come crashing in at the climax, like somebody turning on the radio just as Nimrod states its theme for the last time. Paul has spent eight chapters preparing for just this moment. Jesus the Messiah has been obedient to God’s Israel-shaped play and purpose. Israel’s mistake had been to suppose the play was all about herself. It wasn’t. Israel’s task was to redeem the rest of the world; Jesus has accomplished it. God forgive us, we have often supposed that the plan, the play, was all about us humans. It wasn’t. The human task was to reflect God’s image into the whole of creation, painting on God’s canvas the living signs of powerful, sovereign love. So when Jesus accomplished his great saving act, humans were delivered from death; and when humans then share God’s solemn glory, creation itself will be set free for its original purpose. It can’t wait.
Underneath all this is a principle that cuts deeply across some current assumptions. Creation was made to flourish when looked after by humans. Humans were made to reflect the image of the creator into the world. Freedom isn’t throwing off all constraint. It’s finding what you were made for, and being obedient to that and nothing else. It will always be costly; that’s part of the point, part of reflecting the image of God now seen in Christ (v. 29).
Inside this again, waiting to be rediscovered by our rushing, restless age, is the strange glory of the sabbath. Look at it this way: if even God took a day off, why do you need to worry? Look at the signs of God’s relaxed pleasure – the lilies, the birds – and learn to reflect that too.
The Sunday Next Before Lent
Exodus 24.12–18
2 Peter 1.16–21
Matthew 17.1–9
The mountain, the glory, the fear. The old story thunders around the crags of scripture, and we hear it echoing from every side, rolling on down the valleys. Moses on the mountain with God. Joshua (‘Jesus’ in Greek) there with him. Jesus on the mountain with Moses and Elijah. Peter on the mountain with Jesus and Moses and Elijah. We beheld his glory, as of God’s only son. The prophetic word made more sure. The cloud and the fire. The booths in the wilderness. No one has seen God; this one has revealed him.
Whatever else it means, it means we have to listen to the thunder and ponder what it says. Peter implies that the way to faith is to hold firm to the great old stories, and treat them with the respect they deserve. They are a candle to see you through the night; attention to them will be rewarded as day breaks (always slightly later than you thought, or wanted) and the morning star rises in your hearts. Eager for the day, we often spurn the candle, and wonder why we bump into things while waiting for light to dawn.
Today’s candle flickers to and fro. Themes glint and sparkle. God’s glory rests on the mountain for six days; on the seventh Moses is summoned. Is the giving of the law a new creation? Yes and no: forty days and nights on the mountain, alone with the glory, and meanwhile Aaron and Hur are left behind to keep charge – but did they? Maybe this is like a new Genesis 1 and Genesis 3? Jesus waits six days, and on the seventh takes Peter and James and John up the mountain. Who meets whom? What did it mean for Moses and Elijah? The candle sets light to time and space, the devouring fire blazes out like the sun, the cloud swallows them up, and the word echoes around the disciples’ hearts ever afterwards.
There are strange old stories, and some not so old, of those who watched the candle, and then the morning star, with such intensity that their own faces started to change. Sometimes it’s in the eyes. Sometimes, perhaps, the whole face. Our Western consciousness, and perhaps self-consciousness, denies us so much. Transfiguration was not meant to be a private experience for Jesus only. When he appears, we shall be like him; we shall see him as he is.
The Israelites saw the cloud and fire. Aaron saw it. And yet … Peter saw Jesus’ face shine like the sun. He heard the words. And yet … Memory is a great antidote to temptation. Whatever mountain you have to climb in the coming forty days, whatever words you have to hear, remember where you came from and where you are going. Remember how the thunder sounded. Remember what you saw in the candle’s flickering light. Joshua was with Moses. He saw, and remembered. ‘As I was with Moses, so I will be with you.’ And so …
The First Sunday of Lent
Genesis 2.15–17; 3.1–7
Romans 5.12–19
Matthew 4.1–11
Students set to translate Romans 5 often despair: some of its ‘sentences’ have neither subjects nor verbs nor objects, but are just collocations of indirect phrases. Paul at his most oblique: ‘So then – through the trespass of the one – unto all people – unto condemnation, so also – through the righteous act of the one – unto all people – unto the verdict of life!’ Perhaps this too is quite deliberate, the linguistic form that reverence takes when alluding to the deep and strange work of God.
It is also something to do with the fact that this paragraph sums up the previous four and a half chapters and looks on to the next three – and the next three, and the final five. This is the craggy ridge from which, unless you suffer from vertigo, you can look out in both directions – and, indeed, at Genesis 3 and Matthew 4. With a view like that, you don’t expect the path to be gentle.
The point of the Adam/Christ comparison is to emphasize that the human project begun in Genesis, the key part of the creator’s project for the whole creation, has been put back on track. Paul doesn’t offer a full ‘doctrine of sin’ here, but merely summarizes what he had said in 1.18–32 (which doesn’t usually make it into the lectionaries). Enough for the moment to know that sin involves disobedience, failure of loyalty, a fracturing of the creator’s intention, which, because it is a turning away from the source of life, cannot but bring death.
The parallel is unbalanced (that is the point of vv. 15–17) because Jesus did not start where Adam started; he began where Adam ended up. The ‘obedience’ of the Messiah is his obedience to the whole saving plan of God, the Israel-shaped plan to which Israel had herself been disobedient; hence the double task, not just to lift the weight that Adam failed to lift but first to catch it as it fell. And the result of that abounding grace (v. 15) is the firm platform on which Christ’s people now stand. ‘By his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make the many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities’; Isaiah is never far from Paul’s mind, and the echoes here are plain.
Dense doctrinal statements are, of course, shorthand ways of drawing together a larger world of narrative. Romans was written, so far as we know, before the Gospels, but it presupposes the sort of story we find in Matthew 4. Jesus offers God not merely the obedience which Adam refused, but that redeeming obedience which Israel refused in the wilderness. Jesus faced the ‘if …’ of the tempter with courage, with Scripture, with loyalty to the one who had called him. Interestingly, he thereby chose the way Eve had thought to avoid, the way of death, the naked death of the cross. But the tree he chose was the tree of wisdom, the tree of life.
The Second Sunday of Lent
Genesis 12.1–4a
Romans 4.1–5, 13–17
John 3.1–17
‘Leave country, kin and home, and go.’ And Abram went. The call was like that other word, to leave and cleave, spoken before the Fall: a marriage vow, a challenge and a pledge of loyalty. Like, too, the older word to image-bearing Adam, and to Eve: be fruitful, multiply, and tend the garden. Now: I’ll make you fruitful