who heard their kinsman speak
of suffering for righteousness,
of blessing for the meek;
could they have guessed who this man was,
this man they’d known from youth?
a carpenter from Nazareth
the bearer of God’s truth?
And dare we guess how Jesus’ words
will challenge all we know,
how vast the vision, broad its scope,
how strong its undertow
that stirs the basis of our lives,
asks of us that we face
the challenge of beatitude,
to live our lives by grace?
O that the boundless love of God
Christ’s burning, searing word,
would live in us, and then through us
transform our broken world.44
Earthenware vessels
How on earth are we to fulfil this heavenly calling? How can we live with God and others so that others may live with and for others? How can we be not only signs of the priestliness of God’s people but effectual signs, activators and animators of their calling to live holy lives of blessing? George Herbert, the seventeenth-century Anglican priest and poet, knew the problem.
Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
He is a brittle crazy glass:
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
This glorious and transcendent place,
To be a window, through thy grace.45
Sue, an ordinand whom we both knew, once went to a lecture given by Jürgen Moltmann, the influential German theologian. Inspired by Moltmann’s theology, she attended a small book-signing event after the lecture. As Moltmann was signing her book, Sue mustered the courage to tell him how she was struggling to make the Christian faith relevant to the inner-city people among whom she was living and ministering. Moltmann was silent for some time. She thought he had not heard her or had chosen not to reply. Finally, he turned to her, looked at her with a piercing stare and said, ‘You must divest yourself.’ In this short moment and four words, Sue felt that she had been seen by the eyes of Christ and heard the gospel of the Lord.
Moltmann was calling for the radical repentance that lies at the centre of Christian faith. It is a turning from human pride. Karl Barth defined pride as the original sin, the root problem of humanity’s relationship with God. Pride is the human principle that says ‘we can go it alone’. We cannot be saved unless we turn from this confidence in our own capacities, until we empty ourselves of our own attempts to sort ourselves out and get ourselves right. ‘For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God’ (Ephesians 2:10). Abraham is the father of our salvation by grace through faith. When all seemed hopeless, when the weakness of his own fleshly powers overwhelmed him, he heard God say, ‘Abram, I will sort it’; and he believed the promise of God.
The dynamics of grace do not end with conversion. They begin with the call to follow Christ and they extend into every aspect of discipleship, including Christian ministry. We are saved by grace through faith and we minister by grace through faith. If the father of salvation by grace through faith is Abraham, the father of ministry by grace through faith is Moses. Moses was called to lead the people out of slavery to freedom in the promised land. God had seen the bondage of his people and had come to deliver them (Exodus 3:7–8). God had determined to bring his people to their rightful place in his purposes. God was going to set his people free to worship (Exodus 3:12; 4:23) and was calling Moses to play an instrumental part in these mighty works. Moses’ response was archetypal, echoed throughout the generations of calls to ministry: ‘Who am I that I should go?’ (Exodus 3:11). God’s reply to Moses is equally foundational and remains the word to all who have been called: ‘I will be with you; and this shall be a sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain’ (Exodus 3:12). Moses’ response is a statement of his own weakness. God’s response is a promise of his presence – a presence that will be known to be true only in its believing, only in obeying the call, only in the doing of ministry. ‘Only the believers obey, and only the obedient believe’, said Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his great work on discipleship.46
Moses’ recognition of his own weakness is a justifying recognition. It justifies that God has made the right choice. It justifies that Moses is the right person for this work because it shows that Moses is in the right place to realize that the work will be completed not by his own abilities but by God’s abiding presence and power. It is the place that leads to priestly praise and proclamation:
For I will proclaim the name of the Lord;
ascribe greatness to our God!
The Rock, his work is perfect
and all his ways are just.
A faithful God, without deceit,
just and upright is he. (Deuteronomy 32:3–4)
Moses’ song exalts the Lord as the true God who is able to accomplish the unexpected. It is the same key in which Hannah, Mary and other biblical characters sang. ‘There is no Holy One like the Lord, no one besides you,’ sings Hannah, no one ‘raises up the poor from the dust’ and makes the ‘barren bear seven children’ (1 Samuel 2:2). Mary’s soul too ‘proclaims the greatness of the Lord’ who has ‘looked with favour on his lowly servant’ (Luke 1:46–48). The Daily Office invites us to sing these familiar words of the Magnificat each evening as we gather the day before God in prayer. The day may have felt very unproductive. The powerful forces of the world may have seemed secure on their thrones and we, feeble against them. But the theological truth in the strange kenotic workings of God is that even on this day, when our ministry has seemed at its most barren, God has done great things for us and through us, simply because, with Mary, our faith has said ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord’ (Luke 1:38).
Paul seems to have been suffering from some sort of ‘physical infirmity’ (Galatians 4.13) when he first brought the gospel to the Galatians. It may have been the ‘thorn in the flesh’ to which he referred when writing to the Corinthians. Certainly, the experience of weakness that appeared to debilitate his ministry led Paul to a deeper realization of the power of God.
Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore, I am content with weaknesses . . . for whenever I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:8–10)
Just as in the dynamics of salvation ‘nothing in our hands we bring, simply to the cross we cling’, so in the dynamics of ministry all we can do is to offer ourselves to God in our weakness, even offer our weakness itself to God, trusting that God’s ‘extraordinary power’ (2 Corinthians 4:7) will be manifested through us. Yes, training for ministry is important, but the fundamental lesson to be learnt in any course of theological education is that ‘our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant’ (2 Corinthians 4:5–6).
Aelred, the abbot of a large Cistercian monastery in Yorkshire during the twelfth century, had a profound sense of his own inadequacy for the responsibility that had been placed upon him. His Pastoral Prayer is a moving manifesto of ministerial weakness.
O Good Shepherd Jesus
good, gentle, tender Shepherd,
behold as a shepherd, poor and pitiful,
a shepherd of your sheep indeed,
but weak and clumsy and of little use,
cries