighty? Did the idea of waiting for the Holy Spirit strike them as not quite exciting enough?

And what of these one hundred and twenty? Who were they? We are told virtually nothing about them, yet they exerted enormous influence on not only their own culture, but ultimately on the course of human history. In the line of our curiosity about the lives of influential people we would like to know more about this group: what were their political affiliations? How many men and how many women? In this, as in so much of the biographies of the people around Jesus, we are told virtually nothing. And, lest we become complacent, the little we know of the eleven disciples who are left of the original twelve, does not make us any more confident. These eleven have hardly covered themselves in glory. Just the contrary. In their time with Jesus they have showed themselves often confused about what is going on, lacking in both faith and foresight, frequently bickering about status and position. Their unofficial leader, Peter, denied he knew Christ when confronted by a servant girl, making his promises to face death for Christ utterly laughable. And the other disciples had fled like frightened rabbits. So we might be tempted (with good reason) to think that Jesus, in trusting these people was making a tragic error of judgment. However, we are due to be surprised. This motley crew will change the world. Amazing!

A Theology of Friendship

The following is an adapted extract from an article in Word and Worship 2011 pages 163 - 164 written by Pieter Van Niekerk and addresses the need for a well-thought theology of friendship:
 

Interpreting the Word

The command to love one another goes hand in hand with friendship between Jesus and his followers. It is intimate. O’Day in her lecture, I Have Called You Friends, quotes John 15:12-15 and adds to it. She says that friendship has no prominence in theology. The Gospel according to John shows the opposite. “For Jesus, friendship is the ultimate relationship with God and with one another.” The Greek words for ‘love’ (phileo) and for ‘friend’ (philus) share the sonic verb. In the New Testament a ‘friend’ is immediately understood as ‘one who loves.’ This fundamental connection between love and friendship is an essential starting point for reclaiming friendship as a resource for faith and ethics for contemporary Christians.” Jesus is the model and source of friendship. "The pattern of Jesus’ own life and death moves the teaching of John 15:13 from philosophical ideal to an embodied promise and gift".

In a column in a daily newspaper, Christina Landman writes about the need for a theology of friendship when she writes about sexual molestation and abuse: “There are people whom we should protect ourselves. But at the same time we should recklessly reach out to most people. People should befriend one another. Actually we should get rid of words such as ‘single person’ and ‘single parent.’ Nobody is really single. We could only call a person single when we regard marriage as the only relationship among people that is of any importance. On the contrary, female theologians maintain that each person forms a part of many relationships. People should work on various (platonic) relationships in order to support others and make them feel dignified. A woman should not only have a relationship at home, because if such a relationship should turn violent, she would have no outside support. For this reason female theologians pay special attention to a theology of friendship these days. A theology of friendship makes matters even. It gives individuals the opportunity of starting friendships at all levels, so that they need never regard themselves as single.”

Frederick Marais expresses his thoughts on friendship, intimacy and vulnerability as regards a missional theology. He writes: “Johan Heroldt and Marius Ungerer, two experienced ABSA-consultants, discovered how vulnerability in the work place creates safe spaces. The question Johan and Marius had asked was how it could be possible for friendship and intimacy to evolve in a working environment like ABSA, after research had found that most employees claim that the most intimate relationships exist in the work-place. Johan and Marius found that the most important thing concerning the development of intimacy and friendships is the willingness to be vulnerable. It was a matter of predisposition rather than consultants or pastors that provided the key to this matter of friendship and intimacy.

Mark Peske has the following to say: “In previous years, I invited people to church when I met them, thinking in that way they would hear the gospel. I began to see that l was giving the church an unfair advantage. I was asking them to come to my turf where l was the leader, where I stood and spoke while they sat and listened. It was a lack of courage that led me to rely on them to a place where l was the boss and they were the servants. What I had to learn to do was speak the gospel on their terms — in their homes, in their boats as a friend and as an equal.” (Mark Peske, missionary to the Obija, as quoted in The local church in mission; Lausanne Occasional Paper No 39).

The words of Jesus in John 15:12-15 echo in the familiar scene of Jesus as the “Good Shepherd” laying down his life for his sheep (John 10:11). What distinguished Jesus’ words from this ideal was not their content but the fact that Jesus did not merely talk about laying down his life for his friends. Jesus enacted the ancient ideal friendship — he laid down his life for his friends. Jesus’ whole life is an incarnation of the ideal of friendship. What Jesus teaches he is already living. The pattern of Jesus’ own life and death moves the teaching of John 15: I 3 from philosophical ideal to an embodied promise and gift. A quick review of some key passages from John will illustrate how Jesus’ entire life and death is an act of friendship. The ‘Good Shepherd’ discourse of John is a useful place to begin. John 10 begins with a parable about a sheepfold: he focuses first on the gate and then on the shepherd (10:3-5). This parable gives a very realistic picture of sheep herding and of the role of the shepherd. Jesus interprets this parable by identifying himself with both the gate (10: 7-10) and the shepherd (10:11-18). The good shepherd ‘lays down his life for the sheep” and so puts care of the sheep above all else.

This is in striking contrast to the hireling who would put the sheep in jeopardy rather than risk his own life (10:12-13). The contrast between the shepherd and the hireling is like that between the true and the false friend—the false friend will not be around in a time of crisis, but the true friend will be. As one ancient storyteller writes, ‘Just so in calm weather a man cannot tell whether sailing master is good; he will need a storm to determine that.’ But Jesus is not simply telling a story about shepherds and hirelings, about true and false friends. Jesus is talking about himself, about the love that animates everything he does. To make this clear, Jesus speaks directly, in first-person language: “lay down my life for the sheep” (John l0:15). He talks directly about his own life and death: ‘For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord’ (l0:l7-18a)” (O’Day).

"I am the one that Jesus loves"

As we come to consider the words of Jesus in John 15, the first thing that should strike us is that Jesus  uses the word ‘love’ a lot in this passage. The Greek wards agapao/agape did not appear in vv. 1-8, but are found 9 times in these verses. These words are prominent throughout what is sometimes called the ‘Farewell Discourses’ of chapters 13-17. Altogether the verb is used 24 times in those chapters (and 13 times in the rest of the book) and the noun occurring 6 times (and only once in the rest of the book).

In these verses, this verb refers to:

The love that the Father has for the Son (v. 9, see also 17:23, 24, 26)

The love that Jesus' has for his followers, his disciples (vv. 9, 12, see also 13:34)

The love that the disciples must have for each other (vv. 12, 17, see also 13:34-35)

The noun refers to:

Jesus' love (v. 9, 10)

The Father's love (v. 10)

Human (Jesus') love that lays down one's life for another (v. 13)

John’s use of agapao/agape is closely related to John’s use of phileo/philos (vv. 13, 14, 15). 

Gail O'Day (John, New Interpreter's Bible) writes:

"The Fourth Gospel uses the two Greek verbs for "love (agapao and phileo) interchangeably (cf., eg., 13:2 and 20:2; 5:20 and 10:17), so when Jesus speaks of friends [philos] here, he is really saying "those who are loved" (cf. the description of Lazarus at 11:3, 11).... A comparison of 14:15 and 21 with 15:14 suggests that to be Jesus' friend and to love Jesus are synonymous, because both are defined as keeping Jesus' commandments." [p. 758]

It is interesting to notes that in this passage there is no mention of the disciples loving Jesus or God because the emphasis in our text is on God's love for us and our love for one another.

Philip Yancy (What's So Amazing about Grace?) writes about this:

"Not long ago I received in the mail a postcard from a friend that had on it only six words, "I am the one Jesus loves." I smiled when I saw the return address, for my strange friend excels at these pious slogans. When I called him, though, he told me the slogan came from the author and speaker Brennan Manning. At a seminar, Manning referred to Jesus' closest friend on earth, the disciple named John, identified in the Gospels as "the one Jesus loved." Manning said, "If John were to be asked, 'What is your primary identity in life?' he would not reply, 'I am a disciple, an apostle, an evangelist, an author of one of the four Gospels,' but rather, 'I am the one Jesus loves.'"

What would it mean, I ask myself, if I too came to the place where I saw my primary identity in life as "the one Jesus loves"? How differently would I view myself at the end of a day?

Sociologists have a theory of the looking-glass self: you become what the most important person in your life (wife, father, boss, etc.) thinks you are. How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible's astounding words about God's love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?

Brennan Manning tells the story of an Irish priest who, on a walking tour of a rural parish, sees an old peasant kneeling by the side of the road, praying. Impressed, the priest says to the man, "You must be very close to God." The peasant looks up from his prayers, thinks a moment, and then smiles, "Yes, he's very fond of me." [pp. 68-69]

Today, may you believe that you are someone that Jesus loves.

To quote O'Day again:

"Jesus reminds the disciples (including the readers) that their place with him is the result of his initiative, not theirs; relationship with Jesus is ultimately a result of God's grace (cf. 6:37-39, 44)." [p. 759]

Love, faithfulness, joy and friendship

John 15:9-17

New International Version (NIV)

⁹ “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. ¹⁰ If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. ¹¹ I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. ¹² My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. ¹³ Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. ¹⁴ You are my friends if you do what I command. ¹⁵ I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. ¹⁶ You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit —fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. ¹⁷ This is my command: Love each other.

 Instructions / Guidelines:

1.      Please ask someone to read the passage through out loud.

2.      Read it through a second time quietly.

3.      Find a partner and share with them what struck you, what you found interesting or what you could not understand.

4.      Share your partner’s insights with the group.

In the group reflect, talk about and discuss what this passage says to us about:

1. Love: What does it mean to be loved by Jesus?

2. Faithfulness: Why do those whom Jesus loves keep his commands?

3. Joy: How does joy come to the one who is loved by Jesus and who is faithful in keeping Jesus’ commands?

4. Friendship: What does it mean to you to be a ‘friend of Jesus’ and what kind of a friend are you to others?