Extra Credit Podcast

The Joseph Story Ep. 6. Jewish scholar Yair Zakovitch says that the book of Genesis is the Table of Contents for the Bible. Everything is contained Genesis in embryonic form, it is the genetic code of the Bible.The more I study Genesis the more I’m convinced he’s right. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that most every point Paul makes in his letters can be made on the basis of texts from Genesis.Perhaps Paul’s most important point is taken from a line in the Joseph story.In Romans 9–11 Paul is making an intricate argument about God’s faithfulness to his people Israel, despite their unfaithfulness, and he’s trying to show that God’s including the gentiles in the new covenant is consistent with God’s original promises to Israel. Far from nullifying God’s promises to Israel, it is actually by bringing the gentiles into the covenant that God is keeping his promises to Israel.And at the climax of this argument in Romans 11 Paul gives a famous–or maybe infamous–line:Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the fullness of the nations has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved. (Rom 11:25-26)Many commentators on the book of Romans throughout the centuries have been baffled by what Paul might mean by this. What does it mean that all Israel will be saved? Who does “Israel” refer to?What makes this more difficult to answer is that it is a fact of history that there are a multitude of names to refer to the people from this region: Jew, Israelite, Hebrew, Israeli, etc.Do those all mean the same thing? New Testament scholar Jason Staples has made the definitive case that the answer to this is no. Although for the better part of the last two centuries we have treated the main biblical terms “Jew” and “Israelite” as interchangeable, they are not used that way in Scripture (or ancient historical texts like Josephus).To what does the name Israel refer?First, it refers to the patriarch Jacob after God changed his name to Israel.Second, it is applied to the children of Israel/Jacob. Therefore, it comes to refer to the twelve-tribe totality of “Israel.”But something complicating happens in the history of this people. They split in two. The North secedes from the southern kingdom. The North (which was comprised of ten tribes) retained the name Israel, while the South (comprised of Judah, Benjamin, and Levi) took the name of its most prominent tribe Judah.After the split between the two kingdoms, those from the North were called Israelites while those from the South began to be referred to as Jews after the tribe of Judah (Yehudim in Hebrew and Ioudaioi in Greek).This, of course, means that after the split the terms “Jew” and “Israelite” are not interchangeable names for the same group of people, but rather, as Staples has shown, the term Jew is a subset of Israel.In other words, all Jews are Israelites, but not all Israelites are Jews.The term Israel can refer to the twelve-tribe totality but it can also more specifically refer to the northern kingdom (depending on the book of the Bible you are reading and the context of the passage).Think of it this way: “Kansan” is a subset of “American.” All Kansans are Americans but not all Americans are Kansans.And yet, as Staples has pointed out, “Countless scholars [today] regularly alternate between these terms for stylistic reasons.” Simply put, we’ve gotten very confused over a pretty simple, but important fact.If we fast forward in the story to 722 BC we find another complicating factor. The northern kingdom of Israel was conquered and carried into exile by the Assyrians. The ten northern tribes were never seen again. All that remained were the southern tribes—or, those that were called Jews from Judah—which included people from the tribes Judah, Benjamin, and Levi.To complicate it once again, this means that while all Benjaminites are Jews, not all Jews are Benjaminites.So, we can see that the question of who “all Israel” refers to In Romans 11 is not as straightforward as we might imagine. By “all Israel” Paul almost certainly does not simply mean “all Jews” because there are some Israelites who are not Jews. For example, the Samaritans of Paul’s day did not claim to be Jews but descendants of the northern tribes of Joseph (Ephraim and Manasseh). The Samaritans’ claim was disputed, but the disputation was never over whether they were Jews but whether they were Israelites. In other words, Samaritans are Israelites but not Jews.The key to answering the question of who Paul means by “all Israel” comes in the other odd phrase he uses in the same sentence. And this line is taken directly from the Joseph story.Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the fullness of the nations has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved. (Rom 11:25-26The only other place that this odd phrase appears in Scripture is in Genesis at the end of the Joseph story. Jacob/Israel is an old man and about to die, so Joseph brings his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, to Jacob so that he can bless them. In a surprising twist, Jacob gives the firstborn rights to the younger son Ephraim. Jacob says that Ephraim’s seed will become “the fullness of the nations.” Ephraim, of course, becomes the prominent tribe from the northern kingdom. The kings from the North come from the tribe of Ephraim. This means that when the northern tribes are carried away by the Assyrians it is “Ephraim” who is, as Leviticus 26:33 puts it, “scattered among the nations.” The consistent promise of the prophets is that God will act to restore all Israel—meaning the twelve-tribe totality. Which means he will have to regather the northern Israelites (usually referred to as “the house of Israel” or “the house of Ephraim/Joseph”) who have been scattered among the nations. Here’s just one example from Zechariah:“I will strengthen the house of Judah, and I will save the house of Joseph, and will bring them back because I have compassion on them. They will be as though I had not rejected them for I am the Lord their God and I will answer them. Ephraim will be like a mighty man…”(Zech 10:6–7)What’s more stunning for many Christians today is that all the new covenant promises found in Jeremiah and Ezekiel where God promises to put his Spirit in his people and give them a new tender heart of flesh are made exclusively to Israel. The dry bones in the valley in Ezekiel’s vision are the dry bones of the house of northern Israel—those tribes that have been long gone for centuries.So, why do gentile Christians read these passages and assume they are promises made to them? Now we are starting to feel why Paul received so much pushback. Paul thinks that God has acted in one elegant, brilliant move to fulfill both Israel’s original calling to be a light to the nations and his promise that he would restore all Israel.Paul, along with the other apostles, recognized that God’s Spirit was being poured out not only on Jews but on gentiles as well. Gentiles were receiving new, tender hearts of flesh with the Torah written on them. God was keeping his promise to Israel but in a completely surprising way. Jews of Paul’s day knew the promise of the prophets was that God would regather his scattered people from among the nations. But they didn’t know how this would happen since the northern tribes had all dissolved. They had inter-married wherever they were taken into exile, so after more than eight centuries there was no trace of them left. They had, for all intents and purposes, become gentiles. Then it must’ve hit Paul. God promised to resurrect the lost tribes of Israel, but he was doing it by bringing in the gentiles/nations because that’s where the northern tribes had been scattered.This is why the resurrected Jesus commissions his disciples in Acts 1:8 to take the good news to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. God is restoring Israel—resurrecting the lost northern tribes—by bringing in the nations into which they assimilated. So “all Israel” looks something like the chart below—where “exiled Israelites” or “Ephraim’s seed”—have become “the fullness of the nations.”Remember Paul says, “Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the fullness of the nations has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved.” This is how God is saving “all Israel”—by bringing in the nations.In class we connected this back to the Joseph story.Here you can read through a substack post from Jason Staples himself, responding to a question I put to him a couple months back on Jesus, Judah, and the Joseph story. (I especially like the line where he says, “Combs is, of course, exactly right.”) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

The Joseph Story Ep. 5The Roaring LionAt the end of the Joseph story the elderly patriarch Jacob gathers his sons around him to deliver last words to each of them. It is Judah (along with Joseph) that receives the most positive (and lengthiest) words. This helps us to pay closer attention to the important role that Judah plays in the Joseph narrative. He is one of the heroes of the story.Jacob’s blessing of Judah in Gen. 49 gives us insight into Judah’s role:8 Judah, you, shall your brothers shall praise you; your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies; your father’s sons shall bow down before you.9 Judah is a lion’s whelp [cub]; from the prey, my son, you have risen up.He crouches down, he stretches out like a lion, like the king of beasts—who dares arouse him?All of this carries distinctly Davidic overtones because David is from the tribe of Judah. This also means that these words carry messianic overtones. From the beginning Christians have read these words addressed to Judah as being in some mysterious way about Jesus of Nazareth—the Lion of the tribe of Judah.Jacob’s words to Judah are primarily about his military prowess. This, again, is obviously an homage to David. But within the Genesis narrative itself Judah is not a military warrior. So, what exactly is it that makes Judah a lion? In at least one reading of the story it is his words. He delivers two of the key speeches in the story (one to Jacob and one to Joseph) that both have the effect of reconciling and saving the family. As Avivah Zornberg points out, it is the force of Judah’s words that show the “kingly power” he brings to bear.So—to play with the image a little—what makes Judah a lion is his roar, his word. The speech Judah delivers to Joseph in Egypt is, “one of the most remarkable speeches in all the Bible.” In that speech, Judah does not know that he is speaking to Joseph. Judah thinks Joseph is an Egyptian ruler who is about to take his youngest brother, Benjamin, as a slave. So, Judah “went up to” Joseph to make his plea. Judah’s speech breaks through Joseph’s disguise. Joseph begins to weep. His heart is opened. He orders all of his Egyptian servants out of the room and reveals his true identity to the brothers: “I am Joseph.”One ancient rabbinic Midrash beautifully summarizes the kingly power of Judah’s speech as a rope that can reach down to the deep well of Joseph’s heart:“Then Judah went up to him”: “The designs in a man’s mind are deep waters, but a man of understanding can draw them out” [Proverbs 20:5].“The designs in a man’s mind are deep waters” refers to Joseph. But as much as Joseph was wise, Judah came and defeated him, as it is said, ‘Then Judah went up to him.’What does this resemble? A deep pit into which no one could climb down. Then a clever person came and brought a long rope that reached down to the water so he could draw from it. So was Joseph deep, and Judah came to draw from him.Judah’s speech is the rope that draws the deep waters up from Joseph. Judah doesn’t know this Egyptian lord, but he can see that as he is speaking something is stirring deep within him. Judah realizes there is water down deep in the well of this man’s heart and it is cool and clean water. It is drinkable water. The problem is no one can reach it. Judah’s speech is the rope that brings forth the deep waters from Joseph’s heart. And this is what makes him fit to be the father of kings, the father of David, the father of Jesus.Judah’s power is the power the psalms refer to as “deep calling out to deep.” It is the lion’s roar which shakes everything false leaving behind only what is firm and true.The Lion of the Tribe of Judah: A Theology of Preaching?The book of Revelation makes the connection of Judah the lion to Jesus explicit:Then one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep. See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.” Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered.” (Revelation 5:5–6) What makes Jesus the lion of the tribe of Judah? According to John’s vision he is the lion of Judah as a slain lamb. Like Judah, Jesus’ words pierce through to peoples’ hearts and reach the tender place—the place where there is cool, clear, drinkable water. Isn’t this what happens over and over again in the gospels? When people gather around Jesus we are told that he knows what is in every person’s heart. He discerns the depths. And he speaks to peoples’ depths from his own depths. Jesus never speaks superficially or shallowly from his throat but only ever from his heart. This is at least part of the reason why no one understands Jesus when he speaks in the gospels. Dietrich Bonhoeffer notes that when Jesus converses with the Pharisees, “he seems to answer a completely different question from the one he was asked. He seems to speak past the question, but in this very act he completely addresses the questioner.” Jesus’ word pierces to the division of soul and spirit, joint and marrow.When Jacob delivers his last words to Judah he says, “Judah is a lion’s cub; from the prey, my son, you have risen up.”The great medieval Rabbi Rashi, in a typical midrashic (mis)reading, says that “the prey” that Jacob is referring to is Joseph. The word for prey is teref which rhymes with Jacob’s words that Joseph has been torn to pieces (tarof toraf Yosef). Judah was the wild animal that tore Joseph to pieces.But Rashi makes one other surprising move. When Jacob says, “From prey, my son, you have risen up” Rashi says that by “my son” Jacob is not speaking about Judah but referring to Joseph. In other words, Jacob is saying to Judah, “from the prey, my son Joseph, you have risen up.” It is by Judah’s speech that Joseph is metaphorically brought back to life. This is precisely what the words of Jesus do. Standing at the grave of his friend Lazarus Jesus weeps. He instructs them to roll away the stone from the grave. Then, Luke tells us, “he cried out in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’” The Greek word used for “cried out” can be translated as “screamed.” This is the roaring Lion of Judah whose speech raises the dead.We could begin to piece together a whole theology of preaching from this story of Judah’s roar.When the preacher preaches he or she is not offering their opinion or advice. The preacher is delivering the Word of God. Jesus himself promises to speak through the humble human words of the preacher. The Lion of the tribe of Judah roars in our preaching. Just as milk does not come from the mother, says St. Augustine, the Word of God does not come from the preacher. But, of course, preaching hardly ever appears to be raising the dead. Most sermons do not sound like a “lion’s roar.” But this is the folly of preaching. Yes, the Lion roars when his word is preached, but usually (if not always) it sounds like a whimper.The Apostle Paul dealt with this. His preaching was foolishness and presented itself as weakness. Paul’s sermons did not sound like a lion’s roar, but a tender, weak, slain lamb’s bleating.This is the promise in the foolishness of preaching. The voice of the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the resurrected one, Jesus Christ, speaks to us today by his Spirit when the Word is preached. He draws up the clean, cold water out of the depths of our hearts. Bringing us back to life with his own life. But his roar sounds like a bleat.As Karl Barth said, when the word is preached “[Christ] speaks for Himself…It is not He that needs proclamation but proclamation that needs Him. He…makes it possible.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

The Joseph Story Ep. 4This week we take a close look at Joseph’s scheme (dissembling) that he puts his brothers through. The scheme serves the purpose of forcing the brothers to experience the suffering they caused Joseph in an “eye-for-an-eye” type justice. But it also forces them to relive their original crime, which unearths their feelings of guilt.In other words, Joseph scheme causes his brothers to come to an intimate knowledge of the truth of what they did to him, but then it also opens up the possibility for forgiveness, reconciliation, and even communion.Joseph’s SchemeIn Genesis 42 the brothers are forced to go down to Egypt to buy grain because of the famine. When they arrive Joseph immediately recognizes them, but they do not recognize him. After asking them where they are from, Joseph accuses them of being spies who have come to see the “nakedness” of the land. He then throws them into prison.This is an obvious doubling and reversal of what the brothers did to Joseph at the beginning of the story. Joseph’s scheme or plot echoes the brothers murderous conspiring—an eye for an eye.The brothers threw Joseph down into a pit. That pit led to Joseph being brought down to Egypt where he eventually is thrown into prison, which he associates with being in the pit. Now, the brothers are in the same place they put Joseph. And, what’s more, they have been thrown into prison after being falsely accused of a crime (with sexual overtones: i.e. “nakedness” in Scripture consistently refers to sexual misconduct). This is precisely what happened to Joseph in Potiphar’s house. He was thrown into prison after being falsely accused of sexual misconduct with Potiphar’s wife. The brothers are figuratively suffering an eye-for-an-eye punishment for what they did to Joseph. But this initiates another doubling in the story. Joseph’s next move causes the brothers to relive their original crime.Joseph says that in order for the brothers to prove they are not spies they must travel back to Canaan and bring their youngest brother Benjamin back with them. This will show him that they were telling the truth about who they are. But, of course, this is causing the brothers to relive the sins of their past: They must now bring the other son of Rachel down to Egypt, just as they did with Joseph.The narrative gives many signs of the doubling of the story, but this is the most striking: When they set off to travel back to Egypt with Benjamin we are told that they carry with them gifts of balm, honey, gum, myrrh, pistachio nuts, and almonds (Gen. 43:11). These are the very goods that Ishmaelite traders had with them when they took Joseph down to Egypt twenty years earlier (Gen. 37:25).Finally, Joseph’s plot has one last test in it. Not only are the brothers forced to experience Joseph’s suffering and relive their past sins, they are also given an opportunity to perpetrate a new crime. Joseph has his silver goblet hidden in Benjamin’s sack of grain. When it is discovered Joseph says that Benjamin must become his slave in Egypt. Will the brothers do to Benjamin what they did to Joseph all those years earlier? Will they try to be rid of another favored son?God’s (Hellish) JudgmentJoseph’s scheme, has put the brothers through an eye-for-an-eye judgment. Yet, there is an obvious way that we cannot read this. Jesus says in Matt. 5:38-39 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.”Both Exodus and Leviticus spell out laws like this: * Exodus 21:23-25 But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.* Leviticus 24:19-20 Anyone who injures their neighbor is to be injured in the same manner: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The one who has inflicted the injury must suffer the same injury.Jesus is not overruling the laws given in the Torah, rather he is spelling out the spirit of these laws. So, Joseph’s scheme cannot be read as a how-to manual for getting even with your family. In Matthew 5 Jesus is not saying that Christians should let people take advantage of them, rather the point is that Christians must trust God to be the one to make things right. Paul says in Romans 12 that we are not to repay anyone evil for evil. Live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, but leave room for God’s wrath for it is written: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”God is the only one who can make eye-for-an-eye judgments. But we must remember that God’s ways are not our ways. The result of Joseph’s scheme is the beginning of a process of reconciliation between brothers. Can we imagine that God’s eye-for-an-eye judgments might be up to the same thing? It hardly needs to be pointed out that justice is not served simply by repaying evil for evil. If you gouge my eye out in a fight, it does not actually repair or heal me to then have your eye gouged out. So, what’s the wisdom in eye-for-an-eye justice? It is not merely that it is punitive or retributive justice—which is not really justice at all. The glimmer of truth in this kind of justice is that it can bring some of the truth of what you have done to me to bear on you so that you reckon with the harm you’ve inflicted.So, why is the Joseph story given to us? Perhaps to gain an insight, a foretaste into how God’s judgment might work.George MacDonald captures the true spirit of God’s justice: “Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.”Simply annihilating evil does not overcome it. Annihilation is an evil act. So to annihilate evil is to overcome evil with evil. Evil is victorious in that case. God is much better than that. He does not repay evil for evil. God overcomes evil by replacing it with his goodness. The true overcoming of evil is only with the good. This story bears a faint witness to this truth. By Joseph’s scheme the brothers live with their evil long enough that they finally choose to do good. They—figuratively—replace the evil they did to Joseph with what they do for Benjamin. This is the slaying of evil.I think that can even help us envision how God’s judgment might work. Of course I’m not claiming that this is the method by which God will put everything right, but it does help free up our imaginations to envision how a perfectly good God might bring his restorative justice to bear on the evils that have taken place in his world. Hebrews says that it is appointed unto man once to die and then comes judgment. Perhaps Joseph’s scheme gives us a foretaste of what God’s (hellish) judgment might be like. In George MacDonald’s fairytale Lilith (a story about the queen of hell!), people who have died are given the opportunity to confront what they’ve done in their lives and come to acknowledge the truth of their sins and the evils they’ve done to others. It is judgment. In fact, it’s hell. It’s terrifying. But the point is that this is a healing and restoring judgment. It is surgery. Each person has to come to see their own wrongs for themselves. They have to lay down on the operating table. This is where C.S. Lewis got his famous idea of hell: That the doors of hell are locked for the inside.This is Lewis’s idea of hell, too. The gates of hell are locked from the inside. Lewis has made a very appealing case that God does not send people to hell, but rather people choose hell for themselves. The doors are locked, but they are locked from the inside. While Lewis got his take on hell from MacDonald, they ultimately disagree. Both Lewis and MacDonald agree that God’s desire is that none should perish. Where they disagree is not in God’s desire but in God’s capacity. Lewis believed that some people will never come around. Even if hell is a never-ending repeating cycle of eye-for-an-eye justice in which sinners are being shown the truth of their sins and given the opportunity to make right what was wrong, Lewis believed that some people will choose to stay locked in that loop. As Lewis himself says, in the end love loses. God does not get what he wants. What God desire he cannot bring about because many human beings will not cooperate with what God wants.MacDonald had issues with that. For one, it makes it so that evil is actually undefeatable. It makes evil out to be an equal opposite power to God that in the end God cannot do anything about. But, of course, we have many passages in Scripture that seem to suggest that God will annihilate all evil rather than purge it.Whether you go with Lewis or MacDonald on the final issue, I think the Joseph story can at least bear a faint witness to how ultimately good the (even hellish) justice of God really is. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

The Joseph Story Ep. 3A preliminary remark: One of the gifts of Scripture is that its stories allow us to process our deep-seated personal pain in a safe way. I can talk about my own pain a lot easier by talking about Joseph’s pain. The topic of trauma is a sensitive one, but perhaps the Joseph narrative can give us enough distance from our own circumstances—even for a moment—to think about the nature of trauma, God’s promises in the midst of trauma, and especially to begin to pray. Family TraumaOld Testament scholar James Ackerman points out that the main theme of the Joseph story is the providential care of the family of Israel through Joseph’s career. But, he says, a very strong and related sub-theme is the reconciliation of family. We’ve been referring to this theme as “family wounds.”The wounds in the Joseph story are deep. Joseph’s father, Jacob, loves him more than any of his brothers. This not only creates arrogance in Joseph, but it also has the unintended consequence of cutting him off from his brothers. His brothers hate him for this and it leads to their plot to “cast him into the pit” and be rid of him for good.Avivah Zornberg observes that this is a traumatic experience for Joseph—one that will mark him the rest of his life. In other words, family trauma and the healing of that trauma is right at the heart of the story of Joseph. DismemberedZornberg points out that the themes of remembering and forgetting play a crucial role in the entire drama. Or as she has it: “Re-membering the Dismembered.” Joseph himself is dismembered by his brothers. They rip the coat of many colors from him, dip it in goat’s blood, send it to their father, and ask him to identify it: “Is this not Joseph’s coat we found?” Jacob cries out: “It is my son’s robe! A wild animal has devoured him; Joseph has surely been torn to pieces” (Gen. 37:33).In Hebrew that last line is only three eerily rhyming words: Tarof toraf Yosef.Joseph is torn apart. Jacob is wrong, but he’s also right. The brothers were the wild animals that “flayed” and “dismembered” Joseph so that he would not be a threat to them ever again. They were Cain and he was Abel.The rest of the story is about re-membering what was dismembered. Putting the broken, fragmented pieces of Joseph (and his brothers) back together through the act of remembering.Re-memberedZornberg asks: What happened at the pit that day? It seems straightforward. We tell the story to children and we reprise Genesis 37. But is it so simple? Perhaps not. At the beginning of Genesis 37 the 10 brothers decide all together to kill Joseph. They are of one mind on the issue. But Reuben speaks up. He’s the oldest. Reuben saves Joseph by saying, “Let us not commit murder.” Zornberg says that in Hebrew it’s the coldest, most legal way of stating the matter. In other words he is saying, “Let us not commit the crime of murder.” His plea is not filled with compassion for Joseph’s sake. It’s not an appeal for Joseph’s life but an appeal that they not become guilty of the crime of murder. But the narrator says that Reuben said this so that he might rescue him from the pit later.Twenty-two years pass. Joseph has been a slave in Potiphar’s house, accused of attempting to rape Potiphar’s wife, and thrown into prison (the pit, again!). But he rises out of prison to the right hand of Pharaoh. He is the most powerful person in Egypt. The famine hits the land and the brothers journey to Egypt to find grain. In Gen. 42 the brothers are all standing together again but the circumstances have been completely reversed. Joseph knows who they are but they do not recognize him. He accuses them of being spies that have come to check out the land. He begins his masquerade—pulling them this way and then that way. He says that in order from them to prove they are not spies they must go get their youngest brother, Benjamin, and bring him back to Egypt. While they do this he will keep one of the other brothers in prison. It is at this moment that we get the first confession of what they had done to Joseph twenty-two years earlier. As far as we know, they have never once spoken about it with each other until this moment. This is the first re-membering of what they dismembered. What do they remember? They re-member their cruelty. Not just the fact that they are guilty of a crime, but that they were overly cruel in a completely callous way. They say:“Alas, we are paying the penalty for what we did to our brother; we watched him in the anguish of his being when he begged us for his life and we did not hear it. That is why this anguish has come upon us.” (Gen. 42:21)Joseph was crying for his life but they didn’t hear it. It did not affect them in the moment. Immediately Reuben starts justifying himself:“Then Reuben answered them, “Did I not tell you not to sin against the child? But you would not hear it.” (Gen. 42:22)But in Genesis 37 he didn’t say anything like that. Then it was a cold statement that did not show any compassion towards Joseph: “Do not commit the crime of murder.” But now he remembers himself as being compassionate for Joseph. He remembers telling them: “Do not sin against the child!” But, he says, you would not hear it.So, what really happened by the pit? Zornberg then asks: Is Reuben editing the past to make himself look better? Is he trying to justify his own cruel actions? It’s possible. Memories often do work in the vein of wish-fulfillment. But, Zornberg observes, we do know that it was in his heart to save the child in some way—the text told us he said that calloused thing in order to save him.The 12th century Rabbi Maimonides says that Reuben did actually say, “Do not sin against the child,” but the brothers wouldn’t hear it. That’s why he shifted to talking about not committing the crime of murder. Genesis 37 does not record it because they did not hear it. It was as if he did not say that at all.This seems odd until we remember this little detail: “You would not hear it.”There was something else the brothers would not hear on that day. Did Joseph cry out from the pit? In Genesis 37 we are not told anything about Joseph crying out, begging for his life. We are only told that the brothers went and celebrated with a meal while Joseph was stuck in the pit. But now, twenty-two years later, we are finding out that he did cry.The brothers re-member. But before this moment it was as if it didn’t really happen. By not hearing Joseph’s cries they dismembered him. They tore him apart. Broke him into pieces.Zornberg then observes that it is only when someone hears you, acknowledges you, re-members the truth of what has happened to you, that the wound—the trauma—can start to heal. Joseph has been living a dismembered, broken life ever since that day at the pit. The only way for something that’s been dismembered to be healed is for it to be re-membered. When Joseph overhears them telling the story of the pit and all that they did to him, he is beginning to be re-membered. They did hear him cry. Reuben did see him as the little child that he was. Joseph is remembered and he begins to weep. Joseph has been in the world of the pit this whole time. His identity has been lost. He is fragmented and dismembered. He himself celebrates the fact that he has forgotten the trauma of the pit. He names his firstborn son Manasseh for “God has made me forget completely my hardship and my parental home” (Gen. 41:51).He’s grateful that God has made him forget. He’s thankful he is not haunted by the memory of what they did to him. But the irony of the name is clear: If you name your son “amnesia” have you really forgotten? Something in Joseph wants to remember that he has suffered a wound.Eventually in the story Joseph cannot continue the masquerade. He has to reveal his true identity to his brothers. He begins to weep again and orders all his Egyptian servants out of the room. He turns to his brothers and says: “I am Joseph.”He is re-membered. How? By hearing his brothers re-member him. He was in the pit, out of eyesight. Forgotten. Dismembered. But their re-membering begins to restore him. The work is not done, but he’s made the first few steps of climbing out of the pit of trauma. The broken fragments of himself are being re-membered.Jesus: Dismembered and Re-memberedAt the last supper Jesus gathers his disciples and breaks the bread to give it to them: “This is my body, broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”When Christ died on the cross his body was fragmented, broken, dismembered. But in his dismemberment for us in his death he has united himself to all deaths. He is broken into the pieces of every death in order to bring resurrection to all who have died.Christ is dismembered into the fragments of our lives, our traumas, our wounds—and by taking our deaths upon himself he re-members us—he puts us back together.Christ commands us to eat the meal in remembrance of him. We are to remember him. But when we do this it is actually him who is re-membering us—making us members of his body and bringing healing and restoration.The request of the thief on the cross to Jesus is Joseph’s request to the cup-bearer in the Egyptian prison: they both ask to be remembered. The cup-bearer forgets Joseph, but Jesus does not forget anyone. The thief said to Jesus: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:42). Jesus heard his cry. He hears all our cries to re-member and as we eat the bread and drink the cup he makes good on his promise. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

A Sermon for Good Friday 2026A Good Friday sermon on Psalm 229 Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.10 On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.Johannes Tauler (1300-1361) on Mary at the foot of Jesus’ cross:“For if any creature could have brought comfort to our Lord as He hung upon the Cross, none would have been so fitted for this as His most blessed Mother…[But] His Mother’s presence brought no comfort with it, but rather added to His pain, for her pains were thereby joined to His…“For Thou alone by the lance of Thy compassion, hast searched into the weight and the grievousness of her woes, which to all men are simply beyond all understanding. And this, indeed, so greatly added to the pain of Thy passion, because not only in Thy body, but also in Thy Mother’s Heart Thou wert crucified, for her cross was Thy Cross, and Thine was hers.”(Meditations on the Life and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, chapter 44) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

The Joseph Story Ep. 2 Because of the additional “duties” that Holy Week brings, I was unable to write up an overview of this week’s class. I’m sure that with Easter Sunday on the horizon you will all find it in your hearts to forgive me.Here is the diagram of Joseph’s family tree that I drew in class:And here is the quote from Bonhoeffer:“So people called by Jesus learn that they had lived an illusion in their relationship to the world. The illusion is immediacy. It has blocked faith and obedience. Now they know that there can be no unmediated relationships, even in the most intimate ties of their lives, in the blood ties to father and mother, to children, brothers and sisters in marital love, in historical responsibilities. Ever since Jesus called, there are no longer natural, historical, or experiential unmediated relationships for his disciples. Christ the mediator stands between son and father, between husband and wife, between individual and nation, whether they can recognize him or not. There is no way from us to others than the path through Christ, his word, and our following him. Immediacy is a delusion…any time a [relationship] lays claim to immediacy, it must be hated for Christ’s sake.”(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 94–95.)Finally, I was drawing heavily in this class from an incredible teaching from Chris Green on “Family Matters.” You can (and should!) listen to that here: The Ties That Bind. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

The Joseph Story Ep. 1The Jewish scholar Jon Levenson has said that the Joseph story in Genesis “is arguably the most sophisticated narrative in the Jewish or the Christian Bibles.” Chris Green writes that it is “deceptively simple” and that it becomes “more mysterious with every good re-reading.” Taking these two thoughts together we see that the sophistication of the Joseph story is the reason why it becomes more mysterious the more you read it. For many of us this will sound like an odd claim. The Joseph story, as most of us have been taught, is very simple and straightforward. It’s the story of a faithful man who is hated by his brothers, sold into slavery in Egypt, but no matter what misfortune happens to him he remains faithful and God prospers him.While this is not wholly wrong, it also betrays a very simplistic, flattened reading of this “sophisticated” and “mysterious” story. Our simplistic readings are fall into one of two types: (1) practical readings and (2) typological readings.Practical ReadingsIf something is practical you can sell it. The greatest sin of any church or teacher today is to be impractical. We are enslaved to the practical. This means that we expect that every truth should make immediate and easy sense to us and that it should improve our lives. So it is unsurprising that practical readings on the Joseph story abound today.Here are just a few examples that Green gives of popular practical readings of the Joseph story:* “If they think like Joseph, believers can survive ‘in the lean times’ and ‘advance into the season ahead.’” (Shawn Akers)* “You may feel that God is leading you further and further and further away from your dream until the moment it happens. Look at Joseph.” (Mark Rutland)* “Joseph’s faith leads to prosperity. During a worldwide famine, Joseph was in charge of all the food. Now that’s prosperity! God was able to reveal the spiritual secrets that would open the door of success for him. That’s what makes God’s method of prospering so exciting. It works anywhere and everywhere. It will work in the poorest countries on the face of this earth just like it works here in the United States. And you can be sure that it will work for you!” (Kenneth Copeland)You can see how practical readings want to package Joseph and sell the story as something you can use to your benefit. Besides the fact that this is a less than faithful way to read and preach Scripture, none of this is in the text.Typological ReadingsTypological readings of Joseph want to read him as a “type” of Christ. Many throughout church history have noticed the unmistakable likeness of Jesus’s and Joseph’s stories: he is the favored son, he is betrayed by his brothers, he is innocent when he is tempted, he is delivered from prison to a position of power, and he accomplishes a sort of salvation for his family.Joseph is often seen to be one of the “cleanest” and “purest” types of Christ in the Old Testament. Many have said that he is presented to us as “sinless/faultless.” Now, these are vastly superior readings to the practical readings, but we still have a problem. We still aren’t reading the texts of the story closely or carefully. If we think Joseph has no faults, or that he is cleanest and most perfect type of Christ we aren’t reading the actual story very closely. In fact, the New Testament never makes the connection between Jesus and Joseph. That doesn’t mean Joseph isn’t a type, but it does help to remind us to read more carefully.In our eagerness to see Jesus in the text, we fail to actually read the story of Joseph. We rush to impose a lifeless image of Christ on him. With these readings Joseph becomes a mannequin who is only there to model clothes that really belong to Jesus. To quote Green yet again, “Our typological readings often amount to us stamping dead images of Jesus” onto Old Testament texts, narratives, characters rather than discovering his “living likeness” there.A Closer Reading…In the class we tried to do a number of close readings of a few of the texts from the Joseph story. I’ll list them here, but to hear the full explanation you can listen to the podcast.* Joseph is presented at the beginning of the story as “a spoiled younger child who is a tattletale.” His reporting on his own dreams to his brothers reveals an “adolescent narcissism.”* Most surprising and easiest to miss is the fact that Joseph’s dreams are never said to come from God. “This is the first dream recorded in Genesis in which the voice of God does not speak…The absence of any specific divine speech or revelation in the dream accentuates its ambiguity.” This is a significant departure from the way that Genesis relates others who dream earlier in the story. For example: * Genesis 20:3, “God came to Abimelech in a dream and said to him…”* Genesis 28:13, “There above the ladder stood the LORD, and he said, ‘I am the LORD, the God of Abraham and Isaac…’”* Genesis 31:24, “God came to Laban the Aramean in a dream of the night.”* Joseph never prays within the narrative. Even when he interprets the dreams of the cupbearer, the baker, or Pharaoh we are not told that he speaks to God regarding the interpretations. Samuel Draper writes, “Joseph rhetorically says, ‘do not all interpretations (of dreams) belong to God?’ Yet he then proceeds to interpret them with no further reference to the divine. This same pattern occurs with Pharaoh’s dreams in chapter 41 where Joseph attributes the interpretations to God, but God is not seen to act himself in inspiring Joseph’s interpretations.”* Joseph’s plan for the 7 years of famine has the effect of centralizing all of Egypt’s wealth and power to Pharaoh and enslaving all the people to Pharaoh. But it is Joseph’s own policies that will end up being forced onto his own children generations later. Joseph’s enslaving of Egypt has the consequence of enslaving his own people generations later.* Gen. 47:21-22: “So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh. All the Egyptians sold their fields, because the famine was severe upon them, and the land became Pharaoh’s. As for the people, he made slaves of them from one end of Egypt to the other.”Rabbi Arthur Waskow provides an alternative reading which points most of this out. Waskow observes that when Joseph is given the chance to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams, he does not pause to ask God for guidance. What if Joseph had asked God for wisdom? Waskow writes:“What might have happened if Joseph had asked God for guidance, and God had answered. How might God have told him to deal with the danger of famine? We have a hint: God’s command of how to prevent famine in the Land of Israel. Each year, every landholding family must let the poor gather grain from the corners of the field. In the seventh year, the land must lie fallow and all debts must be forgiven. The seventh year? How instructive! Perhaps Pharaoh’s dream should have been interpreted to say: There will be seven years of plenty. If you reap all seven years, there will follow seven years of famine. If you reset in the seventh year, you will have enough to eat. What Joseph hears and what he creates is almost precisely the reverse of the process that God later commands for the Land of Israel. Could that command have come earlier? Would God have made the Teaching available as soon as anyone asked?” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Paul pens both his letters to Timothy to encourage him to continue his struggle against the false teachers in the congregation at Ephesus. Paul planted this church years earlier. Luke records this in Acts 19—20. As Paul was leaving Ephesus he warned the church that false teachers would creep in and even arise out of their own number. There was something about the church in Ephesus that made it especially susceptible to a certain form of false teaching.I think at least part of that reason for this susceptibility was Ephesus’s culture of magic. It was a city steeped in magic. By “magic” I don’t mean sleight of hand, Penn and Teller, or Branson, Missouri—I mean incantations, hexes, or what the KJV calls “witchcraft.” But it was precisely that culture of magic that also led to Paul’s success. Luke tells us in Acts 19 that God was doing many great miracles through Paul. Handkerchiefs that touched his skin were being brought to the sick and they were being restored. It was Paul’s spiritual power—his spiritual street cred—that had the Ephesians intrigued by his gospel proclamation. The obsession with magic was a sort of double-edged sword cutting both ways. And I think Paul knew it would continue to be a problem, which was why he left Timothy in Ephesus to pastor this church.It is easy for us modern people to think that the issue of “magic” is something of the past—not something we need to be concerned about. After all, we live in what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor called the “age of disenchantment.” We live in a world that is drained of magic. It would be fairly difficult to find someone who believes in witchcraft or incantations. We live in the age of scientific enlightenment.But I don’t think the truth is quite that simple.While it is true that magic is not practiced in our corner of the world like it was in former times, I think we still live in a world that is steeped in what Chris Green calls magical thinking.I learned this first from C.S. Lewis. Lewis often made the case that modern, western people are actually some of the most magically minded people in the world–even if it looks a bit different than it did in first century Ephesus.Magic vs. MiraclesWhat has to be disentangled in Ephesus (and for us today) is the difference between magic and miracles. There is a marked contrast between the miracles God was doing through Paul and the magic practiced by the Ephesians. I spell this out in the podcast, but here is the short of it: * Magic is about bending nature/reality to my will; Miracles are nature/reality coming to align with the will of God. * Magic is a technique and is marked by mechanical thinking; Miracles give birth to relational thinking.* Magic violates nature; Miracles fulfill nature.C.S. Lewis, in his book Miracles, puts it like this:I contend that in all these miracles alike the incarnate God does suddenly and locally something that God has done or will do in general. Each miracle writes for us in small letters something that God has already written, or will write, in letters almost too large to be noticed, across the whole canvas of Nature. So, let’s take his first miracle as an example: turning water into wine. Is that magic? Is he violating the nature of water to turn it into wine? No, Lewis says, in that miracle Jesus is doing something suddenly in one moment that is already written in the canvas of nature.“Every year, as part of the Natural order, God makes wine. He does so by creating a vegetable organism that can turn water, soil and sunlight into a juice which will, under proper conditions, become wine. Thus, in a certain sense, He constantly turns water into wine, for wine, like all drinks, is but water modified…God, now incarnate, short circuits the process: makes wine in a moment: uses earthenware jars instead of vegetable fibres to hold the water. But uses them to do what He is always doing. The miracle consists in the short cut; but the event to which it leads is the usual one.”And it is for this very reason that Jesus refused when he was tempted by the Devil to turn stones to bread. That’s magic! Lewis says that Jesus refused because “The Son does nothing except what he sees the Father do.” And that father made that stone a stone.Lewis is picking this up directly from the Scottish preacher and author George MacDonald. Lewis referred to MacDonald as his “master.”Here is how George MacDonald puts it in a sermon on the wilderness temptations:“The Father said, That is a stone. The Son would not say, That is a loaf. No one creative fiat shall contradict another. The Father and the Son are of one mind. The Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change into another thing what His Father had made one thing. There was no such change in the feeding of the multitudes. The fish and the bread were fish and bread before… There was in these miracles, I think in all, only a hastening of appearances: the doing of that in a day, which may ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God time is not what it is with us.”Is it even possible for Jesus to make stones into bread? I think MacDonald is suggesting that it is not possible for Jesus to do this and remain who he is. Jesus cannot turn stones into bread without ceasing to be who he is.Why? Because he is the Father’s Word that makes the stone a stone. For him to do magic and turn a stone into a loaf of bread would be for him to contradict himself and to contradict himself would be to contradict the Father. Jesus will not—indeed cannot!—violate or deform anyone or anything in its integrity. Magic mutilates in order to gain power. God creates, fills, and fulfills all things to make them what they are.All this is grounded, of course, in the incarnation—what Lewis calls “the grand miracle.” When the Word becomes flesh it does not violate the nature of humanity, it fulfills it, and makes it what it was intended to be.The Magician’s TwinAre we still magical? This is where Lewis is most insightful, I think.In an essay entitled “The Abolition of Man,” published in 1944, Lewis was concerned with the way the world was going. World War 2, technology, the atomic bomb—science was producing new technologies at rapid speed. What worried him was that as we were technology was making massive advances we were losing our moral formation.We knew how to make a nuclear bomb, but the question was not whether or not we knew how, but whether or not we should.At the end of the essay Lewis compares our scientific thinking with magical thinking. In fact, he thinks they are twins. (We discuss this in class, but I’ll leave you with his words.) “I have described as a ‘magician’s bargain’ that process whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to Nature in return for power. And I meant what I said. The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak.“There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious–such as digging up and mutilating the dead.“[Francis Bacon] rejects magic because it does not work; but his goal is that of the magician.“It might be going too far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from its birth: but I think it would be true to say that it was born in an unhealthy neighborhood and at an inauspicious hour.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

As we close our study of 1 & 2 Timothy we come to the most notorious lines in either book: “11 A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet” (1 Tim. 2:11-12).Of course, the typical complementarian vs. egalitarian debates center on this passage. In class I gave both a historical and a theological argument for why I don’t think this passage prohibits all women throughout all time from teaching or holding positions of authority within the church. ****This post is not a write-up of the class, but a sort of postscript to the class. If you want to find either the historical or theological arguments I gave, you’ll have to listen to the podcast. What follows is a few extra, more technical details to the way I think history and theology should interact.****History and TheologyHistorical-critical arguments function by seeking to uncover the historical background behind the text. This historical work is very important, but ultimately I don’t think it is strong enough to hold the weight we put on it. The mistake is in assuming that “historical-critical” readings have an objectivity to them—that history is a “hard science.” But the truth is that historical-critical readings are just as subjective as any other kinds of readings because you can never remove the “reading subject” from the act of reading. (This is the myth of “scientific objectivity and neutrality” and it has made its way into the heart of biblical studies. George Steiner called it the “fallacy of imitative form.” The fallacy is that we can copy and paste the “scientific method” and apply it to all fields of study and end up with cold, hard, scientific truth—even when interpreting Scripture.)If you come to my office I can show you bookshelves filled with commentaries by different historical-critical scholars—all brilliant—but they disagree (especially on the issue of women in ministry). The complementarian historical-critic can form a background history to 1 Timothy that shows that Paul clearly meant this prohibition against women teaching in the church to be universally applied to all churches in all times. On the other hand, we can pull down a commentary by an egalitarian scholar that constructs a historical background to 1 Timothy that shows that Paul clearly did not mean for this prohibition to be universally applied. And then you can pick whichever view you like best and pretend that it is “scientific truth.” But what’s more subjective than picking the commentary that says what you like best? None of this is to degrade the work of historical-critical scholars. We absolutely need that work. But it is time we recognize the limits of what historical scholarship can actually deliver. This is why I concluded the class with a theological argument for women in ministry. I think that is a much more robust grounding for women in ministry while at the same time being honest about the involvement of the “reading subject” in the interpretation of the text.To paraphrase one of my favorite lines from Ephraim Radner: We do not look to history to find the truth of Christ, we look to Christ to find the truth of history. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Suffering and Power2 Timothy is a tender letter. It is written from a jail cell by a man who knows he is not long for this world. Paul’s heart is opened wide to Timothy throughout. The letter begins: “To my dear son, Timothy,” and concludes with: “Do your best to come quickly to me.” Paul needs his dear son by his side because most everyone else has deserted him. He’s lonely and in need……and yet the letter is packed full of powerful statements that are meant to encourage Timothy to remain strong in the faith even amidst his fear, doubt, and shame. We get strong, quotable lines like: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day…” (2 Tim. 4:7—8).These are the two, seemingly antithetical, themes in the letter: suffering and power.Paul’s suffering is a cause for concern for those that follow his teachings. His imprisonment is shameful. It almost seems like an argument against the truth of the gospel message that he proclaims. If the man Jesus Christ is enthroned in heaven at the right hand of the Father and has been made Lord and Judge of all, then why is Paul suffering in prison?We often don’t allow these two notes to ring out very clearly in our reading of 2 Timothy, but they are the very dynamism of the letter. This dynamism is captured in back to back verses—one we like to quote and the other we often forget. In 2 Timothy 1:7 Paul writes, “...for God did not give us a Spirit of cowardice but rather a Spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” That’s a Hallmark card if there ever was one. But we don’t let Paul finish his thought. He continues, “Do not be ashamed, then, of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel, according to the power of God…” (2 Tim. 1:8).God has given Timothy the Spirit of power and, therefore, he ought not be ashamed that Paul is in prison and about to die. In fact, precisely because Timothy has the Spirit of power, he should actually join in with Paul in suffering for the gospel. To have the Spirit of power results in suffering.The Spirit and Power?Paul is using the word “power” in a way that is almost unrecognizable to us. Typically when we hear the word “power” what comes to mind are things like domination, control, and the sword. “Power” is a term we usually associate with masculinity. The same problem we addressed last week with election and predestination is sneaking in again: the problem of abstraction. If the concept of power remains abstract it can be defined any way one likes. We think we know what power is like and then when we are told that God’s Spirit gives power, we assume we know what that means. What is needed is a concrete definition of power. What does the power of this God look like?Think of two well-known texts: Zech. 4:6 “‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord Almighty.” God’s work in the world is not accomplished by worldly power, but by the Spirit. God’s Spirit and worldly power are not compatible. Now think of Acts 1:8 “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” The Spirit is God’s own power. But the power the Spirit brings is a power to suffer. The Greek word here for “witnesses” is “martyria.” The power the Spirit gives is a power for martyrdom.The Weakness of GodPaul repeatedly makes the point that God’s power is revealed in weakness. 1 Cor. 1:18–25 18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God…20 Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.“The weakness of God” is a striking line we easily miss if we are in a hurry. What is the weakness of God? We can mishear him if we think he’s saying something like: “God is so powerful that even his weakness—if there were such a thing—would be stronger than human strength.” That is to explain the text away. Let the words Paul actually wrote shock you. The weakness of God is his power, and God’s power is mightier than worldly power. What is the weakness of God? It’s the cross. As St. Maximus says, “The one who knows the mystery of the cross and the tomb, knows the reasons of things.” The power of God is Christ suffering on the cross. And it is this power that is at the heart of creation.The death of Jesus in weakness is God’s power, but it is not controlling. It is not dominating. It is not “masculine” in the sense we discussed above. But, Paul says, to those whom God has called it is the power of God.Gregory of Nyssa explains it this way: the crucifixion is the greatest demonstration of God’s power because in dying on a cross God is showing that he can even do something that is opposite to his nature. God is so powerful that he can become weak.This truth is grasped more easily by those who are in the midst of suffering. Listen to Dietrich Bonhoeffer describing the weakness and powerlessness of God from his own prison cell:“[God] is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matt. 8:17 [“he took our infirmities and bore our diseases”] makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering. Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world…The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.How is it that God’s suffering and God’s powerlessness help us? Is it that he pretends to be powerless or that he feigns suffering? No. Think of the striking difference between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John is vastly different from the other three Gospels in many ways, but one of the primary differences is in the way it characterizes Jesus’ suffering. In the synoptics Gospels while Jesus is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane he is in anguish and sweating great drops of blood: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not what I will but your will be done.” (Luke 22:42, Matthew 26:39). In John’s Gospel what does Jesus pray? “Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour? No! For this reason I have come!” (John 12:27)From the cross in Matthew and Mark Jesus cries out, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” But in John’s Gospel he says, “It is finished.” It seems that in the synoptic Gospels we get agony where in John’s Gospel we get triumph.But the point is not that Jesus was play-acting, or that his suffering was not genuine. The point is that the suffering is the triumph. His anguish is his glory. His cross is his throne. His weakness is his power!God’s power is revealed in the weakness of Jesus. And this power in weakness is shown just as much in his birth as in his death. To be born is to be totally at the mercy of life happening to you. It is to “suffer” in the technical sense. But precisely by accepting this suffering he transforms it and generates new life from inside the suffering. Jesus accepts suffering and even death precisely so that he can create resurrection life for us in the midst our sufferings.And now we can see a bit more clearly what God’s power is like. It is not dominating, controlling, or “masculine.” It is the power to give life. It is much more like the power of a womb.Many early Christian writers often compared God to a breastfeeding mother. God’s power is a power that nourishes and generates life rather than merely taking life. St. Augustine often described God’s power as “maternal love, expressing itself as weakness.”A womb is powerful. Not in a dominating or controlling way, but in a generative way. It creates new life. When we conceive of power we usually think of power as the ability to take life. But true power is found in the ability to give life.Jesus’ power is much more like the power of a womb. He accepts the suffering of this world and by accepting it into himself he brings it into the divine life and then changes it for our good. Jesus metabolizes our suffering into the life of God in order to bring his divinity to bear on our suffering.Jesus died. He allowed that happen to him. That was truly weakness. But by that weakness he transformed death from the inside out. He changed death into a way of life and love. In his weakness he is strong.The Spirit Dwelling Within UsWhen we think of God’s power we think of the force that can get us out of jams—a force that acts on my life and on my circumstances from the outside. But God wants something else for us. He doesn’t merely want his power to act on our lives from the outside, he wants his power to be at work in our lives.This is why Paul tells Timothy in 1:14 that he is to “guard the truth that has been entrusted to you by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us.” The Spirit of God is the power of God. But that power does not arrive in our lives to act on our lives from the outside. The power of God is not next to us or around us or above us—it is in us!The work of the Spirit is to mystically join our suffering to Jesus’ suffering so that it is transformed by his power. Think of the Spirit as an umbilical cord that connects our wounds to the wounds of Christ—the source of life! No one saw this more vividly than Julian of Norwich in her divine showings:“Here I saw a great one-ing between Christ and us, as I understand it, for when He was in pain, we were in pain…The most significant point that can be seen in the Passion is to comprehend and to understand that He who suffered is God… and now He is risen and no more able to suffer, yet he suffers with us still… we are now on His cross with Him in our pains and our suffering, dying; and if we willingly remain on the same cross with His help and His grace until the last moment, suddenly He shall change his appearance to us, and we shall be with Him in heaven…and then shall all be brought to joy.”By the power of the Spirit we are on the same cross with Jesus in our current sufferings. The Spirit connects us to the womb of Jesus so that we are nourished and sustained right now and so that we will eventually be brought forth in joy. This is the power of God’s Spirit. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Last week we looked at the non-rivalrous, non-competitive posture the church is to have to the world. The church is called to be for the world not against it. In 1 Timothy 2:1—5 Paul says that there is one mediator, Jesus Christ, who died for the entire world, and it is through this mediator that the church is called to make petitions, prayers, intercession, and thanksgiving for all people. Why? Because “God wills that all people be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.”But this focus on the universality of God’s desire for all people to be saved seems to bump up against another idea in the Pastoral Epistles—namely, that God has an elect group of people, the church, and he has chosen them before the beginning of time.2 Tim. 2:8–10 8 Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David—that is my gospel, 9 for which I suffer hardship, even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained. 10 Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, so that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory.Why does Paul use the word “elect” here instead of “the entire world”? The word “elect” means chosen. It carries a notion of choosing among options—this one instead of that one. Think of being at the grocery store picking out produce. Election seems to be opposed to universality. Does God will that all people should be saved or does he actually have a special group of chosen people?Does God preordain the destinies of individuals? Does he have a group of people he has chosen to save and another group he has chosen not to save?My hunch is that many of us don’t really know what to do with the election or predestination passages in Scripture. Th thought of God choosing some people for salvation and others for damnation doesn’t sit well with most of us. But those passages are there and occupy a central place for Paul. Here’s just one example:Ephesians 1:4–5 4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. 5 In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.What jumps to mind for most people is the specter of Calvinism and Double Predestination.John CalvinCalvin’s doctrine of election arises from his observation that not everyone in the world has the gospel preached to them, and even of those that do, many do not respond in faith. He combines that observation with his interpretation of Scripture and comes to the conclusion that from eternity God has predestined some to salvation and others to destruction.“All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death.” (Calvin, Institutes, III.21)God’s predestination is done by God’s “Absolute Decree.” God doesn’t choose people based on his foreknowledge of their merit or the works that they will do. If he did, it would not be a free gift of grace but something we earned. This is why election takes place “before the foundations of the world” (Eph. 1:4). As Paul says in 2 Tim. 1:9 “[God] saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace, and this grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began…”There is no distinction, then, between those individuals elected to salvation and those predestined for destruction. It is based solely on God’s omnipotent, free will.This seems to make God into an arbitrary tyrant. Calvin deals with these problems by saying that God’s will, by the fact that he wills it, is good and right. In other words, what right does the clay have to say to the potter, “Why have you made me like this?”Karl BarthThe Swiss theologian Karl Barth introduced a major corrective to the Calvinist doctrine of election. In short, Barth’s doctrine of election is radically christocentric—everything centers on Christ.“The doctrine of election is the sum of the Gospel because of all words that can be said or heard it is the best: that God elects man; that God is for man…It is grounded in the knowledge of Jesus Christ because He is both the electing God and the elected man in One. It is part of the doctrine of God because originally God’s election of man is a predestination not merely of man but of Himself.” (Barth, Church Dogmatics, II.2, p. 3)Barth insists that the doctrine of election must be understood as gospel—as good news. He rejects any understanding of the doctrine of election that isn’t grounded in the knowledge of Jesus. If the gospel is central to understanding God’s election, then we have to begin with Jesus if we want to think rightly about election.For Barth, we have a true view of God only when we get to know him in the face of Jesus. If you want to know who God is—and therefore what election means—you have to look to Jesus. There is no God behind the back of Jesus of Nazareth.In other words, the God who elects is fully revealed in Jesus. Jesus Christ is the God who elects. There’s no other hidden, unknown God above or higher than Jesus that does the electing. If we are talking about God we are always also talking about him. He is the image of the invisible Father. Iff anyone has seen him, they have seen the Father. No one has seen the Father, but Jesus, God’s one and only Son, has made him known. Jesus is the “Electing God.”But—and here’s the key—Jesus is not only the God who elects, he is also the one elected. He is both the “Electing God” and the “Elected Man.” He is both truly God and truly human.For Barth the problem with Calvin’s understanding of election is that it is too abstract. The God doing the electing is an abstract, hidden, and unknown God. But God is not abstract. He is perfectly revealed in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.The image of the potter and the clay has to be completely reworked now in light of the Incarnation. Jesus is both the potter and the clay in one person. He’s the potter who has become the clay in order to save it.Jesus For Us and With UsI think Barth’s doctrine of election helps us make more sense of our seemingly conflicting passages in 1 and 2 Timothy. Is election God arbitrarily choosing ABC but rejecting XYZ? Or should we begin our thinking about election by talking about God’s choice made in Jesus Christ to be for all humanity?If Barth is right, then God has elected all humanity in the act of the Incarnation. By becoming human, God has united himself with the entire human race. Christ is the elected human being and “in him” we are also elected. Jesus is the man who so radically joined himself with sinners like you and me that for the Father to raise Jesus from the dead he would have to take us along with him. With this in place let’s reconsider a few passages:2 Timothy 1:9–10[God] saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace, and this grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time…The grace was given to us where? In Jesus Christ. When was it given? Before the beginning of time. Put otherwise, before the beginning of time God decided (elected!) to be God this way. He elected to God for us in Jesus Christ, laying his life down for the sake of the world. That’s God’s election. Ephesians 1:4For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.Chose us where? In Christ. This isn’t a blind, arbitrary choice made above or behind Jesus. Election happens in Jesus, not simply for him. When was it given? Before God created anything he elected to be the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. 1 Timothy 2:3–4This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wills all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.God has elected to be the God who loves all people to the point of death on a cross. In Christ—the one elect man—God wills the election of all humanity. Robert Jenson, summarizing Barth, puts it like this: “God has chosen and determined Himself from all eternity to be man for [all] men.”As Paul says in 2 Timothy 2:13 “…if we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.”Your election is sure precisely because it does not depend on you, but it is made “in Christ.” Our salvation depends not on our faith but on God who is faithful even when we are faithless. Paul gives us this striking line: “for he cannot deny himself.” This means two things. First, God in his character and nature is faithful to the faithless. He can’t deny this about himself. This is who he has elected to be. For him to act unfaithfully would be for him to deny himself.But second, and more mysteriously, if God denied us he would be denying himself because he is the one who has elected to be joined to us from before the beginning of time. We are his body and he is our head. If he denied you—even if you were faithless—he would be denying himself.I’ll leave you with Barth at his best:“God is none other than the one who in his Son elects himself. And in and with himself elects his people.” (Barth, Church Dogmatics, II.2)In other words, Jesus refuses to be God without you. That’s good news. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

What relationship is the church to have with the world? Many versions of Christianity assume that the church and world are locked in a metaphysical fight to the death. One will win, the other will lose. But the church is not in a competition or duel with the world. Jesus says he will build his church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. The only competitive relationship the church has is with the powers of hell. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…” God is for the world. God loves the world so much he created the church. The fundamental posture of the church is a being-for-the-world rather than a being-against-the-world. The first is intercessory, the latter is competitive. This way of framing the issue is something I learned from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We’ve spent quite a lot of time with Bonhoeffer’s thought recently. But this is good and right because last Wednesday—February 4—was his 120th birthday! We did not properly celebrate last week (though I’m sure you all celebrated privately). So, in honor of Bonhoeffer’s birthday, we spent time with his lecture notes on 1 Timothy 2:1—7. Here’s the text from 1 Timothy: 1 I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people— 2 for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and dignity. 3 This is good, and pleases God our Savior, 4 who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. 5 For there is one God and one mediator between God and human beings, the human being Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all people. This has now been witnessed to at the proper time. 7 And for this purpose I was appointed a herald and an apostle—I am telling the truth, I am not lying—and a true and faithful teacher of the Gentiles.Bonhoeffer’s notes on 1 & 2 Timothy come from a class he taught in the summer of 1938. The lecture notes are handwritten and titled, “Exercises in the Pastoral Epistles.” Here are his notes on 1 Timothy 2…Verse 1. Once Timothy is exhorted toward true teaching, Paul speaks of prayer. It is a deeply rooted predicament of the church-community that it repeatedly forgets that the privilege of prayer has been given not only for its own sake but for the sake of the entire world. “Christ came into the world…” (1:15). That the church-community is rescued from the world does not mean that it should despise the world; instead, it means that its task is to intercede for the world. Precisely because those who have been rescued from the reign of the world truly know the world (“all people”), they are bound with the world in a new manner. Prayer and the preaching of the gospel serve the world according to the will of God in Jesus Christ. The church-community that denies its responsibility toward the world, toward “all people” (v. 1), and withdraws into itself denies the gospel and its commission. The church-community of saved sinners must moreover learn that from now on its prayer cannot be limited to petitions concerning its own affairs, but that genuine prayer extends far beyond that. 1. Petitions—in the beginning, this is the proper attitude of the child. 2. Worship, whose gaze is not upon our own needs but on God’s majesty and glory. 3. Intercession—entreating for other, by right of the church-community’s priesthood. 4. Thanksgiving for everything. In this fullness, congregational prayer belongs to all people, without any privilege for the pious over the unbelievers, friends and enemies. How could the church-community of Jesus ever withhold prayer from the enemies who need it in a special way? In the church-community’s prayer, all that is human becomes one, without distinctions, one before the grace of God. The fact that the church-community should and can see every person, whether powerful or despised, as in need of God’s grace makes it completely free and fearless in its encounter with people and takes away any contempt for humankind and all hatred. Because I am “to pray for all people,” I therefore cannot despise or hate any person; [otherwise] my prayer is a lie. Only in this way does the church-community remain what it is, a church-community of sinners saved by God’s grace.Because all humankind needs the prayer of the church-community, this holds true for kings and those in power as well. As human beings they are the objects of intercession. Whether they are Christians [or] persecutors (Nero), they are human beings, poor sinners in need of salvation and grace. Here, too, Paul always sees the human being behind the office. The church-community should bring petition, worship, intercession, thanksgiving for all people before God, even for enemies! That authorities must be mentioned in particular is necessitated by the fact that the church-community tends to despise and condemn those in power, especially in times of oppression. But this holds true, even for authorities: Petition = that is, for true order and government, justice and truth. Worship = that is, despite enemies and despite the powers that be, do not forget the one who alone has power. Intercession = that is, to ask for salvation and grace for those who are in sin, whose conversion would mean much for many people. Thanksgiving = that is, for the order and power that remains, as well as for the attack of the enemy under which the faith of the church-community endures. The church-community is not particularly called to pray for political-worldly objectives. Rather, the aim of this prayer also serves the church-community. The final objective cannot be that the world should remain in its worldly nature and be happy; the aim of God in the world is always God’s church-community. That which is done by God on earth is done ultimately for the sake of the church-community of Jesus Christ. The church-community, for its part, does everything to win the world for salvation, and that means nothing other than to serve God. But it is able to do this only when it leads a “quiet and peaceable life, in all piety and dignity” (The love of God and neighbor?). The church-community asks not for turbulent times of battle but for quiet and rest. Undoubtedly, God may bless even times of battle, but these are also times of temptation that the church-community does not ask for, for it knows how many fall by the wayside in such times and how difficult the ministry of true piety and dignity is in such times. So much prayer gets lost here, prayer for the oppressors becomes hard for the church-community, and much danger lies in this shortcoming! In a time of chaos the orders of the Christian life dissolve; the temptation to disorder and the frenzy of battle become so grave, shattering the measure of [reverence, respectfulness) and inflicting harm on the church-community.Verse 3. Such prayer for all people is pleasing to God, since God’s salvatory will embraces all people. From this it becomes clear that the content of prayer is the salvation of all people, including kings and authorities. The church-community asks for salvation and knowledge of the truth for all people, that is, for conversion. Verses 5ff. God’s salvatory will is unlimited; no person should be privileged over another person, for they are all human beings, and God is the one and only God, who is above everyone, to whom everyone must be converted. Therefore, pray for all people because they have the same God as you, even if they practice idolatry. There is only one mediator between God and human beings (!) who is there for everyone and who alone is able to save, the human being (!) Jesus Christ. He has given himself for all to be saved and has instituted the preaching of this. Now is the time of proclamation. The apostle has become the teacher for the nations. The universal preaching of salvation corresponds to the universal prayer of the church-community.This needs to be said in particular (against the genealogists who break open the differences among people,) against the teachers of the law who desire to erect boundaries between the pious and sinners, and who claim for themselves a privilege with God. The gospel belongs to all people because it belongs to sinners. How and if the universal salvific will of God will be achieved is no longer the objective of proclamation. Unaffected by this secret (which can easily lead again into “controversies, debates”), proclamation is to be issued universally, preaching law and judgment to those who transgress and the gospel to sinners. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Pillars That Make Shared Life PossibleWe are moving outward in concentric circles from the center of the church (the eucharist), to ordained ministry, to sociality within the church mediated by Christ, and now to the structures of authority within the church.Talking about power and authority is messy business. People get hurt in church—sometimes inadvertently, other times deliberately. But I’m convinced that the most dangerous thing to do is avoid talking about it. We are in desperate need of different ways of thinking and talking about authority within the church to help us recover a healthy understanding of authority.In 1 Timothy 3:14—15 Paul says that the church is the pillar and support of the truth in the world. Pillars are precisely about structure. They bear the weight of the building so that there is room inside for common life.When we hear the word “authority” we immediately think of someone exerting control over others. Our minds move quickly to abuses of power and how to prevent it. Of course this is important to consider, but it’s not a helpful starting point for reflection. It’s like being inside a building and only able to think about how the whole building might collapse at any moment. That’s going to create unnecessary anxiety and paralyze you from actually getting on with life.The place to start is with Jesus. How does God’s authority and power work according to him? In Mark 10 James and John come to Jesus and ask him if they can have the seats at his right and left hand when he comes in his kingdom. They are asking for positions of power and authority. Jesus tells them that these positions are already appointed. But when the other disciples hear about this they become indignant. So, Jesus calls them all together and says, “The rulers of the gentiles lord it over them, but not so among you. Whoever wants to become great among you must be one who serves. And whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all. For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:35—45).True authority, according to Jesus, is authority that serves. Jesus’ authority empowers others, lifts them up, and makes shared life possible. Just like pillars, those with authority are supposed to provide structure to the building, bearing the weight—the responsibility. The way the power of the world works is to make those beneath you bear the weight. “Lording it over” others is a way to exert authority so that they will be the pillars that make your life of luxury possible (think of Pharaoh).The difference between Jesus’ way and the world’s way is seen in who bears the weight? Who acts as the pillars? In the church it should be those with the greatest amount of power who bear the most weight (i.e. the elders, bishops/overseers, pastors/priests, deacons, etc.).One other thing to notice in Mark 10. When James and John ask if they can sit in the positions of power in Jesus’ kingdom, Jesus does not say, “Oh those don’t exist in my kingdom.” He doesn’t say, “Well, it’s actually a round table.” He doesn’t say, “There actually is no way to be great in the kingdom.” Rather, he says that if you want to become great you must do it this way: you must become a servant. Jesus doesn’t say, “Oh I’m not Lord!” Rather, he says, “I am the Lord, as one who serves.” Jesus does not reject authority structures, but he forces us to reshape and reimagine them in the way of the cross.The Question of HierarchyThere is a right and wrong way to hear this. These authority structures in church are often understood as a sort of “religious hierarchy” where the bishops, pastors/priests, deacons, etc. have greater access to God and his presence because they are closer to the top of the hierarchy. The assumption is that there is a fullness at the top of the hierarchy that gets lesser and lesser as you move down. In this (mis)understanding God is located at the top, so the higher up you are the closer to God you are. And the power of God flows first to those at the top of the hierarchy and then down from there like spiritual trickle-down economics. We have to reject this. The economy of God is infinitely better than Reagonomics. The economy of God is founded on the infinite, inexhaustible, and unfathomable riches in Christ Jesus. If we’ve really met God in the face of Jesus Christ then we know that he does not simply occupy the top of the hierarchy, but that in Christ he has also become the servant of all—bending down to humanity to wash feet.The deep theological truth here is that God is not just another being among others on the hierarchy of being. Rather, he is Being itself. He is the one who is creating and sustaining the entire hierarchy. He undergirds it all and gives being to it all. And, as we see in Christ, he means to fill all things on the hierarchy with himself. He is making the whole hierarchy to be himself because in the end Christ will be all and in all.In this understanding, no one is closer to God and his power than anyone else. God is the Source of Life of all he has made.Christ is fully present at all points on the hierarchy. But this does not create a bland, barren, cookie-cutter equality where everything becomes identical and loses its uniqueness. Christ means to fill all things with himself in order to make them uniquely what he’s called them to be so that they can play their unique part. It may be more helpful for us if we flip the picture on its side. Rather than thinking of the hierarchy as a ladder stretching up and down vertically, picture it as the keyboard of a piano stretching horizontally. A piano has higher and lower notes, but none of the notes are more important than the others. All the notes are unique and have their part to play making music.The first notes played in a song don’t have more of the song in it. They clue you in to what song is being played because they “lead” or “initiate” the song, but they themselves are not the whole song. We do need some to be leaders—to “initiate,” to “go first”—simply so that the whole song can be played. Order and structure are unavoidable in music. You can’t play all the notes of the song and sing all the words all at once. It is no different with our shared life in the church. The question is not whether power, authority, and structure will happen in the church, but whether or not it is done faithfully to the Lord who is a Servant. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Perhaps the most famous line in either First or Second Timothy comes in 1 Timothy 2:5, “There is one God, and so there is one mediator between God and man, namely the man Jesus Christ.”We can easily see the importance of this line, but when we consider it within the context of Paul’s letter to Timothy it can be hard to see how it fits in with the rest of the argument. Yes, Christ is our mediator with God. He has reconciled us to God. He has made peace between us and God. Important? Yes. But is it central? Paul’s letters are his instruction to Timothy on how to handle human relationships within the church. Paul puts it bluntly in 1 Timothy 3:15 “[I am writing this to you] so that you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church.”What does Christ as the one mediator between God and humanity have to do with how we conduct ourselves in church? As it turns out, this little line is the heart of all of Paul’s instructions to Timothy. The key is to see that Christ’s mediation is not only vertical (me and God) but also horizontal (me and you).Think of 1 John 4 says about the relationship of the “vertical” and “horizontal”: “If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20). There is no vertical dimension of Christ’s mediation without the horizontal dimension. T.F. Torrance was the first theologian to help me begin to think through what it means to say that Jesus is the one mediator between God and humanity. Torrance calls it “the double movement” of the incarnation: Jesus is (1) God to us and (2) us to God. But it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who helped me think through the horizontal dimension of Christ’s mediation. In Life Together he begins by contrasting two different kinds communities, or two different ways of relating to others. There is the Self-centered relationship/community (marked by what he calls “Human/Emotional Love”) and the Christ-Centered relationship/community (marked by “Spiritual Love”). This is the passage from Life Together we discussed in class:“Christian community means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ…We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.”“Among human beings there is strife. ‘He is our peace’ (Eph. 2:14), says Paul of Jesus Christ. In him, broken and divided humanity has become one. Without Christ there is discord between God and humanity and between one human being and another. Christ has become the mediator who has made peace with God and peace among human beings. Without Christ we would not know God; we could neither call on God nor come to God. But without Christ we also would not know our brother, nor could we come to him. The way to them is blocked by our own ego. Christ opened up the way to God and to our brother one another. Now Christians can live with each other in peace; they can love and serve one another; they can become one. But they can continue to do so only through Jesus Christ. Only in Jesus Christ are we one; only through him are we bound together. He remains the one and only mediator throughout eternity.”“In the self-centered community there exists a profound, elemental emotional desire for…immediate contact with other human souls…This desire of the human soul seeks the complete intimate fusion of I and You…in forcing the other into one’s own sphere of power and influence.”“Self-centered love loves the other for the sake of itself; spiritual love loves the other for the sake of Christ. That is why self-centered love seeks direct contact with other persons. It loves them, not as free persons, but as those whom it binds to itself. It wants to do everything it can to win and conquer; it puts pressure on the other person. It desires to be irresistible, to dominate.”“Spiritual love, however, comes from Jesus Christ; it serves him alone. It knows that it has no direct access to other persons. Christ stands between me and others. I do not know in advance what love of others means on the basis of the general idea of love that grows out of my emotional desires. All this may instead be hatred and the worst kind of selfishness in the eyes of Christ…Contrary to all my own opinions and convictions, Jesus Christ will tell me what love for my brothers and sisters really looks like.”“Because Christ stands between me and an other, I must not long for unmediated community with that person. As only Christ was able to speak to me in such a way that I was helped, so others too can only be helped by Christ alone. However, this means that I must release others from all my attempts to control, coerce, and dominate them with my love. In their freedom from me, other persons want to be loved for who they are, as those for whom Christ became a human being, died, and rose again, as those for whom Christ won the forgiveness of sins and prepare eternal life…I must allow them the freedom to be Christ’s. They should encounter me only as the persons that they already are for Christ [or: I must meet the other only as the person that he already is in Christ’s eyes]. This is the meaning of the claim that we can encounter others only through the mediation of Christ. Self-centered love constructs its own image of other persons, about what they are and what they should become. It takes the life of the other person into its own hands. Spiritual love recognizes the true image of the other person as seen from the perspective of Jesus Christ. It is the image Jesus Christ has formed and wants to form in all people.”“[Spiritual love] will not seek to agitate another by exerting all too personal, direct influence or by crudely interfering in one’s life…It will be willing to release others again so that Christ may deal with them. It will respect the other as the boundary that Christ establishes between us; and it will find full community with the other in the Christ who alone binds us together. This spiritual love will thus speak to Christ about the other Christian more than to the other Christian about Christ. It knows that the most direct way to others is always through prayer to Christ.”The question for us is whether we will allow Christ to mediate our relationships—not only with our enemies, but also with those closest to us. Will we seek direct and unmediated contact with them or will we trust them to Jesus’ hands? Will we grow impatient with them or trust them to Jesus’ timing? Are we so invested in our ideas of what we want them to be that we cannot release them to Jesus and allow him to make them what he’s called them to be? Will we interrupt his work in their lives by crudely interfering or will we give Jesus the space to shape and form them?Only when we allow Jesus to mediate our relationships with others will we ever really know them because he is their life This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

In 1 Timothy 4 Paul reminds Timothy that he was commissions into ministry “by Spirit-filled utterance [prophecy] and with the laying on of hands by the council of elders.” Again in 2 Timothy 1 Paul encourages Timothy to “fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands.”This is the beginning of the sacramental ritual of ordination. This ritual is “sacramental” because it not only authorized Timothy for his particular ministerial responsibilities but it also granted the very gift of the Spirit needed to fulfill those responsibilities.A “sacrament” is a sign that accomplishes what it signifies. The Lord’s Supper is a sign of our communion with God through Christ, but it is not merely a sign. When we partake in the Supper the reality of our communion with God is actually taking place. In other words, Jesus is really present in the bread and the cup. This is how the earliest Pentecostal fathers and mothers viewed Communion. In the Communion meal we are not just remembering the past event of Jesus’ death that took place two centuries ago. Rather, as we partake of this meal Christ really communes with us. He is mysteriously present as the Savior, Healer, Spirit-Baptizer, and soon-coming King.Chris Green provides tons of historical examples in his book Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper. I’ll include just a few of my favorites here.D.W. Kerr (General Council, 1916)The [Weekly Evangel] report of the 1916 General Council of the Assemblies of God includes a lengthy treatment of a sermon preached by D.W. Kerr in preparation for the Communion celebration that closed the meeting. Repeatedly, the article—recounting Kerr’s remarks—emphasizes the present-tense effectiveness of the Supper.‘This meal is intended not only for our spiritual, but for our physical benefit. Here is good news for the sick. You are invited to a meal for your health. As you are eating in faith you can receive healing for your body. If you cannot use the past tense and say ‘By His stripes ye were healed’, turn it into the present tense and declare, ‘By His stripes I am healed’. You say perhaps ‘I hope to be healed’. What time in the future will you be healed? God brings the future down to the present tense.’…[Kerr says] the feast points both back, to Christ’s death, and forward, to his return. However, participants’ focus must remain always on the Supper’s ‘distinct present aspect’…‘Here is the present tense of Calvary. We have come to a place of freshness, the result of Calvary. What is it? Life and life more abundant!…There is nothing old or stale about this memorial feast, the fruit of the vine is not old, the shed blood is not aged, the bread is not stale, the Lord’s body is not a mere thing of the past, the way is new and living. The thing most striking about the character of the feast is its presentness, not its pastness or its futureness. It has a present aspect, there is a sign of warmth, the blood is not cold and coagulated but flowing fresh from the wounded side of Jesus, ‘recently killed and yet living’.Myer Pearlman (Pentecostal Evangel, 1934)“[The meal] consists of the religious partaking of bread and wine, which, after having been presented to God the Father in memorial of Christ’s inexhaustible sacrifice, becomes a means of grace whereby we are inspired to an increased faith and faithfulness to Him who loved us and redeemed us.”E.N. Bell (Weekly Evangel, 1916)In response to a reader’s question about the possible benefits of taking the Supper, sometime editor and frequent contributor E.N. Bell provides a detailed explanation of his view of the Sacrament, complete with a brief overview of four historical positions. Catholics, he says, believe that the bread when it is blessed by the priest is ‘transmuted into the literal living body of Christ’, so that ‘in partaking we actually eat the body of Christ and literally drink His blood, and so get eternal life by partaking of the supper.’ Bell rejects this teaching. He rejects the doctrine of consubstantiation, as well, which he attributes to the Episcopalians. The third position, proposed by ‘the noted theologian Zwingle’ [sic], understands Communion as ‘simply a Memorial Feast,’ in which ‘the only good received in partaking [is] in bringing vividly to memory the truths of Christ’s atoning death.’ In this view, as Bell understands it, neither Christ’s body nor his blood are present at the Table, but are only ‘remembered and appropriated.’ Bell acknowledges some truth in this position, but he finally rejects it, too: ‘It lowers our view of the Lord’s Supper and makes it a thing too common.’ The fourth stance Bell attributes to Calvinists, especially Presbyterians, who maintain, he says, that the elements remain unchanged, but Christ is truly, spiritually present to the celebrants. Having provided this overview, Bell ventures his own view:“There is a good deal of truth in this spiritual view. In fact there is some truth in nearly every view of it. But I do not believe the physical Christ is present in the bread nor in the cup. I believe the loaf is still real bread and the cup still only the fruit of the vine. I believe it is a memorial, for Jesus said, ‘This do in MEMORY of me.’ But it is more than a memorial feast. Jesus is there in the Spirit to bless, quicken, uplift and heal; but what benefit the partaker will receive depends on his spiritual discernment; his faith and his appropriation from the spiritually present living Christ.”Elizabeth Sisson ("Our Health, His Wealth,” 1925)“Ah! Not more truly in that hour, happily called ‘Holy Communion,’ in that service, blessedly named ‘the Lord’s Supper,’ are the emblems of the Saviour’s broken body and shed blood, passed around, than is the SUBSTANCE always being passed to us. ‘You may feast at Jesus’ table all the time.”…She insists that what is needed is “Sacramental living; for it makes continually holy, common things.”Recovery of “sacramental living” is key, I think, to the work God has called us to do in participating in building Christ’s church. “Sacramental living” as Sisson says, makes everyday, humdrum life holy. This is what God means for us. He does not intend for us to live life always waiting on the next wild experience, but for our lives to be integrated sacramentally into his life. God means to sanctifying all aspects of our lives and to fill all things up with the life of his Son. The sacraments teach us that, even though it is harder to track, most of God’s work is in the mundane. As a sacrament the Lord’s Supper trains our vision: Jesus Christ is really present in this ordinary meal of bread and wine. And what is revealed in this meal is the essence of every meal. God means for every meal to become communion with him and our neighbors. The sacrament of ordination (laying on of hands) trains us to see that in the calling of minsters, God is revealing the “priestly essence” of all callings. Every vocation is to be “priestly” at its heart. Done in service and love for the life of the world. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Paul writes to his young protégé Timothy to “command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longer.” Paul does not ever clearly explain what these false teachers were teaching (Timothy doesn’t need him to). Throughout the two letters we primarily get little hints and insights into the situation by the way Paul talks about the effect these teachings have in the church-community.However, there are two passages in which we get a bit more of the picture regarding the content of the false teaching. In 2 Timothy 2 we learn that they are teaching that the resurrection has already happened, and then in 1 Timothy 4 we hear that they are a “pro-abstinence” group. They teach that people should abstain from marriage (sex) and from certain food (diet).This is almost certainly grounded in some brand of gnostic teaching that asserts that the material creation is corrupt and will spiritually pollute you if you partake in it.Paul strongly refutes this in 1 Tim. 4:3—5:3 They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods,which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. 4 For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, 5 because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.The problem was not so much that this heresy was technically imprecise, but that it led to sick living. In fact, it distorts the very heart of what it means to be human. Paul reminds Timothy that everything God created is good (Genesis 1) and has been given as a gift to be received with thanksgiving. The word Paul uses for “thanksgiving” is eucharistia. This, of course, quickly became the language the church used to refer to the Lord’s Supper. In Comunnion we receive with thanksgiving the gift of Christ’s body and blood.Paul says that everything God has created is good and it is consecrated when we receive it with thanksgiving—not because our thanksgiving magically changes the nature of things. Our prayers of thanksgiving are not a hocus pocus spell that magically make unclean things clean. Rather, as Luke Timothy Johnson says, our thanksgiving blesses God by recognizing that all things came from him and that all things are to be returned to him. Without the human thanksgiving the world still belongs to God, but it is not made “known” that it belongs to God. Without our thanksgiving (eucharist) there is no mutuality or reciprocity between the creation and the Creator—there is no relationship.The business of thanksgiving, of eucharist, is priestly work and so it is human work. All humanity is called to be priests, recognizing the goodness of God in all of creation and offering it back to him in thanksgiving and praise. No one has made this case more poignantly than Alexander Schmemann in For the Life of the World:To be sure, man is not the only hungry being. All that exists lives by ‘eating.’ The whole creation depends on food. But the unique position of man in the universe is that he alone is to bless God for the food and the life he receives from Him. He alone is to respond to God’s blessing with his blessing. The significant fact about life in the Garden is that man is to name things. As soon as animals have been created to keep Adam company, God brings them to Adam to see what he will call them…Now, in the Bible a name is infinitely more than a means to distinguish one thing from another. It reveals the very essence of a thing, or rather its essence as God’s gift. To name a thing is to manifest the meaning and value God gave it, to know it as coming from God and to know its place and function within the cosmos created by God.To name a thing, in other words, is to bless God for it and in it…God blessed the world, blessed man, blessed the seventh day (that is, time), and this means that He filled all that exists with His love and goodness, made all this ‘very good.’ So the only natural reaction of man, to whom God gave this blessed and sanctified world, is to bless God in return, to thank Him, to see the world as God sees it and–in this act of gratitude and adoration–to know, name, and possess the world. All rational, spiritual, and other qualities of man, distinguishing him from other creatures, have their focus and ultimate fulfillment in this capacity to bless God, to know, so to speak, the meaning of the thirst and hunger that constitutes life… The first, and basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God–and by filling the world with this eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him. The world was created as the ‘matter,’ the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament.It is not accidental, therefore, that the biblical story of the Fall is centered again on food. Man ate the forbidden fruit. The fruit of that one tree, whatever else it may signify, was unlike every other fruit in the Garden: it was not offered as a gift to man. Not given, not blessed by God, it was food whose eating was condemned to be communion with itself alone, and not with God. It is the image of the world loved for itself, and eating it is the image of life understood as an end in itself.To love is not easy, Mankind has chosen not to return God’s love. Man has loved the world, but as an end in itself and not transparent to God. He has done it so consistently that it has become something that is ‘in the air.’ It seems natural for man to experience the world as opaque, and not shot through with the presence of God. It seems natural not to live a life of thanksgiving for God’s gift of a world. It seems natural not to be eucharistic. The world is a fallen world because it has fallen away from the awareness that God is all in all…Man was to be the priest of a eucharist, offering the world to God, and in this offering he was to receive the gift of life. But in the fallen world man does not have the priestly power to do this. His dependence on the world becomes a closed circuit, and his love is deviated from its true direction. He still loves, he is still hungry. He knows he is dependent on that which is beyond him. But his love and his dependence refer only to the world in itself. He does not know that breathing can be communion with God. He does not realize that to eat can be to receive life from God in more than its physical sense…For ‘the wages of sin is death.’ The life man chose was only the appearance of life. God showed him that he himself had decided to eat bread in a way that would simply return him to the ground from which both he and the bread had been taken. ‘For dust thou art and into dust shalt thou return.’ Man lost the eucharistic life, he lost the life of life itself, the power to transform it into Life. He ceased to be the priest of the world and became its slave.The eucharistic life is what is lost in our world. We ate of the one tree that was not given by God as a gift to us. We ate of the one meal that was not in communion with God. But this is the gospel promise: in Christ God has given us a new meal that restores that communion. It is Christ’s very body and blood. It is the Lord’s supper. It is Eucharist. To eat of it is to be established in the communion of creation with its Creator because Christ, in his very person, is the communion of Creator and creature. As our great High Priest he has restored us to our original vocation as a kingdom of priests called to gather up the world around us and offer it back to him consecrated by our thanksgiving (eucharist) in Christ. In other words, through Jesus Christ creation becomes what it was made to be: very good.Our calling as members of Christ’s body is a priestly calling. It is, as Schmemann says, for the life of the world. Priestly work is work done on behalf of others. We worship, we offer our thanksgiving, for the sake of the world around us. This is the eucharistic life established in Christ. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

“Sound teaching strengthens, while sick teaching weakens…sick teaching leads to sick holiness.” -Dietrich BonhoefferSick Teaching, Sick HolinessGordon Fee argues that the primary purpose of Paul’s Pastoral Epistles is not to establish church order or provide a “church manual” for church governance. Rather, Paul’s purpose in writing to Timothy is to thwart the false teachers that have gained sway in the house churches of Ephesus.Paul can hardly go a chapter without writing about sound teaching/doctrine. The Greek word for “sound” that Paul uses is hygiano. Timothy is to devote himself to hygienic teaching, or teaching that is healthy and leads to health. The false teachers are unaware of the fact that they are promoting what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls a “sick teaching” that “leads to sick holiness.” In Paul’s words, it is a teaching that “spreads like gangrene” (2 Tim. 2:17).The difficulty is that Paul calls out the problem of sick teaching without really spelling out the nature or the content of such teaching. The reason is obvious. The letter was written to a lifelong companion, who would not have needed such instruction. Timothy is Paul’s “child in the faith” so the entire truth of Paul’s gospel (as we see it in Ephesians, Galatians, and Romans) is taken for granted.We have to pay close attention to see the marks of what Paul considers sick teaching and sick holiness.Marks of Sick TeachingWhat are some of the signs Paul gives to be on alert for to spot sick teaching? How do we spot gangrene?* An addiction to controversy and vain speculations (1 Tim. 1:4)* Legalism/Moral rigorism (1 Tim. 4:3)* Their teaching is driven by fear not motivated by love (1 Tim. 1:7—8, see St. John Chrysostom’s second homily on 1 Timothy)* Conceited (1 Tim. 6:3)* Quarrelsome and argumentative (1 Tim. 6:3)* Abusive/harsh language (1 Tim. 6:3)* An unhealthy attachment to their own opinions (1 Tim. 1:4, 1 Tim. 6:3—5)* Sincere (1 Tim. 4:2)The heart of the difference between sick and healthy teaching is a theme that is never far from Paul’s mind when he mentions these characteristics we’ve just listed. It comes down to freedom, fear, and love.In 2 Tim. 3:6—8 Paul a comparison to the false teachers at Ephesus and two out of the way characters from the book of Exodus. He writes, 6 They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, 7 always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. 8 Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these teachers oppose the truth. Jannes and Jambres are names given to two of the magicians in Pharaoh’s court that match Moses blow for blow with magic. Aaron throws his staff on the ground and it turns into a snake, but the magicians can match it. Moses turns the waters into blood, but again Pharaoh’s magicians mimic the sign.In the Old Testament the magicians are not named, but it is a part of the tradition of Jewish midrash to give names to the nameless. By “at least 150 B.C. the Egyptian magicians had been narrowed to two brothers and given the names Jannes and Jambres. By the time of Paul this tradition had become common stock.”This was a battle of power and authority; the authority of Moses, given him by God, and the authority of the magicians. But there is a stark difference in the way the two are wielding this power. Moses used his authority for the sake of liberating the Hebrew people while Jannes and Jambres used their’s to keep the people enslaved.As Chris Green once put it, “How do I know whether I’m speaking so that it’s God’s authority happening or merely my own authority? When I speak with God’s authority you are freed, but when I speak on my authority you are bound to me.”This is the heart of what makes the false teachers teaching so sick: its end goal is enslavement and subjugation to the false teachers. This is not always the easiest thing to discern, but the question has to always be this: is this teaching freeing me or is it dominating me?The Swiss theologian Karl Barth is famous for saying that all of God’s commands are actually permissions, they are “musts” in service of a “may.” And this, Barth says, is what sets God’s command apart from all others: God’s commands are always liberating not enslaving.Think of all God’s creation commands in Genesis 1. “Let there be light” is a command but it is also permission. By the command it permits the light to do what it does. It is a command that gives rise to freedom. God does not dominate, we dominate. God liberates. God doesn’t want slavish obedience, he wants the free obedience of his Son to come out of us in the power of the Spirit.Sick teaching is always driven by fear, the fear of enslavement and domination, and ultimately the fear of death (remember, they are “lovers of money”). But healthy doctrine births love in the hearts of those who hear it because it sets free. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

“By the way, a prison cell like this is a good analogy for Advent; one waits, hopes, does this or that—ultimately negligible things—the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.”-Dietrich BonhoefferThis week we read and discussed some of Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison during the season of Advent. Bonhoeffer touches on themes of suffering, grief, loss, and restoration, and sharing in the sufferings of God. Here are the sections we discussed:Letter to Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer, Dec. 17, 1943My dear Parents,There is probably nothing else for me to do than to write you a Christmas letter just in case. Even though it is beyond comprehension that I may possibly be kept sitting here even over Christmas, nevertheless, in the last eight and a half months I have learned to consider the improbable probable and by a sacrificium intellectus to allow those things to happen to me that I can’t change…Above all, you must not think I will become despondent on account of this lonely Christmas; it will take its distinctive place forever in the series of diverse Christmases I have celebrated in Spain, in America, in England, and I intend that in years to come I will not be ashamed but will be able to look back with a certain pride on these days. That is the one thing no one can take from me…Viewed from a Christian perspective, Christmas in a prison cell can, of course, hardly be considered particularly problematic. Most likely many of those here in this building will celebrate a more meaningful and authentic Christmas than in places where it is celebrated in name only. That misery, sorrow, poverty, loneliness, helplessness, and guilt mean something quite different in the eyes of God than according to human judgment; that God turns toward the very places from which humans turn away; that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn–a prisoner grasps this better than others, and for him this is truly good news. And to the extent he believes it, he knows that he has been placed within the Christian community that goes beyond the scope of all spatial and temporal limits, and the prison walls lose their significance.Letter to Eberhard Bethge, December 18, 1943Dear Eberhard,You too must receive a Christmas letter, at least. I no longer believe I will be released. As I understand it, I would have been acquitted at the hearing on December 17; but the lawyers wanted to take the safer route, and now I will presumably be sitting here for weeks yet, if not months. The past few weeks have been more difficult emotionally than all of what preceded them…I am thinking today above all of the fact that you too will soon be confronting circumstances that will be very hard for you, probably even harder than mine…It’s true that not everything that happens is simply “God’s will.” But in the end nothing happens “apart from God’s will” (Matt. 10:29), that is, in every event, even the most ungodly, there is a way through to God. When, as in your case, someone has just begun an extremely happy marriage and has thanked God for it, then it is exceedingly hard to come to terms with the fact that the same God who has just founded this marriage now already demands of us another period of great privation. In my experience there is no greater torment than longing…I have become acquainted with homesickness a couple of times in my life; there is no worse pain, and in the months here in prison I have had a quite terrible longing a couple of times. And because I think it will be similar for you in the next months, I wanted to write you about my experiences in this. Perhaps they can be of some use for you… Above all, one must never fall prey to self-pity. And finally as pertains to the Christian dimension of the matter, the hymn reads, “that we may not forget / what one so readily forgets, / that this poor earth / is not our home”; it is indeed something important but is nevertheless only the very last thing. I believe we are so to love God in our life and in the good things God gives us and to lay hold of such trust in God that, when the time comes and is here—but truly only then!—we also go to God with love, trust, and joy. But—to say it clearly—that a person in the arms of his wife should long for the hereafter is, to put it mildly, tasteless and in any case is not God’s will. One should find and love God in what God directly gives us; if it pleases God to allow us to enjoy an overwhelming earthly happiness, then one shouldn’t be more pious than God and allow this happiness to be gnawed away through arrogant thoughts and challenges and wild religious fantasy that is never satisfied with what God gives. God will not fail the person who finds his earthly happiness in God and is grateful, in those hours when he is reminded that all earthly things are temporary and that it is good to accustom his heart to eternity and finally the hours will not fail to come in which we can honestly say, “I wish that I were home.” But all this has its time, and the main thing is that we remain in step with God and not keep rushing a few steps ahead, though also not lagging a single step behind either. It is arrogance to want to have everything at once, the happiness of marriage and the cross and the heavenly Jerusalem in which there is no husband and wife. “He has made everything suitable for its time” (Eccl. 3:11). Everything has “its hour”: [”]...to weep and...to laugh;...to embrace and...to refrain from embracing;...to tear and...to sew...and God seeks out what has gone by.” This last verse apparently means that nothing of the past is lost, that God seeks out with us the past that belongs to us to reclaim it. Thus when the longing for something past overtakes us—and this occurs at completely unpredictable times—then we can know that that is only one of the many “hours” that God still has in store for us, and then we should seek out that past again, not by our own effort but with God. Enough of this, I see that I have attempted too much; I actually can’t tell you anything on this subject that you don’t already know yourself.Forth Sunday in AdventWhat I wrote yesterday was not a Christmas letter. Today I must say to you above all how tremendously glad I am that you are able to be home for Christmas! That is good luck; almost no one else will be as fortunate as you. The thought that you are celebrating the fifth Christmas of this war in freedom and with Renate is so reassuring for me and makes me so confident for all that is to come that rejoice in it daily. You will celebrate a very beautiful and joyful day; and after all that has happened to you so far, I believe that it will not be so long before you are again on leave in Berlin, and we will celebrate Easter together once again in peacetime, won’t we?In recent weeks this line has been running through my head over and over: “Calm your hearts, dear friends; / whatever plagues you, / whatever fails you, / I will restore it all.” What does that mean, “I will restore it all”? Nothing is lost; in Christ all things are taken up, preserved, albeit in transfigured form, transparent, clear, liberated from the torment of self-serving demands. Christ brings all this back, indeed, as God intended, without being distorted by sin. The doctrine originating in Eph. 1:10 of the restoration of all things, re-capitulatio (Irenaeus), is a magnificent and consummately consoling thought. The verse “God seeks out what has gone by” is here fulfilled…By the way, “restoration” is, of course, not to be confused with “sublimation”!Letter to Renate and Eberhard Bethge, Christmas Eve 1943Dear Renate and Eberhard,…I want to say a few things for the period of separation now awaiting you. One need not even mention how difficult such separation is for us. But since I have now spent nine months separated from all the people I am attached to, I have some experience about which I would like to write to you. Up to now, Eberhard and I have shared all experiences that were important to us and thereby helped each other in many ways, and now, Renate, you will be part of this in some way. In the process you should attempt somewhat to forget me as “uncle” and think of me more as the friend of your husband. First, there is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so; one must simply persevere and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is a great comfort, for one remains connected to the other person through the emptiness to the extent it truly remains unfilled. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness; God in no way fills it but rather keeps it empty and thus helps us preserve—even if in pain—our authentic communion. Further, the more beautiful and full the memories, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into peaceful joy. One bears what was beautiful in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within. One must guard against wallowing in these memories, giving oneself entirely over to them, just as one does not gaze endlessly at a precious gift but only at particular times, and otherwise possesses it only as a hidden treasure of which one is certain. Then a lasting joy and strength radiate from the past. Further, times of separation are not lost and fruitless for common life, or at least not necessarily, but rather in them a quite remarkably strong communion—despite all problems—can develop. Moreover, I have experienced especially here that we can always cope with facts; it is only what we anticipate that is magnified by worry and anxiety beyond all measure. From first awakening until our return to sleep, we must commend and entrust the other person to God wholly and without reserve, and let our worries become prayer for the other person. “With anxieties and with worry...God lets nothing be taken from himself.”Letter to Eberhard Bethge, May 20, 1944Dear Eberhard,This letter is written just to you again; whether you discuss any of it with Renate is, of course, up to you. Today I would like to try and respond to the question that seems to me the most important one for you at present. At one point you asked what it meant that all your thoughts are occupied with your love for Renate, and the hard experiences of the last three weeks must have made that especially clear to you. To begin with, I must say that everything you told me moved me so deeply that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for the rest of the day, and I had a restless night. I’m infinitely grateful to you for that. It was a confirmation of our friendship, and besides it’s rousing all my life forces and fighting spirit again, making me defiant and clear…You want to live with Renate and be happy, as you have the right to be. And you have to live, for Renate’s sake and for little Dietrich’s (and even big Dietrich’s)...However, there is a danger, in any passionate erotic love, that through it you may lose what I’d like to call the polyphony of life. What I mean is that God, the Eternal, wants to be loved with our whole heart, not to the detriment of earthly love or to diminish it, but as a sort of cantus firmus to which the other voices of life resound in counterpoint. One of these contrapuntal themes, which keep their full independence but are still related to the cantus firmus, is earthly love. Even in the Bible there is the Song of Solomon, and you really can’t imagine a hotter, more sensual, and glowing love than the one spoken of here. It’s really good that this is in the Bible, contradicting all those who think being Christian is about tempering one’s passions (where is there any such tempering in the Old Testament?). Where the cantus firmus is clear and distinct, a counterpoint can develop as mightily as it wants. The two are “undivided and yet distinct,” as the Definition of Chalcedon says, like the divine and human natures in Christ. Is that perhaps why we are so at home with polyphony in music, why it is important to us, because it is the musical image of this christological fact…? This idea came to me only after your visit yesterday. Do you understand what I mean? I wanted to ask you to let the cantus firmus be heard clearly in your being together; only then will it sound complete and full, and the counterpoint will always know that it is being carried and can’t get out of tune or be cut adrift, while remaining itself and complete in itself. Only this polyphony gives your life wholeness, and you know that no disaster can befall you as long as the cantus firmus continues.Letter to Eberhard Bethge, July 16, 1944God would have us know that we must live as those who manage their lives without God. The same God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34!). The same God who makes us to live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God, and with God, we live without God. God consents to be pushed out of the world and onto the cross; God is weak and powerless in the world and in precisely this way, and only so, is at our side and helps us. Matt. 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us not by virtue of his omnipotence but rather by virtue of his weakness and suffering! This is the crucial distinction between Christianity and all religions. Human religiosity directs people in need to the power of God in the world, God as deus ex machina. The Bible directs people toward the powerlessness and the suffering of God; only the suffering God can help.July 18“Christians stand by God in God’s own pain”—that distinguishes Christians from heathens. “Could you not stay awake with me one hour?” Jesus asks in Gethsemane. That is the opposite of everything a religious person expects from God. The human being is called upon to share in God’s suffering at the hands of a godless world. Thus we must really live in that godless world and not try to cover up or transfigure its godlessness somehow with religion…Being a Christian does not mean being religious in a certain way, making oneself into something or other (a sinner, penitent, or saint) according to some method or other. Instead it means being human…It is not a religious act that makes someone a Christian, but rather sharing in God’s suffering in the worldly life. That is metanoia [repentance], not thinking first of one’s own needs, questions, sins, and fears but allowing oneself to be pulled into walking the path that Jesus walks…“Who Am I?” Poem (1944)Who am I? They often tell me I step out from my cell calm and cheerful and poised, like a squire from his manor. Who am I? They often tell me I speak with my guards freely, friendly and clear, as though I were the one in charge. Who am I? They also tell me I bear days of calamity serenely, smiling and proud, like one accustomed to victory. Am I really what others say of me? Or am I only what I know of myself? Restless, yearning, sick, like a caged bird, struggling for life breath, as if I were being strangled, starving for colors, for flowers, for birdsong, thirsting for kind words, human closeness, shaking with rage at power lust and pettiest insult, tossed about, waiting for great things to happen, helplessly fearing for friends so far away, too tired and empty to pray, to think, to work, weary and ready to take my leave of it all? Who am I? This one or the other? Am I this one today and tomorrow another? Am I both at once? Before others a hypocrite and in my own eyes a pitiful, whimpering weakling? Or is what remains in me like a defeated army, Fleeing in disarray from victory already won? Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, thou knowest me; O God, I am thine! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

I.Fleming Rutledge says that “Advent begins in the dark.” She writes, We live in a world where the season of Advent is simply relegated to the “frenzy of holiday” time in which the commercial Christmas music insists that “it’s the most wonderful time of the year” and Starbucks invites everyone to “feel the merry.” The disappointment, brokenness, suffering, and pain that characterize life in this present world is held in dynamic tension with the promise of future glory that is yet to come. In that Advent tension, the church lives its life.Advent is the season in which we take the darkness of the world seriously. In one of his letters from prison Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggests that Advent and a prison cell have a lot in common:By the way, a prison cell like this is a good analogy for Advent; one waits, hopes, does this or that—ultimately negligible things—the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that we find the central figure of Advent, John the Baptist, in prison in Matthew 11. John has been thrown in prison by King Herod and as he awaits his execution he sends two of his disciples to Jesus to ask him a question: “Are you the one who is to come are should we look for another?” (Matt. 11:3).This is most commonly read today as a moment of doubt for John. It makes easy sense to us. He is suffering in prison for unjust reasons. He is about to be put to death. How could this be happening to him as Jesus is so close by? II.It’s surprising, then, that hardly any of the early church fathers read Matthew 11 like we do. Some (like Tertullian and Justin Martyr) read this passage thinking of John like Peter. Peter confessed that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the Living God, but then is immediately rebuked by Jesus because he doesn’t think Jesus should suffer in Jerusalem. Peter made the right confession, but didn’t fully understand how Jesus was to be the Messiah. So, some fathers said, John was a pious prophet and acknowledged Jesus and preached the remission of sin, but he could not believe that Christ would have to die and suffer.But that’s the minority report. Most of the fathers saw it differently. They said: What happened to Peter couldn’t have been what happened to John because John was a prophet—yes, even more than a prophet! Jesus couldn’t be clearer when he said that all the prophets testify that he must suffer, be put to death, and rise on the third day. This is the heart of the prophets. John was a prophet and Peter wasn’t. (In fact, Peter didn’t understand any of the prophets until after the resurrection.)John bore witness to Jesus saying, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Clearly John knew that Jesus was not going to become the Messiah by military might, but that he would die as a sacrificial lamb.So, why does he send his disciples to ask if Jesus is really the coming one? Is this not a moment of weakness? Church fathers like Gregory the Great, Jerome, and John Chrysostom insist that he was not asking out of his own doubt or ignorance, but because he already knew the answer to the question. Jerome says that John is asking this question in the way Jesus asked the question, “Where is Lazarus buried?” He did not ask because he was ignorant but in order that those who were with him “might be prepared for faith” and believe.In the same way, John asks his question in order that he might prepare the way for his disciples to come to faith in Jesus, the Lamb of God. This is an astounding reading, and one that does not occur to most of us as we read Matthew 11 today. It sounds a bit hard to believe. On this reading, John doesn’t think of his imprisonment as something he must be delivered from, but he sees this as an opportunity for his disciples to come to faith. It sounds absurd until you keep reading the passage. As John’s disciples head back to John, Jesus speaks to the gathered crowd about John. He asks the crowd: “What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What, then, did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. What, then, did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. (Matt. 11:7—9)If John was a reed shaken by the wind he would be someone who was wavering because of his circumstances. But that’s not John. And, Jesus says, John does not wear soft clothing but camel’s skin, he doesn’t dwell in the king’s house but in the wilderness. John is quite at home in discomfort and suffering.And if John is not only a prophet but more than a prophet, then of course he knows that Jesus is the promised messiah and that he must suffer in order to bring salvation to the world. All the prophets testify to this.John is not sending word to Jesus to ask, “Are you really the one coming one? Are you coming to this prison to set me free or not?” Rather, John’s imprisonment has become the occasion for him to prepare the way for the Advent of Christ into the hearts of his own disciples and for those who hear his question today.I wonder if this reading (which is easily supported by the text) sounds outlandish to us today simply because our faith is not as mature. Put another way, I think very often our readings of scripture tell more about us and our own character than anything else. Perhaps most of us don’t see this possibility in the text because we can’t imagine being this faithful ourselves. As Gregory the Great says, “The sacred scriptures grow with the one who reads them.”(Both Gregory and Jerome actually go on to give an even deeper reading of John the Baptist’s question. They suggest that his question was not only for the sake of his disciples and their faith, but that John was actually asking for another commission from Jesus. Gregory says that John knew at the waters of the Jordan that Jesus was the Redeemer of the world, but now that he is about to die in prison and go into sheol John was asking if he could be the first one to tell the spirits in prison that Jesus is coming. In other words, both Jerome and Gregory suggest that John is saying, “After I die can I be the first one to share the good news in sheol?” That’s a reading that requires a level of faith that is way beyond my capacity to imagine.)III.We return to the theme of Advent. Advent is about the “once and future coming” of Jesus. But speaking of Christ’s “second coming” can be misleading. Of course it isn’t wrong to use this language, but we have to be careful that we not think that it means the Jesus is not here right now.This is why Karl Rahner says that Christ’s “second coming” is really only the fulfillment of his one coming which is still in progress at the present time. The church has spoken of Christ’s Advent in three ways: 1) his advent in the Incarnation (past), 2) his advent in glory (future), but also 3) his advent in and through his Word and the sacraments (present).That’s what Rahner means by saying that Christ really only has one coming which has already begun and will one day be fulfilled—but is also unfolding right now.The mystery of Advent happens at any moment we open ourselves up to it. Through the power of the Holy Spirit you and I are being made to be the hands and feet of Jesus—his body. So, to put it another way, Christ wants to make his Advent to the world around you through you right now.John was called to proclaim the Advent of the Lord. But John not only announced Christ’s initial coming, but he is also called to embody Christ’s advent even in prison.Chris Green points out that it is odd that Jesus commands his followers to visit people who are imprisoned and yet here in Matthew 11 Jesus does not go and visit John in prison. Why doesn’t Jesus just go to visit John himself? Green says, because Jesus is in John in prison. “Whenever you visit the prisoner you do it to me.”Jesus was inside John in prison, which is why John was able to become the Advent of Jesus for the sake of his disciples. Because Jesus was present in John in his suffering, his suffering was turned outward for the good of others. IV.Many of us feel like we are suffering in a sort of prison right now. And it is easy to begin to wonder why Jesus doesn’t come to you in your prison, in your suffering. But what we have to realize is that Jesus is in you in your suffering, turning it for your good and the good of those around you.That doesn’t mean it was God’s will for John to be in prison. God didn’t put you in your prison but he is inside you in your prison and the walls will come tumbling down. That’s the promise of resurrection.But in the waiting he’s filling you with his Spirit for the sake of your neighbor. In the midst of your prison God is making you to be the Advent of Jesus. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. (Psalm 42:5)Psalm 42 is a psalm of hope in the face of despair, but there isn’t a hint of optimism in it. The literary critic Terry Eagleton once said that the optimist is just as bereft of hope as the nihilist—neither has any need of it. In common usage, though, the language of “hope” is on a continuum with optimism, only weaker. Imagine you have plans for a picnic with friends this weekend, but the forecast is predicting a strong chance of rain. You text one of your friends, “Do you think we will still have the picnic?” They respond, “I’m hopeful, but not optimistic.” You would think they were saying, “I’m wishing for it to happen, but I really don’t think it will.” In this usage, hope amounts to something like “wishful thinking” which doesn’t even rise to the level of optimism.But the psalmist is not an optimist, and he is certainly not engaged in any wishful thinking. He’s hopeful.Herbert McCabe defines optimism as the superstitious belief in “inevitable progress.” Everything will naturally work itself out in the end. Bad things are always followed by good things. “Happily ever after” is the arc of the universe.If this psalmist was an optimist, his psalm would’ve sounded something like this: “My tears have been my food day and night and my enemies taunt me, my soul is cast down within me, BUT I’m sure tomorrow things will start looking up.”This psalmist is not optimistic, but he is filled with hope. Optimism is impersonal, but hope is relational. Hope is the belief in a living God you know you can count on, even if you can’t predict what he is up to. His hope is in God. When we talk about “hoping in God” today I think what we often mean is: “I wish my life would go a certain way, and God is the one who can make that happen.” It’s basically optimism with a dash of “God” thrown in. God becomes the mechanism that ensures the outcome we want. But notice that the psalmist does not actually hope for any specific outcome in his life. His hope is only in God. I think we could put it in even stronger language: the psalmist’s hope is not just in the Lord, his hope is the Lord.The prophet Jeremiah says, “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord” (Jer. 17:7). We could use this same formulation for the psalmist, and insert the word “hope.” His hope is in the Lord, but even more than that his hope is the Lord.Your treasure could be in the bank but your treasure isn’t the bank itself. Our way of using the language of hope turns God into the bank that ensures our desires are fulfilled. Of course there isn’t anything wrong with hoping in God for certain outcomes in your life. But there is a difference in hoping in God for favorable outcomes, and trusting God with the entirety of your life. Theologian Karl Rahner distinguishes these two hopes as “mundane hopes” on the one hand and “theological hope” on the other. Mundane hopes are not bad in any way. But they must give way to theological hope, a complete trusting in and desire for the Giver not just the gifts. In one of his sermons Rahner puts it like this:We have many hopes in our lives that fade, and the question arises whether we also have a hope given by God himself that underpins and embraces everything; a hope that does not perish, but lasts through all our other hopes’ undertakings. We have many hopes: for health, for victory over sickness, for success in life, for love and security, for peace in the world, and thousands of other things to which the life impulse reaches out. They are all good in themselves; we also experience repeatedly the fulfillment of these hopes in part and for a period of time. Finally, all these hopes get disappointed. They fade and pass away, whether they have been fulfilled or not; because we are headed toward death, and along this path our hopes are taken away one after another. What then?...Is there just despair at the death of every hope…? Or does there occur then the event of the one and only, but all-encompassing, hope? Christians witness the experience that in the death of all hopes hope can surge up and conquer. Then we have no single thing to hold onto; the one unfathomability embracing all, and called by the true name of God, silently receives us. And when we let ourselves be taken and fall, trusting that this unfathomable mystery is the one blessed homeland, then we experience that we do not have to hold on in order to be held, we do not have to struggle to win…He is himself our hope. God is the one all-encompassing, all-embracing hope that surges up and conquers even in death. The question is whether or not you can let go of your “mundane hopes” and fall into the hope that is God? Can you trust that falling into him is actually the best place to be?Julian of Norwich, the 14th century English anchoress, led a life filled with suffering. She lived through three sieges of the black plague which killed over half of the population in Norwich. She lived through the assassination of a king and an archbishop. She witnessed the nationwide rioting of the poor in the Peasants’ Rebellion and the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. The world she lived in was, by all accounts, falling apart at the seams. On top of all this she herself almost died from terrible health crisis. And it was in the midst of this sickness that she had 16 visions (or showings) that she later recorded and called Revelations of Divine Love. In the most famous line in her Revelations Jesus said to her:"It is true that sin is the cause of [the pain of the whole world], but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." These words were said most tenderly... "I am able to make everything well, and I know how to make everything well, and I wish to make everything well, and I shall make everything well..."It seems to me that what happened to Julian in her visions is precisely what Karl Rahner described above. Julian is brought to the brink of death and meets Christ—the one ell-encompassing, all-embracing hope which holds us. She is not told how things shall be well, but only that they shall be well. Her hope is not merely in the Lord, her hope is the Lord. Julian is not optimistic but she is completely hopeful. She experienced in her bones what the psalmist is saying. All shall be well, not because she thinks she will get what she wants in the end, but because in the end she knows the God who holds her in his hands and she trusts him to be her hope.That’s hopeful, but it’s not optimistic. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

The superscription of Psalm 34 contains an oddity. It reads: “A Psalm of David, when he changed his behavior before Abimelech; who drove him away, and he departed.” The account of David “feigning madness” is found in 1 Samuel 21, but in 1 Samuel it is not before Abimelech that David “changed his behavior,” it was before King Achish. So, why has the name been changed in the superscription of Psalm 34? Why Abimelech instead of Achish?For many of us in American evangelical spaces this at least hints at questions of “inerrancy.” Is this a historical error in scripture? In class we took this opportunity to discuss why theories of inerrancy frame the question of scripture’s authority in precisely the wrong way. In short, theories of inerrancy encourage us to spend all our energy trying to prove inerrancy is true rather than reading and studying the scriptures to be formed into Christlikeness. Theories of inerrancy often end up teaching us to read the Bible in order to prove that we are right rather than to be sanctified by the Spirit.Robert Jenson argues that many modern people go at the question of the inspiration of scripture backwards. We have begun with what we think we need from scripture, and then have recruited the Spirit to assure us that our expectations are satisfied. But what we think we need the scriptures to be and what God has actually made them to be are two different things. Scripture is God’s gift to us, but it’s not what we would’ve bought for ourselves if we were shopping at Mardel’s. As with everything in life, God gives us what he knows we actually need, not what we think we want.The easiest example of our (misguided) expectations is historical and scientific accuracy. We think that for the Bible to be true it must be completely accurate in all the things we care about. But instead of thinking that we know what the scriptures need to be, shouldn’t we do it the other way around and ask, “What is the wisdom of the Spirit in giving us these texts?”Jenson writes, “We might even ask what [the Spirit] intends with any errors found in [scripture]… Some of the [early church] Fathers had a theory that may not be so bizarre as it sounds at first: manifest errors and lacunae are there to trip up our penchant for exegetical simplicities.”To put it bluntly: Is the Spirit’s goal to ensure the scriptures are inerrant and scientifically accurate or is his goal to form you into the image of Jesus with them? Jenson points out that the early church Fathers had a much different relationship to “errors” or “oddities” within scripture (although they would never have called them errors). Premodern Christian readers assumed that the “errors/oddities” were all there on purpose. Why? To slow us down. To provoke us to wrestle with a text as Jacob wrestled with God until he was blessed. In class we compared the two approaches: 1) how do people read the superscription of Psalm 34 if they are concerned about upholding inerrancy versus 2) how St. Augustine read it in the fourth century?The contrast is stark. Those who read with the goal of upholding inerrancy inevitably end up explaining away the “oddity” of the text. Augustine sees the oddity as an invitation into the mystery of Christ’s sacrifice of his body and blood. Hopefully you can see my point in all of this. It’s not that there isn’t a way to affirm that the Bible is “inerrant,” it’s just that it isn’t very helpful. To put it cheekily (and overly simplistically): You can either read the scriptures to pile up information or for the sake of your transformation, but you can’t do both.The Spirit’s intention with the scriptures is to speak the living Word (Jesus, himself) to you whoever you are and whatever situation you find yourself in. It’s that particular and personal precisely because Jesus is the Word in the words of scripture. And what the Spirit spoke to Augustine and his church will be different from what the Spirit is speaking to us in our churches this Sunday. And, even more, what he will say to your neighbor sitting in the pew next to you this Sunday will be different than what he is saying to you. That’s just what it means to say Jesus is risen. It seems to me that very often attempts to secure a wooden theory of inerrancy are covert attempts to have the Bible without the resurrected Jesus. It can be an attempt to contain Jesus in the past, and therefore control what he has to say.As I try to stop preaching at you, I’ll leave you with Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the doctrine of the inspiration of scripture (as opposed to a theory of inerrancy):The biblical doctrine of inspiration removes the Bible from the historical situation... Inspiration means that God commits himself to the word spoken by this human being in all its inadequacies. Inspiration [means] that God turns his word back to himself. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

What hard travail God does in death! He strives in sleep, in our despair, And all flesh shudders underneath The nightmare of His sepulcher. The earth shakes, grinding its deep stone; All night the cold wind heaves and pries; Creation strains sinew and bone Against the dark door where He lies. The stem bent, pent in seed, grows straight And stands. Pain breaks in song. Surprising The merely dead, graves fill with light Like opened eyes. He rests in rising. (Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: Sabbath Poems)The Gospel of John begins by linking itself to the book of Genesis with its first words, “In the beginning…” The attentive reader will be on high alert for further connections.Like the synoptic Gospels, John has the sabbath controversies between Jesus and the religious leaders play a big role in the narrative. But with John’s strong connection to Genesis we may be able to discern more layers in the controversies. The command to remember the sabbath day finds its grounding in the creation narrative of Genesis. On the seventh day God rested from all his work. And, notoriously, Genesis doesn’t mention any conclusion to this seventh day. God continues to rest. Or, at least, that’s the implication many have taken.John Behr, in his book John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel, notes that in John 5 Jesus heals a sick man on the sabbath. The religious leaders “started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the sabbath.” Jesus’ response to them is curious: “My Father is still working, and I also am working” (Jn. 5:17). The Son and the Father are not resting, but still working. Just a few verses later Jesus tells us specifically what the works of his Father are: “The Father raises the dead and gives them life…” (5:21). This is God’s work. And he is still working. The creation week of Genesis 1 is not finished yet.Just as in Genesis, so also in the Gospel of John: God works until the end of the sixth day. And in John it is on the sixth day of the week that Jesus is crucified. In the Genesis creation account it is on the sixth day that God creates human beings as his final work before resting. And now on the sixth day in John’s Gospel Pilate brings Jesus before the crowd and says, “Behold the human being” (ho anthropos; Jn. 19:5).And when the sixth day is nearing its conclusion, Jesus says, “It is finished.” What is finished? The works of God—dying with the dead in order to give life to them. The sixth day of John’s creation week is over. Only now does God rest from his work.Startlingly, this would make the seventh day the day that Jesus’ body lay in the tomb. The deep truth of the sabbath is that it is actually Holy Saturday, when Jesus rests from his work of creation—of giving life to the dead.And, if I can hazard this thought, I don’t think John means to say that the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is the beginning of a new creation or re-creation. But that this is God’s first work of creation. The Father is still working. In John’s telling the sixth day of the first creation week has not concluded yet.To put it another way: the sabbath rest of God that Genesis tells us about is happening right before our eyes in John’s Gospel. Jesus in the tomb is God resting on the seventh day of the creation week.This is the sabbath sleep we are called into. For God to finish his work in us, we are called to rest in the rest of Jesus. To sleep with him so that we may also rise with him. Stop striving. Stop working. Just rest. God’s greatest work begins when you and I sleep (Ps. 127:2). The God who brought Eve out of Adam’s side while he slept; the God who made the covenant with Abraham while he slept; the God who was at work in the sleep of Jesus will do what you and I cannot do.As Wendell Berry says, “What hard travail God does in death! He strives in sleep.”Trust yourself to his work and sleep his sabbath sleep with him. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Psalm 27 7 “Hear, O LORD, when I cry aloud; be gracious to me and answer me! 8 “Come,” my heart says, “seek his face!” Your face, LORD, do I seek. 9 Do not hide your face from me.Last week I was listening to an interview with theologian Geoff Holsclaw who works in the intersection of theology and neuro-science—specifically with attachment theory. In the interview he discussed how children become attached in healthy and unhealthy ways to their parents and what this might suggest about our relationship with God.He made a few interesting comments about children and their parents’ faces and how that might relate to our relationship with God:* Typically from birth to around nine months, the eyesight of children is scanning to find faces, especially eyes.* Humans are one of the few species that have white in their eyes. This allows us to lock eyes with another person and it allows us to have joint attention to other things while we are making eye contact. (If you are talking with someone and they suddenly look over your shoulder, it’s virtually impossible for you to keep from turning around to take a peak at what they are looking at.) * Locking eyes and seeing faces is key to infant development.* Holsclaw gave this example: Say you are at a friend’s house for the first time with your 8 month old. Your friend has a cat and your child has never seen a cat before. The cat makes a sudden movement and your child is scared. What does the child inevitably do? It looks to you to know how to feel and react in the situation. If you are not scared, their panic will decrease. But if you are scared, the child’s fear will increase. In other words, the parent is the person the child looks at to understand their environment and how to respond to it.* Holsclaw then makes the point that the Scriptures are keyed into this when it comes to our relationship with God our Father. The psalms reference the face of God repeatedly. “I lift my eyes to the hills, where my help comes from.” Or most famously the Aaronic blessing in Numbers 6:24-26, “The Lord bless youand keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.”* Holsclaw concludes that it is God’s face that we are to look to in order to know the condition of our situation, just as a child looks to the faces of its mother and father. I really love this. It’s beautiful and true. But something hit me as I was listening to the interview. What does it mean to “seek God’s face”? What do we mean when we tell people to “seek the face of God”? It is pretty abstract and vague. It can mean almost anything and so is in danger of meaning nothing. As a cradle Pentecostal I grew up thinking it meant something like locking myself in a room, putting worship music on and reading the Bible, hoping tears come. To seek God’s face was about cultivating feelings of love and devotion in your heart.I think this gets right to the heart of one of our issues today: we have so interiorized our relationship with God and made it primarily about our hearts.To bring it back to the example of a child finding the face of their parent—I can’t help but notice these are two different movements. The child is panicked and so it looks outside of itself to the face of the parent. But when we think of seeking God’s face we think of a movement into ourselves. The child is looking at something concrete. They have a place to look. But with God do we have any place to look? Or does it remain an abstraction? And this question occurred to me as I was listening to that interview: Do we really think God has a face that we can see or not? Is this language of seeking God’s face a mere metaphor or is it really true in some sense (even if it is mysterious)?The psalms seem to suggest that he does have a face we can see. Other places in scripture talk about the “eyes of God” or the “hands of God” or, famously, Moses could only see the “back of God.”I learned this first from Robert Jenson. He makes the point using Ezekiel’s vision. In his vision Ezekiel sees one “like a son of man” sitting on God’s throne. In other words, he sees someone who looks like a human.So, Jenson asks: If the man on the throne in Ezekiel is not an actual man but merely a symbol or picture or something of the sort, then it is anthropomorphic language—presenting God as if he were a man although he isn’t. In that case, this language of God’s “face/hands/back” would be nothing more than a relic of ancient paganism and needs to be explained away. And that’s what most modern theology and biblical scholarship has tried to do.God doesn’t really have a back, or hands and feet, or eyes to see, or a face that can be seen. This is all just metaphorical language for something else.I asked Chris Green (one of Jenson’s students) about what Jenson meant in all this. This was his response: There’s a difference between reading it figuratively (as merely a metaphor for something else) and reading it mysteriously, spiritually. When we talk about God’s back, for example, we can say (and [Jenson] himself does say) that there are “sides” to our knowledge of God. But we don’t know which God we’re talking about unless we have first said that God actually has a back—and it was whipped. So, if I say, “Now, God doesn’t really have a back; this is just a figure of speech to refer to the limits of human knowledge,” then I am dealing not with the God of Jesus but a god I’ve dreamed up. Let’s put this back into the question of the psalms and “seeking God’s face.” If we take the language of “seeking God’s face” as a mere metaphor for trying hard to be genuine in our devotion to God, then we aren’t talking about the God of Jesus yet.In fact, we are forgetting the central confession of our faith: that the second person of the trinity, the eternal Son of God, is a man who does have a back that was whipped and a face that can be seen.The account of the transfiguration makes the point. Peter, James, and John see Jesus transfigured, he is shining with God’s own light—because he is God’s own light. Now, did Peter, James, and John really see the face of God or was this a mere metaphor for something else? This makes the point sharper.God has a face and as Paul says clearly in 2 Corinthians 4:6 “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.”But this is mysterious. God has a face because God is incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. But where do we see Jesus’ face?Again, we have been conditioned to think that our relationship with God is purely a private, interior reality that is never mediated to us. But that’s just not how this God works. God mediates his face through his creation—through us.The New Testament makes this point over and over again (see 2 Cor. 1:19 or 1 Thess. 2:13). Listen to the way Peter speaks to his congregations about seeing God: Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (1 Peter 1:8–9)Peter does say that they have not seen him, and yet they love him. Of course they haven’t seen him like Peter did. But they have seen him. How? Through the witness of Peter. How did these people who had never seen Jesus fall in love with Jesus? They know Peter. They’ve seen Peter. They’ve seen Jesus in Peter. After all, Peter is a member of Jesus’ body!Jesus is filling up the whole world with himself, beginning with his body, the church. If you want to see Jesus you have to find his body. You have to put your body in the right place to see him. Or as Jenson says,In Paul’s general conceptual discourse, a person’s body is that person’s own self as he is available to others: it is his visibility and audibility and tangibility...In Paul’s language, to say that the church is the body of the risen Christ is straightforwardly to affirm that the church is his availability in and for the world. Would you now see Christ? View this gathering called the church—and blessed is he who is not offended by what he sees. Would you now come to him? Join them.To see Jesus you find his body. And there you will find the preaching of the word (you will hear him). You will find the bread and wine on the communion table (you will see him, touch him, and taste him). And you will find a little group of people gathered around these things, and these people Jesus calls his body.God does have a face. It is the face of Jesus. But Jesus’s face is not a million miles away in heaven. It is right here with us. We have to be trained to see it. It isn’t straightforward, but it is true. How do you seek the face of God? You seek the face of Jesus. How do you seek the face of Jesus? You come near to the people who know him. As Paul says to the Corinthians:16 But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. 17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18 And we all, who with unveiled faces reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. (2 Cor. 3:16–18)Jesus is the face of God and you and I are made to become the face of Jesus. If my vision is trained correctly, I can see the Lord Jesus in you because you are reflecting his face to me.We are called to seek the face of the Lord. But we can only do that because God first turned his face toward us in the face of his Son, Jesus Christ. This means he is a strange God, indeed. He is a God who actually has a face.Our God can be seen, touched, heard, smelled, and tasted. Because our God is Jesus. As Chris Green says, “He’s somebody. He has a body!” And you have been included into it.Gerard Manley Hopkins “As kingfishers catch fire”As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves--goes its self; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came. I say more: the just man justices; Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces. This is a public episode. 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In his book A Religion Against Itself Robert Jenson makes the case that the Christianity is an anti-religious religion and that the Bible is an anti-religious religious text. At first this seems to fit nicely with our cliched (and mostly wrong) ways of speaking negatively about religion (think vapid statements like: “It’s not religion, it’s relationship). But that isn’t what Jenson is up to. He isn’t out to rid Christianity of liturgy and ritual.So, what does he mean by religion?Jenson defines religion something like this: Religion is a way to guarantee the outcome of your life. Religion is using God as a tool to secure your own dreams and desires for your future. It works like this: If I obey, if I give my tithes, if I sacrifice, then I will put God in my debt and he will give me what I desire. Religion in this sense is a quid pro quo with God. We scratch God’s back so that he will scratch ours. But, according to Jenson, this is precisely what the Bible is arguing against on every page. The very beginning of the Bible is an audacious piece of religion-debunking. We lift just one verse from the long polemic which is Genesis 1: “And God made the two great lights... he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” What is the point of this? Ancient man found his greatest single religious assurance—later, his greatest religious anxiety—in the sight of the wheeling heavenly beings. There were his gods, visibly enclosing him, knowable and predictable in their visibility and eternal in the mathematics of their behavior. The words of the cynical old priest who wrote our passage were a deliberate impiety: “Gods nothing! Energy sources that God hung up there!” From here to Galileo is a matter of details.What is the gospel in this? Quite simply: “You do not need to fear and worship the world in which God has put you, or any part of it. Subdue it, have dominion over it enjoy it!” The first chapter of the Bible is like the last, where we read: “And when I heard and saw [these things], I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed them to me; but he said to me, ‘You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you...Worship God.’”In between, the message is the same. Christ was crucified for blasphemy. Paul, who understood the crucifixion better than most, spent most of his literary energy in anti-religious polemic. For example, he wrote to the believers at Galatia: “You observe days, and months, and seasons, and years! I am afraid I have labored over you in vain.” What was the matter with days and months and seasons and years? Surely we can, also in our life of faith, not do without a calendar? But the Galatians “observed” the calendar, i.e., they watched it, expecting something from it. What could be expected from a calendar? Eternity—for the great feasts and fasts of a religious calendar return each year with the same content. Every great festival cancels time, for each year despite all that has happened we end where we began.What is the gospel in Paul’s polemic? “You do not need to cling to the past, to the way things have always been. If something utterly new should happen, something which broke the sheltering wheel of the returning seasons and festivals. you need not fear. You may take the risk of the future. For the risk of the future has been made by Jesus Christ to be the kind of risk which love brings.”Religion comforts and sustains us by abolishing the radical newness and unpredictability of the future, by suspending the future into an eternal present. There is, trusts religion, something already there that guarantees the future, guarantees that something good will come of me. Because this something is already there it is knowable, and because it is knowable I can experience the guarantee of my future which it gives. To be already present and knowable, it must be given in the past—in the “once-upon-a-time” of mythical stories about how things are in eternity, or in the “I fast twice in the week” record of accomplishments at which legalistic religion looks back. Religion is the rule of the past. The security it gives is that all will be again as it was, the security of return to the womb, of peace in death. This religious security is exactly what the gospel seeks to free us from…The anti-religious polemic of the Bible is, therefore, polemic in principle… The gods are attacked for the sake of God.Is then the faith of the Bible after all about a god and therefore itself a sort of religion? To be sure—but it is a religion opposed to religion. Faith as we see it in Scripture is religion at odds with itself, a religion polemic against its own character as a religion.If Jenson is right that the consistent theme of the Bible is an anti-religious polemic, then we should expect to find it in the psalms. Unsurprisingly, I think we find an attack on the religious act par excellence: sacrifice.Sacrifice is the great religious act because it is literally a quid pro quo. In sacrifice we give the gods food to eat, we fill up their bellies, and in return they protect us from disaster. They help us win in battle. They make it so that our harvest is good and that our children are strong and healthy. But the witness of the Bible from A to Z is that this God does not want sacrifice. The psalms repeatedly make this point:* Psalm 40:6 “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire—but my ears you have opened—burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require.”* Psalm 50:9—13 “I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens, for every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains, and the insects in the fields are mine. If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?”* Psalm 51:16—17 “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.”The phrase of Hosea 6:6 (which Jesus takes up in Matthew’s Gospel) is a good summary: “I desire mercy not sacrifice.”Of course we know that Scripture can also use the word “sacrifice” in a positive sense—in the merciful sense. But what does a merciful sacrifice look like? Hebrews 10 takes up Psalm 40 and argues that what God wants is not sacrifice, but obedience. But not any kind of obedience. He wants the obedience that the Son of God gives to the Father. In other words, he wants free obedience. He doesn’t want the obedience of a slave. That would be obedience as sacrifice. The slave offers the master his obedience and in return the master provides shelter and food for the slave. God is not a master. He does not want to dominate us—which is precisely why he does not want sacrifice. The obedience God wants is the free obedience of a son—of the Son.The only sacrifice that is pleasing and acceptable to God is the sacrifice of Jesus. If we are to offer God anything, it can only be Jesus.But what does it mean to offer God the sacrifice of Jesus? Isn’t Jesus God’s gift to us? For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. Jesus is what God gives to the world because he loves it. What would it mean for us to offer Jesus back to God?To offer God his Son back to him is to begin to love the world the way he loves it. It is to have the obedience of the Son become your obedience by the power of the Spirit. It is to have the Son’s life and your life become one life. What God wants is for the life of his Son to become your life and flow out of your life. When that is the case, your obedience becomes the obedience of the Son. The sacrifice God is pleased with is Jesus. And Jesus is the one who serves others. In other words, don’t feed God with your sacrifices and your obedience, feed your hungry neighbors through the mercy of Christ. Hebrews 13:15—16 couldn’t be clearer: “Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”To offer God the sacrifice of Jesus is to love the world around you. To love it with God’s own love. To have the life of Jesus pouring forth from your belly, rivers of living water. The gospel frees us from religious sacrifices so that we can live from grace and in gratitude. I’ll leave you with the freedom of the gospel according to Jenson:The gospel is permission, granting of freedom, to love. The believer is, simply, one who knows that he does not need to worry about himself because God will take care of that, and who therefore has all the time and energy unused to worry about other people.Diagram: The question is does the sacrifice precede God’s word that “You are accepted” or does the sacrifice follow God’s word? If it precedes it, then it is religious sacrifice. It is trying to control the future and dictate outcomes. It is a quid pro quo. It is a slave’s obedience. But if the sacrifice follows God’s word, then it is the free obedience of the Son. It is mercy. It is a free gift that is freely received and freely returned. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Messianic PsalmsThe psalms are filled with promise—particularly the promise that God will put an end to evil and injustice. The so-called “messianic psalms” are the beating heart of this promise. God promises that, through his messiah, he will overcome the evil of the world (specifically the evil of “the nations” and “the kings of the earth”).The promised messiah is portrayed in the psalms as the true king of Israel. But almost every messianic psalm moves directly to the global (or even cosmic) nature of the messiah’s kingship. Listen to Psalm 2:6-106 “I have installed my king on Zion, my holy mountain.”7 I will proclaim the Lord’s decree:He said to me, “You are my son; today I have become your father.8 Ask me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession.9 You will break them with a rod of iron; you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”10 Therefore, you kings, be wise; be warned, you rulers of the earth.And Psalm 110:1-2, 4-61 The LORD says to my lord:“Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.”2 The Lord will extend your mighty scepter from Zion, saying, “Rule in the midst of your enemies!”4 The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind: “You are a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.”5 The Lord is at your right hand; he will crush kings on the day of his wrath.6 He will judge the nations, heaping up the deadand crushing the rulers of the whole earth.You can see the movement of the messiah’s kingship extending from Israel (Zion) to the whole earth. The image we are given for how this is accomplished is “a rod of iron” in Psalm 2 and “a mighty scepter” in Psalm 110.Christians have naturally read these psalms as being about Jesus. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all make use of the messianic psalms and suggest that they are fulfilled in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.The Rod of Iron, A Mighty Scepter“I will break them with a rod of iron” (Ps. 2:9) and “The Lord will extend your mighty scepter from Zion, saying, ‘Rule in the midst of your enemies’” (Ps. 110:2).These are harsh images that give violent pictures of wrath, anger, and justice. But they are images. God does not literally have a rod of iron or a mighty scepter—as if he needed them. This is metaphorical language. The images speak of God’s rule, his justice, his authority, and dominion. But the question lingering is one of identity. Who is the one we are being told holds the iron rod or the scepter? We know what the rod of iron looks like in the hands of Caesar or Herod or Hitler. But Jesus is unlike these rulers. He is the true ruler of Israel—and the entire world—by laying his life down, not lording it over them.Martin Luther in his lecture on Psalm 2 gives us the typical Christian interpretation of the “rod of iron”:Rod of Iron is the holy Gospel, which is Christ’s royal scepter in His church and kingdom… It is called a ‘rod’ because it directs, convicts, reproves, and upholds, etc.St. Augustine (fourth century) interprets the “mighty scepter of power” in Psalm 110 like this:What has to happen, for [Christ’s] enemies to be subjected beneath his feet? Listen to his own words as he teaches and explains it: And for repentance and forgiveness of sins to be preached in in his name throughout all nations, beginning from Jerusalem (Lk 24:47)…From Zion will the Lord send forth your scepter of power because the preaching of his lordship will begin from Jerusalem.In other words, the power of the scepter by which the Messiah will rule is the power of the word of the gospel. Many will hear this as a softening of the meaning of “the rod of iron” image. This is meant to be a brutal image, an image of force and forcefulness. I agree. The rod of iron does strike and it does kill. But it strikes and kills in the way Jesus strikes and kills. This is the wrath of the lamb, as Revelation 6 puts it. The wrath of Caesar and the wrath of the crucified Jesus are not the same wrath. As Augustine points out, the mighty scepter of the Messiah extends forth from Zion, or Jerusalem. Why? Because the resurrected Jesus told his disciples that because all authority in heaven and earth had been given to him, they were to go into all nations preaching the gospel and baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The “scepter” is the preached word of the gospel and the sacrament of baptism.The scepter “extends forth from Zion” because Jesus said to his disciples, “You will be my witnesses [beginning in] Jerusalem, and [extending out to] all of Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”How does the this Messiah subdue the nations? He does so by the power of his mighty scepter, with his rod of iron. But the power of God is Jesus Christ and him crucified. The power of the gospel proclamation moves into all the earth as the rod of iron, subduing all who hear it. Does the rod of iron kill? Absolutely! But it is the killing of baptism. As Paul says in Romans 6, “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.”The kings of the earth are conquered the same way you and I are: by the mighty scepter, by the wrath of the lamb, by the word of God, by baptism.The world is conquered by a Conquered Messiah. Jesus is the wrath of God, which means that the world is subdued not by being overthrown, but by love. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

One of the primary themes of the psalms is God’s care for the poor. He is their judge and defender. But the bond between God and the poor is extends beyond mere compassion, and into identity. God will not—indeed, he cannot—forget the poor any more than he can forget himself. God is poor and he is inviting us to share in his poverty that we might be rich as he is rich. Herbert McCabe makes just this argument in a wonderful little essay titled “God and Poverty.” I want to suggest that there is something godlike about being able to live in poverty; so we shall have to think about the poverty of God. And I want to suggest that there is something less than human about needing to live with riches. And the movement from riches to poverty, from having to not having, can be a movement not only to being more human but to being divine. In a way, the success story for Christians is from riches to rags…Riches and poverty in themselves represent two extremes, two directions we might aim at. Riches represent the ideal of taking the world for your own use; poverty represents the ideal of complete freedom from possessions. Whichever we aim at we could never attain for ourselves. But poverty we can in the end be given. Sometimes we think of that as death, the cross, and sometimes as resurrection, new life.I would like to contrast possessions and being. We take possession of things. Even if they are gifts we can either take them or refuse them. Taking is essential to possessions. Being or life, on the other hand, cannot, in this sense, be taken. It can only be sheer gift.No one can take upon herself life; nothing can bring itself into existence. Always we receive being from another or from others. To aim at riches is to aim at taking possession of things, even, perhaps, taking possession of people. To aim at poverty is to aim at the giving of life, and this comes from gratitude for receiving life ourselves. And giving life is a specially godlike activity.It is simply not possible for God to be like someone who aims at riches. We cannot speak literally of the riches of God, for he has not, and could not have, any possessions. It is true that often enough, in the psalms for example, we speak of God as though he were a landlord of the whole earth: ‘In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also; the sea is his, for he made it, and the dry land, which his hands have formed’ (Psalm 95:4–5). But these are images to be offset by other images, just like the images of God as a warrior or a rock or an eagle. We have, and we need to have, hundreds of images of God, incompatible with each other and not to be forced into some system, not to be taken literally. The image of God as a wealthy landowner holding court amongst his tenants is one of these. We cannot speak literally of the riches and possessions of God for he could not take anything to use for his own purposes. He can only use one creature for the sake of another, for the benefit of another. Nothing is or acts for the benefit of God.We cannot speak literally of the riches of God. But I think we can speak literally of the poverty of God. Of course, his poverty is not the same as our poverty, as his wisdom is not the same as ours. But he is literally poor because he simply and literally has no possessions. He takes nothing for his own use. He only has life and being. And, if you want to press the point, he does not even have life, as he does not have wisdom or have goodness. In God, being alive or being wise or being good are just simply being God and nothing more, nothing extra he has. So for us to aim at poverty is for us to aim in the direction of the simplicity and poverty of God—a direction away from possessing to being.God’s creative act is an act of God’s poverty, for God gains nothing by it. God makes without becoming richer. His act of creation is purely and simply for the benefit of his creatures. We are sometimes tempted to ask what motive God had for making the world—meaning ‘What did he hope to gain by it?’ But, of course, this question is absurd. It is only creation that gains by God’s act. It is a purely gratuitous act of love, that characteristic act of love which is the giving of life.The beauty of creation adds nothing to the beauty of God, as the light of the moon adds nothing to the light of the sun but simply reflects it. And God’s delight in his creatures and their beauty is not something extra to his delight in the beauty of his creative divinity itself—the delight that we call the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit is just God’s delight in his own life as he contemplates it in conceiving his Word. Or, as we say more formally, the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Word. This eternal delight is the joy that belongs to aiming at poverty, as sorrow belongs to possessions…The gospel does not tell us to have no possessions. It tells us to aim at poverty, to move towards it, and certainly not to aim at riches. We cannot serve both God and riches.Diagrams from ClassDiagram 1: “Riches” and “Poverty” are two extremes, two directions we might aim at in life. “Riches” represents the ideal of taking/possessing the world around you. It is marked by sorrow (Rich Young Ruler). “Poverty” represents the ideal of giving/receiving the world around you. It is marked by joy (Widow’s Mite).Diagram 2: We need to break the equivalence in our minds between good fortune and blessing. This is at the heart of Jesus’ teaching. Blessing can be present in both bad fortune and good fortune. In fact, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor” or “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” To be “poor in spirit” is to recognize and accept that you have limitations, that you are dependent, that you are called to live a life of giving/receiving rather than taking/possessing. In truth, everyone is poor in spirit. But it is harder for those with good fortune to see (hence, the distance). As we see throughout the Gospels, poorer people (people experiencing bad fortune) have an easier time accepting that they are poor in spirit. But it is possible to be poor in spirit in both bad and good fortune. As Paul says in Philippians 4:12—13, “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in lack [good fortune or bad fortune].” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

God Is Our HomePsalm 46 begins with one of the more memorable lines in scripture: “God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble.”The psalms never tire of emphasizing this theme. Psalm 90 says that God has been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Psalm 91 says that we live in the shelter of the most high and that we abide in his shadow.In other words, God is our home. This is basic to Christian spirituality: God is our true dwelling place. “In him we live and move and have our being,” as Paul says in Acts. “Build your home on the rock not the sand,” Jesus says. “Abide in me,” says the Gospel of John.We Are God’s HomeBut Psalm 46 goes on to tell us that God also has a dwelling place: God dwells in his holy place, or his holy tent (v. 4). This should strike us as odd if we stop to consider it. We dwell in God—that makes sense. But surely God has no home. Nothing can contain him. But the psalmist says that God does have a home—in his holy place/tabernacle.If you were to ask an old Israelite: “Where is your God?” They would probably say, “Well he sits enthroned above the heavens. He is the author of our story and, in fact, the author of the story of the whole world. So, of course he is ‘up there.’ Oh but also he is over there in that small little tent that he had us make for him.”For the Israelites, God has an address: 1 Tabernacle Way. Yes, he is God above all things, enthroned in the heavens, not contained by anything, but you can also locate him. His home is over there in that tent. Israel bears witness to the fact that God is two things at once” He is God above us, but he is also God with us.The Gospel of John picks up on this, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God…And the Word was made flesh and dwelt [tabernacled] among us” (Jn. 1:1, 14). One of the chief themes in the Gospel of John is that Jesus himself is the temple. In other words, Jesus is God’s address. If you want to locate the eternal, omnipresent God, you must find the man Jesus of Nazareth.This is what Jesus tells us in John 14:8–10 8 Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” 9 Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10 Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, dwelling in me, who is doing his work.Paul puts it this way “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col. 1:19). In other words, The Father’s home is in Jesus. If you want to locate the Father you must come to Jesus. But how do you come to Jesus? Psalm 46:4 gives us the clue—although most of our English translations hide it from us. In Hebrew the text actually says that God “dwells in his holy places/tents.” It’s plural. The KJV preserves it: “The holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High.”But doesn’t God only have one tabernacle, or one temple? Isn’t there only one Jesus? Yes, all that is true, but we can’t leave it there. Jesus says in John 14 that God the Father dwells in him, but he doesn’t leave it there either. He goes on to say, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our dwelling with them” (John 14:23).Now, we can hear the deep truth of Psalm 46. God is our dwelling place, but in Christ God has made us his dwelling places. Or as Paul puts it in Colossians: The fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Christ, and the mystery hidden for ages is that Christ is in you, the hope of glory! Or again in 1 Corinthians Paul tells the believers, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?”Our true home is in God and God’s true home is in us.This mystery is grounded and takes place in the person of Jesus. He is fully God and fully human in one person. Two distinct natures are brought into union in him.Maybe we could put it like this: Jesus’ divinity finds its home in his humanity and his humanity finds its home in his divinity. Jesus is both our home in God and God’s home in us.How To Become a Home for GodPsalm 46:7 summarizes the mystery: “The Lord God almighty is with us, the God of Jacob is our fortress.”God is our fortress (he is our home), but he is also together with us (he makes his home in us).All this can easily become empty abstraction. We need a concrete example. Think of Mary. God sends the angel Gabriel to her, “Greetings Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.” And she was puzzled at these words. Why? Because they mean two things at once. “The Lord is with you.” Mary has found favor with God. God is her true home. She belongs to him. But precisely because she belongs to him so fully, he is coming to make his home in her. “The Lord is with you.” Mary’s home is in God and God is now making his home in Mary. God is with her and she is with child (two ways of saying the same thing).Jesus is saying to her, “Mary, I love you. You come be at home in me. I’ll take care of you. I will be your refuge and strength. I will be your very present help in trouble.” But he also is saying this to her, “Mary, because I love you I am making my home in your womb and in your arms. I will need you to take care of me. I will need you to be my refuge and my strength. I will need you to be my very present help when I am in trouble.”Because God is Mary’s home he comes to her and makes it so that she will become his home. He is taking care of her, but the way he takes care of her is by coming to her so that she will take care of him. Mary’s salvation comes in her caring for God.By Jesus depending on Mary he is actually giving grace to her. This is the power and majesty of the God of Israel: Jesus saves us by becoming dependent on us. God’s helplessness helps us.Hans Urs von Balthasar puts it like this: “[Mary must] introduce her Child into the business of being human… She must do two things simultaneously: teach her Son, nourish him, care for him… and learn from him, feed on him, trust herself to him.”But don’t miss the point. Mary is not something other than we are. She is our example! We are called to the same thing Mary is called to. God is our home, and the way he makes us at home in himself is by coming to us so that we will be a home for him.Will We Welcome Jesus?But how does Jesus come to us? Jesus brings a child before his disciples and says, “Whenever you welcome one of these little ones in my name you welcome me!” Later in Matthew 25 he says, “Whatever you do for the least of these, you do to me.”By caring for those helpless around us we welcome Jesus in and care for him. We become his home. This is how Jesus is our home: He comes to us and asks us to be his home.God is our refuge, and precisely because he is our refuge he calls us to be a refuge for him. And he comes to us in the least of these—children, the poor, the weak, the imprisoned, the sick, the immigrant, the helpless.Those of us who consider ourselves friends of Jesus need to take seriously the fact that we might not like the way he comes to us. Everyone is comfortable with the idea that God is our refuge, but it is much more difficult when God comes to us in unexpected ways and asks us to be his refuge. We want God to save us, to deliver us, but we want it to be in a way that fits our expectations, and God is more often than not an enemy of our expectations.While sitting in the Tegel prison in July of 1944 Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a poem on the way that God takes care of our needs by calling us to care for God’s needs:“Christians and Heathens” I. People go to God when they’re in need, Plead for help, pray for blessings and bread, For rescue from their sickness, guilt, and death. So do they all. All of them, Christians and heathens. II. People go to God when God’s in need, Find God poor, reviled, without shelter or bread, See God devoured by sin, weakness, and death. Christians stand by God in God’s own pain. III. God goes to all people in their need, Fills body and soul with God’s own bread, Goes for Christians and for heathens to Calvary’s death And forgives them both.Be Still and KnowThis can begin to sound like a burden that is too heavy to bear, but the psalm delivers us the pure gospel promise in verse 10: “Be still and know that I am God.”Becoming a home for God is not about our white-knuckled effort. Quite the opposite. It’s about being still and resting in God. The only reason we can become a home for God is because he is already our home. Mary can only become a home for Jesus because Jesus has already been her home.Be still and know that God is your home. It’s for this reason that the pressure is taken off of us. Jesus takes pressure off of us when he draws near. He calls us to lay our burdens down and take up his yoke because his burden is easy and light.Think of the experience of having a guest coming to stay at your house for a few days. There is a kind of pressure for you and your household to entertain and host a guest. You can’t be as relaxed as usual. You can’t wear the things you would normally wear around the house. There is a pressure that the guest applies to your life. But God desiring to dwell in you is not like having a guest move in. He doesn’t add pressure the way a guest does because he is the guest that turns out to be your true home. He comes to you as a guest and asks to live in your heart. But when you invite him in you realize he is home.Jesus stands at the door and knocks. Home stands at the door and knocks. Let him move in. Because the truth is you are not his host, he is yours. He comes as a guest, but as a guest who is our home. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Psalm 51: SuperscriptionPrayer for Cleansing and Pardon To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.Most of us will know the background for this psalm. King David is home in his palace as his army is off fighting one of his wars. From his palace he spots a woman named Bathsheba bathing on her rooftop and he is overcome with desire and lust. He calls for her to be brought to him, and he “goes in to her.” Bible isn’t very shy, is it?And Bathsheba became pregnant. As it turns out Bathsheba was the wife of one of David’s military men, Uriah the Hittite. So, in an effort to cover up his sin David had Uriah sent home from the battlefield to the palace. David has him come to the palace for dinner and gets him plastered. David then tells Uriah to go home to his wife, hoping Uriah will sleep with his wife and no one will know that anything untoward happened between David and Bathsheba. But Uriah is a more noble man even when he is drunk than David is sober. Uriah refuses to go home to his wife while the rest of his men are out on the battlefield. David has to come up with a new plan. David has his general, Joab, put Uriah on the front lines of battle so that Uriah will be killed. After Uriah has been killed David could then take Bathsheba as his own wife before anyone knew she was pregnant.And David thought he had gotten away with his scheme…If it wasn’t for the meddling prophet, Nathan. The prophet comes to confront King David with his sin, but he doesn’t confront him directly. He is subtle, even subversive. Nathan tells the King a story about a rich man and a poor man. The rich man had a great amount of cattle and sheep, while the poor man only had one little ewe lamb that he raised, even sleeping with the lamb in his arms. When the rich man had a guest come into his house, rather than using one of his own sheep to prepare a meal for the guest, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man to feed the traveler.David burned with anger and proclaimed that the rich man should be put to death and repay the poor man four times what was taken from him. The prophet turned to the King and said, “You are the man.” And the King’s eyes were opened. He confessed his sins. The prophets replied, “The Lord has taken away your sins.”St. Augustine preached a sermon on this psalm in Carthage in the summer of 411. He begins his sermon saying”We say this with grief and trepidation, yet since God wanted the matter to be written about, he does not mean us to hush it up. What I am going to say, therefore, is not what I want to say, but what I am forced to say. I say it not to encourage you to imitation, but to teach you caution.Augustine’s primary concern as he begins his sermon is one I had never even considered as a preacher. That if we hear what the great King David did, we may find it easy to justify our own sins.Augustine cautions his audience saying: There are many who are very willing to fall with David, but unwilling to rise again with him. The story is not put before you as an example of falling, but as an example of rising again if you have fallen…Let all who have not fallen listen, to ensure they do not fall; and let all who have fallen listen, so that they may learn to get up again.Psalm 51:1—2Have mercy on me, O GodAugustine then makes the insightful point that this grave sin of David’s happened when he was exalted on the throne and in the palace—when everything was going well for him. We all fear adversity, but most of us are not afraid of prosperity. “Yet prosperity is more dangerous to the soul than adversity is to the body.”David did not commit that sin while he was being persecuted by Saul. While the holy David was enduring Saul’s enmity, while he was hounded hither and thither by Saul’s pursuit, while he was fleeing from one hiding-place to another in his effort not to fall into Saul’s hands, he did not desire any woman who was not his, nor did he murder any man with whose wife he had committed adultery. The more wretched he perceived himself to be in his weakness and distress, the more intent he was on God. Tribulation is a useful thing, just as the surgeon’s knife may be more useful than the devil’s blandishments. But once David had defeated his enemies and gained security, the pressure was off him and his pride grew to excess. His example is therefore valid for us in this sense too, that we must beware of complacency.Comfort and success can lead to pride, Augustine suggests. And pride is the root of all sin.The medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, commenting on Paul’s discussion of his “thorn in the flesh,” (2 Cor. 12) was convinced that Paul’s thorn was a habitual sin. But, he asks, why would God not remove sin from Paul? Surely God does not want us to remain in sin. But, Thomas says, God is a great physician, and any wise doctor knows you have to be willing to use a lesser disease to combat a greater disease (think: chemotherapy). Because God is the great physician he will allow even a grave sin to remain in our lives if it can keep us from the even more dangerous sin of pride. Paul asked for the thorn to be removed because he doesn’t know what the doctor is up to. He knows the thorn hurts—it feels wrong—but what he is asking is for is for the doctor’s remedy would be removed from him. And of course, the doctor does not oblige.I think Thomas’s reading has a lot of merit. Why does Paul say that the thorn was given to him? To keep him from being too elated—literally “puffed up with pride.” The thorn kept him humble, kept him in touch with his weakness. And, hearing the doctor’s orders, Paul decides he will boast in his weakness, because in his weakness Jesus’ strength is made perfect.God refuses to heal us in a way that will lead us to a worse sickness.King David has become comfortable in his palace. He is puffed up. There is no thorn in his flesh, and Augustine is suggesting that that’s part of his problem. Comfort and success is not bad, but it is perhaps the most dangerous sickness because we easily become elated—puffed up with pride.Augustine continues: This psalm warns those who have fallen in sin, but it does not leave those who have fallen in despair…Listen to [the prophet David] crying out, and cry out with him; listen to him groaning, and groan too; listen to him weeping, and add your tears to his; listen to him corrected, and share his joy. If sin could not be denied access to you, let the hope of forgiveness not be debarred. The prophet Nathab was sent to that man; and notice how humble the king was. He did not brush his mentor’s words aside… King in his majesty though he was, he listened to the prophet; now let Christ’s lowly people listen to Christ.This is what makes the psalms so unique. That a king like David could hear God’s “No!” That David could have the humility to see that what he desires is not the same as what God desires. The German philosopher, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, wrote an essay on the psalms giving voice to God’s divine “No” to humanity. The essay was entitled, “Hitler and Israel, Or on Prayer.” Rosenstock-Huessy says that the psalms present to us a God who is free. He is free to come to his people Israel and tell them, “No. Not this way.” God’s freedom is what allows him to correct the desires and the will of his own people. This, Rosenstock-Huessy says, is right at the heart of the difference between Hitler and Israel. For Hitler there is no possibility for God to say “No” to Hitler’s plans, Hitler’s will, and Hitler’s dreams. In Hitler’s mind his will and his God’s will are not separable. They are one and the same.Put another way: Hitler thinks that what he wants is always what God wants. And so he is not open to hearing God’s, “No.” This exhibit A of what pride looks like. Rosenstock-Huessy puts it like this:[The psalms testify to] God’s ‘No’… Hitler’s will and his God’s will are nauseatingly one… [but] God touched Israel’s lips with his fiery coal: My will, O mortal, not thine, be done.[The Psalms are] the white heat of speech, during which man’s will is separated from God’s will, and men come to know God’s will as differing from their own wishes and from their leader’s will.Psalm 51:4 Against you, you only, have I sinnedThis verse can be misleading. It can sound as though David doesn’t think he sinned against either Bathsheba or Uriah (or his whole kingdom, for that matter). But of course he had. Sin is always the harm we do to our neighbors. We can’t truly harm God. Our sins cannot impinge upon him or violate him. Our sins violate our neighbors. So how can David say this? If we see the truth of who God is in Jesus of Nazareth it becomes clear: God is not God all by himself. God is and always has been the God-human. But precisely for this reason he has taken who we are in our human weakness into himself. He is God as human, not in spite of being human.If we follow the logic of God’s incarnation in Jesus, then we can say it this way: to harm any human being is to harm God, because God has identified himself with humanity in Christ. Our sins do not violate God by nature, but he takes it personally. This is why Jesus comes to Saul on the road to Damascus and says, “Saul, Saul why do you persecute me?” This is why Jesus tells us in Matthew 25 that whatever you have done to the least of these little lambs, you have done to me. He is the Good Shepherd who has become the lamb of God.David is witnessing to the truth that the Apostle Paul had to come to realize. On the road to Damascus Paul was saying, “What have I done to you Lord?” And Jesus’ response is that what Paul had done to the least of these he had done to him because he has filled all things with myself.To sin against your neighbor is to sin against God because God has become your neighbor in Jesus of Nazareth.Psalm 51:9Hide your face from my sinsDavid says, “Hide your face from my sins,” but Augustine notes that David does not ask God to hide his face from himself. God is concerned with you, not your sin. A lot of the preaching we have heard has caused us to think that God is really only concerned with our sins—that our sins are some massive problem for him, but they aren’t. God turns his face away from your sins, but never from you.And here we have the confession portion of the David’s psalm. He has confessed his sins and pleaded for God’s great mercy. David is forgiven, and he is certain of it. How is he certain? It’s not simply because he feels innocent now. He is certain because he has heard a concrete word from God through the prophet Nathan. The prophet told him, “The Lord has taken away your sins.”This is where we come up against a problem we face today. The modern churches many of us have known do not have any practice of personal confession and absolution. We are left on our own to confess to God and so we are left alone with our own perception of God’s assurance of pardon. Robert Jenson puts it like this:We do not have the arrangements the psalmist did. We confess, indeed, silently “directly” to God or in generalities with a group, under which we silently insert our actual sins.But David doesn’t do this. He confesses his sins to Nathan.Jenson's point is that because we have done away with the practice of personal confession of sins we are stuck in the situation that many of the psalms lament: If I keep silent about my sins, my bones will waste away. Put another way: if this Psalm 51 invites us to confess our sins along with David, to where will we confess? We are left by ourselves.Jenson is saying that the believer in Israel could do something specific with his sin, and then be blessed by it. But we don’t have that anymore because we have forfeited the practice of personal confession to one another as James instructs (James 5:16).This makes us uncomfortable. We think we should just be fine confessing our sins straight to God without anyone else involved. We think our relationship with God is private and unmediated. And there is some truth to that. For some of us that may be enough. But what about those of us who, after confessing our sins, are not sure whether or not we have been really, truly forgiven?Are we missing out on a gift of God that we should regain? Bonhoeffer and the Gift of Personal ConfessionIn one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s most famous books he makes just this case. He argues that we have missed out on one of God’s greatest gifts to us because our churches have disposed with the practice of personal confession—confessing our sins to one another. (You can read more from Bonhoeffer in the attached document below.) These are his primary points:* “In confession there takes place a breakthrough to community.”“‘Confess your sins to one another’ (James 5:16). Those who remain alone with their evil are left utterly alone. It is possible that Christians may remain lonely in spite of daily worship together…the final breakthrough to community does not occur precisely because they enjoy community with one another as pious believers, but not with one another as those lacking piety, as sinners. For the pious community permits no one to be a sinner. Hence all have to conceal their sins from themselves and from the community. We are not allowed to be sinners. Many Christians would be unimaginably horrified if a real sinner were suddenly to turn up among the pious. So we remain alone with our sin, trapped in lies and hypocrisy, for we are in fact sinners.“However, the grace of the gospel, which is hard for the pious to comprehend, confronts us with the truth. It says to us, you are a sinner, a great, unholy sinner. Now come, as the sinner that you are, to your God who loves you.”* “In confession there occurs a breakthrough to the cross.”“The root of all sin is pride…Confession in the presence of another believer is the most profound kind of humiliation. It hurts, makes one feel small; it deals a terrible blow to one’s pride.“And it is nothing else but our community with Jesus Christ that leads us to the disgraceful dying that comes in confession, so that we may truly share in this cross. The cross of Jesus Christ shatters all pride. We cannot find the cross of Jesus if we are afraid of going to the place where Jesus can be found, to the public death of the sinner. And we refuse to carry the cross when we are ashamed to take upon ourselves the shameful death of the sinner in confession.”* “In confession there occurs a breakthrough to assurance.”“Why is it often easier for us to acknowledge our sins before God than before another believer? God is holy and without sin, a just judge of evil, and an enemy of all disobedience. But another Christian is sinful, as are we, knowing from personal experience the night of secret sin. Should we not find it easier to go to one another than to the holy God? But if that is not the case, we must ask ourselves whether we often have not been deluding ourselves about our confession of sin to God–whether we have not instead been confessing our sins to ourselves and also forgiving ourselves. And is not the reason for our innumerable relapses and for that feebleness of our Christian obedience to be found precisely in the fact that we are living from self-forgiveness and not from the real forgiveness of our sins? Self-forgiveness can never lead to the break with sin.“Who can give us the assurance that we are not dealing with ourselves but with the living God in the confession and the forgiveness of our sins? God gives us this assurance through one another. The other believer breaks the circle of self-deception.”I’ve attached both the handouts I distributed to the class. The first is a selection of excerpts from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s chapter on “Confession and the Lord’s Supper” from Life Together. The second is the liturgy of the Reconciliation of a Penitent from the Book of Common Prayer. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. (Psalm 32:1)The Covering (Up?) of SinIn a memorable phrase (not least because Paul quotes it in Romans 4) Psalm 32:1 says, “Blessed is the one…whose sin is covered.”The language of “covering” is striking here. What does it mean to have your sins covered? This is a suggestive metaphor. And as with any suggestive material, we have to take care in how we hear it. It isn’t immediately clear.In the winter of AD 412 St. Augustine of Hippo preached a sermon on Psalm 32 to the people of Carthage in the city’s most famous basilica. In explaining what the psalmist means be the covering of sins, Augustine brings up the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. In Jesus’ parable both the Pharisee and the Tax Collector go to the temple to pray. The Pharisee thanks God that he is not like the adulterers, the robbers, or even the tax collectors. Unlike these filthy evildoers this pharisee says, “I fast twice a week and tithe on all that I get.” But the Tax Collector stands at a distance and beats his breast as he prays: “God be merciful to me a sinner.” Jesus says that it is the Tax Collector who is justified before God. The Pharisee prays opposite of Psalm 32. Psalm 32 says that blessing is for those whose sins are forgiven, but the Pharisee says, “Blessed is the one who has no sins.” The Pharisee’s problem is that he is sinless—just like Saul of Tarsus or the Rich Young Ruler. Augustine looks to his Carthaginian audience and says:The Pharisee was indeed guilty of sin; but he was looking the wrong way, and failed to realize where he was standing. He was like someone in need of healing who had come to a doctor’s surgery, but presented only his sound limbs and covered up his wounds.Notice Augustine says the Pharisee’s problem is that he “covered up” his sins. But doesn’t our psalm say having your sins covered is to be blessed? Yes, says Augustine, but there are two ways to cover sins: You can cover something in order to hide it or you can cover something in order to heal it. The first leads to death, the second leads to life.Rather than letting God cover his sins, the Pharisee covers his own sins up to hide them from himself, from his neighbors, and ultimately from God. Augustine continues:Let God cover your wounds; don’t cover them yourself. If you cover them up out of embarrassment, the doctor will not heal them. Allow the physician to cover and cure them, because he covers them with a dressing. Under the physician’s dressing the wound heals; under the patient’s covering it is merely hidden. Anyway, from whom are you trying to hide it? From him who knows everything?The Pharisee presented his healthy limbs: “I fast and I tithe on all I get.” The Rich Young Ruler had kept the commandments from his youth. Saul of Tarsus was “flawless” in his righteousness under the law. Fasting, tithing, and obedience are all good things. But all three refused to present their wounded limbs to the Great Physician. And in the cases of all three the wounded limbs were their pride. Pride is the one thing the Doctor has the hardest time treating. Not because it is too hard for him, but because it keeps the patient from staying on the operating table.Pride just is the covering up of our own sins. It’s blinding. It is the covering that is a hiding and just so it can never lead to the covering that is a healing.So, Augustine says, present your sins to the Lord and come out of hiding.Hiding in (Not from) GodBut don’t the Scriptures themselves say that “we are hidden in Christ? Or don’t the psalmists often say things like: “Let me hide in the shadow of your wings”? Don’t we sing, “Rock of Ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee”? Should we hide or not? The language of “hiding” in Scripture works the same way that the language of “covering” does. As Augustine pointed out, there are two ways to “cover.” There is a way to cover up yourself and there is a way to be covered by God. The same dynamic is at work in the language of “hiding.” There are two ways to be hidden. I’ve witnessed the two ways of hiding in my young children just this last week. A few nights ago my two oldest kids (5 and 2) were after me to play hide-and-seek. Because my daughter is only 2 years old, she often finds it scary to go hide by herself. So we take turns hiding with her. First my daughter and my son go hide together from me. But the next round my daughter and I would hide together from my son. The first round my daughter was hiding from me. The second round she hides with me.And I can’t help but notice the absolute giddiness in her as we hide together. Her giggling can’t be contained. Most all of us will all have had the experience of building forts when we were young. There is an excitement and even a giddiness in being safely hidden. Like being in a tent in the rain. I suspect this is the reason most of us sleep with “covers.” There’s a comfort in being hidden.When the psalmist asks to be hidden under God’s wing he is not asking be hidden from God, but hidden in God. Notice the song Rock of Ages says, “Let me hide myself in thee” not, “Let me hide myself from thee.” I’m convinced this difference is at the heart of whether or not we grasp the gospel. We have all heard sermons in which the preacher says something like, “If you believe in Jesus, then when God looks at you he doesn’t see you, he sees Jesus.” This is one of the biggest mistakes we can make because what we are suggesting is that we are being hidden in Christ from God. Rather than being hidden in Christ, who is God.When the psalmist asks to be hidden in the shadow of God’s wings he is comparing God to a mother bird. But a mother bird does not hide her chicks under her wings so that she doesn’t have to look at them. She hides them to be close to them, to comfort them, to protect them from the dangers around them.For many of us our theology has gone off course here. We have imagined that what Christ does for us is hide us in himself from the Father, so that the Father does not destroy us out of his just wrath.But this is a perversion of the gospel.This came home to me reading a book by a modern day shepherd named James Rebanks.  Rebanks says that when it is lambing season they have mothers that die in the birthing process and little lambs that die. They have motherless lambs and childless mothers.He says an old shepherding trick is to take the dead body of the lamb who died in birth and skin it from the neck to the hoofs. The shepherd then takes that skin and covers one of the orphan lambs with it like a jacket. Then he takes that orphaned lamb and gives it to the mother who lost her lamb in childbirth. The orphan lamb smells like her baby. And, Rebanks says, she almost always will mother it and feed it as if it is her own. But, and I love this, he says you can tell that she knows something is up. He says the ewe looks at the shepherd with a look that says, “I know you did something and I know this isn’t my lamb.” But after a few moments of skepticism she still feeds and cares for the lamb like it is her own.Reading this I could feel a version of my former self gearing up to preach it straightaway. “Jesus is the lamb of God who has covered us in himself so that the Father accepts us as if we were him.” But this isn’t what the New Testament bears witness to. If we press into this metaphor we can see its many problems. The first—and biggest—problem it suggests if taken literally is that Jesus (God the Son) is tricking God the Father into loving you. God doesn’t actually want you, in fact he can’t stand to look at you because you are too sinful. But because his Son is perfect and has covered you, the Father accepts you because you “smell” like his Son.This is not the gospel. That would be hiding from God. The gospel promises that you are being hidden in God. He is your home and in him you find your true self—your true identity. You don’t have to cover it up in order for him to accept you.The gospel is that the lamb of God has died in order to show you that you truly belong to the Father. The Father desperately wants you. This is the deepest truth of your life. God is head over heels in love with you. But he needs you to know that this is true of you. As John puts it, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” Or Paul says to the Corinthians that “God was reconciling the world to himself in his Son Christ Jesus.”Jesus does not die to convince the Father to accept you. He dies so that you can see that the Father has loved you from before the foundations of the earth: “You have died, and your life is now hidden in Christ in God” not from God (Col. 3:3).This is what it means for God to cover your sin. He clothes you in Christ, not to hide you from view, but to keep you close. God doesn’t have to fool himself into loving you. His love makes you who he always meant for you to be.In other words, when you are clothed in Christ, you are becoming yourself! This is precisely what happens in the Prodigal Son story. The younger son has gone away from his father and squandered his inheritance on wild living. He comes to his senses and realizes that he should go back to his father, not as a son, but as a slave. When he gets home he tries to tell his father that he is not worthy to be a son, but asks if he can be made a slave in his father’s house. But the Father will not hear it. He says, “Go and get a robe! Cover him in his own robe! For my son was dead and now he is alive, he was lost but now he is found!”The father covering his son in the robe is not a lie. The father refuses to regard his son as a slave because he has never been a slave. He’s always only been a son. When the father covers his son in the robe he is telling him, “You are my son. You always have been. I put this robe on you so that you know it is true.”The robe does cover his sin, his nakedness, his poverty, his filth. But it’s not a robe that doesn’t belong to him. It is his precisely because the father says it always has been. In this act of covering his son the father is making the boy to be who he has always been. The father was saying, “Come out of your delusions of being one of my slaves! You are my child.”This is how God covers our sin. And his covering sin is precisely what makes him righteous. In fact, in Scripture uncovering or exposing sin is often what the unrighteous people do. If they can, the righteous cover sin.Think of Joseph and Mary. Before they were married she was found to be with child. In Joseph’s mind this pregnancy is the result of Mary’s sin. But because he was a righteous man he decided he would not expose her, but he would cover her.“Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, [or, was a righteous man] he did not want to expose her to public disgrace, so he had in mind to divorce her quietly” (Matt. 1:19).God covers sin. This is what he’s been doing since Genesis 3. Adam and Eve fall into sin and God is there to cover their nakedness. Because he is righteous.We often think that to be truly righteous is to expose every sin any chance we get. But this is not righteousness according to Jesus.Bonhoeffer puts his finger on something we desperately need to hear in our world of exposure and cynicism:“The point is precisely that ‘truthfulness’ does not mean the disclosure of everything that exists. God Himself made clothes for man (Gen. 3:21); and this means that [after the fall] many things in man are to remain concealed…Exposure is cynical; and even if the cynic appears to himself to be specially honest.”God covers sin. That is what makes him righteous. We’ve often been taught the opposite. It is true that God exposes the evil, but he always covers the person (Col. 2:15). We are called into this same sort of work for those around us. We are called to cover the sins of our spouses, our families, our neighbors, and even our enemies. This doesn’t mean hiding them from God, or pretending they don’t exist. It means hiding them in God for their ultimate healing and restoration.I leave the last word to the Apostle Peter: “Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8).Amen. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

We did not meet for our typical midweek Bible study this week, so I figured I would repost an old teaching that I know I need to return to often.This teaching was from our study of 1 Corinthians 3 in the Spring of 2024. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Psalm 23 (KJV) 1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. 2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. 3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. 4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. 5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. 6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.The Servant ShepherdOur familiarity with Psalm 23 can keep us from seeing the masterful progressions contained within these six lines. I’ll point to just a few that we discussed in the class.The psalm begins with words about God. “The Lord is my shepherd. He makes me leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.” But in the valley of the shadow of death things turn. We move from words about God to talking to God. “I will fear no evil for you are with me. Your rod and staff comfort me. You prepare a table before me.” We meet the Good Shepherd in the valley of death. But on the other side of the valley we find, to our surprise, that the Good Shepherd is preparing a table before us in the presence of our enemies. First, why is a sheep being allowed to eat at the table? And second, why is it that God is the waiter and we are the guests? Why is God serving us? Isn’t that backwards? Isn’t the point of our lives to serve God? We aren’t the first to be shocked by this truth. Jesus’ own disciples couldn’t believe it which is why Jesus told them, “The son of man did not come to be served, but to serve.” Chris Green puts the point like this: “We do not know even how to begin to take it seriously. How can it be that he serves us? But what if it were true? What if we’re trying to serve a God who wants to serve us?”God is unlike anything we can compare him to, but he is more dissimilar to some things than he is to others. God is more dissimilar to a king than he is to a shepherd. A king exists at the top of the ladder of society. He has servants that do his bidding. Our God is lowly enough to wash feet. But the psalm keeps moving. The Good Shepherd isn’t just serving you, he is anointing your head with oil. The word “Christ” or “Messiah” simply means the “Anointed One.” Only Jesus is the anointed one—he alone is the Christ—but here he is making you to be like him. But that still isn’t worded quite right. He isn’t merely making you like him so that you can imitate his example. He is making you to be him, to be his own body. He is bringing you into himself—he is the head and his people are his body.If the head is anointed with oil, the body will be anointed, too. This is what Psalm 133 testifies to. The oil is poured upon the head of the priest, but it doesn’t remain on the head. It runs down upon his beard and to the collar of his garments—to his body!Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity! It is like the precious oil upon the head, running down upon the beard,upon the beard of Aaron, running down on the collar of his robes! Ps. 133:1—3Oil is a sign of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is poured out on the Head at his baptism so that he can baptize us, his body, in the Spirit at Pentecost. He is bringing us all the way into his life. He is sharing everything with us.From Sheep to ShepherdsNow comes the most astounding line of the psalm: “And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”When the psalm began you were a sheep in the Shepherd’s pasture. He led you around to still waters and walked with you through the valley of the shadow of death. But on the other side of the valley of death something shifted. You are not a sheep in the pasture anymore, you are a guest at the Shepherd’s table, eating his food! And after dinner you have been invited to dwell in the house with the Shepherd. Not for a sheep sleepover, but forever. What in the world is a sheep doing dwelling in the house of the Shepherd? Sheep don’t live in the shepherd’s house. We began the psalm as sheep, but the psalm ends with us being equals with the shepherd living in his house. In other words, by the end of the psalm you are not a sheep anymore. The work of God in your life is to make you into a shepherd in the way that he is a shepherd. Or as Jesus tells his disciples: “I no longer call you servants. I call you friends.”How is this made possible? Remember what John the Baptist said when he saw Jesus approaching him? “Behold the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.” The shepherd is a sheep. Or as John would later write in Revelation 7:17 “For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” The Good Shepherd is a Shepherd by becoming a Lamb. Or to put it in terms St. Athanasius might approve of: The Shepherd became a sheep in order to make sheep into Shepherds.And now we see why the psalmist says that goodness and mercy shall follow him all the day of his life. The psalmist isn’t merely talking about what God will do for you, but rather what God is doing through you for the sake of others.Goodness and mercy shall follow you like the train of a bride’s wedding dress follows her wherever she goes. It is the trail she leaves anywhere she goes in the room. Now that you’ve been made a shepherd with the Shepherd, wherever you go goodness and mercy will be the result for the people you come in contact with. This is the overflowing cup you are given: the eternal life of God. Those who believe in the Good Shepherd will have rivers of living water flowing up out of their bellies (John 7:38). Your life is meant to become the overflow for your neighbor’s life. Because you are not meant to remain a sheep. You are meant to be a Shepherd with the Shepherd and as the Shepherd.  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

This week we continue our discussion of forgiveness and the psalms.The Soldiers that Pierced HimThe soldiers are not the principally guilty party in the crucifixion of Jesus. They did not decide that Jesus should be executed. In this way we can pity them: they are just doing their job. But their job is not guiltless. There is still responsibility for the soldiers to bear for this tragedy. It is evil, and Jesus suffers directly at their hands. They are the ones physically wounding him. It is a concrete trauma, and helpful for us to think through how the full process of forgiveness is meant to work.Kallistos Ware puts it like this: If the process of forgiveness is to be brought to full completion, the evil has to be frankly admitted by both sides, by aggressor as well as the victim. It is true that, when we suffer wrong, we should endeavor to forgive the other immediately, without delay; not waiting for the other to acknowledge the wrong. It was precisely in this spirit that Jesus prayed at His crucifixion, “Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” If, however, the forgiveness is to come to proper interpersonal fulfillment; more than this is required. Forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered; and the one who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.”Even while he was still on the cross Jesus forgave the soldiers. But as Ware points out, more than this is required if the process of forgiveness is to be brought to full completion. The proper fulfillment of forgiveness is both justice and reconciliation. Jesus shows us here that we should forgive immediately and without delay. But for the proper fulfillment of forgiveness to take place the evil must be truthfully acknowledged by the perpetrator and the victim. If the soldiers cannot admit to any guilt, then they will not benefit from the forgiveness Jesus has given to them. But what would it look like if they did?What might the full process of forgiveness look like between Jesus and the soldiers who crucified him? What does Scripture suggest to us about what might/could happen between Jesus and the soldiers who wounded him? To engage this question is not a flight of fancy. This is how Scripture works. It is suggestive by design and it invites us into the stories. Not to simply imagine the past, but to engage us in the present. This is how the resurrected Jesus speaks to us today, right now.Scripture is like a Picasso painting. Compared to a realistic painting a Picasso has very few brush strokes and they are all suggestive. They don’t tell you the whole story. They invite you in to the blank space and ask you to imaginatively fill them in. Here’s the question we are asking: What are the “brush strokes” Scripture provides for us regarding the soldiers?In the Gospels Jesus prays from the cross that his Father will forgive the soldiers for what they’ve done. And Jesus’ prayers get answered. Robert Jenson says that this is a question posed by Jesus to the Father: Will you still be my Father now that I am tied up with these despicable brothers? In other words Jesus is saying to the Father, “If you are going to resurrect me, you will have to accept these soldiers with me because I want them to be forgiven.” The resurrection of Jesus is the assurance that the soldiers (and all humanity) have been forgiven. But what other texts could we turn to that invite us to imagine the goodness of God in the way he deals with these soldiers?Psalm 22: Dogs Surround MeOn the cross Jesus also quotes Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). In one of Augustine’s sermons on this psalm he says that the passion of Christ is told to us in here as clearly as it is told to us in the gospels. Psalm 22 not only speaks of the passion of Christ, but we find the soldiers mentioned again:12 Many bulls surround me;    strong bulls of Bashan encircle me. 13 Roaring lions that tear their prey     open their mouths wide against me 16 Dogs surround me,     a pack of villains encircles me;     they pierce my hands and my feet.The “dogs” surrounding Jesus at his crucifixion are certainly not limited to the soldiers, but physically they are the representation of the evil system that has put Jesus on the cross. Augustine points out that dogs bark without understanding, without truth. No matter who passes by the yard, dogs bark. What these dogs have done they have done in ignorance. Or as Jesus put it, “They know not what they do.”Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:8 emphasizes the same point regarding ignorance: “None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”Again, Paul is not only (or even primarily) speaking of the soldiers here, but they are certainly included. I don’t think it is much of a stretch to say that the soldiers are the most ignorant out of those responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion.There is a deep truth here about all wounding. All wounds are inflicted without perfect knowledge. Of course some wounding is more knowledgeable, more intentional, more knowing, and so more despicable. Pilate, Herod, and the religious leaders are all more knowledgeable than the soldiers who pierced him, but it is still not perfect knowledge. If we knew the perfect truth of all things we would never wound others because the perfect truth of every situation is the will of God, which is Jesus Christ. To truly know something is to truly love it. “Perfect knowledge is perfect love.”Scripture has suggested these two things: 1) This is an ignorant act by the soldiers and 2) Jesus forgives them. But as Kallistos Ware said if the forgiveness is to come to it's proper completion, the soldiers will have to come to see the truth themselves and recognize what they’ve done as evil. Psalm 22 offers us more on this. In verse 21 the psalmist says something unexpected. There is a turn. 19 But you, Lord, do not be far from me.     You are my strength; come quickly to help me. 20 Deliver me from the sword,     my precious life from the power of the dogs. 21 Rescue me from the mouth of the lions;     save me from the horns of the wild oxen. 22 I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters;     in the assembly I will praise you.The psalmist prays to be delivered from the power of the dogs, but then says that he will proclaim the name of the Lord to his brothers and sisters. But who are Jesus’ brothers and sisters? Are the soldiers included here? It’s not much of a stretch to say they are. He has pleaded with his Father for the forgiveness and we know that he is dying for their sake, in order to bring many sons and daughters to repentance (Heb. 2:10).But there’s still more in our psalm:27  All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, And all the families of the gentiles will worship before You. 28 For the kingdom is the Lord’s And He rules over the nations. 29 All the prosperous of the earth will eat and worship, All those who go down to the dust will bow before Him, Even he who cannot keep his soul alive.All the families of the gentiles, to the ends of the earth, will remember and turn to the Lord. He is the Lord who rules over all the nations, but he does so by forgiving them. The gentiles will worship the Lord, even those who have gone down to the dust, those who have died, will bow before him.Every Eye Will See HimWhen did this happen? Has this happened? This is an eschatological promise, a promise about the second coming of Christ. The book of Revelation supplies us with another brush stroke on the canvas:Behold, He is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see Him, even those who pierced Him… (Rev. 1:7)This is a very suggestive line. Does it mean that every person who is alive when Jesus returns will see him? But it says that even those who pierced him will see him. This odd line seems to suggest that the second coming of Jesus is not simply the last event on the timeline of history, not merely one tick on the timeline like all other events. Rather, Jesus’s second coming is an event that will happen to the timeline of history. Jesus’ return will happen to every moment of the timeline. How else could the soldiers see him when he comes with the clouds?In other words, Jesus second coming is not just the healing of the end of the timeline, but the healing of every moment on the timeline. It’s not like a fairytale that only ends happily ever after. The promise is that every one of our wounds—even those in our past—will be unmade and remade by the Lord Jesus.In the way we experience time, it is true that if something has happened then it is in the past. It is over and done. Nothing can change that. But why would that apply to Christ? He is the creator of time—time is his creature! Time is not a condition Jesus has to live within, time lives in him. He is not bound by time in the way we experience it.Our past is closed off to us. We can’t go back and change it. The soldiers cannot change the fact that they pierced him. But why would we think that God does not have access to all the past moments of suffering, trauma, and evil? The past is not closed off to God like it is to us. This doesn’t simply mean that God is able to view what has happened in the past, but that he actually has the ability to enter all past events and act on them—to change them and make them be what they ought to have been all along.This is, at least in part, what the book of Revelation means when it says that Jesus will wipe every tear from every eye. Not just that he will wipe away the tears from the eyes of those who are alive when he returns, but that when he comes he will wipe away every tear from every crying eye in every moment of history. This is hard to even imagine. But Paul reminds us that “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has in store for those that love Him” (1 Cor. 2:9).If we can imagine what God might do to make things right, it is still not even close to what He has prepared for us.This is the unmaking and remaking of all past traumas and wounds. God will come to every moment on the timeline of history and unmake and remake them according to his will. But he won’t do that without us.What if in the end, when Christ returns, we are all allowed to work with God and with those who we have wronged and with those who have wronged us in a reworking of those past traumas? To bring justice and reconciliation. What if Jesus’ return is the opening of the possibility of the soldiers reworking what they should’ve done in that moment and making it true to God’s will?I believe that in the end even Jesus’ wounds that he bears in his resurrected body will be undone and remade, by God—yes—but God with the soldiers who put the wounds into him.For true forgiveness to be completely done, both the victim and the perpetrator have to see the truth of the evil that was done and then begin the work of making it right. And because of God’s infinite goodness he can make a way where there seems to be no way. This is one of the greatest hopes that the gospel gives to us: We each will be given the opportunity to participate in the undoing of both the wounds we’ve received and the wounds we have inflicted. We will be given the opportunity to participate in God’s making all things new. That’s hope. That’s hope for the soldiers who pierced him, and that’s hope for you and me.I’ve often heard pastors say things like this: “Your past has no future, but your present does.” What they mean is that what is done is done. You can’t change what has been done. You can only change yourself right now. And there’s some wisdom in that.But the promise of the resurrection is that your past does have a future. With God’s help you will be able to forgive and be forgiven. You will have all your wounds unmade. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Psalm 130:1-4 1 Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. 2 Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy! 3 If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? 4 But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be feared.Kallistos Ware points out that while the psalms frequently talk about forgiveness, they do not very clearly talk about the fact that we are called to forgive one another. Jesus teaches us to forgive one another. He teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” And he tells Peter that he must forgive the one who sins against him not merely seven times but seventy times seven.We are touching one of those seemingly clashing chords here. It seems to be unresolvable. A shallow reading would say something like this: the psalms teach vengeance on our enemies while Jesus teaches forgiveness of our enemies. But there is harmony here. It’s deep and beautiful if we have ears to hear. The tension is there and it’s there on purpose. If music didn’t have tension in it, it would be boring. This is what ensures the harmony: we confess that the voice that speaks in the psalms is the same voice Peter heard walking the shores of Galilee.Sarah Coakley argues that this line in Ps. 130:4 (“But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be feared”) unearths a deep theological insight: forgiveness is actually impossible. The psalms are testifying to the fact that: only God forgives. The Fearfulness of ForgivenessTo our ears this line in v. 4 seems odd (“Forgiveness is with you, therefore you are to be feared”). It even seems backwards. What do forgiveness and fearfulness have to do with one another? Surely they are opposites. To forgive someone—to have mercy on them—is not a fearful thing. Imagine neighborhood kids saying, “Watch out for Old Man Jenkins at the end of the street! He forgives people!” Mercy is not something that strikes terror in our hearts. If anything we think the opposite: someone who is merciful and extends forgiveness is wimpy or weak. Forgiving is not fearful behavior. And yet the psalm insists that because God forgives therefore he is to be feared.Interestingly, the root of the noun “forgiveness” in v. 4 is the Hebrew word salah. Salah is one of the few words that is only properly used of God in the Hebrew Bible. Another example would be the word bara which means “to create.” Only God creates in the sense of bara, and only God forgives in the sense of salah. Jacob Milgrom says that salah is “exclusively a divine gift… Only God can be the subject of salah, never man!”Only God can forgive, but why should this result in fear? Sarah Coakley notes that this isn’t the only passage that puts forgiveness and fear together like this. In Solomon’s dedication prayer at the temple he articulates the same movement from forgiveness to fear: “Then hear in heaven your dwelling place, forgive…so that they may fear you…” (1 Kings 8:39–40)In both Ps. 130 and 1 Kgs. 8 fear is a result of forgiveness, not the other way around. We are more likely to think that if fear and forgiveness are related in any way, the fear would come first—someone is fearful God won’t forgive them—then as a result of their proper fear of God, he forgives them. But these passages say the forgiveness comes first and fear is the result.In ancient Israel Ps. 130 was one of the texts read aloud on the Day of Atonement (along with the book of Jonah, a story of forgiveness, anger, and fear of the Lord). One ancient rabbinic commentary on the Day of Atonement puts it like this: “Israel is steeped in sin…but they do repentance and the Lord forgives their sins every year, and renews their heart to fear him” (Exodus Rabbah 1.6).Rashi, an important medieval rabbi, continues the point: “You have not given the authority to any intermediary to forgive…and therefore no person will trust in the forgiveness of anyone else [but God].”Most striking to me is the end of the Joseph story. Joseph is reunited with his brothers who had sold him into slavery. They end up begging him for forgiveness. Joseph responds: “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm for me God intended it for good…” (Gen. 50:19–20)The fear that comes in forgiveness is the recognition that only God can forgive. This is “the fear of the Lord” which is unlike any other fear.The Son of Man, Forgiveness, and FearThe Gospels also bear witness to this theme, but with a surprising twist. In the story of the healing of the paralytic man (Mk 2, Matt 9) Jesus sees the faith of the man’s friends and before anyone says a word he declares the the man’s sins are forgiven. The religious leaders put their finger on the same point: “This man is blaspheming,” they say, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Jesus then heals the man in order to show that “the son of man has authority not the earth to forgive sins.” And in Matthew’s account all those standing there were filled with fear.Again, Sarah Coakley observes, “the more one insists on the uniquely divine characteristic of forgiveness, the higher one’s Christology is pressed.” Who is this Jesus? Yes, the winds and the waves obey him. Yes, he can heal blind eyes and lame legs. These are miracles that other humans have performed in Israel’s history. But no one can forgive sins but God alone. The forgiveness comes and the result is fear. The “fear of the Lord” in Scripture is a theme with its own complex harmony. To properly fear the Lord means you aren’t afraid of anything—especially death. The fear of the Lord is an odd kind of fear because it is a fear that liberates us from all other fear. As Maximus the Confessor put it, the fear of the Lord is an “expression of the true law of tenderness.” It’s a fear that creates love and tenderness. This is a complex chord being played by the Spirit in the Scriptures. And then we get this note added to the chord: in the book of Revelation John falls at Jesus’ feet though dead, but Jesus, putting his right hand on John, says “Fear not. I am the first and the last.” Contained within the chord of “the fear of the Lord” is also “Fear not.”The 19th century Scottish preacher George MacDonald said that the “fear of the Lord” is another way of referring to the fact that God is a consuming fire. The fire of God “is his essential being, his love” but it is a fire that is unlike earthly fire in that the further you get from it, the worse it burns you. Only at a distance does this fire burn, and the closer we get to it the more the burning turns to comfort, and comfort to bliss. Forgiveness is a fearful thing because only God can forgive. It is the fire of God. Once we’ve caught a glimpse of that fire, initially it fills us with fear. It burns. But the closer we move into the burning heart of God’s forgiveness (which is simply Jesus), the more the “Fear of the Lord” becomes a “Fear not.”Forgiving as the LordForgiveness is a uniquely divine capability. No one can forgive sins but God alone. And the Gospels show us that Jesus forgives sins because he and the Father are one. So far so good.And yet, we come to another complex chord played in Scripture. Jesus repeatedly instructs us to forgive. Peter is instructed to forgive not seven times but seventy times seven. Paul tells the Colossians to “Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you” (Colossians 3:13).To forgive someone seventy-seven times is to perfectly, fully, completely forgive—something that is uniquely divine. And Paul isn’t shying away from this either. We are to forgive as the Lord forgives.In other words, Jesus is giving Peter permission to forgive with God’s own forgiveness. Peter is invited into the divine activity of forgiveness. In other words, if Jesus is in God and Peter is in Jesus, then Peter has been brought into share the very life of God. Or as Peter himself puts it in 2 Peter 1:4 in Christ we have become “partakers in the divine nature.” We are the body of Christ, united to our head. Everything that is true of Jesus he makes true for you and for me. If the head says, “Your sins are forgiven” then he is giving his body the ability to say the same. Think back to the Joseph story. His brothers plead with him for forgiveness and Joseph says, “Am I in the place of God?”The gospel gives us this surprising and unfathomable truth: You have been united to Jesus Christ. What is true of him becomes true of you. He is loved by God the Father and so are you. He is resurrected from the dead and so will you be. The son of man has the authority on the earth to forgive sins and by grace you have been given the same divine ability to forgive. Forgive as the Lord!Here’s a final example to make the point. Hanging from the cross Jesus prays: “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” And so Stephen, filled with the Holy Spirit, can pray the same thing when he is being murdered: “Father, forgive them!” Stephen speaks up with God’s own voice and declares his murderers forgiven. And of course they have been. Jesus “is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). Stephen can speak up to God with God’s own voice and forgive declare his persecutors forgiven. Return to Joseph’s question: “Am I in the place of God?” And in Jesus Christ that’s precisely where we find ourselves. Jesus has made your place his place in the incarnation. And so, too, in the resurrection he has made God’s place to be our own.Forgiveness is impossible. Only God forgives. But this is just what Jesus does. He is the one who makes a way where there is no way. He is the one who makes forgiveness the impossible possibility. That’s just another way of saying that he’s resurrected from the grave. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Last week we concluded discussing the difficulty of Scripture. The Scriptures are like the music of God and they are filled with strange, unexpected, and perplexingly intricate harmonies that bewilder and frustrate untrained readers. The unskilled reader will hear in the Scriptures only dissonances, only clashes. I suggested that the only way to start to hear the deep, complex, but beautiful harmony of Scripture is if you are trained to hear it.The only way to do that is by putting yourself around master craftsmen. Men and women who know how to hear this deep music. Bonhoeffer was our guide last week. This week we turn to Origen, Athanasius, Basil, and Augustine, master craftsmen of the early church, to hear what they have to teach us on the psalms.(St.) Origen of Alexandria (185—253) Psalms as TherapyOrigen is perhaps the most important interpreter of Scripture in the church’s history. All our best thinkers, our best theologians, and our best readers of scripture don’t happen without Origen. Origen says that reading the Bible is like being a physician. In the ancient world, healers, or doctors, were pretty good at dealing with certain chronic illnesses. Say you had a skin rash. The ancient physicians knew knew how to mash up a couple different herbs from the garden in order to give you relief. Doctors in Origen’s day needed to know every plant and herb growing in the garden. And, Origen says, it’s the same with reading the Bible. You have to know it in order to offer healing to someone who has an ailment.The psalms, according to Origen, were one of the primary “herbs” used for healing. For Origen, the psalms were a means of therapy for the sick soul. St. Athanasius of Alexandria (296—373) Mirror and MedicineAthanasius, another very central and key figure in the early church picks up on this notion of the healing properties of the psalms. Athansius writes a letter to a man named Marcellinus and he begins like this:Your steadfastness in Christ fills me with admiration. Not only are you bearing well your present trial, with its attendant suffering; you are even living under rule and, so the bearer of your letter tells me, using the leisure necessitated by your recent illness to study the whole body of the Holy Scriptures and especially the Psalms. Of every one of those, he says, you are trying to grasp the inner force and sense. Splendid! I myself am devoted to the Psalms, as indeed to the whole Bible; and I once talked with a certain studious old man, who had bestowed much labor on the Psalter, and he spoke to me about it with great persuasiveness and charm, expressing himself clearly too, and holding a copy of it in his hand the while he spoke. So I am going to write down for you the things he said.Athanasius, following Origen, sees himself as physician of the soul. He knows that you can’t truly read the psalms without making them your own. He continues:[The book of Psalms] has this peculiar marvel of its own, that within it are represented and portrayed in all their great variety the movements of the human soul. It is like a picture, in which you see yourself portrayed, and seeing, may understand and consequently form yourself upon the pattern given. Elsewhere in the Bible you read only that the Law commands this or that to be done, you listen to the Prophets to learn about the Savior’s coming, or you turn to the historical books to learn the doings of the kings and holy men; but in the Psalter, besides all these things, you learn about yourself. You find depicted in it all the movements of your soul, all its changes, its ups and downs, its failures and recoveries. Moreover, whatever your particular need or trouble, from this same book you can select a form of words to fit it, so that you do not merely hear and then pass on, but learn the way to remedy your ill…In fact, under all the circumstances of life, we shall find that these divine songs suit ourselves and meet our own souls’ need at every turn…The Psalms thus serve the one who sings them as a mirror.For Athanasius, reading the psalms leads to deeper knowledge of oneself. The psalms are a mirror that allow you to see yourself more truly. The psalms, as a mirror to the self, have a diagnostic quality to them.  Like Origen, Athanasius thinks the psalms are therapeutic.St. Basil the Great (330—379) A Spoonful of SugarBasil, building on Origen and Athanasius, says this in his sermon on Psalm 1:All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful, composed by the Spirit for this reason, namely, that we men, each and all of us, as if in a general hospital for souls, may select the remedy for his own condition…Now, the prophets teach one thing, historians another, the law something else, and the form of advice found in the proverbs something different still. But, the Book of Psalms has taken over what is profitable from all. It foretells coming events; it recalls history; it frames laws for life; it suggests what must be done; and, in general, it is the common treasury of good doctrine, carefully finding what is suitable for each one. The old wounds of souls it cures completely, and to the recently wounded it brings speedy improvement; the diseased it treats, and the unharmed it preserves. On the whole, it effaces, as far as is possible, the passions, which subtly exercise dominion over souls during the lifetime of man, and it does this with a certain orderly persuasion and sweetness which produces sound thoughts.Basil goes on to say that the brilliance of the Spirit’s work in the psalms is that it combines good doctrine with song. The medicine that comes from the psalms can be hard to swallow, so the Spirit mingled them with the sweetness of a song. I think Basil, Athanasius, and Origen are all exactly right. The psalms are therapeutic. They bring us healing. They are like a mirror for our souls to diagnose our ailments. They are like medicine mixed with honey in order that they go done easier. But why do the psalms do this for us? Why does the medicine work? How do the psalms mirror us?St. Augustine of Hippo (354—430)The Whole Christ: Head and BodyAugustine picks all this up. He sees the psalms as both a mirror and medicine for the soul. In his sermon on Ps. 94 (which begins, “The Lord is a God who avenges…Rise up, Judge of the earth; pay back to the proud what they deserve”) Augustine says:Meanwhile the wicked triumph, the wicked exult, the wicked blaspheme and commit all manner of crimes…Does this upset you? The psalm grieves with you, and asks questions with you, but not because it does not know. Rather does it ask you with the question to which it knows the answer, so that in it you may find what you did not know. Anyone who wants to console someone else acts like this: unless he grieves with the other, he cannot lift him up. First of all he grieves with him, and then he strengthens him with a consoling word…So too the psalm, and indeed the Spirit of God, though knowing everything, asks questions with you, as though giving expression to your own words… But then he notes how the psalm shifts in verse 22: “The Lord is has become my fortress, and my God the rock in whom I take refuge.” What happened in the shift? Clearly some sort of healing. But how does the medicine work? Augustine puts his finger right on the answer:Look how the psalm corrects itself: allow yourself to be corrected along with it. It was to that end that the psalm adopted your complaint. What did you say? How long will sinners gloat, O Lord, How long? The psalm took on your words, so now you take on the words of the psalm. And what does the psalm say? The Lord has become a refuge for me.The psalm grieves with you and asks questions of you, but then he says the psalm corrects itself, and we have to be corrected with it. This is the key line: “The psalm took on your words, so now you take on the words of the psalm.”What does that sound like? Or who does that sound like?Augustine’s great insight into the psalms can be put into this question: Who is the ‘I’ that is praying here? Is it always and only just the psalmist? Is it me? Whose voice is speaking what and to whom are they speaking?The psalms contain many voices, and the key to understanding them is seeing who is speaking in each case. This is a difficult question because it isn’t always easy to identify the voice in the psalms. Sometimes the psalmist speaks for himself and sometimes for God. Other times the psalmist will speak as though he is identified with the whole people of Israel.  Sometimes he speaks as the king of Israel. And many times he speaks as though he is the poor and the downtrodden. All these voices come through the psalmist.So, Augustine puts this question to us: What person do you know who is simultaneously a human and God himself, the king of Israel and all of Israel, and the poor and the downtrodden? What person can include all these voices as his very own? Only Jesus of Nazareth. The one who speaks in the psalms is Jesus Christ as “the whole Christ” (what in Latin Augustine calls the totus Christus). The whole Christ for Augustine is both the head (Jesus Christ himself) and his body (the church with all its members). This is Augustine’s greatest insight: Jesus is both simultaneously the head of the body and the body itself. He is all and in all! In the psalms you can hear him speaking as the head and at other times you can hear him speaking as the body.Let’s take a few examples of how Augustine does this when he preaches. Here is a bit of Augustine’s sermon on Ps. 40 (on the line: “He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God”):Someone may perhaps ask who the speaker is in this psalm. Briefly, it is Christ. But as you know, brothers and sisters—and it can never be said too often—Christ sometimes speaks in his own person, as our Head. He is the Savior of the body and its Head, the Son of God who was born of a virgin, suffered for us, rose for our justification and sits at God's right hand to intercede for us… Accordingly he sometimes speaks as our Head, and at other times as from ourselves, his members, just as he spoke in the name of his members and not from himself when he said, I was hungry and you fed me (Mt 25:35). Again, when he said, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? (Acts 9:4) it was the Head crying out in the person of his members, yet he did not say, "Why are you persecuting my members?" but, Why are you persecuting me? If he suffers in us, we shall also be crowned in him. This is the love of Christ. Can anything else compare with it? He put a hymn about this matter into our mouths, and sings it with the voice of his members.”And here’s Augustine again on Ps. 60:Christ willed to prefigure us, who are his body, in that body of his in which he died and rose again, and ascended into heaven, so that where the head has gone in advance, the members may confidently expect to follow. He transfigured us into himself…The psalm takes your words of complaint and despair and sorrow to itself, and then gives you its words to have as your own. This is the beautiful exchange of Jesus. He takes on what is deathly in us and then communicates his own life to us.The psalms are medicine. We’ve always known that. They heal. But why does the medicine work? Because the one who prays them is Jesus of Nazareth, and he’s always been the head of his body praying these prayers. When the ancient Israelites gathered in the temple with these hymns and lamentations, they prayed them with their head: Jesus Christ. That’s the reason that this psalm is medicine for your soul. It’s like the psalms are an IV drip through which you receive the healing medicine—which is the very life of Christ!In other words, in the book of Psalms we are getting to overhear Jesus’ prayers to his Father. And we find that he prays for us—his body—as our representative. He gives voice to our cries.Famously the Gospel of John allows the reader to overhear many of Jesus’ prayers to his Father. I think we can learn something of what the psalms are meant to be by looking closer at John.In John 11 Jesus is standing at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. He has already discussed the resurrection with Martha and wept with Mary. But then we get these revealing lines:So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me. When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out…” (John 11:41–44)Why is he praying? For the benefit of the people who can hear him. So that they can believe! Now, if the psalms are also Jesus’ prayers what does this tell us about the psalms? They are Jesus’ prayers that are given to us for our sake! So that we may believe, so that we may be healed.Jesus’ prayers in John’s Gospel and in the psalms are given as medicine for the sake of our healing. Jesus lets us overhear his words to the Father so that the confidence he has in God can become our confidence. When Jesus prays so that we can hear him, he is saying: “I’m doing this so that what is always true for me, the head, can now become true for them, my body.”This is the IV drip connected to our sin-sick souls. The connection is the head to the body. The life flows from the head into the body. This is why when a body is out of alignment with its head we say the patient is dis-eased. There is no ease between the head and body. Medicine, when working properly, restores the ease, the rest, the alignment between a head and body.The words of the psalms are nothing less than this: they are the words of the head, Jesus Christ, prayed for the sake of his body in order to make the body sing his song again. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

The Prayerbook of the BibleThe Psalms are a prayerbook, the prayerbook of the Scriptures. They contain multitudes. Athanasius of Alexandria said that the Psalms are like a garden, containing things of all kinds. What he means is that the Psalms contain every part of the Scriptures: the Torah/law, the prophets, and the rest of what we call the Old Testament. The whole of Scripture is contained in this little garden. But the Psalms are an odd book to find in the Bible. The Psalms are a book of prayers and that’s precisely what makes it odd. Why? Because the Bible is the Word of God to us. But prayers by definition are human words to God. And yet the Psalms are included in Scripture which is God’s word to us. The Psalms are odd because they are both the word of God to us and also the words of humans to God. How can our words to God also be God’s own word to us?Who Prays the Psalms?The only way to understand this is through Jesus. In the incarnation God becomes human. Jesus is simultaneously God and human, never separated but always at one and the same time. So, in Jesus’ mouth the words of human beings (the Psalms) become the word of God. When Jesus speaks it is simultaneously a human word and a divine word.In this way the Psalms are pure grace. In Jesus, God has made his way to us and then also made our way back to him possible.T.F. Torrance calls “the double movement of the Incarnation.” Jesus is both God’s word to us and our word back to God. We can see the double movement everywhere within Scripture.Take the prophets. The Word of God comes to Israel by way of the prophets: “And the Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah/Ezekiel/Hosea/etc.” But then that same word that came through the prophets to Israel is then offered back to God by Israel in the Psalms.The word coming down to us from God and the word going back up from us to God is the same word. It is Jesus of Nazareth.Which means that we can only speak to God in and with Jesus. He is our way back to God.Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it like this: “It is not simply a religious given that we can come to God in prayer but rather is made possible alone through Christ. No prayer can find the way to God that our intercessor Jesus Christ does not himself pick up and pray for us, that is not prayed in the name of Jesus Christ.”This is simple if we slow down over it. How do most of us typically end our prayers? Not in our own name, but “in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.” Our way to God is not in our own name, but in his. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through him (John 14:6).But this means that the only true way to pray the Psalms is in the name of Jesus. Bonhoeffer makes this argument in his wonderful little book on the Psalms: “It is a great grace that God tells us how we can speak with, and have community with, God. We can do so because we pray in the name of Jesus Christ. The Psalms have been given to us precisely so that we can learn to pray them in the name of Jesus.”In other words, prayer is always prayer mediated through Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of Jesus. So, what’s the difference between praying in our own spirit vs. praying in the Spirit of Jesus? Fire from Heaven?Luke 9 gives us the beginning of an answer. 51 When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. 52 And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to prepare for his arrival, 53 but they did not receive him because his face was set toward Jerusalem. 54 When his disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them [some ancient manuscripts add: ‘as Elijah did’]?” 55 But he turned and rebuked them. 56 Then they went on to another village. (Luke 9:51-56)James and John wanted to do what Elijah had done. They wanted to call down fire from heaven on their enemies and destroy them. That sounds like a request that you would find in the book of Psalms. And yet Jesus rebukes them. Crucially some later manuscripts of the book of Luke provide this line from Jesus at the beginning of v. 56: “And he said, ‘You do not know what spirit you belong to, for the Son of Man did not come to destroy human lives, but to save them.’”The Spirit of Jesus and the spirit of vengeance against our enemies are not the same spirit. The spirit that longs for vengeance is our own spirit.Just a few verses later in Luke Jesus says that if you want to follow him you will have to do what deny yourself and take up your cross. You must lose your life. You must lose your own spirit and in that way you will find your true life, which is the Life/Spirit of Jesus. This is key. If you pray the Psalms in your own name, you will lose yourself, but to truly find yourself in the Psalms you will have to pray them in Jesus’ Spirit. Paul says in 2 Cor. 3 that we must read all Scripture according to the Spirit, not the letter. The same dynamic is at play. To read the Scriptures according to the letter is to read them according to your own spirit—to read them in your own name—and Paul says the letter kills. But to read them according to the Spirit, is to read them according to Jesus’ Spirit. And Jesus’ Spirit is the spirit that inspired the Scriptures. Paul says that reading Scripture according to the Spirit gives life.This is what the Psalms are actually about. They testify to Jesus.“He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44). But the New Testament doesn’t only tell us that the Psalms speak of Jesus, but that Jesus is actually the one speaking in the Psalms. “So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters. He says, “I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters;  in the assembly I will sing your praises” (Heb. 2:11–12 ).Hebrews is claiming that Jesus is the speaker of Ps. 22. Or again:“Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased.’ Then I said, ‘Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—I have come to do your will, my God’” (Heb. 10:5–7).Christ came into the world speaking Psalm 40. He is the true speaker.But the danger always lurks. Are we going to pray the Psalms in our own name—which will lead to death—or will we pray the Psalms in the name of Jesus? According to “the letter” the Psalms can often be ugly, violent, and vindictive. But Jesus has cleansed our prayers by making them his own. When the Psalms are prayed in Jesus’ name they are made whole.Rowan Williams puts it like this:“Jesus hears all the words we speak—words of pain and protest and violence and rage. He hears them and he takes them, and in the presence of God the Father he says, ‘This is the humanity I have brought home. It’s not a pretty sight; it’s not edifying and impressive and heroic, it’s just real: real and needy and confused, and here it is brought home to heaven, dropped into the burning heart of God—for healing and for transformation.”Jesus "is not scared of anything we have to say.” He can handle it. Not because he is insensitive to our suffering, but because he is the one who can heal not only the fact that we suffered, but also the way we speak about our suffering.Bathe Your Feet in the Blood of the WickedLearning to pray the Psalms “in Jesus’ name” can be especially hard in the places where the Psalms talk about enemies. If we pray these Psalms in our own name, we will easily identify our enemies and pray for their ultimate destruction. But what might happen if we pray them in Jesus’ name? The Spirit of Jesus is to love your enemies and pray for their forgiveness, even if those enemies are crucifying you. To pray the Psalms in this way takes practice. And the best way to practice is apprenticeship to a master craftsman. In July of 1937 Bonhoeffer preached a sermon on Psalm 58 to the students at the underground seminary in Finkenwalde. Psalm 58 contains some of the harshest language of vengeance against the enemy. “O God, break the teeth in their mouths; tear out the fangs of the young lions…” (v. 6)“Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime; like the untimely birth that never sees the sun…” (v. 8)“The righteous will rejoice when they see vengeance done; they will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.” (v. 10)Upon reading the Psalm aloud to the seminarians Bonhoeffer asks this question: Are we permitted to pray like this? He answers: “No, we, we cannot pray this psalm. But not because we are too good (what a shallow notion, what incredible arrogance!), but because we are too sinful ourselves, too evil! Only those who are themselves completely without guilt can pray like this.”To pray like this would not only be to call down God’s righteous wrath on our enemies, but on ourselves as well. We are not completely without guilt. Who can pray this way?“Only the one who is completely free from any desire for vengeance on his own and free from all hatred, and certainly only the one who does not use his prayers to satisfy his own hunger for revenge can pray in the purity of heart: ‘O God, break the teeth in their mouths; tear out the fangs of the young lions, O Lord!’ That is to say, O God…It is your honor that is violated. O God, may you now step in and destroy your enemy, exercise your power, let your righteous wrath be kindled.” But how can we hear a line like "The righteous will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked” in the Spirit of Jesus? Shouldn’t we shrink back from praying words like these? No, Bonhoeffer says. What we need is to gain a better ear to hear the voice of Jesus in this.“Is it not utterly impossible for us, as Christian, to pray the end of this psalm? My dear congregation, if we shrink away here then we have understood nothing… Anyone who shrinks back in horror from such joy in God’s vengeance and from the blood of the wicked does not yet understand what happened on the cross of Christ. God’s righteous wrath at the wicked has, after all, already come down upon us. The blood of the wicked has already flowed. God’s death sentence over the wicked has already been pronounced. God’s righteousness has been fulfilled. All this happened on the cross of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ died the death of the wicked…Christ, the innocent one, died the death of the wicked so that we need not die that same death.”The blood of the wicked has already flowed, but in this surprising way: it was the blood of the Son of God. The righteous one became the wicked one for the sake of the wicked. Bonhoeffer finishes his sermon:And now a virtually incomprehensible riddle is solved: Jesus Christ, the innocent one, prays in the hour in which God’s vengeance is visited upon the wicked on earth, in which our psalm here is fulfilled: Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing… He alone is permitted [to pray this way]. The blood of the wicked in which we bathe gives us…a portion in God’s victory. The blood of the wicked has become our redemption; it makes us free of all sin. That is the miracle…Christ prays this psalm for us in a vicarious representative fashion. He accuses the wicked, summoning God's vengeance and righteousness down upon them, and offering himself on the cross for the sake of the wicked with his own innocent suffering…And now we pray along with this psalm, with the ardent petition that God bring all our enemies to the cross of Christ and grant them mercy, with fierce yearning that the day might soon come when Christ visibly triumphs over all his enemies and establishes his kingdom. Thus we have learned to pray this psalm. Amen.Origen and the Music of ScriptureOrigen of Alexandria (3rd century) describes Scripture as the music of God. He says it is a composition with strange, unexpected, and perplexingly intricate harmonies that bewilder and frustrate untrained readers. This is why, Origen says, that unskilled hearers hear only dissonances in the Scriptures, as if the Old Testament conflicts with the New, or the Prophets conflict with the Law, or Paul’s letters conflict with the Gospels. In order to hear the deep, beautiful harmonies of the Scriptures, readers will have to be trained for it. We need to apprentice ourselves to masters like Origen or Bonhoeffer.Origen goes on to say that Scripture is not just the music of God, but it is also the instrument on which we can play the music of God. But, again, he argues that believers can only “hear” the harmonies in Scripture that they can “play.” If you can only bang on the piano and pretend it is a song (like my 4 year old loves to do) then that cacophony will be all you will be able to hear in Scripture. But if you can hear the music of the love of God even in the dense, difficult, dissonant chords that Scripture often throws at us, you are like someone who can hear and play sonatas by Bach. The music of God is, at its heart, a four-chord chorus: Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. But that simple chord progression is transposed in all sorts of keys, time signatures, and voicings throughout the Bible. What we are called into is to join the great fugue that is the life of God, and as we join we grow in our musical understanding. We can begin to hear complex harmonies in the places that before we only heard dissonance. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Are the Psalms Coherent?Most of us have a favorite Psalm the way we have a favorite song. The psalms have been a great source of comfort, a balm to weary souls since the time of ancient Israel. But if you crack open the Psalms at random, chances are you will not open to a pleasant song of praise, but a harsh (even vindictive) song of imprecation. The Psalms of complaint make up a third of the entire psalter. In other words, your chances of flipping to “The Lord is my shepherd” is much slimmer than finding lines like this: “Happy is the one who snatches up the babies of his enemies and dashes their heads against the rocks.”The range of mood between the Psalms is vast. And this brings a question: If the Psalms are this varied how do they all hold together? Are the Psalms really one book or are they just a collection of many types of prayers and songs?Is there any sense in which the book of Psalms works as a whole? Orientation—Disorientation—New OrientationOld Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann (RIP) argues that there is a spiritual coherence to the book of Psalms. He suggests that the Psalms can be understood as a movement through three stages:* Psalms of Orientation: If you are oriented you have balance. These Psalms express a faith in God and creation. There is an obvious equilibrium to the world. God’s creation operates on clear-cut rules that yield clear-cut results. Most of us will have experienced seasons in our life that are like this. (See Psalms 1, 37, 104.)* Psalms of Disorientation: But there are also seasons where things aren’t working. If you are disoriented you have lost your balance and your bearing. The Psalms of disorientation are songs of anguish, hurt, alienation, and suffering. And these songs are often marked by language that is exaggerated, harsh, accusatory, and even vindictive. (See Psalms 13, 22, 88, 109.)* New Orientation: And then in the midst of that darkness,l many of us will have experienced the surprise of healing and other unexpected gifts. Joy breaks through the despair; new light breaks through the darkness. And this is a genuinely new orientation, not just a restoration of the old orientation. You see things differently than you did before the pain and suffering. (See Psalms 30, 34, 40, 150.)We are really just talking about two movements here. The first is a move (downward) from orientation into disorientation. The old way of thinking about things isn’t working anymore. This is where we find ourselves in what the Psalms often call “the pit.”The second movement is a move (upward) from disorientation into a new orientation. In the midst of the darkness we are surprised by a new gift from God and given a new way to make sense of the world on the other side of the pit.Brueggemann points out that Christians should recognize the double movement of crucifixion and resurrection here. That is not by accident. The Psalms are a baptism.Now, it has been hard for us to see this shape of the psalms in all their honesty because, as Brueggemann argues, we live in a culture of denial. We don’t want to deal with the darkness so we deny its existence or power. We numb ourselves in many different ways so that we don’t have to confront disorientation and the reality that we are in the pit.The PitChris Green, building on Brueggemann’s schema, says that the pit is a situation of alienation, isolation, suffering and grief. Green suggests that a movement down into the pit is always characterized by alienation and disempowerment.  The deeper you fall into the pit the deeper the experience of disempowerment becomes. The primary problem Scripture identifies with being in the pit is a surprising one: people in the pit do not praise God. The pit is a place where you experience a loss of voice. Your voice is taken from you because of your pain, suffering, alienation. It’s like getting the wind perpetually knocked out of you.Ps. 115:17 “The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any who go down into silence.”Isa. 38:18 “For Sheol cannot thank you; death cannot praise you; those who go down to the Pit cannot hope for your faithfulness.”Ps. 88:3–6, 10–13 “For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; I am like those who have no help, like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep. Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise up to praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Are your wonders known in the darkness or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness? But I, O Lord, cry out to you; in the morning my prayer comes before you.”To be in the pit is to be the walking dead. You are alive but you are deadened, cut off from your community, from yourself, and from God.All of this is bound up with the central issue, though: a loss of voice. The deeper you fall into the pit the more difficult it becomes to pray, the more voiceless you become.There might only be room enough for a cry or a complaint. But there is no praise or thanksgiving. This fall into the pit can happen very suddenly (a diagnosis from the doctor, the death of a loved one) or it can happen over time. You might not even realize how far down into the pit you’ve fallen because of how slow your fall has been. And because we are all unique there are many different reasons that we find ourselves in the pit. Just because what has affected you deeply would not affect others as deeply does not mean that they are not in the pit.Green suggests that the reason a loss of voice is so dangerous is that when you lose your ability to speak up and give voice to your pain, you can get to a place where you cannot distinguish yourself from your pain anymore. You and your pain become identical. There is a collapse of your pain into yourself. The ability to distinguish yourself from your pain gets harder and harder the deeper into the pit you fall. The antidote is precisely what the psalter give us in the Psalms of disorientation. The psalmists are people in the pit crying out to God. Sometimes they speak in very mean and angry ways. But they are still speaking! They haven’t completely lost their voice yet. Yes there is complaint, but a complaint is still speech of some sort.Green puts it like this: “Before you completely collapse into your pain, the last coal that still has some fire in it is your ability to complain.” As long as you still have the ability to complain there is hope because you still have some part of your voice left. The most dangerous place to be is when you can no longer speak about your pain at all.Green argues that the Psalms show us the way out of the pit and we can roughly categorize them in steps:First, you have to find your voice again. If you can find your voice, you can begin to distinguish yourself from your pain. You can hold it at a distance, away from yourself. You are not your pain. Even a complaint is still a distinguishing of yourself from your suffering. The complaint is a coal that is about to be snuffed out, but if you bring it to God he can breath on it and restore the flame.Second, we have to move from complaint to being able to name your pain correctly. What happened to you? Who caused this? Why are you here in the pit? The moment you can correctly name your pain you are already on your way out. This is intimately tied up with the human vocation God gives to Adam in the Garden of Eden. He gives him the power to name and distinguish things in the world around him. One way of describing the human vocation is becoming more and more precise with how we name things and distinguish this from that.Third, once the naming has begun and it becomes more and more accurate, the naming turns to praise. The naming flowers into praise and thanksgiving because you start to recognize the truth of God in what has happened to you. You meet God in the pit. You realize he has been with you this whole time, sustaining you, promising to bring you through. Being able to more accurately tell the story is the beginning of praise. Gratitude grows.And now the small ember of complaint has grown into a robust flame. You’ve gotten your voice back. Praise brings you into God’s truth about the world.On the other side of the pit is the knowledge that even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death you are with me. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Ends or Means?Why did God become human? This is an old question and it is deceptively simple. The way we answer it will fill in answers to a lot of other questions that we aren’t directly considering.It’s sort of like coming to a dirt road that has a bunch of ruts in it from other cars that have driven down it when the road was soft. Some of those ruts have been dug in so deep that you can easily get stuck. I once heard about a sign at the beginning of one of those old country roads that read: “Choose your rut carefully, you’ll be in it the next 4 miles.”The same applies with this question. The way you answer it will lock you in to some things you didn’t necessarily intend when you began.I think there are two broad categories of answers to the question: “Why did God become human?”* Instrumentalizing* HumanizingThe difference is simple. We’ve all had relationships that were instrumentalizing and hopefully we’ve all had relationships that were deeply humanizing. If someone is instrumentalizing their relationship with you they are using the relationship as a tool to get something else accomplished. The relationship becomes a means to some other end goal. But in relationships that are humanizing the relationship itself is the end goal. There is no point to the relationship except the relationship itself.These two categories can help us map the different answers that might be given to the question: “Why did God become human?” Is the Incarnation a means to some other end (instrumentalizing)? Or is the Incarnation the end goal itself (humanizing)? InstrumentalizingLet’s take just one very common “instrumentalizing” answer: “God became human in order to die.”This answer says that God became human because someone had to pay the price for sins. The cross does pay the price for sin. Scripture uses the language of a “ransom” (“The son of man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” Mk. 10:45). So, of course sin is addressed in the the life of Jesus, but forgiveness of sins is not the end goal of the Incarnation, rather it is a by-product of God becoming human. If you make “paying the price for sin” the end goal of the Incarnation, you will end up with some distorted views about God, the world, and humanity. Here’s just one example in meme form:The reason for the Incarnation here is something like this: We need Jesus to save us from what the Father is going to do to us.Obviously the issues here are legion (in both senses). At bottom this would pit God against God. The Son is trying to save you from the Father. The Father turns his wrath on the Son instead of you in order to save you from what he was going to do to you. So there are deeply theological problems with this picture.But this also instrumentalizes the Incarnation. It turns the Incarnation into a transaction between God and God as a means to accomplish salvation.The Incarnation is the means to the end goal of balancing the Father’s scales of justice. His law has been broken and he demands a pound of flesh in return. So either Jesus gives it to him or we will.This “instrumentalizing” view (and others like it, even the more sophisticated ones) ends up making the Incarnation an afterthought for God. God created the world, but when things went south he had to send his Son in order to pull things back on track. In this case, the Incarnation doesn’t reveal anything to us about who God actually is or who we actually are. It’s merely a means to an end.Humanizing (the end goal itself)The second answer to why God became human insists that the Incarnation is the end goal itself. The Incarnation is the point of all creation. All things were created by Jesus, through Jesus, and for Jesus. The incarnation is the beginning and the end of creation. It is the first and last thought of God about his creation (see Col. 1, Jn. 1, Heb. 1). In other words, God’s becoming human is not a tool that gets some other job done. It is the job done! Maximus the Confessor puts it like this:“The one who knows the mystery of the cross and the tomb, knows the reason of [all] things. The one who is initiated into the infinite power of the Resurrection, knows the purpose for which God knowingly created all.”According to Maximus the Incarnation was not a strategy to solve some other problem. The Incarnation is the purpose of the whole world. God created the world in order to becoming human.This has a lot to say to us about how we relate to other. Our relationships with others are not tools for us to use to get something else accomplished. (Even if that something else is “getting them saved.”) Our relationships are never our means to some other end goal. Relationship is itself the end goal. Theosis: Becoming GodIn the 4th century Athanasius of Alexandria wrote: “God became man so that man might become like God.”That can be a very jarring statement to hear for the first time. There are many ways to mishear this. What Athanasius does not mean is some sort of crude polytheism in which we all become gods who rule over our own private worlds apart from God.Athanasius is saying that what God is by nature, he is making us to be us by grace.This is the wonderful promise of the gospel: God wants to share his very life with you. He wants you and me and all creation to participate in the life that only naturally belongs to Father, Son, and Spirit. The early church had a term for this: “Theosis.” God is bringing us into his own life.2 Peter 1:4 says, “[God] has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature…”If we use the language of “children of God” it might be a little more familiar. Who is God’s Son? He only has one by nature. His name is Jesus Christ. Jesus is the only begotten Son of God. And yet we dare to say that we, too, are called children of God! But we are not children by nature, we are children by grace. In the Incarnation God has become human–what we are by nature–so that he can include you by grace into what he is by nature. God wants to have the same relationship with you that he shares with Jesus. And Jesus wants you to have the same relationship with the Father that he has.You and I can be called children of God only because we are in Christ. This is the meaning of Athanasius’s famous line. But even Athanasius’s dictum can be turned into an “instrumentalizing” of the Incarnation. You could mishear Athanasius as saying that the Incarnation is a means to some other end. We will mishear him if we think he means something like: “God became what was opposite and contrary to himself in order to make human beings something that is opposite and contrary to what they are.” In other words, for God to make us “God” he would need to cancel out our human nature. The end goal would be to make us something non-human.But that’s not what Athanasius means. We have to invoke Bonhoeffer one last time. In His Ethics he takes Athanasius’s famous line and tweaks it:“Human beings become human because God became human.”He is not disagreeing with Athanasius. He’s saying the same thing, but in a more precise way. He’s saying that because the God we meet in the life of Jesus is God as human, then to become God in the way that this God is God is to become truly human.Or as Bonhoeffer will say elsewhere:“God as human being, and human being as God, must be held together in our thinking…We believe that Jesus the human being is God, and that he is so as the human being, not in spite of his humanity or beyond his humanity…”“It is finished”So what does it mean to be truly human? Think back to Genesis and the account of creation. In Genesis 1 God sets out each new day to create and fill the creation by saying, “Let there be...” He says it, it is, and it is good. Everything God creates is done in this fashion, except one thing: humanity.On the sixth day of the week we find a change in the pattern. Rather than saying, “Let there be human beings,” God says, “Let us make human beings…” All the other bits of creation made on days one through five were simply setting the scene—the backdrop—for the play. Now, with the creation of humanity, we’ve come to the main action. This will be center stage: God’s project of making human beings in his image. And a project implies that it is not completed yet.Two questions arise: 1) Why doesn’t God say, “Let there be a human being,” and 2) Has he finished his project yet?We find the answer in John’s Gospel. John famously begins with an obvious allusion to Genesis: “In the beginning...” John is claiming (at least in part) that the life of Jesus is what Genesis is about. As you read through John you find that he has slipped in a multitude of echoes and allusions to Genesis.On the day of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion John stresses that it was the sixth day of the week (John 19:14 “the day of Preparation for the Passover,” or as we call it “Good Friday”). Jesus, now beaten and bloodied, has been arrested and Pilate brings him before the hostile crowd. But Pilate announces something odd. He says,  “Behold, the man,” “Ecce homo” (Latin) “ho anthropos” (Greek), or more accurately in English: “Behold, the human being.” In Genesis God began his project of creating human beings on the sixth day and in John’s Gospel he completes it on the sixth day. Behold the human being. And then we get Jesus’ last words from the cross: “It is finished!”The project that God began in Genesis is now being accomplished in Jesus, the truly human one. “Behold, the human being!” Jesus, the one who pours himself out, who empties himself for the sake of others, is the image of God. This is the image God is conforming us to.So again, why doesn’t God create human beings by saying “Let there be human beings”? Because to be truly human is to voluntarily lay your life down, to pour yourself out for the sake of others.In other words, in order for the completion of God’s project of creating a human being to take place in you and me, we have to say, “Let it be.” God is patiently waiting for us to respond with our own, “Not my will, but yours be done.”These are truly human words precisely because they are truly divine words. The Spirit makes our words to be the words of Jesus. And oddly enough these human-divine words are words of prayer. As Robert Jenson says human beings are the “praying animal.”  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

A Hidden God?In the early 2nd century a Greek opponent of Christianity named Celsus argued that Jesus could not be God because there was nothing visibly divine about him. Celsus writes:“If there were a divine spirit in the body of Jesus, that body would of necessity vary in some respect from other bodies…in size, in beauty, in strength, in voice. It would have something attractive in its characteristics for it’s impossible that the body having something of the divine nature should in no way differ from other bodies. But Christians say that the body of Jesus was not at all different. Indeed, they so claim that it was small, ill-favored, and unsightly.”Surely the divine cannot “fit” inside the human. Wouldn’t God have to become less than God to become human? Wouldn’t he have to undergo some sort of metaphysical surgery to “fit”? In Celsus’s mind humanity and divinity are polar opposites. Time and eternity, finitude and infinitude, death and life—how could these opposites hold together in Jesus?And yet this is the central claim of Christianity: God is the one who became human in Jesus Christ. Christians are those who look at the little baby in the manger and the bloodied man on the cross and say: “This is God.”This bring us to a central theme within Christian theology that is usually referred to as “the hiddenness of God.” Christian theology throughout the church’s history has generally agreed that there is a hiddenness to God even in his revelation. When you look at the baby in the manger or the man on the cross you cannot simply see with your eyes that this is God. There is a hiddenness, an incognito.But the real question is in what way is he hidden? There’s more than one way to be hidden.A Kierkegaardian ParableThe Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard told a story that cuts right to the heart of the way God is hidden in the incarnation of Jesus. It goes something like this:Once upon a time there was a beautiful peasant maiden who worked in the fields gathering wheat. One day as the prince of the kingdom was walking on the parapet of the castle he noticed the young maiden. As he watched her work he was captured by her beauty. It was love at first sight. He decided in his heart that he would marry the young maiden. But he immediately recognized a problem. The prince knew that because he had power over all the land the maiden would marry him even if she didn’t love him. He knew that his power as the prince would coerce her into marriage. But he didn’t want that. He wanted her to genuinely love him in return.So, he devised a plan. He would disguise himself as a peasant and hide his true identity. He put on the brown, tattered clothes of a peasant over the top of his royal purple garments; the purple hidden by the brown, the royalty hidden by the poverty.Kierkegaard notes that this kind of a story grabs our attention. It’s a classic romantic drama. But, he says, what holds our attention in the story is not whether or not the beautiful peasant maiden will fall in love with the prince. That’s a foregone conclusion. He is noble, he is handsome, he is a prince, we know how these stories go.What really holds our attention is not whether she will fall in love with him, but rather when he will reveal to her that he is actually the prince. When will he take off the brown peasants’ clothing and reveal the royal purple robes underneath? When will he come out of hiding? And how will she respond?Perhaps he will tell her his true identity after they have worked together in the fields for several weeks and months. Maybe during a break in their work he will declare his love for her and reveal to her his true identity.Or maybe he will wait until their wedding day, after she says “I do,” so that he knows she genuinely loves him. Maybe then he will rip back the brown clothes and reveal the purple. Perhaps he will even wait until after the wedding night. Maybe they will spend their first night together in a humble cottage and at breakfast the next morning he will turn to her and say, “You have not only become my wife, you have become the princess of the entire kingdom! Tonight we will sleep in the palace.”Stanley Hauerwas says that Kierkegaard’s story reveals the way we think about Jesus and the hiddenness of God. Generally speaking, there are two ways Christians have thought about the way God is hidden: 1) “Concealing” and 2) “Revealing.”1) Concealing. The first way would say: Before the Son of God became incarnate he was robed in royal purple. He was eternal, infinite, all-powerful, all-knowing, and omnipresent. But when he became human, he laid aside some of these things in order to truly be a human being. In the incarnation he becomes finite, weak, limited in knowledge, etc. In other words, the prince has to stop being the prince (in some capacity) for a time in order to become a peasant. The resurrection, in this view, is the “rip” of the brown clothes to reveal the purple. That is, obviously, a type of hiddenness. God hides himself by concealing his true identity.2) Revealing. The second way to think about this, as Hauerwas says, is that in Jesus there is no purple underneath the brown clothes. The brown clothes of the servant are actually the true clothes of the prince. This is who he is. He is the prince not despite appearing as a servant—he is the prince as a servant.In Jesus there is no other royal purple robes hiding elsewhere. His purple robes are his slave clothes. But this, too, is a type of hiddenness. God isn’t hidden because he conceals his true identity. Rather, God is hidden in that he actually reveals his true identity. God does not hide himself from us, he reveals himself to us. But it is precisely his revelation that hides him. Robert Jenson summarizes the two ways of conceiving of the hiddenness of God like this:“In one way or another, western theology has tended to construe Christ’s human sufferings and death as clues to the character of his hidden divine presence. According to Luther, they are his divine presence among and for us. All orthodox theology is agreed that God remains hidden even when revealed; Luther goes beyond this to insist that it is precisely his revelation that hides him… Traditional theology has tended to say that God is hidden by his metaphysical distance from us, across which we must peer; Luther says that what hides him is that his revealed presence is so unavoidably in our face.”The first way (concealing) can fall prey to the assumption that Jesus is really a king in the way the world knows kings. The only difference is that he hides it under his slave clothes for 33 years. With his understanding the incarnation is God acting out of character (and/or nature). For the duration of Jesus’ earthly life he conceals himself, but hiding under the brown clothes is really power as we all know it and want it. We can easily start to think that the purple Jesus really has is no different than the purple that Herod or Caesar wears.I’m convinced the second way (revealing) is the faithful way to understand God’s hiddenness. God hides by revealing himself. We actually don’t know what divinity is really like. We don’t know what real power is. We only know cheap, earthly imitations of both divinity and power. But in God’s revelation of himself Jesus shows us that the true God is a crucified God; that real power is the power of the cross.To put it back in the terms from Kierkegaard’s story: True purple is not Caesar’s purple. True purple is the crimson of the cross. God is hidden in his revelation. But the way he is hidden is different than we would ever imagine. He does not hide himself, he reveals himself. But what he reveals turns out to hide him from us because it is not anything close to what we would expect. What he reveals is that he is essentially humble and lowly.Kenosis, Humility, and HumiliationBiblically, the rubber meets the road in how we read the Christ hymn in Philippians 2. “Although [or “Because”] being in the form of God, He did not consider his equality with God as something to be exploited for his own advantage, But emptied himself [kenosis], By taking the form of a slave, By being born in the likeness of human beings. And being found in human form, He humbled himself By becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and given to him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:6—11).The hiddenness of God is directly tied to what Paul here calls “emptying” (or in Greek “kenosis”). The question is who is being emptied of what and when? The typical understanding of the sequence of events of the Incarnation would be something like this: God → humiliation → HumanIn this way of construing the matter, becoming human is a humiliation for God. God’s self is hidden in the act of becoming human because he has to lay aside his divinity in order to become human. He has to give up “the form of God.” He has to undergo metaphysical surgery—a “divinectomy” of sorts.But then we are left with a major problem. If Jesus has to empty himself of the “form of God,” then his life isn’t really isn’t revealing to us who God actually is. He is hiding the purple divine garment underneath the brown human garment. We still don’t know what the purple garment looks like.In his Christology lectures, Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggests that we understand the sequence of events differently:God → Human → humiliationJesus’ divinity is seen in his humanity, not despite it. For God to become human is not a humiliation for God, it is a revelation of God. God’s becoming human is the most fitting thing for him because he is the God-human.Chris Green summarizes Bonhoeffer’s point:“As Bonhoeffer reminds us in his christology lectures, the incarnation is not a humiliation for God—it is not as if God finds it unbecoming to take humanity as his own! The incarnation is a humiliation for us, because God comes among us as one without beauty, without desirability or comeliness, making nonsense of every frame of reference, every standard of judgment, every order and scheme we have devised for ourselves as a means of giving our lives significance and stability.”God does not have to become less God in order to become fully human. Jesus is not emptying himself of divinity, rather he is revealing to us that it is the nature of the true God to empty himself. This God is God as human. Or as Luther often said: “I point to this human being [on the cross] and say, this is God!”This is the mystery of the Triune life. In Jesus’ humiliation we are seeing God’s exaltation. Jesus isn’t humiliated in order that he can then be exalted. His humiliation on the cross is his exaltation.Put differently, the throne of God and the cross of Jesus are not two separate things, but one single reality. Jesus tells us this in John’s Gospel: “‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die” (12:32–33).There is a humiliation in the incarnation, but it is not that God would become human. Rather the humiliation, the scandal, is that God would be human in this way: lowly, humble, suffering, shameful, dishonored, and defiled.Unveiled FacesScripture is full of instances in which creatures come in contact with the face of God and they have to hide their own faces. It is too much for them to take in.In the visions of Ezekiel, Isaiah, and John we see the cherubim/seraphim (those closest to the throne of God) continually hide their faces with their wings. They veil themselves from the glory of the face of God. But why? In Ezekiel’s vision as he looks upon the throne of God he sees something odd: the one seated on the throne has the appearance of one a son of man—a human being. But why does the one on the throne look like a man? Christian theology must answer: because the second person of the Trinity is a man–Jesus of Nazareth.Gregory the Great (6th century) describes Ezekiel’s vision like this:“We should observe how the order is maintained… For above holy men still living in the body are the angels, and above the angels are superior angelic powers closer to God, and above the powers is…the man Christ Jesus.”That which is most exalted, even above all the angels, rulers, and thrones is the humiliated, crucified man of Golgotha. That is the stumbling block. The Exalted One is the Crucified One.The the highest is also the lowest. And it is highest by being the lowest. This is why the angels hide their faces. It’s not simply because God’s glory is so much higher than the glory of the angels (though it is). It’s that the way it is higher is precisely in that it is lower. As Bonhoeffer says, “God glorifies himself in the human being.”But angels aren’t the only ones to encounter God’s immediate presence. Elijah and Moses also see God in his glory, and they both do so on the top of mountains. Moses is on the mountain of the Lord and he asks to see God’s glory. God tells him that he cannot look on his face and live, but that he will pass before Moses while Moses is in the cleft of the rock. God covers the cleft with his hand so that Moses can only see his backside.Moses sees not the face, but the backside of God. Martin Luther notes that “the backside” (or “posterioria” in Latin) is the shameful side of God. Luther then suggests something provocative. What is the shameful “backside” of God except the cross of Jesus? Moses sees the lowliness of God, but in that lowliness he sees God as he truly is. Moses sees Jesus: He sees God in shame, dishonor, and suffering. He sees the Crucified God.But Elijah also encounters God on a mountain (perhaps the same one):“A great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.” (1 Kgs 19:11–13).God comes in a still small voice. Not in the thundering power of the earthquake or the wind, and not in the glory of the fire. God comes in weakness because this is how God always comes to us.But there is a difference between the stories of Moses and Elijah.Elijah veils his face just like the angels do. He cannot bear to look on the one who comes in the weakness of the still small voice. But Moses does not. Moses speaks to God face to face as a man speak to his friend. Moses only veils his face with the Israelites, but with God he takes the veil off. Moses knows that the truth of God’s glory is that he is humble. Moses knows (somehow, someway) that God is the God-human. Moses unveils his own face and the face he sees looking back at him is the face of Jesus of Nazareth. That’s God’s glory.The question posed to us is whether or not we will veil our face when we are confronted by the cross. The cross is too much for us to take in because we expect God’s “purple” to be higher than us. But God’s royal purple robes are lower than us, and that’s the block we stumble over. This stumbling stone is precisely what creates faith in us. Will we veil our faces in his presence or will we take our veils off?In 2 Corinthians Paul tells us what we are called to do: “And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another…” (2 Cor. 3:18).But here is the the good news of the gospel: Even if we veil our faces in the presence of this lowly king, he still meets with us. He will continue to meet with us until the veil is removed from our face. He did it for Elijah, and he will do it for you. The gospel of Luke tells us that Moses and Elijah both met Jesus on a mountain, the mount of transfiguration. Jesus appears in his glory before Peter, James, and John and there he is with both Moses and Elijah. Jesus speaks with the two prophets about his departure, his exodus, his crucifixion. His lowliness.This is his “backside.” This is the “still small voice.” And on the mount of transfiguration both Moses and Elijah turn to the Lord with unveiled faces because God has turned toward them in his meekness.The veil that covers our face is our own embarrassment over the fact that God is this humble, this lowly. Take off the veil like Moses did. Turn to the Lord today. But even if you delay taking off your veil like Elijah, the promise we are given is that one day it will be removed and you will see the Lord high and exalted and your knees will bow.But your knees will not bow in terror or fear, they will not bow merely because he is so much higher than you are, but because he is so much lower. Your knees will bow because the God you will see is that God whose knees are already bowed down in order to wash your feet. And when you bend down to meet him there, the veil will finally be removed. But not until you meet him down low. Or as Maggie Ross writes, “Behold the God who is infinitely more humble than those who pray to him, more stripped, more emptied, more self-outpouring…The scandal of the incarnation is not that we are naked before Emmanuel, God with us, but God is naked before us.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Scripture uses a variety of terms to describe the human self (e.g. body, soul, spirit, mind, and heart). Last week we discussed the human self in its integrity. We are both embodied souls and ensouled bodies. This week we take a look at the human heart with its shallows and its depths. Fortunately, last October we had Dr. Chris E.W. Green with us for our theology conference and he lectured on a theology of the human heart. I thought it would be a perfect opportunity for us to revisit a bit of his excellent teaching within the context of our wider study of what it means to be truly human.In class we watched a shortened version of one his lectures. (The podcast I’ve attached is the audio from the lecture we watched Wednesday night). You can watch the full lecture here: You can also find the first lecture here and the Q&A session here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

The Deep Unity of the SelfWhat does it mean to be a human self? What constitutes it? We will all be familiar with a similar vocab bank: body, soul, spirit, mind, heart, etc. It’s also probably not much of a stretch to assume that most of us have been taught that human beings are composed of two (or three) parts: body and soul (and spirit).It’s often of assumed that these composite parts of the human self are separate and discrete things that we can treat in isolation. But in Scripture there is a lot of overlap between these terms. Different biblical authors (and writers throughout the church’s history) use these words differently. Sometimes they use them with a lot of precision in order to make important distinctions, but sometimes precision isn’t the goal. For instance, words like spirit/soul can be completely interchangeable in some biblical texts. Think of Mary’s song in Luke 1:47, “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” Is Luke using this language to make a distinction between the soul and the spirit? Is he trying to be precise? Do souls have the specific job of magnifying and spirits handle the rejoicing? Some might want to make that case, but in my reading this is sort of a poetic doubling, a literary device.I think what’s being communicated is that Mary–as one whole person–is magnifying and rejoicing. It’s not so much that there are two regions inside her—one called “soul” and the other called “spirit”—Mary is the single subject here. The act of magnifying and rejoicing is something that involves Mary’s whole person. Not simply her soul and spirit but also her body (lungs, vocal cords, and lips as she sings)!Biblical authors and theologians might intend to be precise and make distinctions at times, but very often there is a lot of overlap in the way these terms get used. It all depends on the writer and the context. But I do think this is key: there is no hard and fast way of using the language of soul, spirit, mind, heart. Our problems come when we decide in advance exactly what these terms have to mean and then read our own arbitrary definitions into the biblical texts. You have to read a biblical author/theologian on their own terms and try to figure out what’s important to them and see the distinctions they want to make. There isn’t one easy schema that the Bible always uses. But that’s what many of us will have learned. Think of the common saying: “You are a soul but you have a body.” Or: “You are a spirit, who has a soul, that lives in a body.” The problem with systems like this is not that they claim humans have spirits and souls and bodies. The problem is that these words are not always used in technically precise ways that are uniform across Scripture. Something in us craves for these neat and tidy definitions and distinctions, though. I think it is a uniquely modern craving. We view ourselves as machines or computers and those have separable parts. And the key to scientific knowledge—or so we think—is to break everything down to its smallest components. The smaller the better. Breaking things down and taking them apart allows us to analyze them. And we think that what something is in its smallest parts reveals the deepest truth of it. Knowledge comes by dissection.But say you are in a biology class that is dissecting a cat. The professor says, “We are going to split up into groups and this group will study the heart, this group the brain, this group the stomach, etc… and when we come back together we will share what we’ve found.” You will definitely gain plenty of information about the anatomy of the cat. But there is one thing you won’t have access to: the cat! Because in order to dissect it, you had to kill it.I think the truth of what it means to be human is found not in dissecting us down to our parts and studying them in isolation from one another, but rather the deepest truth is found in the whole. Being analytical and breaking things down to their smallest bits is a really helpful thing, but true knowledge comes on the other side of analysis. It comes in encountering.This doesn’t mean we can’t distinguish between the parts of the human self. We can. But those parts aren’t what they are in isolation from the other parts.Our thinking needs to be more christological. Jesus Christ has two natures. He is fully divine and fully human. But the truth of who he is can never be found by breaking him down into his natures, but only in the wholeness of his person. Does Jesus ever say or do anything without being simultaneously fully divine and fully human? No. To truly know Jesus we encounter the him in his personhood. Put otherwise, full knowledge comes not in mere analysis (breaking things down into parts), but in synthesis (unity of the whole).Neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist argues that because our brains have two hemispheres we have two ways of attending to the world: analysis and synthesis. Breaking things down to grasp the bits and the parts on the one hand, and seeing the whole picture on the other. Obviously you need both, but the end goal should be synthesis.One of the most fascinating examples McGilchrist gives to show the difference is a semi-rare condition called “face-blindness.” People with face-blindness (prosopagnosia) have a harder time recognizing faces. This is usually due to a traumatic injury or developmental issues in the right hemisphere of the brain.But here’s the weird thing. People with face-blindness are not blind. It’s not that they can’t see faces. They can. They can see facial features like noses, eyes, ears, and mouths. But what they are unable to do is recognize whose face it is. They can see the parts of the face, but they can’t see the whole thing at once and identify it. For most of us, it’s the opposite. We see faces as wholes, as singular things, and we might even struggle to describe the parts of a person’s face that we know very well. (I could talk about face-blindness for hours. Malcolm Gladwell recently had an episode on his podcast Revisionist History on face-blindness that was really great. One man they interviewed said that he will regularly have to pause a movie to ask his wife who a character is. She usually says something like: “Honey that is still Robert De Niro, he just has a hat on now.”)Of Earth and SpiritThe truth is that the typical hard and fast distinction and separation of soul from body (“You are a soul and you have a body”) is not quite right. In Genesis 2:7 we read: “...then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”The human being that God creates in his image is taken from the earth. Humanity is derived from a piece of earth. That’s who it is. The church’s temptation from the beginning was to see the body as dirty, defiling, and evil. The body is bad so it needs to be shed.But in Genesis we get a completely different picture. Human beings are taken from the dust of the ground but that ground is not the cursed ground of Genesis 3, it is the blessed ground. We are taken from the earth that God called “good!” Your body is a good gift from God. Without it you wouldn’t be you.The christianities that have shaped many of us have often undercut the importance and the goodness of the body (“You only have a body.”) But the truth is that a person’s body belongs intimately to who they are. Our bodies aren’t prisons, or shells, some exterior thing that can just be cast off. I think we can put it this strongly: Human beings do not ‘have’ bodies. We are bodies.But we are not only bodies. God doesn’t just mold us from the dust of the ground. He breathes the breath of life into the body. This breath/soul is life, it animates the human being. The soul is not an abstract gas that floats around until it is pumped into human lungs. The soul (nephesh in Hebrew and psyche in Greek) is the concrete bodily life of a creature. The soul is the whole person.We have to hold both things simultaneously: We are embodied souls and we are ensouled bodies. Without either one we are not in the image of God. And neither one is what it is made to be without the other.Oftentimes people will point to 2 Corinthians 5:8 to prove that we are souls who only have bodies. Paul writes, “We would rather be absent from the body and to be present form the Lord.” On the first reading it does sound like it is our body that needs to be shed in order to be present with the Lord. But if you read the whole passage you will find that Paul is actually making the exact opposite point. “For we know that, if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to be further clothed with our heavenly dwelling, for surely when we have been clothed in it we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan under our burden because we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.” (2 Cor. 5:1-5).Paul seems to think that a disembodied existence would be a dreadful thing. It would be sub-human. We do not want to “shed this mortal coil” and be a “naked” soul. That wouldn’t be comfortable or fitting for us.The goal is not to take off this body and become a naked soul, but rather to be “further clothed” with a resurrected body, a body that is incorruptible. To be disembodied is to be less than human.Being Re-Membered at The Lord’s SupperThis separation and dismembering of the human person can lead to misunderstanding what salvation actually is. God intends to redeem us as whole persons: body and soul.Think of another popular passage we regularly misread. In Revelation 3:20 Jesus is speaking to the church in Sardis: “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and eat with you, and you with me.”We usually hear this verse and think that it is talking about “asking Jesus into your heart.” But the passage says nothing about that. (We easily forget he is talking to people who are already in the church.)So, what is it about? It’s about eating with Jesus. And not a spiritualized eating. Really eating—bodily. Jesus calls his church to gather at his table and eat a meal of bread and wine. It would be hard to do that without your body.But eating with Jesus does not only involve your body. It involves the whole of who you are. The communion meal is bread and wine, but it is not merely bread and wine. In eating this meal we are participating in the very life of Jesus (1 Cor. 10:16).The earliest Pentecostals were adamant about this. The communion meal is not merely a meal of bread and wine that brings Jesus to our memory. They insisted that Jesus is actually present in the meal. We feast with him as we feast on him.When we eat the bread and drink the cup we are communing with Jesus as whole persons. Our bodies are engaged along with our souls (and our spirits, hearts, and minds). The supper is an all-embracing reality.God created human beings as body and soul, and that’s how he is saving us. In the incarnation Jesus has taken to himself the totality of what it means to be human. He has a human heart, a human mind, a human soul, a human spirit, and a human body. If he didn’t take all of these things to himself, then we would not be completely saved.Our tendency is to denigrate the body and exalt the soul, as if that’s what’s really important. The truth is that most of us would rather not be human. We would prefer to be something more, something more lofty. That was Adam and Eve’s sin. In wanting to become more than human they tried to become like God. But they didn’t realize that God is God precisely as a human. C.S. Lewis says that the perennial human temptation is to be more spiritual than God. But:“There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life in us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.”Jesus has ordained that our fellowship with him take place at a meal. The Lord’s Supper is a remembering. But it is also a re-membering. It takes the broken and disconnected pieces of our lives and re-members them, makes us whole. This is the work of Jesus. Jesus is out to re-member you. And he does this by calling us to eat this meal “in remembrance” of him. As often as we eat the bread and drink the cup we re-member Christ. He makes us members of his own body in our eating. The Spirit gathers us up—body, soul, heart, mind, spirit—and brings us into the wholeness that is Christ.And all this happens over a shared meal.As Rowan Williams memorably put it, “It is, perhaps, the most simple thing we can say about Holy Communion, yet it is still supremely worth saying. In Holy Communion, Jesus Christ tells us that he wants our company.”He wants your company. Not just a piece of you. Not just your soul or your mind or your heart. He wants to eat with the entirety of you in order to make you entirely you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Being Human as VocationBecoming truly human is not just a matter of being, but of doing (hence the “becoming truly human”). In truth, being and doing are not separable, but are always one—our being is always a doing. Put otherwise, when the Spirit unites us to Christ we are not only given Christ’s identity (being), but Christ’s vocation (doing).Psalm 8:6–8, riffing on Genesis 1-2, describes the human vocation: “What is mankind that you are mindful of them, a son of man that you care for him? You made them a little lower than the angels; you crowned them with glory and honor and put everything under their feet.”The author of Hebrews quotes Ps. 8 but riffs on it: “As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them, but we do see Jesus…” (Heb. 2:8). Yes, we were created to have dominion over creation, but we do not yet have the dominion God means for us to have.The human vocation is only fulfilled, for now, in Jesus—the pioneer of our faith. What is true of him, will be true of us. As Chris Green says, the human vocation is nothing less than a share in Jesus’ lordship, Jesus’ dominion over all creation. But we know that his “lordship” is not a “lording it over” creation, but rather a serving of creation. Put another way, becoming truly human is a calling to become priests. Priestly work is mediating work. It is about reconciling two parties, it is about peacemaking, building bridges, and making connections.But this is a calling for all humanity. It is a calling to a responsibility, a burden for others before God.The Image of God: RelationalityGenesis 1 says that God created human beings in his image and after his likeness. But what is that image and likeness? The text is sparse and ambiguous. It leaves plenty of room for interpretation. Scripture invites us to fill in the spaces it leaves.The most common answers that have been given to the question of what makes us in the image of God are either 1) faculties or 2) capacities we possess. Is it our faculty of reason and knowledge that makes us in the image of God? Is it our capacity to be virtuous and holy?Dietrich Bonhoeffer argues that it is neither our won faculties or our capacities that make us image bearers. Rather, he suggests, is it is that we are created free.“To say that in humankind God creates God’s own image on earth means that humankind is like the Creator in that it is free. To be sure, it is free only through God’s creation, through the word of God; it is free for the worship of the Creator. For in the language of the Bible freedom is not something that people have for themselves but something they have for others. No one is free ‘in herself’ or ‘in himself’--free as it were in a vacuum or free in the same way that a person may be musical, intelligent, or blind in herself or in himself. Freedom is not a quality a human being has; it is not an ability, a capacity, an attribute of being that may be deeply hidden in a person but can somehow be uncovered…”Bonhoeffer is saying the image of God in human beings is found in our freedom. But our freedom is not a faculty/capacity or a quality that we possess in and of ourselves. Our freedom is found in the face of our neighbor, not inside ourselves. Our freedom is not a freedom from our neighbors, but our freedom for them. Freedom is not something you own. Freedom is a calling. It’s an event, a doing. It is a responsibility. Freedom can only arise in our relationship to the other.“Being free means ‘being-free-for-the-other’, because I am bound to the other. Only by being in relation with the other am I free.”This is a very different definition of freedom than the one we typically conceive. Freedom for Bonhoeffer is something that happens between me and you, not something I possess all by myself. It happens to me through you. This is a definition of freedom rooted in our relationality rather than our individuality. In other words, the image of God is fundamentally relational. Being the image of God is not something that I have all by myself without you. It is something we have only together—through our relationship to one another.But where is he getting this from? Notice the text of Genesis 1 actually says. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).The image of God is found in our relationship to what is other than ourselves. He creates humanity male and female. This is unity in differentiation. Humans are different from one another, and in that difference they are one.Bonhoeffer puts it like this:“The creature is free in that one creature exists in relation to another creature, in that one human being is free for another human being. And God created them [male and female]. The human being is not alone. Human beings exist in duality, and it is in this dependence on the other that their creatureliness consists.”But how is this difference from one another what makes us in the image of God? Because God is not God alone. God is Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit. In God there is relationality. God just is the relationships between the Three Persons. What makes God God is the relationships between Father, Son, and Spirit. He is one precisely in that he is three.Humanity is made in the image of God in that we are constituted in relationship to one another. The image of God is in our inherent relationality.What makes us human is that we are turned outward from ourselves to others. Our lives are created for the sake of others, not to be closed in on ourselves.This is what makes the calling of becoming human a priestly calling. A priest’s work is about relationships.Intercession: “Bone of my bone”We can see that the human calling is a priestly calling most clearly in Genesis 2:15,“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work and to keep it.”The phrase “work and keep” is carefully chosen. These words almost always appear in the Old Testament in reference to the job of the priests. Priests are to “work and keep” the temple (Numbers 3:7).Genesis is picturing the Garden of Eden as a temple, as a Holy of Holies, with Adam and Eve as the High Priests of all creation. Eden is the temple for the sake of the world. And this is precisely what priests do: they are not called to work in the temple instead of the world, but for the sake of the world. Or to put it another way: Adam and Eve are intercessors!What does it mean to be an intercessor? Symeon the New Theologian says that an intercessor one who refuses to be saved apart from their neighbors. Paul in Romans 9 gives us an example: “I wish I were accursed and cut off for the sake of my kinsmen according to the flesh.” Paul wishes that he would not be saved at all if his kinsmen are not saved. Intercession is quintessentially priestly work.Intercessors stand in for the sake of their neighbors and for the sake of the world.Jesus, the great High Priest, is the true human not instead of all humanity, but for the sake of all humanity. He does what he does for the sake of the world! As Bonhoeffer never tires of saying, “Jesus is the man for others.”And to be truly human in this way is to take up Jesus’ vocation. To live your life for the sake of your neighbor, for the sake of the world.Think of Genesis again. In Genesis 2 God creates Eve from the side/rib of Adam and when Adam wakes up to see Eve, he has poetry on his lips: “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” This isn’t a merely a romantic poem. He is saying, “I can’t be myself without you, Eve. Now you make me who I am! Before you were here I wasn’t even myself. You are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!”We all know this at a biological level. Who am I without my parents? Who am I without my children? Who am I without my friends? At a fundamental level these people make me who I am.But while biology and natural friendship shows us something of the truth of what it means to be human, Jesus calls us to something higher. He says, “Even the tax collectors love those who love them back. I’m calling you to love your enemies.”In calling us to love our enemies Jesus is calling us to a deeper intercession, a deeper humanity. When Paul says that he wishes he would be accursed and cut off for the sake of his kinsmen, he is speaking not only of his friends but even his enemies. Many of his kinsmen wanted to kill him, and yet he is saying: “I am not myself without them. I refuse to be saved without them. God, if you are going to have me, you have to take these people, too!”That’s the work of an intercessor: to look at your neighbors, including your enemies, and say: “This is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!”When Jesus was hanging on the cross he looked at the soldiers who were crucifying him and cried, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do!”This is the deep intercession we are called to. Jesus looks into the faces of his greatest enemies and all that he can think is: “These people are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. I cannot be who I am without them!” This is the deep truth of the gospel: Jesus cannot be himself without you or me. But he also cannot be himself without our greatest enemies. This is the calling to priestly intercession.When you and I gather to worship each Sunday morning, we are called to bring the bones of others with us. When we eat of the bread and drink from the cup, we carry the bones of our neighbors with us. We bring the bones of those who cannot be there with us and even those who, for the time being, refuse to be there with us. We worship for the sake of the world. Why? Because we are called to be priests. This is what it means to be human.The call to be human is a call to recognize that your neighbors (including your enemies) are “bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh.” We are called to carry the bones of the world before God for the sake of the world.Chris Green sums it up perfectly:“The church exists only to remind the world of its true nature and its true destiny in the kingdom of God… For now, however, we find ourselves called out from [the world], but only because we have been singled out by God to share in the work of making room for [the world]. We take on the ecclesial vocation always only on behalf of others—never instead of them, much less against them. We are the called out ones whose lives are dedicated entirely to collaboration with God’s work for those who have yet to hear or to submit to the call. The elect are elected always for the sake of the non-elect. The church is a remnant of the world, gathered from the world to be both a temple and a kingdom of priests for the world’s sake.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Sin: Blocking the Flow of God’s LoveThe way we speak about sin is key. The metaphors we use to speak about reality always end up “using” us. Our language isn’t merely a tool we use, it shapes the way we see reality. I want to juxtapose two metaphors for speaking about sin: breaking God’s laws vs. blocking the flow of God’s life/love. It’s not that one is wrong and the other is right. It’s that the overuse of the one has misshaped and malformed us, and we need a correction.Most of us will have been taught to speak about sin as “breaking God’s laws.” That’s right, insofar as it goes, but it remains too impersonal and abstract. The human conscience loves the idea of a law that it can manipulate, weaponize, and control. I think it could be more helpful for us to speak about sin as “blocking the flow” of God’s love and life for our neighbors. The legal metaphors for sin are too impersonal. The metaphor of “blocking the flow” keeps us anchored in the personal. It keeps our eyes focused on our neighbors.Theologian Kathryn Tanner is puts it like this:“God’s gifts can be blocked by our sins and the sins of others against us; but God does not stop giving to us because we have misused and squandered the gifts that God has given.”Think of the “blocking” here as a garden hose. You can step on the hose and make the flow a little weaker. You can put a kink in the hose to temporarily cut off the flow. But you can store the hose in a kinked position for long enough that you create a break in the hose. Think of sin as the ways we block the flow of God’s life and love to our neighbors and ourselves—kinking the hose in some way.It is key to notice here that the water continues to run even if we clog the flow. God is always fully God to every human being. His love and life is always flowing to them. Our sins make it harder for them to receive that flow of life and love. Our sins are what make it harder for our neighbors to receive the good gifts God has for them. But the flow does not and cannot stop.Sin is the harm we do to our neighbors (including ourselves). Anything that we do or fail to do that makes it harder for our neighbors to believe God, trust God, know God, and receive his love—that’s sin.“A Sick Holiness”The legal metaphors for sin, when they are used in isolation from other metaphors, almost always lead us to moralism. And moralism is, perhaps, the greatest enemy of the truth of the gospel.Moralism is “preaching” that aims to get people to behave a certain way. It is an attempt to conform others to some system of morality. But the gospel conforms people to the Christ. The difference is easy to see: systems of morality are always dead ideas, Jesus Christ is a living person.This is why when we define sin as missing the mark we should immediately think: Whose mark? Societies’ mark? My family’s mark? The democratic/republican party’s mark? My own personal mark? Some might say, “No! Sin is missing the Bible’s mark!” But whose reading of the Bible? Saul’s? The Pharisees’?Jesus challenges every system of morality precisely because he is alive. No moral order can capture him. No ideology can cage him in.So it is key for us to see that holiness and morality are not the same thing. Chris Green puts it like this:“We often, always at terrible cost to ourselves and to others, confuse the sanctified life for a moral life. But the truth is, holiness is beyond morality and immorality.”The gospel is not about making us more moral. In fact, the holiness that the gospel intends for us has very little to do with what consider to be morality and immorality.Bonhoeffer makes just this point. In the Gospel accounts Jesus makes some very high moral demands on people: You have heard it said, “Do not commit adultery,” but I say to you if you so much as look on a woman with lust you have already committed adultery in your heart. With these high moral demands we would expect that he would hang out with the moral heroes of his world. That’s what Plato and Buddha did.But when we read the Gospels we find Jesus among the morally weak and the outright immoral: Children, prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners. (He even tells the moral heroes of his day that the immoral ones will enter the kingdom ahead of them.)Why? Because God chose what is foolish and weak in the world to shame the wise and the strong. So, Bonhoeffer says: “Religion and morality contain the germ of hubris… In this sense, religion and morality can become the most dangerous enemy of God’s coming to human beings, the most dangerous enemy of the Christian message of good news. Thus the Christian message is basically amoral and irreligious, paradoxical as that may sound…”We need to reckon with Bonhoeffer’s stark warning. Morality is one of the greatest dangers to the gospel. Do we believe that?We often think of becoming “holy” as becoming sinless. But God wants more for us than to become blandly sinless. He wants us to be conformed to Christ, to be one with the Father as Jesus is. In Christ we see that holiness is never identical to being moral.Think of Jesus’ life as the gospels tell it. Jesus is called “the holy one of God,” he is holiness incarnate, but he was repeatedly accused of being immoral by the moral heroes of his day. It was this charge of “immorality” that led to his crucifixion. Why? Because his way of life did not (and does not) fit within the moral standards of his day (or of any day). Jesus reveals to us how bankrupt all of our moral systems are. Our concepts of “goodness” have to broken open by the Spirit. To follow Jesus requires that we leave behind our own moralisms. Jesus and our morality cannot coexist.Peter is a perfect example. Peter famously makes the true confession of Jesus’s identity. Jesus asks Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter responds, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus tells Peter that the Father has revealed this to him. He has made a true confession. God has spoken to Peter. But Peter’s true confession still ends up distorted by his own understanding of morality. Jesus responds to Peter’s true confession by saying, “And the son of man must go to Jerusalem and suffer.” “No!” Peter says. He won’t allow it! He’s still operating within his own understanding of morality. He hasn’t let Jesus show him what true holiness is.Peter, like all of us, takes what God has said to him and squeezes it inside his own understanding of what is good and right. The words of Peter’s confession are true, but the sense he makes of them is wrong. He’s got the right words—“You are the Christ”—words that are truly from God, but he’s interpreting them within wrongly. We have to “unlearn” our systems of morality in order to truly follow Jesus. We must allow the Spirit to tear down our conceptions of morality and replace them with genuine holiness—Jesus.Chris Green concludes:“We learn holiness only by unlearning ‘goodness.’ The call to holiness is a call to break free from morality, which, at its heart, is always about power and control.”Holiness has as little to do with morality as it has to do with immorality. Very often in our circles, holiness is defined as a move away from the world. “The world does x, y, and z, so we DO NOT do x, y, and z. That’s what makes us holy/moral.”But we have to ask: Who is defining the “mark” that must be hit here? Is it Jesus?Just because you are moving away from the world does not mean you are moving towards Jesus. In fact, to move away from the world almost always means you are moving further away from Jesus. In the Gospels Jesus is most often found in worldly, immoral places—with the sinners, tax collectors, and prostitutes. This is the problem with moralistic thinking: it confuses morality with true holiness. True holiness is always a move towards Jesus, not merely a move away from the world. Moralism attracts our attention to what it deems to be immorality (for many of us we have heard things like: smoking, drinking, dancing, the clothes you wear, going to the movie theater, etc.) But precisely by focusing our attention on these things, it hides the deeper sins of pride, greed, and self-righteousness.Bonhoeffer calls this a “sick holiness.” “Sick holiness” is holiness defined by our own moral standards. We need to be cured from that deadly disease. Sick holiness might follow every letter of the law of God, but it ends up blocking the flow of God’s life and love to ourselves and our neighbors. “All Sins Are Equal”Right at the heart of “sick holiness” is something most of us have been taught about sin: “All sins are the equal before God.” Intuitively we all know this isn’t true, but it takes some work to unpack. We’ve often made things that are not sinful out to be terribly sinful because of our moral systems (think of the catalogue of vices you’ve heard). But because we’ve said that all sins are equal we’ve made “minor sins” out to be “major sins,” which end up ignoring our deeper problems.Not all sins are equal. They don’t all have the same consequences in our lives or in the lives of others. Some things we have done are deeply wounding and have caused tremendous havoc in the lives of our neighbors. But there are also things we have done that were wrong, but did not have the same catastrophic effects.Scripture often talks about “sinning against God.” And we are called to confess our sins “against God and our neighbor.” But if sin is the harm we do to our neighbors, what does it actually mean to “sin against God”?Is it that we can divide our sins up into two categories? Some of our sins are against God and others are against our neighbors? I don’t think so.Theologically I think we have to say that our sins are never violating or harming God. God cannot be harmed by what we do. Our sins do not block the flow of God’s love and life that he has in himself. We actually cannot trespass against God directly. But we can violate his will by violating our neighbors.The damage our sins do is not to God, but to ourselves and to our neighbors. All of our sins are against our neighbors and in that way they are ultimately against God. But it also isn’t true that our sins are only against our neighbors. To sin against our neighbor is to sin against God. Why? Because of Jesus. Jesus is God who has become your neighbor. God and neighbor are held together in him—in one person!As Jesus says to Paul on the road to Damascus, “Why are you persecuting me?” What we do to anyone we do to him. Jesus takes our sins against our neighbors personally. Every sin—no matter who it is against—is a sin against Jesus. If I sin against you, I am not merely breaking God’s laws, I am wronging you “in Christ.”Thinking of sin as merely breaking God’s laws can hide this deep truth from us. The question always has to be: What wrong have I done to my neighbor?  How have I blocked the flow of God’s life to them? How have I made it harder for them to trust in the goodness of God and to believe in God?When we think of all sins as being equal, we can easily become blind to the harm we’ve done to others because our attention is in the wrong place.Here’s an example. Why is harmful and abusive speech sinful? Because it transgresses God’s law? Yes, but the reason runs deeper. The reason abusive speech is sinful is not that it breaks God’s law (as if there were a list of words you cannot say because God has forbidden them), but that it makes it harder for our neighbors to receive the love God has for them.There is a sense in which it is true that all sins are breaking God’s laws. But even Scripture witnesses to the fact that not all sins are equal. In the Old Testament there are some sins that require stoning, but others don’t. The severity is different. In the New Testament Paul says that a man’s sins requires him to be excluded from the community of believers, but not all sins require this. When we say that “all sins are equal” what we are really doing is individualizing sin and reducing it to be only about me and God, all the while ignoring the harm we’ve done to others, which is the actual problem. And there are different degrees of harm we can cause to other people.Think of a sliding scale, a spectrum running from “bumping into our neighbors” to “wounding our neighbors” all the way to “violating our neighbors.Bumping into our neighbors just happens sometimes. And it isn’t always sinful. These are the ways in which we have been impolite or inconsiderate in a moment. Perhaps we have spoken to someone in the wrong tone of voice or not given someone our full attention. Or maybe we’ve offended someone because something we’ve done doesn’t fit within their understanding of morality. These things are not inherently sinful. I think we can place “vices” here, as well. It isn’t that these things are insignificant. They often can reveal a deeper problem within us. But moralism wants to focus our attention only here, on how we “bump” into others and inconvenience them.Think of the garden hose analogy again. More often than not, “bumping” into others does not block the flow of God’s life and love to them. It’s more of an annoyance.“Wounding” others is a different story. We wound others when we fail to show the love of Christ to the people around us. Usually we “wound” others by the things we have left “undone.” Wounds are not annoyances. They take special care and attention to be healed.But then there is “violating” our neighbors. These are the ways we’ve sinned against others in high-handed ways. We’ve traumatized them. We’ve completely kinked the hose. We’ve made it almost impossible for them to receive God’s love. These are the ways we’ve marred their understanding of who God is. When we “violate” others we put them in critical condition. What they need is an E.R. in order to be healed.But question always has to be this: Am I blocking the flow of God’s love and life to them? Am I making it harder for them to believe in God, to trust that he is good, to truly know who he is?Moralism wants to keep us blind to the ways we’ve “wounded” and “violated” others. It keeps our attention firmly focused on our implolite behaviors, our vices, things that we can manage, so that we become self-righteous. This is where the deepest danger of sin lurks. Pastors and teachers the most susceptible to wounding/violating others because of how we’ve spoken of God, the ways we’ve imaged him for others can be deeply traumatizing.Parents are also very susceptible to this in their relationship with their children. We can become so concerned with how well-behaved our children are, that we deal with them in ways that mars their view of who God actually is. In our efforts to “fix” their behavior, we may be sinning against them in far deeper ways.Obviously it isn’t only true of pastors and parents. We all become susceptible to this in the ways we talk to our neighbors—our coworkers and family members. We can be so concerned with moralism, with “fixing” moral behavior, that we make it harder for them to truly know God. But at its heart sin is anything I do or fail to do to love others with the love of Jesus. Every person I meet, everyone I think about, I am called to love them with the full love of Christ. To unclog the flow.When we start to understand sin in this way most of us will see that we hardly take a breath without sinning. And all we can do is throw ourselves on the love and mercy of Christ. But the promise of the gospel is that his love never stops flowing—even to us moralists trapped in our moralisms. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Curved In On OurselvesLast week I tried to argue that, contrary to much of what we’ve been taught, sin does not separate us from God. Many of us have heard that God cannot even look on it. But if the Gospel records are true we have to say, “Of course he can! If he couldn’t, how would he save us from it?”In Christ we meet a God who loves sinners so much that, not only does he look on their sin, but he becomes their sin in order to free them from it. Sin doesn’t have the power to separate you from God.For many of us, that’s tough to come to terms with. And it’s especially tough because there are texts in Scripture that speak of sin causing a separation, a break, or a fracture. If we start with Jesus, though, we can see that the separation that sin causes is not between us and God, but within ourselves. Sin separates us from ourselves. It separates us from our awareness of and sensitivity to God, our neighbors, and ourselves. Sin causes a lack of self-awareness. In his lectures on the book of Romans Martin Luther famously defines sin as being “incurvatus in se,” or “curved in on the self.” Sin turns us in on ourselves and makes us self-absorbed.I’m going to keep reiterating this because I think it is important for us to wrestle with: Many of us have been given doctrines of sin that are sinful. Or to put it in Luther’s language, those problematic doctrines of sin actually lead to a deeper “curving in” on our own selves. As Chris Green reminds us, “Nothing is so sinful as what we’ve said about sin.”Sin Separates You From YourselfThe separation that sin causes can first be seen in Genesis 2 and 3.In his lectures on Genesis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer observes that the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil are at the center of the garden. The trees are the center of Eden, and so they are the center of Adam and Eve’s life. It is significant that in a story in which Adam and Eve are the main characters, they are not at the center.Bonhoeffer takes this to mean that it is God who is the center of Adam and Eve’s life. The tree of life is an image representing God. God is life. He is my life and your life. You and I do not have life in and of ourselves. Apart from God no one has life. In him we live and move and have our being. Adam and Eve are not their own center. God is their center.So, in Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve enter the center of the garden to take from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they are attempting to make themselves the center of their own lives. They are becoming “gods against God.” They desire to know good and evil from themselves—with themselves as the center.In this act of attempting to find their origin in themselves, they are becoming “curved in on themselves” as Luther says. Not curved toward God and neighbor, but self-absorbed. This is surely what God means when he says, “If you eat of the tree you shall surely die.” To live with yourself at the center of your life is to become deadened to your true life which is only in God. It is to create a false life on a false center.Here’s Bonhoeffer expounding on this in Ethics: “Man at his origin knows only one thing: God…He knows all things only in God, and God in all things. The knowledge of good and evil shows that he is no longer at one with his origin…The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God.”Bonhoeffer speaks of separation here. But it is about Adam and Eve’s knowledge. It’s not that Adam and Eve have successfully cut themselves off from God. They don’t have the ability to do that. They can’t dictate who God is to them and who they are to God. But they can cut themselves off from their awareness and knowledge of their true center.Bonhoeffer continues:“But man cannot be rid of his origins…Man’s life is now in disunion with God, with men, with things, and with himself.”To have yourself as your own center and origin, to live from yourself, to know good and evil from yourself, is another word for the conscience. The conscience is that faculty that adjudicates the rightness and wrongness of what you do. But based on what? Your own perception of good and evil. You are the center and the origin.The reason Adam and Eve are in disunion with God is because they are in disunion with themselves! They’ve “created” false selves. They’ve alienated themselves not from God, but from their true selves. Their false selves are alienated from God. But why? Because they are an unreality. Those lives are lies. Bonhoeffer’s argues that when Adam and Eve take of the fruit, the conscience is born. Before the fall Adam and Eve have no conscience. They know only God as their center and so they don’t have to decide for themselves what is good and what is evil. But when they make themselves their own origin, they make their own knowledge of good and evil their center. Their conscience becomes their new God (Sicut deus—Like God, gods against God). The good and evil that Adam and Eve now know are not the good and evil God knows, but the good and evil of their own choosing. Conscience is the problem the fall creates. And it’s a fracture within Adam and Eve.Bonhoeffer is strong on this point:“Conscience pretends to be the voice of God and the standard for the relation to other men. It is therefore from his right relation to himself that man is to recover the right relation to God and to other men.”This is why the letter to the Hebrews says Jesus’s sacrifice is different than all the other sacrifices that have come before: Jesus’s sacrifice cleanses the conscience of the worshiper (Hebrews 9:9, 14). Think of how different that sounds from what we’ve often been taught. Many of us will have learned that Jesus has to die in order to set things right between us and the Father. We’ve been taught that the problem is between us and God, and Jesus’s death puts that right. But that’s not what Scripture says. Hebrews says that Jesus’s sacrifice changes us, not God. He cleanses our conscience, our perception, our awareness.The separation that sin causes is a break within ourselves. We don’t perceive the world (and God) rightly precisely because we do not see ourselves rightly.In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus talks about the eye being the lamp of the body. He’s talking about our perception. He says the light that is in you is darkness. Your perception is off. You and I think we know what good and evil are, but we are living by our own light—which is darkness.(Don’t forget that John 1 tells us that Jesus is the light of every human. He is our light. He doesn’t become our light when we decide to let him be out light. That’s who he is. When we come to see him as our true light we are recognizing the truth about ourselves. In that process, we are becoming true, not making Jesus true. We live in a delusion (sin) that makes us think we have our own light, but it is darkness.)This is the hope of the gospel: Christ has come to cleanse the conscience! Or to put it another way, Christ comes to reveal to us that our own conscience is not our true center—he is, and always has been! But we need that to be revealed to us. We need to be changed.The work of Christ is overcoming the separation that is in us. The incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection do not change God—it changes us!To say sin separates us from God is to say that God changes in his relation to us. But we know that can’t be the case. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever! We are the ones who change and need changing. God never once leaves us. As St. Irenaeus says, Adam never once escapes the hand of God throughout his life, especially when he is in sin.To sum up: the conscience—according to Bonhoeffer riffing on Luther—is what curves us in on ourselves. It is the seat of sin. The conscience is what needs to be overcome.In one of his lecture notes to the underground seminary at Finkenwalde Bonhoeffer puts it like this:“Whoever is one, whole, unbroken, has no conscience. Those in the middle, between good and evil, have a conscience...Having a conscience means that a person is between good and evil. To every person conscience says: you did something bad, only because I know about good... As long as we have conscience, we cannot be as good as Jesus wants us to be. The goodness of conscience is something different from the goodness of Christ...Ultimately our conscience must die so that Christ alone may live within us. Where Christ alone is, conscience is no longer."Or more simply, as he says in elsewhere, “Christ must become our conscience.” Christ is our true center and we must come to recognize it.The truth of the entire world is that it has been reconciled to Christ—whether it recognizes it or not. He is the true center of all things. Any “world” that is not centered on Christ is not the true world. Any person who is not centered on Christ is living in their own false reality—their own delusion. But this is the point: it isn’t reality! Human beings in their true reality are those who are “accepted in the incarnation of Christ… loved, condemned and reconciled in Christ.”Or as another Lutheran theologian, Robert Jenson, provocatively puts it: “Sin is simply man’s attempt to behave as if he were not reconciled to God through Christ.”Anyone who lives in sin is not living into the truth of who they have been made to be in Christ. They are living in a delusion.But that delusion is not a separation from God. It is a self-delusion. God is right there with every person in their delusion. The incarnation reveals to us just how far God is willing to descend: God even comes inside our own delusions. There is nowhere that we can escape from him.Sin does have a “disorienting and deadening effect” on us. And, “as that damage is done, we begin to lose touch with ourselves… We are less and less capable of being straight and open with God.”But God is never incapable of being straight and open with us. He is waiting for us where he always has been—in his Son Jesus Christ. He has never separated himself from us, but has always been present to us in our own separation from ourselves. Where is God? God is in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the place in which the world has been made one with God. And that is the truth about you and me and everyone we have ever met. Self-Absorption vs. Self-AwarenessSin curves us in on ourselves, but most of what we’ve heard about sin makes us more curved in on ourselves. As Chris Green points out, we are typically more concerned with managing our feelings of guilt than with the harm we’ve actually done to our neighbors. That’s the work of the conscience. As Bonhoeffer insists, the conscience keeps us from knowing God and our neighbors rightly because it keeps us from knowing ourselves rightly. (see 1 Cor. 4:4 and 1 John 3:20). The conscience keeps us self-absorbed, but Jesus brings us into self-awareness. The difference is crucial.So much of the preaching and teaching that we’ve received aims at our conscience, our feelings of guilt, and motivates us to do whatever is necessary to alleviate our feelings of guilt, rather than making right the wrong we’ve done to our neighbors. Focusing on our own feelings of guilt is not a move towards self-awareness but being driven further into self-absorption. Self-awareness is the ability to step into a room and know where you are and how you fit in that particular place. It’s knowing where you end and others begin. Self-absorption has no grasp of this. Someone who is self-absorbed can’t see their own edges, their own limits and boundaries. They are curved in on themselves.We’ve all met people who are caricatures of self-absorption (remember, this is a problem of degree not kind). These people think they are the main character in every room they walk into. As self-absorption increases, self-awareness decreases. Self-awareness can only happen as your conscience dies and Christ comes alive in you. “Where Christ alone is, conscience is no longer.” Coming to see Christ as your true center overcomes the separation that sin causes within us. We don’t know ourselves truly until we know ourselves “in Christ.” True self-awareness can never happen apart from the presence of Jesus.What grieves me is that so much of our preaching and teaching about sin usually throws people back on themselves and creates even more separation within them. It plays to their conscience and increases self-absorption. What our souls desperately need is preaching and teaching that direct us outside of ourselves to Christ.This was right at the heart of the theology of Martin Luther. The gospel is a word that comes to us from outside of ourselves, not from within. Philip Cary summarizes Luther like this:“Luther never looks inside himself to find Christ. It is precisely by taking hold of Christ outside us, in the external word of the Gospel, that faith brings Christ into our heart… If you want to learn a song by heart, you don’t listen to your heart but to the song, as the sound of it reverberates in the air and in your ears… Likewise, if you want to be united with Christ, Luther thinks, you must listen to the Gospel as it comes to you from outside, through your ears and into your heart. When you receive this word by faith, the form of Christ becomes your own, like the music of your heart.”All of this is right. The gospel is an external word, not an internal word. But we need to say more. Although it is true that the gospel is a word that is external to us, we actually find our true center there. It turns out to be the very center of our being. It comes to us on the periphery of the false selves we’ve created, but it invites us to abandon those false selves with their false realities, and to find our center at the cross of Christ.When the gospel comes to us, it does draw us out of our delusions, but it does not annihilate us. It makes us who we have always been called to be. It makes us true by giving us our true center—Jesus Christ.Or to put it in the language we’ve been using: the word of the gospel calls us out from the separation sin has caused within us. It calls us out of our self-delusions, out of our false selves, and back home to our truth.The voice that speaks the truth to us is not our own conscience, but the voice of that strange Galilean man who claimed to be the truth. That voice is the voice that called you into being, after all. And it still is. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

It Takes Training To Be a SinnerThe movement from Adam to Christ is the movement from being born from below to being born from above. It’s the movement into becoming truly human as God is human.But that movement involves a death. Paul puts it succinctly in Colossians 3:1—11. We have already died and our lives are hidden in Christ, but we must continue to take off the “old human” (Adam) and put on the “new human” which is being renewed in the image of the creator. Becoming truly human begins in a death (“you have died” Col. 3:3), but that death is an ongoing process (“Put to death, therefore…” Col. 3:5). That process is what the old Puritans called “the mortification of sin.”The problem is sin. But what is it? How do we come to know what it is? In talking about sin we have to be incredibly careful. But this is an area in which many of the teachers we’ve learned from have not been careful. Many of us have not been careful or prayerful in the way we’ve taught others about sin. Or as Chris Green memorably puts it, “Nothing is more sinful than what we’ve said about sin.”To say the same thing another way, most of us have been given a doctrine of sin that is sinful.The problem—as usual—is that we do not start with Jesus in our understanding of sin. Most of our doctrines of sin begin from our own abstract ideas of what sin must be and then we try to squeeze Jesus into those already-fully-formed ideas. But a doctrine of sin constructed this way makes it so that our ideas of sin are setting the terms for Jesus to fulfill, rather than letting Jesus show us the truth. The result is that we’ve cut Jesus down to the size of our own ideas of sin.Stanley Hauerwas says that becoming a Christian is being “trained to be a sinner.”“To be able to confess our sins is a theological achievement that our baptisms have made possible. For sin, as Karl Barth maintained, is only known in the light of Christ. Thus from Barth’s perspective, our fundamental sin consists in the presumption that we can know our sin without having become a disciple of Christ. In short, to be a Christian means we must be trained to be a sinner.”We assume that because we are sinners we must know what sin is. But do we? Does an addict caught in the throes of their addiction really know the extent of their situation? Can they see their addiction and its dangers with any clarity? No! Only in the light of sobriety can an addict fully know the danger they were in.Misdiagnosing SinMisconceptions about sin abound (but grace does much more abound!). Many of us will have been taught that sin separates us from God, or excludes us from the presence of God, or that God cannot even look on sin. If we begin with Jesus we can see that none of these definitions of sin can be right. In fact, the gospel itself would make no sense if it were true that God cannot be near sin. Jesus—the one who is both truly human and truly God—is called “a friend of sinners.” When you read through the gospels not only do you find God constantly hanging around sinners, but it seems like that’s where he prefers to be.This makes it all the more puzzling that so many theologians, pastors, and teachers continue to define sin as separation from God. If you read through a theology textbook (like Wayne Grudem’s systematic theology), you will find statements like “sin separates us from God” or “God cannot look on sin” and those assertions are typically followed by parentheses containing a Bible verse. (This is what people in the business call a biblical prooftext.)It is true that there are many texts in Scripture that are difficult and require us to wrestle with them. But when you look up these texts that are often cited to prove sin separates us from God, what you typically find is that they aren’t difficult at all. In fact, they are usually making the exact opposite point. Myth #1: “God cannot look on sin”Habakkuk 1:13 is almost always cited in definitions of sin. “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.”But when you read the book you realize that Habakkuk is complaining to God because of sin and injustice. He begins the first chapter saying, “‘How long O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen?' Or cry out to you, ‘Violence!; but you do not save? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?” (Hab. 1:2).Habbakuk feels like God is making him look at and tolerate injustice. He knows God doesn’t like it, and he thinks God shouldn’t look on it either. But God tells him to watch. When we come to the infamous verse 13 that seems to say God cannot look on evil we find there is more to the story. “Lord, are you not from everlasting? My God, my Holy One, you will never die. You, Lord, have appointed them to execute judgment; you, my Rock, have ordained them to punish. Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing. Why then do you tolerate the treacherous?” (Hab. 1:12-13).Habakkuk is crying out to God, knowing he is a God of justice. He says, “I know you are the Holy One and that your eyes are too pure to look on evil and you cannot tolerate it. So, why do you tolerate it?”In other words, Habakkuk is saying, “God, you can’t look on/tolerate evil, so why do you?” The text is actually bearing witness to the exact opposite point. What Habakkuk has to learn is that God’s holiness is not what keeps God from coming in contact with sin, but actually it is what makes it possible for God to be with sinners, cleanse them, and make them whole. That’s what makes him holy.The point is not that God cannot look at sin, but that it is the “looking” of God that frees sinners from their sin.In his lecture on Genesis 1:3—5, Dietrich Bonhoeffer notes that God creates by his word and then “looks” at what he has created and calls it good. Bonhoeffer argues that God’s “looking” at creation is what upholds it and preserves it in its goodness. God’s looking at his creation is what keeps his creation from falling back into nothingness. If God turns his gaze away from something he has made, it ceases to exist. God’s “seeing” is never a passive act. He is never a voyeur. He is not surveilling us. God’s “seeing” is active. It is a grace. When God sees his creation what he sees is the truth of what he has made: that it is good. Bonhoeffer’s point helps us to see that God never looks away from us, even in our sin. He continues to uphold and preserve us in the truth and goodness in which he made us.Myth #2: “Sin is exclusion from God’s presence”Genesis 3-4 are often cited to show that sin causes us to be excluded from God’s presence. Adam and Eve sin in the garden and are exiled from Eden. But as you read the text you find that God has gone into exile with them. The same holds true for Cain in Genesis 4.Later in the story, when many of the Israelites are taken into exile in Babylon, it is again assumed that those in exile have been excluded from God’s presence. Those who are left in the promised land declare that wicked have been removed from God’s presence into exile because of their sin. But the prophet Ezekiel disagrees.“Ezekiel responds by declaring exactly the opposite, namely that those in exile—though neither obedient nor virtuous—are in fact the preserved remnant (11:16–20), even going so far as to depict the presence of YHWH leaving the temple and Jerusalem and heading east, as though YHWH was joining his people in exile (11:22–24), where YHWH will himself be ‘a little sanctuary’ (11:16) for the exiles… YHWH remains present among the exiles. On this point, Dalit Rom-Shiloni observes, ‘exile does not [for Ezekiel] bring separation from God.’”Myth #3: “Sin separates you from God”We read in Isaiah 59:2 “But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.”But, again, when you read the whole chapter you find that Isaiah is making the exact opposite point. Isaiah 59:1 says, “Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save,  nor his ear too dull to hear.”Isaiah is not saying that God is cut off from sinners and can’t reach them because of their sin. He is saying that God can get to sinners even though their sins cut them off from their awareness of him.The passage goes on to say that we are blind and cannot see justice, we look for justice but find none, our deliverance is far away. We have turned our backs on our God.Isaiah 59:15–17 “15 Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey. The Lord looked and was displeased that there was no justice. 16 He saw that there was no one, he was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so his own arm achieved salvation for him, and his own righteousness sustained him. 17 He put on righteousness as his breastplate, and the helmet of salvation on his head; he put on the garments of vengeance and wrapped himself in zeal as in a cloak.”The separation from God is in our perception, our awareness, of God. It is true that our awareness is fractured, but Isaiah is saying that even when we are in this kind of sin and injustice, we are never outside of the reach of the hands of God. Because his arm is not too short (Isa. 59:1). What else can “his own arm achieved salvation for him” be referring to other than the cross of Jesus Christ? Jesus is the arm of the Lord that is “not too short.”This, then, is the point of Isaiah 59: even if it feels like you are outside the reach of righteousness, you are never outside of his reach of his right arm.Myth #4: “Hell is separation from God”There is one text in the New Testament that seems to explicitly say that hell excludes us from God’s presence.2 Thessalonians 1:9 “They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might…”But things are never that simple. The book of Revelation seems to say the opposite. Revelation 14:10 “They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb.”The text forces you to make a decision. Either we have to read 2 Thessalonians in light of Revelation or we must read Revelation in light of 2 Thessalonians. Are sinners shut out from the presence of the Lord in hell or are they in the presence of the Lamb?If we start our understanding of who God is and what sin is with Jesus the answer is clear. Is Jesus God or isn’t he? This brings us directly to the heart of the idea that sin separates us from God. At the end of the day what this suggests is that Jesus is not fully God. But the church teaches us to confess that Jesus is everything that God is and everything that we are—in one person. If we hold to that confession then we can see that the gospels witness to the fact that God himself has gone into God-abandonment (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). But he has done this so that we can know that he is present especially where he seems to be absent. If God has gone into God-abandonment, then there has never been anywhere to hide from him.As the psalmist says, “Where should I go to flee from your presence? If I go to the highest mountain you are there and if I make my bed in hell you are there!”This is the promise of the beautiful gospel. In Christ we can hear God saying, “I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here. I gave you my one and only Son and you murdered him, but I transfigured that evil act into resurrection and the salvation of the whole world. I refuse to separate myself from you, and I refuse to allow you to separate yourself from me.”Or as Lincoln Harvey has it: “The only way the creature could separate itself from God is to take him in our hands and kill him. But God has always already chosen the event of separation as his life in Jesus Christ… And this means that nothing can separate us from the love that God is, because the event of the creature’s attempt to separate is the definition of his life.”This is the true meaning of grace. No matter what you’ve done or will do, God will never leave you or forsake you. The truth is that you cannot separate yourself from him. That’s good news. But the beauty of the mystery deepens: if God is to be true to himself, he cannot separate himself from you. In Jesus Christ, God has so tightly bound himself to you that to deny you would be to deny himself. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Not “How” but “Who”Last week we began a study of what it means to be “truly human.” And we began with the truly human one: Jesus of Nazareth. It is not the case that Adam came first and then, when things went wrong, God sent his Son to be born of a virgin as a reaction to Adam’s sin. This typical way of thinking makes it so that Jesus is made in Adam’s image and—to caricature a bit—turns Jesus into Plan B.Paul insists in Romans 5 that Adam is made in the image of Christ. In other words, Jesus comes first. This is hard for us to think. We know that Jesus is both truly God and truly human, but in order to make this all “fit” we split him in two (sometimes suggesting he is two persons: the eternal Son of God and then Jesus of Nazareth).The problem with this way of thinking is that it begins with the two natures of Christ (human and divine), seeing them in some sort of competition and tension, and then tries to resolve the tension by some sort of math equation. Hopefully you can already see the issue with doing theology this way around. This is to start with our own abstract concepts (humanity and divinity), rather than with the concrete person of Jesus.In other words, we think we know what it means to be God and we think we know what it means to be human and then we try to say Jesus is both those things. This then creates problems for us to solve: How can the uncreated one be created? How can the infinite one be in time? How can the first one come in the middle? How can God die on the cross?But as Dietrich Bonhoeffer points out in his Christology lectures, the first question of theology has to be “Who” not “How?” Rather than starting with the seemingly incommensurable natures of Christ (human and divine) and then asking the question, “How do these fit together?” We must start with the concrete person of Jesus Christ. We must ask, “Who?”We need to start with Jesus to know God and to know ourselves. This one—this person—is simultaneously God and Us.Truly Human BeingTo be truly human—to be human in the way that God is human—we must be fashioned into the image of Jesus, who comes before Adam. To become truly human is to move from Adam to Christ. We’ve got the “who” questioned straightened away. Now we can ask the “how” question. How do we move from Adam to Christ? Ignatius of Antioch, a first century bishop who died around AD 108, wrote a letter to the Roman Christians while he was under arrest and on his way to being martyred. What he says is striking. His primary plea to the Christians in Rome is that they will not try to keep him from being martyred.St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Romans: “It is better for me to die in Christ Jesus than to be king over the ends of the earth. I seek him who died for our sake. I desire him who rose for us. Birth-pangs are upon me. Suffer me, my brethren; hinder me not from living, do not wish me to die…Suffer me to receive the pure light; when I shall have arrived there, I will be a human being [anthropos], suffer me to follow the example of the passion of my God.”“Birth-pangs” are upon him as he is coming to his death. His death is actually his birth. “Hinder me not from living” is Ignatius’s way of saying “Don’t stop me from dying.” Only in his death will he truly come alive. Life and death have been completely reversed here. “When I shall have arrived there, I will be a human being.” He’s not yet truly human. He is “in Adam” now, but he longs to be made into the image of Christ through his death. Only then will he be “a human being.”In other words, for Ignatius, to be put to death in the way Jesus was is to become a true human being.Two BirthsThe movement Ignatius shows us is a movement from Adam to Christ through death and this is what it means to become truly human. But he isn’t making this up for himself. This is what Scripture explicitly tells us.In John 3, Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night. Jesus tells him that he will only be able to see the kingdom if he is “born from above.” Nicodemus asks how someone can be born again once they are old. Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:5—8).Jesus is talking about two different births: one from above and one from below. Yes, Nicodemus, you are born from Adam—from below—but to truly live, to truly be made into the image of God, you must be born from above—born of the Spirit.Paul picks up this same theme in 1 Corinthians 15:35—49: 35 But some one will ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" 36 You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies…42 So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. 43 It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. 44 It is sown an animated body [soma psychikon], it is raised a spiritual body [soma pneumatikon]. If there is an animated body, there is also a spiritual body. 45 Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living soul; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But it is not the spiritual which is first but the animated, and then the spiritual. 47 The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. 48 As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. 49 Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.”The movement here, as John Behr points out, is from Adam to Christ, from being an a body animated by breath (psyche) to a body made alive by the Spirit (pneuma). Adam has breath in his lungs, but that breath expires. Jesus is the Second Adam who—precisely by letting his breath expire—is raised a life-giving Spirit.These are the two births Jesus spoke of to Nicodemus. The first one is a false beginning—in Adam. But the second is the true beginning of all that is created—in Christ. Adam—Christ.Breath—Spirit.Psyche—Pneuma.The Lord Kills and Makes AliveScripture everywhere bears witness to this movement from breath to Spirit. Psalm 104:29–30 “When you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust; when you send forth your Spirit and they will be created.”We have to notice the order. We often read a text like this and think: “Yes, of course. God is the creator so he gives us our breath and then he takes it away whenever he sees fit.” But the text doesn’t say that. It says that he takes away their breath first and then sends forth his Spirit and they will be created.Many have noticed that Scripture speaks this way. Especially in a text like Deuteronomy 32:39, “I kill and make alive.” Once again the order is key. It is the killing that leads to the living. It is crucifixion and resurrection. Origen: “In Scripture we always note that those acts which are ‘unpleasant-seeming,’ as I will name them, are listed first, then those acts which seem gladdening are mentioned second.' I will kill and I will make alive' [Deut 32.39]. He did not say, 'I will make alive' and then 'I will kill.' For it is impossible that what God has made to live would be taken away by himself or by anyone else. But, 'I will kill and I will make alive.' Whom will I kill? Paul the traitor, Paul the persecutor. 'And I will make alive' so that he becomes 'Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ.’"Maximus the Confessor (on God telling Jonah that he will destroy the city of Nineveh): “God in truth both destroys and saves the same city…”Martin Luther: “Thus when God makes alive he does it by killing…when he takes into heaven he does it by sending to hell.”Karl Barth: “In Scripture we do not find the Law alongside the Gospel but in the Gospel, and therefore the holiness of God is not side by side with but in His grace, and His wrath is not separate from but in His love.”This is the secret of God’s wrath: it is not something separate from his love, but is always found in his love. As George Macdonald memorably put it, God’s wrath is nothing but the furthest reaches of God’s love as we resist it.God’s wrath is not like our wrath. Our wrath aims to kill and destroy, but God’s wrath aims to make alive.Origen points out that in Galatians 5 “wrath” is not a fruit of the Spirit, but a work of the flesh! But God is Spirit and not flesh. So, when Scripture talks about God’s “wrath” it cannot mean what it means as a work of the flesh. The wrath of God makes alive. Or, put otherwise, the wrath of God are “the hands of God” that Adam never escapes at any time in his life. The molding and and the shaping are the wrath, which lead us to being born “from above.” It is the wrath of God that takes away our breath in order that he might fill our lungs with his own Spirit so that we might become “life-giving spirits” just as he is.The Gospel of John tells us that when Jesus breathed his last from the cross he handed over his spirit. But the Greek is really specific: “He handed over the Spirit.”Jesus breathing his last from the cross is his breathing the breath of life into all things. He is the Life-Giving Spirit. But he has to breathe his last. He must let go of his breath, and let the old Adam die. Adam must have his breath taken away—crucifixion. But in letting go of his breath he sends forth the Spirit—resurrection. This is not so much “new” creation or “re-creation” as it is true creation. This was always what Genesis meant when it said that God formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into him. At the cross we are witnessing God’s act of true creation. Martin Luther said that God created us in order to redeem us. That’s true. But we can be even more precise. God creates us by redeeming us. But it is only in death that we find life. It is only when you let him take away your breath that you can become clay in his hands and be truly created. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

God’s Hands in the DirtA few years ago I noticed that there are a many of passages in Scripture where God has his hands in the dirt. He’s a working-class God, not afraid to get his hands dirty. This is one of the ways in which he differs from other gods of antiquity.When I started looking into these passages I noticed that every time God “plays in the dirt” he seems to be up to the same thing.The first passage sets the theme. Genesis 2:7 says, “…then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”It turns out that Irenaues of Lyons, a second century church father, was way ahead of me. “Just as, from the beginning of our formation in Adam, the breath of life from God, having been united to the handiwork, animated the human being and showed him to be a rational being…For never at any time did Adam escape the Hands of God, to whom the Father speaking, said, ‘Let us make the human being in our image, after our likeness’ [Gen. 1:26]. And for this reason at the end, ‘not by the will of the flesh, nor by the will of man’ [John 1:13], but by the good pleasure of the Father, his Hands perfected a living human being, in order that Adam might become in the image and likeness of God” (Against the Heresies, 5.1.3)Adam and ChristNotice, though, that Irenaeus is suggesting that Adam was not made in the image and likeness of God immediately from beginning. He seems to be suggesting a process. Adam was made from the dust of the ground by the Hands of God, but throughout his life he never escaped those Hands. The Hands kept molding. It is only “at the end” that the Hands of God “perfected a living human being.” Irenaeus is drawing on Paul’s comparison between Adam and Christ. Adam is the man made at the beginning, Jesus is the perfected human being at the end. Jesus is not made in the image of God but is the image of God.The mystery of the incarnation, as the Council of Chalcedon has it, is that our Lord Jesus Christ is truly God and truly human. To know who God is we must look at Jesus. But if we want to know what it means to be truly human we also look at Jesus.The mystery deepens. Chalcedon says that this one–Jesus of Nazareth–is both begotten by the Father before all ages and also born of the virgin Mary. In other words, this man Jesus—“Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim”—is eternal. There is a human being in the Trinity, and his name is Jesus.So, while it seems that Adam comes before Jesus, in a truer sense he comes second. In Romans 5:14 Paul says that Adam is a “type” of the one who was to come. The word for “type” here is the Greek word for the impression left in wax by a signet ring. The type comes second, the signet ring comes first.Like Irenaeus, many theologians have picked up on Paul’s point. Nicholas Cabasilas, writing in the 14th century, puts it like this:“The old [Adam] was not the paradigm for the new, but the new Adam for the old…To sum it up: the Savior first and alone showed to us the true human, who is perfect on account of both character and life and in all other respects as well.”And here’s Karl Barth (20th century) nodding in agreement:“Man’s essential and original nature is to be found, therefore, not in Adam but in Christ. In Adam we can only find it prefigured. Adam can therefore be interpreted only in the light of Christ and not the other way round…Christ who seems to come second, really comes first, and Adam who seems to come first really comes second.”To say Jesus of Nazareth comes before Adam is to say that something that happened in the middle of time is also before all time. To try to say what Paul (and the rest of the NT) is claiming about Jesus we are going to have to question our typical conceptions of what time is and how it works. Jesus: Plan A or Plan B?In Colossians 1:15—20 Paul makes more audacious claims about the man Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is “the firstborn of all creation.” All things were created by him, through him, and for him. But he is also “the firstborn from the dead.”In other words, Jesus is both the first principle through whom all things were made (the Alpha), and the end of all things (the Omega). Jesus has always been Plan A not Plan B. Put like that, everyone would agree. But surprisingly, the way we typically tell the story of the gospel makes Jesus Plan B. The story goes something like this: God created a world and made human beings in order to be in communion with them. But Adam and Eve rebelled against God, and God had to kick them out of the Garden. What was God to do? God devised a new plan to rescue humanity through his Son Jesus Christ. In this telling God’s Plan A was derailed, so he opted for Jesus as Plan B.Apart from this being heretical, it doesn’t take Paul’s claims about Jesus seriously. Jesus was always Plan A. He was always the goal and intention of creation.But we are left wondering: How is it that Jesus of Nazareth—a human being who lived in the middle of time—is simultaneously the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End?Eternity and TimeIn order to grasp the identity of Jesus, what’s required is a revisioning of time and eternity. Rather than starting with our own conceptions of how time works and then shoehorning Jesus into those conceptions, we need to start with Jesus and let him show us how time works. The Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson helps us do just that. Jenson’s theology was a relentless attempt to make Jesus of Nazareth the starting point for all our theological thinking.Typically we start with our own categories and definitions as if those are just true and then we try to figure out how Jesus fits inside them. (This is precisely how we end up with a “Jesus as Plan B” theology.) Without realizing what we are doing, we think that God is in heaven the way we are on the earth and that God is in eternity in the way we are in time. As Chris Green puts it, we think that heaven/eternity are conditions for God just like space/time are conditions for us. He is bound to them. He has to work from them and inside of them. But God has no conditions. God is not in eternity. Eternity is in God. God is not in heaven like we are on earth. God created heaven just like he created earth. He is his own space and his own time. He isn’t in heaven/eternity, heaven/eternity are in him.With our typical categories and definitions of time and eternity we end up suggesting that the incarnation is a change in God that happens in the middle of time. In eternity past there was God the Father and with him was God the Son—but he wasn’t Jesus yet. He wouldn’t become Jesus until the middle of the story.We are tempted to ask: What were things like in God before the incarnation? But here’s the point: there is no such a thing as before the incarnation in God. Remember what the Chalcedonian creed claims: Jesus is the one who is begotten of the Father before all ages. There is nothing before him. He is the Alpha and the Omega.We assume that in the first century God dropped into our timeline and became Jesus (Plan B thinking!). But scripture is telling us that this life of Jesus–from his conception to his tomb–is the eternity of God. That’s what the resurrection means. God raises the man Jesus of Nazareth to be the form and content of his eternity.This sort of breaks open our brains and shakes everything up. But that’s usually what happens when God is around. We need to let our brains be broken open right at this point.Karl Barth can help break our brains open: “In Jesus Christ it comes about that God takes time to Himself, that He Himself, the eternal One, becomes temporal, that He is present for us in the form of our own existence and our own world, not simply embracing our time and ruling it, but submitting Himself to it, and permitting created time to become and be the form of His eternity.”Or more succinctly (as usual) here’s Robert Jenson: “God took time from our time to be His eternity…” “This God’s eternity is itself a temporal event: the resurrection of Christ.”(This is not easy to think, but we shouldn’t be surprised. If we were talking about quantum mechanics or neurosurgery we would all expect it to be hard. We are talking about God and eternity! Of course it isn’t easy.)The incarnation is not a change in God. As the book of Hebrews puts it, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” The life of the man Jesus turns out to be the Alpha and Omega. Just think of what Jesus says about Abraham: “Before Abraham was, I Am” (John 8:58). Notice it is Jesus who says this.The Gospel of John tells us that Isaiah saw Jesus’ glory (John 12:41). In Isaiah 6, Isaiah sees the Lord high and lifted up, seated upon the throne, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Who was he seeing? The crucified and risen Jesus!The book of Revelation says that the crucified Jesus is “the beginning of God’s creation” (Rev. 3:14). How is that possible? It is possible because Jesus Christ is “the lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8).So, as Jenson points out, the way scripture tells the story of Jesus reveals to us that all time spirals around the risen Jesus “like a helix.”The incarnation is not merely another tick on the timeline of history, it is the foundation of all history. It is the ground of the timeline itself!Or, to put it as boldly as possible: “Creation comes after Easter.” Baptizing TimeThe story the Gospels tell about Jesus forces us to baptize our conceptions of time. Jesus occupies a strange relationship to time and space. He appears and disappears by coming through locked doors to meet the disciples. He appears to Isaiah! This is all just another way of saying that Jesus is the Lord of time and space. And if this is so, then why can’t it be the case that it is the resurrected Jesus who walks with Adam in the cool of the day? Why can’t we even say that the voice that says. “Let there be light” is a voice that Mary would’ve recognized?And if it is the hands of God that formed Adam from the dust of the ground, why can’t we say that those hands bore the nail scars? Don’t we find this in scripture? Romans 4:17 says “[He is] the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.”Jenson thinks the order here is important and that it is “a single concept.” God gives life to the dead man Jesus, and then calls all things into being out of nothingness. Or perhaps better: it is by raising Jesus from the dead that he calls things into being.Creation comes after Easter.We worship a strange God. Why shouldn’t our conceptions of time be fully baptized by the strange gospel of Jesus Christ?History and creation have a purpose, but it cannot be discerned by sight. It is only by faith that we know that Jesus of Nazareth is the true Alpha and Omega of all creation.The one who ate with prostitutes and tax collectors, the one who opened blind eyes and healed lame legs, the one who said, “Let the little children come to me,” the one who loved every human being he crossed paths with—that one is truly God. And he is also truly human. He is God as human.This is the deep mystery of the incarnation: We look to Jesus to know who we truly are. But it is also true that God looks at Jesus to know who he truly is. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

"The tree of life, the cross of Christ, the center of God’s world..." -Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall Insider/Outsider ParadigmThe book of Ruth, as we’ve said, is subversive. It’s challenging the dominant narrative of the day as seen in people like Ezra and Nehemiah. Upon reading Deut. 23, Ezra and Nehemiah conclude that there are insiders and there are outsiders. God loves and accepts Israel, but he has excluded the gentiles like the Ammonites and Moabites.Ezra/Nehemiah have set up what some sociologists have called a “bounded-set community.” Bounded-set communities are defined by a strong boundary that marks off the insiders from the outsiders. By making a strong distinction between insiders and outsiders, you make the identity of your community very clear, very black-and-white. It’s a simplifying move: “This line marks the insiders from the outsiders.”In bounded-set communities it is the boundary marker that defines the community. That’s the most important thing. “Are you a pure-blooded Israelite? Or do you have Moabite blood?” This is the criterion that creates the distinction.The book of Ruth was written to complicate this seemingly simple delineation.  The genealogy that concludes the book makes the point clear. King David, the ultimate insider, is the son of Ruth the Moabite, the ultimate outsider. This is how the book of Ruth ends—with the boundary marker between insider and outsider blurred.The Gospel of Matthew picks up where the book of Ruth leaves off: with an updated genealogy. Matthew gives us the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, but he does something odd. Matthew not only gives us the fathers of Jesus, but also a few of Jesus’ mothers. And the mothers Matthew decides to include are significant: Tamar the Canaanite, Rahab the Canaanite, Ruth the Moabite, and Bathsheba the wife of Uriah the Hittite.The Messiah’s own family tree is filled with outsiders. As Stephen Fowl puts it: Right at the outset of his Gospel, at the beginning of this story that seems to be by Jews, for Jews, and about Jews, Matthew inserts three Gentile women and ‘the wife of Uriah the Hittite’ into the genealogy of the Messiah. Through cunning, pluck, courage, steadfast love, and even murder, adultery, and unconventional sexual encounters, Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba insert themselves, or find themselves inserted, into the story of God’s dealings.Once again the boundary line between insiders and outsiders seems to be scrambled. Matthew plays on the insider/outsider paradigm throughout, sometimes making you think he’s reinforcing it. But if you read the whole arc of Matthew’s story, you can see that he is out to dismember it.The Canaanite WomanThis makes it all the more puzzling when we come to the story of Jesus with the Canaanite woman. It’s an infamous story. Jesus seems to have a brief lapse in being Jesus. He seems not only unloving, but unkind. But, as Chris Green writes, “The spirit of Ruth the Moabite haunts Matthew’s [Gospel].” Something is afoot.The Canaanite woman forces her way to Jesus on behalf of her daughter who is being tormented by an evil spirit. Jesus refuses to see her. He tells his disciples, “I came only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” In other words, “I’m here for insiders, not outsiders like this Canaanite.”The Canaanite woman persists. She makes her way to Jesus and pleads on behalf of her unwell daughter. Jesus rebuffs her again. “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” Jesus reinforces the insider/outsider distinction again. But the woman seems to know Jesus better than that. She knows that his words cannot mean what they appear to mean. She knows his character.“Yes, Lord,” she says, “but even the puppies eat the scraps that fall from their master’s table.” Jesus responds, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”If we’ve read Matthew closely up to this point, we already know that Jesus’ words cannot mean what they seem to mean. The spirit of Ruth is all over this text. First, we have to recognize that this is a Canaanite mother. Matthew has already told us that Jesus has two Canaanite mothers in his family tree. Jesus and this Canaanite woman have a branch of their family tree in common. But this is not just a Canaanite mother, this mother bears a striking resemblance to the gentile mothers in Jesus’ genealogy. She shows cunning, pluck, courage, and steadfast love just as Jesus’ mothers did. She forces her way through the disciples to Jesus (pluck, courage), she goes back-and-forth with Jesus on what he should do for her (cunning), and she does this all for the sake of her sick daughter (steadfast love). Just like her (and Jesus’!) mothers before her, she is an outsider who—precisely because she is an outsider—is a true insider.This is the irony all throughout Matthew’s Gospel. At times he seems to be reinforcing the insider/outsider distinction. But if you read through Matthew, it is easy to see that he is subverting it.Just a few, quick examples. Magi.The first people to worship Jesus are the magi—gentile kings—following a star (astrologers!) that is leading them to the newborn Jesus. They come from “afar” (from other nations), bearing gifts for Jesus (gold, frankincense, and myrrh). As Richard Hays points out, Matthew is playing on Isaiah 60 here. 1 Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you. 2 See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the Lord rises upon you and his glory appears over you. 3 Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn…6b They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.The outsiders are insiders.Blind and Lame. Throughout Matthew’s Gospel it is the outsiders who correctly identify Jesus—including the Canaanite woman. It is the blind, the lame, the lepers, the excluded who know that Jesus is “the son of David.” (See for example Matt. 9 and Matt. 20.)Centurion(s). Matthew gives us two Roman centurions (outsiders) who recognize Jesus. The first centurion with a sick servant knows that Jesus has authority to heal. Jesus doesn’t even need to come to the centurion’s house. If he says the word, it will be done. Jesus says, “I have not seen faith like this in all of Israel!” This outsider has more faith than any insider.The second centurion in Matthew is at the foot of the cross. The very one who had just nailed Jesus to the cross sees the truth. “Truly this was the Son of God.” None of the disciples are there at the foot of the cross in Matthew. They’ve all abandoned him. Only the outsiders remain.The Great Commission. Matthew opens his Gospel with a genealogy of Jesus that includes “the nations” and he concludes with Jesus commissioning his disciples to go to “all nations” and make disciples. In a very real way, the inclusion of the gentiles is “[the end-goal] toward which Matthew’s whole narrative has been driving.” Matthew is intentionally blurring the lines between insiders and outsiders. Over and over again the outsiders are shown to “get it” while the insiders (the religious leaders and even the disciples!) do not.The Cross, the Center of the WorldThe Gospel of Matthew (and Ruth) complicate and blur the typical understanding of insiders vs. outsiders. What Matthew offers in its place is what sociologists call a “centered set community.” In a centered set community it is not the outward boundary that creates the community but rather the magnetism of the center point.In a centered set community it is not always easy to tell who is in and who is out (and that’s the point). The boundaries are porous, fuzzy, grey. They can’t be easily discerned (hence, the Canaanite woman!).For Matthew (and Ruth) the magnetic center is the crucified Jesus. The question is not whether or not you are in based on some arbitrary boundary marker. The question is In which direction are you moving? Toward the center or away from it?In his lectures on Genesis 1—3, Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that the cross is the very center of the world. It is the wellspring of life that draws all things towards the true center.The trunk of the cross becomes the wood [tree] of life, and now in the midst of the world, on the accursed ground itself, life is raised up anew. In the center of the world, from the wood of the cross, the fountain of life springs up.But the cross is the center of the world in a very peculiar way. The cross is not even the center of the city of Jerusalem, much less the world. The cross is located outside the city gate. Eleven years later, while in prison, Bonhoeffer wrote to his friend Eberhard Bethge, meditating on the way that the cross is the center of the world. God lets himself be pushed out of the world and on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in thew world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us…Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering…Only a suffering God can help.The way Jesus is the true center of the world is by being excluded from the world. He is not simply another object in the world, he is the center—the life—of everything in the world. But because he is the true center he has to be pushed outside of the false worlds we’ve built. He cannot fit inside what we’ve made of the world. He is an outsider, excluded.The only way for us to find our true center is to go to him outside the center of the city (Heb. 13:13). We are called to leave behind the worlds that we’ve made with our insider/outsider distinctions. God is overthrowing all that. His ways are higher than our ways. God does not predicate his kingdom on a boundary marker that separates insiders from outsiders. Rather, God predicates his kingdom on a magnetic center, the cross.Jesus says that when he is lifted up on the cross he will draw all people to himself. This is the true center. The question is not whether you are “in or out.” The question is in which direction are you moving? Toward the center or away from it?The outsiders in our world can see Jesus more easily precisely because they are outsiders. Because they have no stake in the false world with its false center, they can see Jesus more easily. “Son of David have mercy on me!” “Son of Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth have mercy on me!”To know Jesus you have to acquaint yourself with his mothers. Or to say the same thing in a different way: to see God you must acquaint yourself with the cross. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

“The last thing God needs is to be noticed.” -Chris E.W. Green A field trip with the old rabbis…Chapter four of the book of Ruth completes the primary movement of the story. It’s a movement from emptiness to fullness. Our story began with empty bellies—bellies that had no food and no children. It began with three deaths (Elimelek, Mahlon, Kilion), but it ends with three births (Obed, Jesse, David). This is the perfect symmetry of a story told by a master story-teller.In many ways the conclusion of the book Ruth is unsurprising. Boaz is able to redeem Elimelek’s land and marry Ruth. Ruth conceives and has a son. And they lived happily ever after.However, the reader is left with more than a few things to meditate on: what is Ruth’s connection to David? What is the meaning of Ruth’s name? And perhaps the strangest question of all is the fact that at the end of chapter four Ruth disappears from the story that bears her name.In considering these questions we take a field trip to the ancient synagogue and sit at the feet of the old rabbis. The rabbis have a wonderfully playful and imaginative way of interpreting the Scriptures—something we desperately need to recover. And the rabbis’ readings of Ruth are nothing if not imaginative and playful.I owe most of what follows to Avivah Zornberg, a brilliant Jewish reader of Scripture, and her pointing out these rabbinic readings.Stranger and Mother to IsraelWhere Ruth ends David begins. This is true of the book of Ruth and the book of Samuel, but it is also true of their family tree. The last chapter of Ruth itself ends with a genealogy that ends with David.In a midrash on the book of Ruth one of the rabbis brings up one of David’s most famous psalms, Psalm 119: “At midnight I will rise to give thanks to Thee because of Thy righteous laws” (Ps 119:62).Rabbi Phinehas commented in the name of Rabbi Eliezer b. Jacob: “A harp and a lyre were suspended over David’s head, and when the hour of midnight came he used to rise and play on them…” (Ruth Rabbah 6:1)Midnight is David’s time for giving thanks to God. This is when he writes his psalms and plays his harp and lyre. But why does he do this at midnight? What connection is this rabbi making with the story of Ruth?Ruth 3:8 tells us that Ruth sneaks into the threshing floor to “uncover the feet” of Boaz at midnight. This is when David’s great-grandparents were (at least) betrothed.David knows his story. Because of this midnight liaison between Ruth and Boaz, David rises at midnight to give thanks to God.The rabbis continue (Ruth Rabbah 6:1):Another interpretation: “Because of Thy righteous laws”: the laws [punishments] You brought upon the Ammonites and Moabites, and the righteousness [loving-kindness] You did for my grandfather and grandmother, for if he [Boaz] had uttered to her [Ruth] one single curse where would I have come from? But You did inspire him to bless her…”David rises at midnight to give thanks God for his righteous laws. But the rabbi here splits them in two: the law on the one hand and God’s righteousness on the other.The laws (or punishments) were brought against the Moabites to ban them. But the righteousness (or loving-kindness) was brought on David’s grandfather and grandmother, Boaz and Ruth.What was the righteousness (loving-kindness) that God did for Boaz and Ruth? The law seemed to demand that Boaz curse Ruth at that midnight liaison, but God’s loving-kindness inspired him to bless her. The rabbis envision David thinking through the possibilities here. It’s as if David is thinking, “I almost didn’t exist!” In fact, he’s saying that some readings of the law (Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s) would prohibit even King David from existing. David is praising God at midnight because the blessing of his existence was so very close to being a curse. And David would never have “come.” He would never have “entered” the world. The (dead) law would have condemned his grandmother and grandfather, but God’s righteousness, his loving-kindness, turned this curse into a blessing. Truly, though, the law has always had God’s righteousness and loving-kindness at its heart. And the rabbis know this.David’s life is a miracle in more ways than one. This is why he wakes at midnight to sing his songs to the Lord—because his Great-Grandmother is Ruth the Moabite.The meaning of her name…Every interpreter of Ruth—almost without exception—loves to point out what all the characters’ names mean. Each of the names in the story have a sort of transparently obvious meaning: Elimelek means “My God is King,” Naomi means “Pleasant,” Mahlon and Kilion mean “Sickness and Destruction,” Orpah means “Nape of the Neck,” Boaz means “Mighty Man of Strength.” But there is one name that is more opaque. What is the meaning of the name Ruth? Ruth’s name is ambiguous which has led to many, many suggestions of what it might mean.Avivah Zornberg points out that at least one rabbi in the Babylonian Talmud provides a different meaning: Ruth. What is the meaning of Ruth? R. Johanan said: “Because she was privileged to be the ancestress of David, who saturated the Holy One, Blessed be He, with songs and hymns.”The Hebrew word for “saturate” is one of the closest sounding words to Ruth’s very odd name. The word “saturate” is not a word that is used often in the Hebrew Bible. But David does use it in one of his greatest hits—Psalm 23: “You anoint my head with oil, my cup overflows [is saturated].”To be saturated is to be satiated. It’s a movement from thirst to being inundated with water. So, why would Ruth’s name mean “saturate”?According to the rabbi quoted above, it is because David—the one who saturates God with praise—comes out of Ruth. She is the overflowing cup from which David is born. The songs that all of Israel will end up singing to God begin with Ruth. She saturates.As Zornberg puts it, “David was an unfolding of what was folded up in Ruth.”The Disappearance of Ruth?All this brings us to what is the most puzzling feature of the entire book of Ruth: Ruth ends up disappearing from her own story.Ruth’s “disappearance” begins right at the moment her baby is born. Immediately the baby is in Naomi’s lap, not Ruth’s. The women all sing that a son has been born to Naomi, not Ruth. Ruth is also not mentioned in her own genealogy that closes the book.But why? Is this the result of ancient Israel’s patriarchal society where women exist for the sake of men? Historically that may be true, but this text breathes with the breath of the living God. What can we make of all this?Remember that Ruth is the one who saturates. Think of what happens when water saturates a plant. As the water soaks into the soil and makes its way down to the roots of the plant in order to fill it up with life, it seems to disappear from sight. It is not gone, though, it has moved to a more interior and vital position. In the same way, Ruth pours herself out into those around her, filling them up with her own love and life. The rabbis have one last insight to offer us.Zornberg points out that in the midrash the rabbis offer a sort of coda—an extension —to the end of the story of Ruth.In the rabbis’ coda we’ve jumped ahead five generations to the court of King Solomon. We are at the scene of what will be his most famous moment, judging the case of the two mothers with the one baby:Ruth the Moabite did not die until she saw her descendant Solomon sitting and judging the case of the prostitutes. That is the meaning of the verse, “And he placed a throne for the king’s mother”–that is Bathsheba; “And she sat at his right hand”–that is Ruth the Moabite. (Ruth Rabbah 2:2)Ruth did not die until she saw her grandson Solomon judging this case. The text of 1 Kings 3 itself just says “There was a throne set for the king’s mother, and she sat at his right hand.” This obviously seems to be referring only to Bathsheba. But in a very imaginative and playful move the rabbi splits the verse to refer to two different mothers of King Solomon. He has Bathsheba sitting to the one side of throne and Ruth on the other. Why is this the end of Ruth’s life? Why does she live to see this case in particular?In this story from 1 Kings 3, two prostitutes come before King Solomon. Both of the women had babies, but one of the babies died during the night. Both women are claiming that the dead baby belongs to the other woman while the living baby belongs to them. There’s no way to know which woman is the true mother of the living baby.So Solomon, in his wisdom, says that the living baby must be cut in two by a sword so that each woman can have half of the baby.The one woman agrees to the plan. “Divide the baby,” she says, “Neither of us will have him.” But the other woman pleads for the life of the baby saying, “Give her the living child, but absolutely do not kill him!” And this shows Solomon who the true mother is. He just quotes the true mother: “Give her the living child, but absolutely do not kill him.” Then he adds, “That’s the mother.”The true mother would lay her life down for the sake of her baby’s life.Here’s what the rabbis are suggesting: where does Solomon get the wisdom he needs to decide a case like this? It must be from his Great-Great-Grandmother, Ruth. Ruth is the one who clings so tightly to Naomi that they share an essential identity. Ruth saturates Naomi like water in a plant. The baby can sit in Naomi’s lap without Ruth losing the baby. Ruth is the true mother. She can let go of the baby precisely because she is the true mother, just as the true mother does in the story of 1 Kings 3.And here is Ruth, sitting beside her grandson, Solomon, flanking him with Bathsheba, witnessing the fruit of her womb. Solomon has something of Ruth in him that allows him to know what to do. She has saturated him.Ruth is happy to disappear in her own story. But she does it in the way God disappears in this story. Have you noticed that God is not really an actor in the story of Ruth? Over and over again we read characters in the story ask God to do something that they themselves end up doing. Boaz prays that Ruth would find shelter in the shadow of God’s wing. But by the end of the story Ruth has found protection under the shadow of Boaz’s wing.As Chris Green writes, “This story is incarnation.” God is fully embodied in the characters of this story. Their movements are God’s movements. Why? Because they have been saturated with his very life. He is the water the plants need to truly live. It isn't so much that God has “disappeared” from the story, but that he has filled the entire story with his own life. In this way Ruth shares God’s character: self-emptying love. The very heart of God is to pour himself out for the sake of others. As Philippians 2 says, “Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped, but rather he emptied himself by becoming a servant.” He saturates.And when God empties himself it does not diminish him. God’s emptying is only ever a filling. This is what makes Ruth exactly like her God. God has no ego, and neither does Ruth. Ruth does not need to be center stage even in her own story, because her life has permeated and saturated all the other lives in the story. “The last thing God needs is to be noticed.” Ruth is both a stranger to Israel and a mother to Israel. In fact, she can only become a mother to Israel by virtue of the fact that she is a stranger to Israel. Jesus is a stranger to Israel and to this world. The closer he comes to us, the stranger he feels. But it is not Jesus that is strange and alien. What we’ve made of our lives is what is strange and alien. When he comes close you realize that he is not strange. He is home.Ruth is the strange one who makes a home for everyone she loves.She has no ego. She saturates the way God does. Unnoticeable at first, but once you see it, you realize you’ve discovered that the deep heart of creation is incarnation. This is a public episode. 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A Good Friday sermon on John 19:1—30.So they took Jesus, 17 and carrying the cross by himself he went out to what is called the Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha. 18 There they crucified him and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them. 19 Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” 20 Many of the Jews read this inscription because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek. 21 Then the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’ ” 22 Pilate answered, “What I have written I have written.” 23 When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his clothes and divided them into four parts, one for each soldier. They also took his tunic; now the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from the top. 24 So they said to one another, “Let us not tear it but cast lots for it to see who will get it.” This was to fulfill what the scripture says,“They divided my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.”25 And that is what the soldiers did.Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. 26 When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” 27 Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.28 After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am thirsty.” 29 A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. 30 When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

“Only good where evil was, is evil dead… That alone is the slaying of evil.” -George MacDonald, Lilith Naomi’s Plan: Risky and RisquéChapter 3 of the book of Ruth is the crucial episode in the story. The plot reaches its climax. But it is also the most disputed part of the book. It’s purposely written with ambiguous language that leaves a lot to the reader’s imagination.In Ruth 3 Naomi devises a plan. She tells Ruth to bathe, anoint herself, and then get dressed. She is to go under the cover of night to the threshing floor where Boaz will have had a good meal and a good strong drink. After Boaz has laid down for the night, Ruth is to go “uncover his feet and lie down.” After that Ruth is to do whatever Boaz tells her to do.Naomi’s plan is pretty straightforward. It doesn’t take much to know what she is insinuating: a sexual encounter is about to happen between Ruth and Boaz. What does Naomi hope will happen? The story does not say. But when you take everything into account the most obvious answer is that Naomi hopes Ruth will become pregnant. This is sort of a plan of entrapment.Biblical Bed Tricks Why all this risqué material? The story is not lewd but it is racy. The ambiguous details of this scene are meant to cause the reader to make connections to two older stories from Genesis about the ancestors of Ruth and Boaz.Both Ruth and Boaz have ancestors in their past who were involved in very similar stories—stories that Wendy Doniger calls “bed trick” stories. A “bed trick” is a very very common literary device where one character goes to bed with someone who is mistaken for someone else. First, Ruth’s ancestors. In Genesis 19:30—37 we read the story of the origins of the Moabite people: Lot and his two daughters. Lot’s two daughters have been widowed (two sons have died!) and they are worried about the future of the family. The older daughter concocts a plan to get Lot, their father, drunk so that they can sleep with him and hopefully conceive sons. It’s a “bed trick.”The oldest daughter conceives a son and names him “Moab” which means “from my father.” According to the story Israel tells the Moabites are the product of incest. These are Ruth’s ancestors.But the second “bed trick” story is from Boaz’s past. In Genesis 38 we find that Judah, one of the twelve sons of Jacob, leaves his family and goes to Canaanite country (maybe even worse than Moabite country).While he is there Judah marries a Canaanite woman and has three sons: Er, Onan, and Shelah. Judah’s oldest son, Er, marries a Canaanite woman named Tamar. But Er dies. Judah then gives his second son, Onan, to impregnate Tamar. But then Onan dies. So, Judah promises Tamar that he will give his third son, Shelah, to her when he is old enough so that she can have a child. But Judah never makes good on his promise.Tamar decides to take matters into her own hands. During the time of sheep-shearing, she disguises herself as a prostitute and waits by the road for Judah. Judah sees her but thinks she is a prostitute and so he has sex with her. But Judah cannot pay her, so she insists that he leave his seal and cord with her as collateral. Tamar conceives and becomes pregnant. But Judah still does not know who she is. It’s a “bed trick.”Later Judah finds out that Tamar is pregnant. He’s enraged and commands that Tamar be burned to death. But Tamar reveals that she has Judah’s seal and cord, showing that the son in her womb is actually Judah’s son. Tamar, the Canaanite, gives birth to twins: Perez and Zerah. And as the book of Ruth will tell us, Perez is the great-great-great grandfather of Boaz.The Healing of the Past…The similarities between the two “bed trick” stories (Lot and his daughters and Judah and Tamar) with the story of Ruth and Boaz are crystal clear. But the meaning is not in the similarities but in the differences. The story of Ruth and Boaz is set up as a “bed trick” but at the moment where the deception should occur, Ruth does not hide her identity with a trick, but comes out into the open about who she is what she desires. And Boaz—though he has had a strong drink like Lot—has his wits about him. He immediately devises a legal plan for marriage.Ruth is like many of Israel’s own ancestors—except she is better! (And Boaz is also better than his grandfather Judah.)The story of Ruth is the healing not only of Ruth’s past history but also of Boaz’s. It is the healing not only of the Moabites’ past, but the healing of the Israelite’s past—which is just as stained as the gentiles. Part of the promise of the book of Ruth is that the children of wayward families can set right their own family histories. Ruth and Boaz are expunging the shame of their ancestors.But the story testifies to even more than that. The book of Ruth teaches us that all things in the past can be set right if God is who he says he is: the Alpha and the Omega.Jesus of Nazareth, who is the son of Judah and Tamar, is also the son of Ruth and Boaz. But this means he is also the son of Lot and his daughters. Jesus is not ashamed to make these people his kin.And Jesus is the one who not only does the will of God so that his family’s past history is made right by the actions of his historical life, but because he is the resurrected one, he is the Lord of all time–Past, Present, and Future. And he intends to set every episode of all human history right. All time is in his hands. This includes the time of Lot and his daughters, the time of Judah and Tamar, and all the past tragedies, traumas, and evils in our own lives.In other words, Jesus doesn’t just want to tidy up the end of the timeline (which is all Boaz and Ruth can do), he wants to heal the entire timeline—even those events that are long gone and in the past. He doesn’t simply want a happy ending to a difficult story. He is resurrecting the entire story of human history.The promise of the gospel is that in the end, at Christ’s coming, he will unmake and then remake all past tragedies, traumas, and evils. What was untrue to God’s will shall be made true. We assume that because something is in our past it is over and done with. But just our past is is closed off to us does not mean it is closed off to him. He is the first and the last, the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.We cannot access our own past, but he can. On our own we cannot make right what has happened, but he can make it so that all things are reconciled—even the traumas and tragedies of our past. And the promise of the gospel—the promise of the book of Ruth!—is that one day he will.As Jordan Daniel Wood put it, “The scars of your past are not irreversible for him.” He will unmake all the evils in our past in order that his true will—his true creation—can come forth in its place. But he will not not just erase it. Our God will unmake all evil and remake it so that his beauty, his goodness, and his perfect will shall be the truth of all past lies.As George MacDonald elegantly put it his fairytale Lilith: Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com