Author Archives: Michael Pahl

What Did Og Ever Do to You?

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The Lord struck down many nations
and killed mighty kings—
Sihon, king of the Amorites,
and Og, king of Bashan,
and all the kingdoms of Canaan—
and gave their land as a heritage,
a heritage to his people Israel.

This was part of our morning prayers this week, this snippet from Psalm 135. It’s a psalm of praise to God, declaring the worship-worthiness of Yahweh. Yahweh is good and gracious! Yahweh is great and powerful! Yahweh’s goodness and greatness are shown in his awesome deeds!

Awesome deeds like killing Egypt’s firstborn, destroying nations and annihilating peoples, and slaying kings like Og, king of Bashan.

Yep.

Og's Bed

Og’s bed

And what did Og do to deserve such a fate? Simply this: he stood up on behalf of his people against an invading army, which just happened to be the army of ancient Israel, who just happened to be Yahweh’s tribe. And so, the original story goes, the Israelites “killed him, his sons, and all his people, until there was no survivor left; and they took possession of his land” (Num 21:33-35).

Ugh.

Not my favourite way to reflect on God’s gracious goodness. And not my favourite way to prompt prayer and worship on a bleary-eyed morning.

But yet I read it. And I reflected on it. And I prayed to God based on it. How in the world could I do that?

I’ve offered many thoughts already on this blog about how we as Christians should read the Bible, including the Old Testament. In general terms it boils down to this: the Bible points us to Jesus, and we follow Jesus.

That’s all well and good, and I’m convinced it is the right way for us as Christians to think about the Bible and how this collection of God-inspired, ancient human writings should function as authoritative Scripture for us.

But how do we then read specific passages, especially passages that make us go “ugh”?

What do we do with Og?

Well, here’s what I do with these biblical passages, and what I did Tuesday morning when the psalmist’s Schadenfreude over Og’s fate zapped me out of my comfortable morning fog.

First, I recognize these stories and songs for what they are: reflections of an ancient tribal culture with its contexts of tribal gods, tribal enemies, and tribal warfare. For me, this doesn’t in any way negate the divine inspiration of these texts—it certainly affects my understanding of how the inspiration of Scripture works, but not that the biblical texts are divinely inspired. I’ve written on this elsewhere, so I won’t belabour the point here: any notion we have of Scripture’s inspiration must take into account the simple realities of what these ancient writings are.

And what we have here is stark tribalism at work. Us versus them. Our god versus their gods. We win, they lose. Our god is greater than their gods. Yay for us! All praise to our god!

Sounds pretty pathetic when I put it just like that. Yet that’s the logic at work here, and we do ourselves no favours when we try to ignore it or deny it.

And it would be pathetic—and tragic—if we stopped there. But we’re not done yet.

I then read these stories and songs through the lens of other Scripture, especially later Scripture, especially the New Testament, and most especially Jesus. Throughout the Bible you have strong hints that this kind of tribalistic perspective is not really the best perspective to have, that it’s not really what God is looking for.

From the creation narratives pointing through Israel to all humanity, to stories of non-Israelites playing key roles in God’s work in the world, to the Hebrew prophets pointing beyond Israel’s present to God’s wider work among the nations—the Old Testament itself deconstructs its own tribalism.

This trajectory continues in the New Testament, centred on Jesus: through Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, God’s kingdom comes on earth for all peoples. The tribes of the earth become reflections of delightful diversity, not reasons for death and destruction.

All this points to a re-thinking of our “enemies.” Human, flesh-and-blood “enemies” are not our true enemies after all. Rather, humanity is united against a common enemy: our own sin and its resulting death. Og is not the problem. We’re the problem: our recycled attitudes and actions of harm against ourselves, others, our world, and ultimately God.

God's Bed

God’s bed

And all this points to a re-thinking of “God.” God is not like us only bigger. God doesn’t mirror our prejudices and dogmas. God doesn’t happen to hate all the people we hate. God loves the world—all of us, every tribe, every nation, every person. Even Og. And God comes to lift us out of our sin and death, to lift us out of our cycles of violence and harm, not through ever-greater displays of power and force but through ever-deeper expressions of selfless love.

Finally, I pray these stories and songs in this re-thought way, and seek to live in light of God’s fuller revelation of himself in Jesus. As I prayed this clip of Psalm 135 this week, in my mind I was converting the words about flesh-and-blood enemies into words about humanity’s real enemies. I read “Sihon and Og” but thought “Sin and Death.”

God has looked past our tribalism to our humanity, and through the crucified and risen Jesus God conquers our cruelty, our deceit, our prejudice, and more. God is greater than our fears! God is mightier than our hatred! Yay for all of us! All praise to our Creator God!

But this, of course, is not all, these joyful praises in private prayer. As I left our morning prayers Tuesday morning, my thoughts lingered in that space.

How do we continue to perpetuate that ancient tribalistic mindset? (Us versus them, our god versus their gods, we win, they lose, our god is greater than their gods.)

How do we do that as groups of people? (Mennonites, Christians, Straight-White-Males, Canada, The West.)

How do I do that in my everyday life? (My rights, my privileges, my little kingdom, mine, mine, mine.)

Ugh.

It was so much easier to just blame Og.

© Michael W. Pahl

Why in the World Do I Believe in Jesus’ Resurrection?

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Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is an utterly impossible event.

I’m serious. It is truly impossible.

When we make it into something that is “possible”—whether historically or scientifically—then we’ve stripped it of its power. When we make it into something that is “possible,” we miss the nature of “resurrection” as new creation invading the old, the transformative redemption of the old into something radically new. As I note in From Resurrection to New Creation, all this is rather scandalous for Christian faith: Jesus’ resurrection demands historical investigation at the same time that it defies historical investigation.

So why then do I believe in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead? Why do I believe in something that is truly impossible?

After all, I don’t make a habit of believing in impossible things. Sure, we all believe things that may well be improvable, but that’s different from believing in things which are impossible. So why do I believe in this particular impossible claim, that something happened to the corpse of Jesus of Nazareth such that he was resurrected from the dead to a transformed bodily existence?

PrintIn From Resurrection to New Creation, I note that this “scandal of the empty tomb” places Christians in the “risky realm of faith—trusting in the primitive testimony of those very first witnesses as found in ancient traditions in later written records, and believing in the history-demanding yet history-defying claim that Jesus of Nazareth was ‘raised from the dead on the third day,’ transformed to an immortal bodily existence untouched by sin and death” (12).

I do think this is the most fundamental basis for belief in Jesus’ resurrection: the apostolic gospel, the “kerygma,” the message of salvation to which the Spirit through the Scriptures and the Church bears witness, calls us to faith in Jesus’ resurrection. But this is a general reality, a common thread which runs through billions of diverse experiences of faith.

So why do I—I, and not all Christians—believe in the impossible: Jesus’ resurrection from the dead?

Belief is a funny thing. We very often continue to hold to a belief for different reasons than we came to believe in the first place; the way we attain belief is not always the same as the way we sustain that belief. So it is that my own belief in Jesus’ resurrection was first prompted by the faith of others: my primary social community in my formative years of childhood and adolescence believed in Jesus’ resurrection, and they passed on that faith to me as well.

This “faith in the faith of my faith community” is still an important dimension of my belief in Jesus’ resurrection, but it is not in itself enough to sustain that belief for me. So, my own belief in Jesus’ resurrection is sustained by a few other things as well.

I have had several experiences of the “transcendent” or “supernatural” in my life—situations where things happened in an unusual and beneficial way, or impressions of something or someone “completely other” and “utterly beyond” engaging me in some way in my “inner being,” or the like.

I’m sure these can all be explained as coincidence in a chaotic world, or neurological processes in response to some subconsciously perceived external stimuli, or whatever. But there’s something about many of these experiences for which those explanations are—however true—not enough. Undoubtedly this simply reflects the fact that I want to believe there is someone somewhere out there who is “completely other” and “utterly beyond.” In any case, these experiences in many ways lay the groundwork for more specific belief.

Rembrandt EmmausI also have an ongoing and growing conviction that no other explanation than Jesus’ resurrection fully does justice to the texts and ideas, events and experiences of those first Jesus-followers after the death of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross. Grave robbing and hallucinations, fainting and reviving, myth-creating and -telling, natural evolution of socio-religious ideas—none of these or similar explanations makes good sense to me of the specific traditions, writings, convictions, ministries, and deaths of those first followers of Jesus.

Now this is not the same as saying Jesus’ resurrection is “provable” according to the standards of historical criticism—I don’t think it is. Rather, it is more along the lines of saying—with deepest apologies to Sherlock and Sir Arthur for completely skewing a maxim of Holmesian logic—that when you have eliminated the improbable, whatever remains, however impossible, may well be the truth.

Nor is this simply another way of saying the same thing as I said above, that belief in Jesus’ resurrection is faith in the apostolic kerygma. This is rather what you might call a historical-but-not-critically-historical reason for cautious conviction that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.

Also significant for my belief in Jesus’ resurrection is seeing individual lives and faith communities transformed by this belief, seeing Christian faith work in the daily grind of real life.

Again, alternative explanations are possible—people can make major, positive changes in their lives for a variety of reasons and from within (or apart from) a variety of faith traditions. And there’s no doubt that many who claim belief in Jesus’ resurrection see very little positive change in their lives, and can in fact do some pretty horrible things. But still, I can’t deny that this particular belief in this particular God who raised this particular Jesus from the dead has had some very positive effects on many individuals, communities, and even crucial moments in human history.

A not-unrelated factor is this: to me, a broadly Christian worldview works better epistemically than the alternatives, allowing me to make sense of my perceptions and experiences in the world in a way that is coherent and meaningful. And a crucial dimension of that Christian worldview is the belief that God raised Jesus from the dead, that God is a God who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist, a hopelessly optimistic notion that God alone provides hope for real, lasting change.

All these factors—my personal experiences of the transcendent, my heritage of faith and my faith community, the coherence of a Christian worldview for me, the positive change I’ve seen in the lives and communities of believers, my dissatisfaction with alternative explanations for the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances, and ultimately, the Scripture- and Church-witnessed apostolic kerygma—all these factors come together to prompt and sustain my belief in the impossible claim that the crucified Jesus was resurrected from the dead.

And this, in turn, changes everything.

—————–

This post is adapted from a post written in 2010 on a previous blog of mine. As a companion to this, you might want to check out my post, “Do Christians Really Need to Believe in Jesus’ Resurrection?” The answer is more complex than you might think!

© Michael W. Pahl.

The Foolishness of the Cross

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A meditation on the cross which I shared at the Morden Good Friday Community Service, April 18, 2014, slightly revised since. It is based on 1 Corinthians 1:18-25.

A few years ago I was fortunate to be able to go to Israel-Palestine with a study group. It was an amazing experience: hiking in the wadis west of the Dead Sea, climbing in the hills around the Sea of Galilee, baptizing a former student of mine in the Jordan River, listening to stories around a community oven in a Palestinian village, getting violently sick in my first days there. Well, that wasn’t so amazing, but it certainly was memorable!

Olive Wood CrossOf course, I brought back mementos of my trip. Stones from different parts of Israel-Palestine, beverage containers with Hebrew and Arabic on them, a ram’s horn. And some plain wooden crosses like this one, simple, carved out of olive wood.

It’s the universal symbol of Christianity, the cross. We set them outside our churches and everyone can see at a glance that we’re Christians. We have them at the front of our churches, focusing our attention in worship. Many churches in Europe are built in the shape of the cross. We place crosses over our graves. We cast crosses in silver and gold—or carve them in wood—and wear them around our necks.

The cross is pervasive among us Christians as a visual symbol for our faith. But you might be surprised to know that the cross wasn’t widely used as a visual, public symbol by the early Christians, probably for at least two hundred years after Jesus. The reason is a simple one—and it makes you think.

The Scandal of the Cross

You see, the cross was not in any way a positive thing for Jews or Christians in those early centuries of the Church. Even sophisticated, respectable Roman citizens thought crucifixion too distasteful for polite conversation. Cicero, a Roman philosopher and politician who lived just before the time of Jesus, said that “the very word ‘cross’ should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts, his eyes and his ears…the very mention of [crucifixion]…is unworthy of a Roman citizen and a free man” (Pro Rabirio 16).

A real cross, the kind that people were crucified on, was normally just a rough-hewn beam of wood that the condemned criminal would carry outside the city, right on the busiest road where everyone could see. There it would be attached to something vertical—a post set up for such executions, or even just a tree. The person would be hung from it, arms outstretched, sometimes for days, until they died an excruciating death, usually of asphyxiation. Crosses were not your ordinary punishment; they were reserved for the worst of criminals, for treasonous rebels, for conquered peoples.

A real cross, then, the kind that Jesus died on, was an instrument of death, a horrific thing, an image of deep shame. It was like a giant billboard displaying Rome’s power and highlighting the subjugation of all other peoples. Cicero might not have wanted even to speak of crucifixion, but his Rome was built on the backs of crucified men.

Christians using the cross as a symbol, then, would be like African Americans in the Deep South of the early twentieth century placing a beautifully woven noose at the front of their churches, or like Jews of 1940s Poland casting a miniature golden gas chamber to wear as jewelry.

It’s disturbing to think about, isn’t it?

But once you get this then you can start to appreciate the Apostle Paul’s words in our passage from 1 Corinthians: “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing…but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.”

Christ, of course, is Jesus: Jesus of Nazareth, who walked those dry and dusty roads of Galilee, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching love of God and neighbour, healing the sick and raising the dead. But “Christ” is a title, not a name: it means “Messiah,” or “anointed one,” and refers to the ancient practice of initiating priests and prophets and kings by anointing their head with oil. When Paul calls Jesus “Christ” he is essentially calling him “King,” the promised Messiah in the family line of King David who was to bring about God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

Of course, for Paul, there’s more going on in Jesus’ story. For Paul, Jesus the Christ was “sent” from God the Father: he perfectly represented God, God’s person and purposes. For Paul, Jesus embodied God in the world: as Colossians puts it, “in [Jesus] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col 1:19).

So this is Paul’s claim, then: the man Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the promised King come to bring about God’s kingdom, perfectly representing God to us, even embodying God for us—and this God-King has died on a Roman cross, executed in torturous pain and shame and oppression, in utter weakness.

If you were a Jew in Paul’s day, like Paul himself and all the first Christians, what would you think of this? The Messiah, the Son of David, was supposed to liberate God’s people from their oppressors, not succumb to those oppressors! The Messiah was supposed to come with mighty signs and wonders in triumph over God’s enemies, not be crucified by them! There was little room for a suffering and dying Messiah in Jewish thinking of the day.

There was also a persistent view among at least some Jews that those who were crucified were cursed by God; it comes from Deuteronomy 21:23, “Anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse.” How could the Messiah be under God’s curse? The Messiah is blessed by God, not cursed!

No, a crucified Christ just could not be—and this was an enormous stumbling block for Jews in Paul’s day to believe in Jesus.

Alexamenos GraffitoWhat if you were a Roman? The Romans had their own stories of divine kings. Caesar Augustus and all “good emperors” after him were deified after their death, viewed by many in the Empire as divine kings. Some emperors along the way couldn’t wait until after they died to be deified, and insisted on being considered divine while they were still alive. So the Romans could understand a god-king. But a divine king being crucified at the hands of his enemies? Impossible! Such a king is not worthy of divinity!

And how about the Greeks? In Paul’s day, some at least thought of God as static, unchangeable, immune to shifting human passions and outside the fluctuating tides of human events. For these Greek thinkers, it was impossible that the divine being should experience suffering, let alone suffering on a cross.

But even for Greek thinkers who didn’t view God this way, they still had no room for this. They all liked their tidy system of thought, their sophisticated reason, their seamless, undisturbed way of understanding the world and our place in it. Stories of a crucified god-king? Too messy, too disturbing, too irrational.

No, a crucified Christ just could not be—and this was seen as complete and utter foolishness for many of the Gentiles in Paul’s day.

“We proclaim Christ crucified,” Paul says. Really, it’s hard to imagine any message in his world that could have been more foolish than that.

The Power of the Cross

But here’s the astounding thing: Paul insists that this foolishness is really wisdom, this weakness is really power. God is foolish in our eyes, God is weak—yet it is only through this foolishness that we find true wisdom, and it is only through this weakness that we find true power.

It is one of the most mysterious—and shocking—truths of Christianity: God brings about salvation for the world through a crucified Christ. God rescues humanity and all creation from sin and death through a Jewish king executed on a Roman cross. God overcomes our greatest enemies—our insatiable greed, our arrogant pride, our overpowering selfishness, these deep-rooted distorted desires that push us to hurt others and harm creation—God overcomes this sin and death by bearing the brunt of our sin and giving himself up to death.

It’s as if Jesus on the cross absorbs into himself all the hatred and violence and guilt and shame and pain and suffering that humans can inflict—he absorbs it all. Instead of fighting violence with violence, instead of fighting power with power, like everyone expected a king to do, or even a god to do—Jesus absorbs it all. Jesus takes all these things—all our sin, and this all-encompassing death that results from our sinful attitudes and actions—Jesus takes all this and absorbs it into himself, as if sucking the poison from a snake bite.

Rembrandt Christ on the CrossThrough this Jesus shows us who God really is: God is the God who would rather die than kill, the God who comes in suffering and weakness rather than brazen displays of power, the God who would rather work silently through our distorted wills than enforce his own will on us. God is the God who loves us, who gives himself for us, the God who forgives us, the God who is not against us but for us, on our side, right by our side in our own suffering.

And in the process, Jesus also lays out a path for us to walk: we are to follow in the footsteps of our crucified Messiah, not in power but in weakness, not in glory but in suffering, not in hatred and violence but in love and peace.

The Good News of the Cross

I think we’re more like the Jews and Greeks and Romans of Paul’s day than we care to admit.

We think God comes to deal with our enemies—those other people, flesh and blood people who aren’t like us, who don’t like us. But the cross shows that God comes to deal with the deeper enemies we all face—our own selfishness and greed, our own arrogance and pride, our own sin and the wider evil and injustice that grows out of it.

We think God comes in power and strength, and so we revere strong and powerful people. We think God comes in wise words and clever arguments, and so we admire intelligent people. We think God comes in glittering glory, and so we idolize beautiful people. But the cross shows that God comes in foolishness and weakness, with nothing in his appearance to attract us to him. God comes in a helpless baby and a crucified king, God comes in the poor, the weak, the suffering, the least of these, Jesus’ brothers and sisters.

We think God makes the world a better place through his sheer will, his mighty power, and so we try to do good in the world by force, coercing others to do our will. But the cross shows that God changes the world through his weak power, through self-giving love and radical forgiveness—and so should we.

We think God only works in “God moments,” those times when something spectacular happens, something miraculous, something extraordinary. But the cross shows that God also works when tragedy strikes, when the worst thing you can imagine happens, when pain and suffering and despair and even death hits us. These too can be “God moments,” sometimes even the most powerful “God moments”—as God comes alongside you and walks with you through darkness and disaster.

We think God is unchangeable, unmoved by the ebb and flow of human circumstances and human experiences. But the cross shows that God knows the very depths of human suffering and sin. If there’s a solution to the problem of evil, it is this: God suffers with us.

One scholar has commented on our passage from 1 Corinthians this way: “The ultimate idolatry is that of insisting that God conform to our own prior views as to how ‘the God who makes sense’ ought to do things” (Gordon Fee, First Corinthians). But the cross shatters all our notions of “what God must be like.”

And in that there is genuine good news, for all of us.

If you are wracked by guilt, or overcome by shame for something you’ve done, God is not standing over you, to condemn you. God is standing before you, arms open wide, ready to forgive you, to welcome you home. Receive God’s forgiveness, and in that you can find the strength to seek the forgiveness of others.

If you are walking through pain and suffering—physical sickness, emotional wounds, mental illness, whatever it may be—God is not outside of all that, oblivious to your hurt. God is right there in the midst of it, ready to walk with you through it, to give you just what you need day by day to make it through. Open yourself to God’s love, trust in God to take care of you.

Road-to-the-CrossAnd if you have any kind of relationship to another human being—I think that pretty much covers all of us—remember this: God calls us to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, the crucified Christ. God calls us to love, not to hate. God calls us to peace, not violence. God calls us to be humble with others, not proud. God calls us to forgive, not to harbor resentment or anger. God calls us to the cross, the weak and foolish cross, because it is only through the cross—Jesus’ kind of selfless, self-giving love, that we can find God’s true wisdom and power.

This is why the cross endures as such a powerful symbol of the Christian faith: not because the cross was an instrument of such horrific brutality and terrorizing oppression, but because the cross shows us so clearly who God truly is. The cross shows us God’s deep and abiding love—for me, for you, for all of us.

———————————-

For some reflections on the cross and nonviolent atonement, check out my later post “Atonement and God’s Wrath.”

© Michael W. Pahl

Jesus Was a Peacenik After All

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This past weekend I hosted my seminar on Jesus in history called, “Was Jesus Married? …and other awkward questions.” (The answer to that one, by the way, was, “Almost certainly not—though it is not historically impossible, and shouldn’t be theologically problematic.” Can you say, “can of worms”?)

But one of those other “awkward questions” was this one: “Was Jesus actually a violent revolutionary (and not a peacenik)?” As I conceded in the seminar, a good prima facie case can be made for Jesus’ revolutionary tendencies.

Those tendencies were undeniably “in the air” in Jesus’ day. There was a proud history of zeal for Torah among Jews of Jesus’ day, including for some a willingness to do violence against foreigners and even fellow Jews in order to uphold “righteousness” according to the Law of Moses. There was also a “zealot” movement that developed against Rome that had roots going back to Galilee in the early first century A.D., right where and when Jesus grew up.

And then there’s what Jesus himself said and did. Jesus proclaimed the imminent kingdom of God, a reality commonly understood as a political kingdom that could well require military effort to bring about. Jesus said things one could interpret as promoting violence, things about bringing and buying swords. Jesus entered Jerusalem in messianic procession and caused a disturbance in the Temple. And to top it all off, Jesus was crucified by Rome, probably for treason.

So, at first blush, the idea of Jesus as a wannabe revolutionary can seem pretty compelling. However, it collapses under the cumulative weight of a host of sayings and deeds of Jesus.

Jesus’ ethical teachings, such as in Matthew 5-7, and his mission teachings, like those in Matthew 10, are among the best attested teachings of Jesus we have. We find many of them in both Matthew and Luke in slightly different versions, we see them reflected in Paul’s writings before the Gospels were even written (e.g. Romans 12-13; 1 Corinthians 9), and we hear them in other early Christian writings of the first century (e.g. James 5, Didache 1).

Tissot - Lord's PrayerIt’s in these teachings that we find Jesus’ strongest words of peace and non-violence. “Love your neighbour,” “love your enemies,” “do not hate your brother,” “turn the other cheek,” “bless those who persecute you,” “blessed are the peacemakers,” and more are found in his ethical teachings, all connected to the “kingdom of God” which we are to pray for and to seek first. Among his mission teachings are calls for Jesus’ followers to proclaim God’s kingdom and heal the sick, giving freely and living simply. If they are rejected they are not to retaliate but simply to “shake the dust off their feet” and move on, leaving the rejecters to God’s judgment.

Other teachings of Jesus may be less widely attested in earliest Christianity, but fit snugly within these basic contours. Jesus’ kingdom parables, for example, repeatedly emphasize the idea that God’s kingdom does not come about suddenly—by force, you might say—but is planted in the world and grows quietly and slowly until its fruition. Or, for instance, Jesus’ controversies with religious leaders include the famous “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but give to God what is God’s”—a recognition of human authorities in this age, yet a declaration that God holds our ultimate and total allegiance. And running through the Synoptic Gospels is a recurring focus on the “least,” the “last,” and the “lost” as who God’s kingdom is for, as those who inhabit God’s kingdom—not the powerful or mighty but the meek and the humble, not the violent and coercive but the gentle and those who serve.

All told, the whole thrust of Jesus’ teaching is that God’s kingdom—God’s universal reign of justice and peace—is being established on earth, brought about through his, and his followers’, self-giving, suffering love for the other. This involves both love for God and for other people, including love for those marginalized among us and for those deemed to be hostile to us.

Jesus’ actions were fully in line with these teachings. One of the regular activities of Jesus widely acknowledged among historians is his practice of “communal meals.” These he viewed as symbolic of God’s kingdom, and the guest lists included repentant sinners, the socially marginalized, and other outsiders—the “least,” the “last,” and the “lost” who inherit God’s kingdom. Likewise, Jesus’ healings—he was certainly acknowledged as a healer, even if his opponents questioned the source and legitimacy of his healings—were also seen as signs of God’s kingdom, and focused on things like mercy over strict Sabbath observance, compassion over ritual purity, and inclusion of the marginalized in God’s kingdom.

Then there’s Jesus’ suffering and death. At least some early Christians viewed Jesus’ death as the crucial event for establishing God’s kingdom on earth (e.g. Mark). Certainly the manner of Jesus’ suffering and death reflected the teachings he had given—he walked the talk. He “turned the other cheek,” standing up to the powers that be and refusing to retaliate, thus exposing their violence and injustice for the evil that it was. He gave himself for the good of others, even through extreme suffering. He modeled the love he commanded.

The overwhelming portrayal of Jesus in our earliest and most extensive sources is that of one who proclaimed and lived out a counter-cultural kingdom of God—one not characterized by violence, but by non-violence, even active peacemaking.

What do we do, then, with the few anomalies, those sayings and actions of Jesus that don’t seem to fit the mould? Well, let’s take a closer look.

The “I have not come to bring peace but a sword” saying (Matt 10:34-36) is part of Jesus’ mission teaching, instructions for his disciples as they preach the gospel and heal the sick. “Sword” here is used figuratively to describe the turmoil that will result from Jesus’ kingdom message and way of life. His point—evident from the surrounding context of this statement—is simply that his kingdom message and actions will provoke resistance from the world, so his followers should be prepared for this and persevere through it.

Rembrandt Christ on the CrossWhat about “Those who do not have a sword should sell their cloak and buy one” (Luke 22:35-38)? Jesus has just alluded to his previous mission teaching, but now intensifies it: this is, once again, a warning about coming resistance to Jesus’ kingdom way. That Luke understands the particular statement as figurative is evident from the way the narrative continues. First, Jesus responds to the disciples that two swords is “enough”—rather ludicrous if Jesus was speaking literally about arming themselves either for rebellion or for defense. (You can almost hear Jesus sigh at their obtuseness.) And second, when the disciples ask about literally using the sword to fight the mob and one of them cuts off the ear of the high priest’s servant, Jesus responds with “No more of this!,” heals the man’s ear, and says, “Have you come out with swords and clubs as if I were a lēstēs (brigand, revolutionary)?” (In other words, “I’m not a lēstēs, people.”) Matthew’s account gets at the gist of Jesus’ real feelings about this, stripped of all irony: “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword” (26:52).

Then there’s the “temple cleansing,” as it is often called. Yes, Jesus does exhibit violence here, something that should caution us against an unrealistic ideal of non-violence. But it’s important to temper that concession with a few other thoughts.

First, none of the Gospels indicate that Jesus committed physical violence against human persons—only John describes the “whip,” and he states this was used to “drive out” the animals. Second, scholarly consensus is that Jesus’ temple action was symbolic and prophetic, like the symbolic-prophetic actions of Ezekiel, for example. Jesus was not realistically going to stop the temple sales of animals with a one-man temple tantrum, but he could symbolically highlight the problems he saw and prophetically pronounce God’s judgment. And third, this action was motivated by a desire for justice and inclusion in the face of injustice and exclusion. Poor Jews, especially non-Judeans who had traveled from around the Empire, relied upon the animals sold in the temple courts for their sacrifices. The temple merchants, it seems, were taking advantage of their situation, keeping the temple from being a “house of prayer for all nations.”

In sum, then, Jesus’ kingdom teaching was overwhelmingly non-violent and constructive in orientation, Jesus’ kingdom actions were overwhelmingly non-violent and restorative in nature, and these realities need to govern how seemingly contradictory realities are understood.

It’s important to note that none of this makes Jesus into a modern pacifist. Jesus doesn’t use his interactions with Roman soldiers to rail against military violence—in this he followed the example of John the Baptist (we Mennonites need to pause and reflect on this more). He doesn’t focus his energies on organizing his followers toward collective acts of resistance against the powers that be or their acts of violence (notwithstanding his “protest march” into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday). He doesn’t develop a program of restorative justice in contrast to the retributive models of justice around him. He doesn’t establish hospitals or schools in war torn areas in order to build a peaceful society.

Nevertheless, Jesus was a thoroughgoing peacenik—and his teachings and example provide the building blocks for a robust, active Christian pacifism that includes all these things, and more.

© Michael W. Pahl

“So, you’re a pastor…”

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It’s one of those conversation stoppers.

“So, what is it you do?” they ask.

“I’m a pastor,” I say.

They nod slowly, eyes dimming. Awkward pause. I can hear the next question, even though it’s left unspoken. It’s the same question as the first: “So, then…what is it you do?”

Good question. What exactly do I do? What does it mean for me to be a “pastor”?

I’m not a corporate CEO, or a business owner, or a franchise manager. I’m not the president of a local club, or the director of a local charity. I’m not a leader in the way the world thinks of leadership—casting visions, setting agendas, running the show, being “the decider.” I’m not here to make money or raise funds or establish a profile or bring in a crowd.

I’m a pastor.

But what does it mean for me to be a “pastor”?

If you asked ten pastors this question, you’d probably get a dozen answers. If you asked their parishioners, you’d probably get a hundred more. But here’s what it means for me to be a pastor.

As a Christian I am called to follow Jesus. As a pastor I am called to encourage others on this path, to follow Jesus in ever-increasing faith, hope, and love.

That’s it. That’s the sum total of my pastoral call.

Or, to put this another way, more in the words of the Apostle Paul: As a Christian I am “in Christ,” defined by Christ, seeking to become more and more like Christ by the power of his Spirit. As a pastor I am called to build up Christ’s body, those who are in Christ, into greater Christlikeness.

That’s my job description as a pastor. When I start my day, each and every day, that’s the task that is before me.

Of course, this has some more specific dimensions to it.

Jesus Good Shepherd catacombsI’ve always liked how Mark’s Gospel describes the calling of the Twelve apostles: “Jesus went up the mountain and called to him those whom he wanted, and they came to him. And he appointed twelve, whom he also named apostles, to be with him, and to be sent out to proclaim the message, and to have authority to cast out demons” (Mark 3:13-15).

They were first and foremost “to be with him,” to know Jesus and talk to him and learn from him and walk with him. They were to do life with Jesus, their Rabbi. Then they were to “proclaim the message,” preaching and teaching the gospel, the good news of God’s kingdom of justice and peace, planted in the soil of this world through Jesus. And they were to “cast out demons,” to be instruments of kingdom liberation and healing to those in bondage to sin and evil, doubt and fear, guilt and shame, darkness and death.

Sure, this is the apostles we’re talking about. But I think this nicely encapsulates the mission of the Church, the calling of all Christians. It also summarizes the way the rest of the New Testament speaks of “pastors,” those “elders” who shepherd God’s people.

As a pastor I am called first and foremost to be with Jesus, in studying Scripture, in prayer, in daily communion with the risen Jesus by his Spirit.

And out of that communion with Christ I am to preach and teach the gospel, declaring and explaining and dialoguing about the good news of what God has done through Christ and continues to do by the Spirit.

And along with that I am to come alongside the infirm, the weak, the outcast, the downtrodden, the guilty, the fearful, the doubting, the despairing, to be an instrument of God’s healing and liberation. It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick; it is the lost who need to be found, the least who need to be feasted, the last who need to be made first.

I agree, it’s not very glamorous. And it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the eyes of the world, all this prayer and Bible-reading and preaching, all this time spent away from the limelight with needy people.

But let others cast visions and set agendas. Let others run the show, be “the decider.” Others can make money and raise funds and establish a profile and bring in the crowds.

Me? I’m called to encourage others on this path of following Jesus. I’m called to build the body of Christ to become more like Christ. I’m called to be with Jesus, to preach the gospel, and cast out demons—and urge others to do the same.

I’m a pastor.

Cross-posted from http://www.mordenmennonitechurch.wordpress.com. © Michael W. Pahl.

On Not Throwing the Theological Baby Out with the Bathwater

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I’ve been reflecting recently on my faith journey, in particular on the “stuff I believe” side of things. I think that journey could be summed up this way: continually sifting through it all, sorting out the essentials, casting off the non-essentials.

Throw out baby with bathwater 2I suspect many Christians go through that kind of process as they get older, whether consciously or not. But I think that’s especially true of those who grew up as I did within a more conservative stream of Christianity.

Very early in my thinking on things theological I determined one thing: this process of “essentializing” my faith would have to be done carefully. I was in my early 20s, and I distinctly recall thinking that it would be all too easy to look around at the sinking boat of my own faith tradition and jump ship to another, only to find that it was in an even worse state.

To quote an old saying, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

Or another: don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.

My faith journey has by and large been about draining bathwater and saving babies.

I don’t have any illusions that I’ve done that flawlessly, and I’m still very much on the journey. But I find it disheartening to see other Christians either so unthinkingly clinging to their faith tradition exactly as they have inherited it, or so carelessly casting off their faith tradition and jumping to a sinking ship worse off than the first.

There’s an awful lot of dirty theological bathwater still being bathed in, and there are an awful lot of good theological babies being thrown out.

Both sides of the problem trouble me, but lately I’ve been more concerned about the latter. For some reason it seems to me like progressives should know better. But all too often they don’t, and perfectly good theological babies get thrown out with all that dirty bathwater.

Scripture’s inspiration and authority get thrown out along with the naïve, uncritical readings of Scripture we grew up with—instead of developing a more nuanced, sophisticated view of what Scripture is and how its authority works for Christian faith and life.

Jesus’ uniqueness gets thrown out along with the negative, fear-based views of other religions we were taught—instead of exploring ways in which Jesus can still be “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” without denying the reality and truth of others’ religious experiences and claims.

The reality of sin and its devastating consequences gets thrown out along with the legalism and judgmentalism and harmful views of human nature that were modeled for us—instead of crafting healthy and helpful ways of thinking about the harms we commit against one another and our world.

And on and on it goes—babies thrown out with the bathwater.

But how do we stop that from happening? How do we discern the good theological babies when we’re trying ourselves to emerge from all that bad theological bathwater?

I’m sure there are many helpful answers that could be given. Here are two that I’ve found especially useful along the way.

First, don’t assume that the fundamentalist or conservative evangelical way of reading the Bible or thinking about Christianity is in fact the “original” or “authentic” or even “biblical” way.

Many people make this assumption—both conservatives and progressives. No, the Bible’s “divine inspiration” doesn’t mean that the Bible’s every narrative is a historical record or every depiction of nature is a scientific assertion, or that the Bible speaks to every imaginable issue, or speaks with a single, clear voice—so you can believe in biblical inspiration without holding to those rather modern ideas. No, “salvation” in the Bible doesn’t mean “getting to go to heaven when I die”—so you can speak of salvation but understand that in the more biblical terms of restoration, reconciliation, flourishing life, societal justice, and more.

Examples of such false assumptions could be multiplied many times over. Don’t give in to those assumptions, but instead do the hard work of careful biblical interpretation and wide-ranging theological reading and reflection yourself before you reject those long-held Christian beliefs. You might be surprised to discover that the traditional ideas mean something other, or something more, than what you were first taught—and they have real traction within our twenty-first century human experience.

And that leads to a second suggestion: in discerning essentials from non-essentials, let three theologies—biblical, historical, and global—be your guides.

By biblical theology I don’t mean “the teaching of the Bible,” but rather the teachings of the Bible—plural—the Bible’s many theologies, in all their complex diversity-in-unity. Read the writings of Scripture carefully and in context, seeing both what makes them different and what holds them together. Do historical and global theology the same way: explore Christian thinking across time and space, through history and around the world, listening carefully for both dissonance and harmony. The harmony of Scripture and Church speaks to essentials, the dissonance to the ways in which God’s people have worked through the challenge of living out their faith in different times and places.

I know of no better antidote to either the narrowness of fundamentalism or the indulgence of hyper-progressivism than a good dose of biblical, historical, and global theology. Read widely across Scripture and through history, listen to diverse Christian voices from around the world, and allow your vision of Christian faith to expand as your list of essentials shrinks and your confidence in those few essentials grows.

Yes, there’s a lot of dirty water to be chucked in current versions of conservative Christianity.

But please, for the love of God, check the water for babies.

Cross-posted from http://www.mordenmennonitechurch.wordpress.com. © Michael W. Pahl.

Can We Read the Bible Devotionally? Should We Even Try?

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I received an email from a church member last night. In it he asks a question that I’ve received in different forms many times in my career as a professor and pastor, so I thought it would be worth posting his question and my response here.

van Gogh - BibleHis question was prompted by comments I had made that every single statement in the Bible is “culture-bound,” that even the most seemingly straightforward assertions or commands in Scripture are part of a complex weave of ancient cultural and literary realities. This means, then, that if we really want to understand what these biblical statements are all about we need to read them, as best as we can, in light of their ancient setting.

Here’s his question:

If absolutely none of the Bible’s commands can be taken at face value, but must be interpreted after major study, the same must apply to promises in the Bible. How can one then read the Bible “devotionally,” claiming and being encouraged by promises, without a major study to make sure of the promises’ meanings, since it is unlikely they mean what they appear on the surface to mean – just like the commands we read in the Bible?

And here’s how I responded, edited slightly for the blog (the smiley-face is original):

Let me try to give an analogy here. The earth spins on its axis and revolves around the sun. Those are basic scientific facts. However, they’re easy to ignore or deny: from our personal perspective it sure doesn’t feel like we’re spinning or moving, and it sure looks like the sun turns around the earth. And in our everyday lives the true facts seem to make very little difference: we go through the seasons, we watch the sun rise, enjoy the sun during the day (or hope it comes out!), and watch the sun set. We even speak in our everyday language about “sunrise” and “sunset,” as if the sun actually goes around the earth.

However, there are moments in our everyday lives, and more significant moments in our collective life as human societies, where we need to make sure we pay attention to those facts. When we want to know the weather forecast, we sure hope the meteorologist has worked with accurate models that include those basic facts of earth’s rotation and revolution. When we want to know what’s going on with climate change, we sure hope the climatologists have considered the implications of the basic realities of the earth’s rotation on its axis and revolution around the sun. And these basic facts have many other implications, from launching the satellites that we now all rely on for our GPS and cell phones, to charting the flight paths of the airplanes we fly on, and more.

Appreciating the basic fact of the antiquity of Scripture is kind of like that. It is a basic fact, there’s no way of getting around it. When we pick up our English Bible and read it and it seems to make sense, it can be easy to ignore or deny the fact of Scripture’s “ancientness.” But that’s ironic: we only have the luxury of sitting down with our English Bibles because a team of scholars has spent years to produce that translation from an ancient text in ancient languages, with that text being reconstructed by other teams of scholars who have spent years comparing ancient manuscripts to come up with the most likely original reading of the text. It’s a fact: the biblical writings are ancient human writings. And that must be taken into account in how we read them.

I have no problem with devotional readings of Scripture, however – I encourage it, in fact. That’s much like everyday people enjoying the sunshine, speaking of “sunrise” and “sunset” without giving much thought to whether their words are really accurate. God can speak through our own private – even inaccurate! – readings of Scripture. Hey, if God can speak through Balaam and his donkey, God can speak through anything – even if that’s not God’s ideal way to speak. So I’m all for people reading their Bibles, hearing God encouraging them or challenging them to greater faith and hope and love, even if they are badly misreading that promise that was actually a covenant promise for ancient Israel in exile (e.g. Jer 29:11), or whatever.

However, there are times when it is very important that we make sure we take into account the basic fact of Scripture’s “ancientness,” because we want to be as sure as possible that we are getting the right interpretation of a particular passage. It’s one thing for someone to be personally challenged to faith, hope, or love by their private reading of their English translation of the Bible. It’s quite another thing for them to take that private reading and impose it on others, or to make it the basis for the faith and practice of their congregation or conference, especially if that reading of Scripture is going to in some way constrain the faith and practice of others. At that point, we need to say, “Hold on – this is important. Let’s go back to the text together and read it in context.”

At least, that’s how I see it. 🙂

For more on these ideas, check out my post on “What is the Bible, and How Should We Read It?” Cross-posted from http://www.mordenmennonitechurch.wordpress.com. © Michael W. Pahl.

Things Jesus Didn’t Say

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This morning I got thinking about ways in which we ignore or distort Jesus’ teachings (note the “we” there – that’s me implicated as well!). Why do we do this? Well, to put it bluntly, Jesus’ teachings are hard!

Bloch Sermon MountJesus’ teachings are sometimes hard to understand, but even when they’re pretty clear, they are even harder to put into practice. They make us uncomfortable. They might make us unpopular. They force us to confront our fears and prejudices, or face up to our own sin, or otherwise dig deep into the darkest parts of our hearts. They force us to action, to not just speak about loving others, but to actually love others in the way of Jesus.

Well, I had a little fun with all that on Twitter this morning, tweeting a few #ThingsJesusDidntSay:

#ThingsJesusDidntSay “Anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment – but be as passive aggressive as you want.”

#ThingsJesusDidntSay “If your right eye causes you to sin by looking lustfully at a woman, insist that she dress more modestly.”

#ThingsJesusDidntSay “Do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you – as long as they’ve got a good credit rating.”

#ThingsJesusDidntSay “I tell you, demonize your enemies and dehumanize those who oppose you. Much easier to keep things straight that way.”

#ThingsJesusDidntSay “Love your neighbour as yourself – except for the one that looks different, or thinks differently, or…”

#ThingsJesusDidntSay “Pray this way: ‘My Father, my own special Father, no one else’s Father…”

#ThingsJesusDidntSay “Pray this way: ‘Our political and economic empire come, our will be done, on earth as it is in [insert nation here].”

#ThingsJesusDidntSay “Pray this way: ‘Give me for the rest of my life all the luxuries that Madison Avenue tells me I need.”

#ThingsJesusDidntSay “Pray this way: ‘Forgive us our sins, whether we forgive others or not.'”

#ThingsJesusDidntSay “Judge others, or you will be judged. It’s not about compassionate concern for the other, it’s about truth!”

#ThingsJesusDidntSay “In everything, do to others what they have done to you.”

#ThingsJesusDidntSay “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord,’ will enter the kingdom, but only those who have the right doctrine.”

I say this was a bit of fun, but of course there’s a serious side to it. Many of us, especially as Mennonites who grew up on the Sermon on the Mount, are so used to Jesus’ teachings that we actually miss their radical significance. We’ve made them comfortable – for ourselves, that is, not for others. We may think they’re about some special religious realm, when in fact they’re about life right now, right here, God’s kingdom coming on earth, God’s will being done on earth.

So what did Jesus actually say about these things? Check out Matthew’s rendering here – but be careful, because you might just have to change the way you think and live.

Cross-posted from http://www.mordenmennonitechurch.wordpress.com. © Michael W. Pahl.

The Lord’s Prayer

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“Lord, teach us to pray.”

That’s how Luke’s Gospel introduces the prayer that we today call the Lord’s Prayer: Jesus’ disciples so moved by Jesus’ own praying that one of them asks Jesus to teach them to pray.

Tissot - Lord's PrayerAnd so Jesus does. He gives his disciples a prayer to pray. But it is also a pattern for prayer, a way of praying. It highlights the attitudes and perspectives we should have in prayer, it sketches out the kinds of things we should focus on in our prayers—and in our lives.

When we pray the Lord’s Prayer thoughtfully and patiently, we find ourselves becoming more and more aligned with Jesus, more and more in tune with Jesus’ way of seeing things and doing things. We not only learn how to pray in the way of Jesus, we are also shaped by this prayer into the image of Jesus.

Centered on God, Focused on God’s Kingdom

Jesus begins his prayer by centering on God:

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.

Prayer is directed to God. It’s not merely inward reflection or meditation—as helpful as those things can be, and as much as those things can even be a part of prayer. But prayer itself is centered on God, not ourselves, not our world. It is a looking to God, turning our thoughts toward God, the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

This is a very personal prayer. Jesus called God “Father,” “Abba.” That’s an Aramaic word that both young children and grown-up children used to refer to their fathers. It’s a term of endearment, a term that combines affection with respect. Calling God our Abba, our Father, highlights the fact that prayer is a very personal thing: we as persons relate to our Creator as a person.

But this is also a collective prayer, even a universal prayer. You see this throughout the Lord’s Prayer: it’s not “my Father,” it’s not “I” and “me” throughout. It’s “our Father,” it’s about “we” and “us.” This loving Creator is the mothering Father of us all on earth: all humanity, every nation, every tribe, every culture, in every time and place.

If “our Father in heaven” highlights this as a universal prayer to the Creator, “hallowed be your name” emphasizes that our Creator is the God of ancient Israel in particular. In the Old Testament, God’s “name” is YHWH, and this name was viewed as sacred, never to be used “in vain,” that is, in empty, meaningless ways (Exod 20:7).

But this idea is not just about God’s name being special, as if there’s something magical about the name YHWH. It’s a way of saying that God himself is holy: God is utterly unique, completely unlike anything or anyone else. It’s a reminder that we are not merely praying to someone who is like us, only bigger and better; we are praying to God, the one in whom and through whom and for whom we exist.

The whole prayer is God-centered: it’s a prayer to YHWH, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the everlasting I Am, who is the personal, loving Creator of all peoples. Jesus calls us to center our prayer on this God, the one true and living God.

But the prayer is also kingdom-focused.

The kingdom of God is the consistent theme of Jesus’ teaching. His miracles are like signposts pointing to God’s kingdom. Everything Jesus says and does is connected to the kingdom of God. Indeed, his whole mission given by God was to be the Messiah, the promised King, to bring about God’s kingdom on earth, to establish God’s rightful reign as King over all things, a reign characterized by love, life, justice, and peace—true shalom.

And so it’s no surprise at all that, after that opening address to God, Jesus’ prayer begins and ends by referring to God’s kingdom.

Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.

“Your kingdom come, your will be done.” These are equivalent phrases: God’s “kingdom” is God’s “will”; God’s kingdom “coming” is God’s will “being done.” God’s will for all things is flourishing life, a life filled with love and peace—and this is exactly what God’s kingdom is all about.

“On earth as it is in heaven.” The biblical authors can use the language of “heaven” or (more often) “the heavens” to refer to the sky above us in contrast to the earth below. However, when they speak of God in connection to “heaven,” as here, the word “heaven” is more about being in God’s immediate presence, wherever that might be.

Here’s the point of Jesus’ prayer, then: it suggests that God’s reign, God’s will for justice and peace, is eternally evident in “heaven,” in God’s immediate presence, but it is not always evident on “earth,” in human experience and human history.

This explains a lot, doesn’t it? We long for life and love because God is life and love—God’s kingdom, God’s will, is fully manifest in his presence, for which we are created. Yet we don’t always experience flourishing life and genuine love because there are things about the human condition—sin and evil—that keep us from fully experiencing the life and love of God.

But here’s the thing: Jesus has planted the seed of God’s kingdom in the soil of earth, and it is growing slowly but surely until it will be fully present on earth, like a mustard seed growing into a plant that provides shade for all. And this is what we long for, what we pray for, what we strive for.

Concerned with Provision, Forgiveness, Protection—for All

Bloch Sermon MountThe Lord’s Prayer is God-centered and kingdom-focused, all the way through. This means that when we get to the petitions at the heart of the prayer we’re still centered on God and focused on God’s kingdom. Provision, forgiveness, and protection—these are kingdom matters, wrapped up in God. And again, note the “us” in all these: provision, forgiveness, and protection are not just for each of us individually, but for us collectively, as Jesus’ followers and as a human race.

Give us this day our daily bread.

The Greek word for “bread” here is a rare word—in the New Testament it’s only found in the Lord’s Prayer. It’s so rare no one is sure exactly what it means, but it probably has the idea of “what is necessary.” It’s not talking about extra things, luxuries in life, but life’s most basic necessities: food, water, clothing, shelter.

Using the word “bread” to translate this rare word is not a bad idea. It evokes a particular story that can help to appreciate what Jesus is saying here: the story of the ancient Israelites, wandering in the desert, collecting manna, bread from heaven, each day. God only gave them enough for one day at a time: if they tried to save it for two days (apart from the Sabbath) the manna spoiled.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” In other words, “God, give us just what we need, just when we need it.”

Again, though, remember the collective “we” here. We don’t all get just what we need, just when we need it. The reality is that some of us get more than we need and others less. But God does give us, collectively, just what we need. We have a responsibility to each other, then: when we have more than we need, we are called to share with those who do not have what they need; and when we do not have enough, we are encouraged to accept generosity from those who have more than enough.

And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.

We often separate out God’s forgiveness of our sins with our forgiveness of others’ sins against us. But Jesus brings them inseparably together. “For if you forgive others their trespasses,” Jesus goes on to say in Matthew’s Gospel, “your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

Strong words! We cannot expect God to forgive us if we don’t forgive others. Hard words! But we need to hear them. Just as God has forgiven us so freely, so largely, so also are we called to forgive others: family, friends, strangers, even enemies.

If you think about it, this is just another angle on the Greatest Commandment. Jesus says that the greatest commandment is to “Love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” But he’s quick to point out that there’s a second commandment attached to it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love of God is inseparable from love of others. Likewise, forgiveness from God is inseparable from forgiveness for others.

And do not bring us to the time of trial,
but rescue us from the evil one.

We think of this as “temptation,” and most of us probably think of being tempted to do some private, personal sin. But the word here is more general than that. It means “trial” or “testing, not just “temptation”—it’s any weakness we may have, any hardship we may endure, any wrong desire we may experience.

This points to the reality of sin and evil in the world—in our own hearts, yes, but also the larger and wider sins and evils that are out there. Not just inward sins like lust, but social sins like materialism, systemic evils like racism, natural evils like cancer. These are all wrong, they are all outside God’s kingdom, God’s will, and so we pray for God to protect us—each of us, all of us—from these wrongs, or at least to preserve us through them.

Provision, forgiveness, and protection. These are at the heart of Jesus’ prayer, they’re at the heart of God’s kingdom. And these are the things our world so desperately needs. Provision for all of humanity’s most basic needs, not hoarding what we don’t need but sharing with all. Forgiveness of harms done against each other, not perpetuating the cycles of violence and vengeance. Protection from suffering and evil, especially for the most vulnerable, the most innocent in our world.

Centered on God, Focused on God’s Kingdom

Jesus’ prayer ends right where it began, centered on God, focused on God’s kingdom:

For the kingdom and the power and the glory
are yours forever. Amen.

We think these are ours, or we strive to achieve them. Having power over other people, over our circumstances. Our will being done, getting things our way. Receiving honour, fame, glory for how great we are, how good we are.

Yet these things are God’s, not ours. And it’s a good thing, too, because we humans have shown time and again that whenever we build our own kingdoms or pursue our own power or seek our own glory, we only increase the evil and suffering of this world.

God shows us a different way in Jesus: building a kingdom through self-giving love for the other, through weakness and humility. And it is only in this way that a kingdom can be built that will last forever, a kingdom of love, and life, and justice, and peace.

May God’s kingdom come, God’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Starting with you and me, right now, following in Jesus’ footsteps, shaped by this very prayer.

Check out also “The Lord’s Prayer for All People,” an expanded version of the Lord’s Prayer which incorporates the themes described here.

© Michael W. Pahl

The God Who Is

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How do you imagine God?

It might seem like a strange question. Most Christians probably don’t consciously imagine God in a certain way. “God is spirit,” we know, and cannot be depicted in any physical form (John 4:24; Exod 20:4).

da Conegliano - God the FatherBut I think we do all have a working sketch of God in our heads, a kind of rough outline of what we imagine God to be like, at least at a subconscious level. This working sketch of God isn’t so much found in our theology—we can quickly recite something resembling an orthodox doctrine of God, using terms like “Trinity,” “Father,” “omnipotent,” “eternal,” and the like. Rather, you can see how we really think about God, that “working sketch of God” we have, in how we talk about God when we move beyond the theological jargon, how we think and speak of God in our everyday life.

And I’m more and more convinced that most people—not just most Christians, but most people—imagine God to be just like us, only bigger and better. God is a bigger and better—stronger, smarter, and saintlier, infinite, immortal, and invisible—version of ourselves.

You can see this in the way people look for evidence for God’s existence, some finding it, others not. It’s as if God is a being just like us, who exists in time and space in the same way we do, and so inevitably leaves behind traces of his presence. God is just like us, only invisible and everywhere, so if we find the right clues we can do a little CSI forensic work and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that God exists—or reject God’s existence on the same basis.

You can see this in the way people cling to language and metaphors for God as if the word is the thing itself—as if God really is a “he,” or a “Father,” or even a “god.” Most Christians, when pushed a little, would probably deny that God is male (that whole “God is spirit” thing), but many will still insist that masculine language for God is the only appropriate way to speak of God, instead of seeing this language for what it is: traditional language born of ancient patriarchal cultures.

You can see this in the way people pray. For some, it seems as if they believe we are literally coming into a king’s throne room, asking for royal favours. For others, it’s as if we are having a casual conversation with our best buddy—who just happens to be all-powerful and all-knowing.

You can see this in the way people speak of their “personal relationship with God”—and then in how they allow God in some areas of their life and keep God out of others, compartmentalizing their relationship with God just as we do all our other relationships.

You can see this in the way people think God meticulously controls everything that happens, from earthquakes and plane crashes, to that near-miss pulling out on the freeway or that amazing performance in the big game. For many people God is like a chess master manipulating the pawns on his board, or a puppeteer pulling the strings to make the world dance.

You can see this in these and many other ways. When you strip away all our theological jargon, most of us imagine God to be like us, only bigger and better.

Of course, one could well say that there are good reasons for thinking this way. The Bible mostly uses this kind of “God is like us only bigger” language to describe God, and it’s surely natural for us as humans to think and speak of deity in terms of our own human experience (what other experience can we use?).

But the Bible in many different ways points beyond this “God is like us only bigger” notion. God is the one “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). God is the one “from whom and through whom and to whom are all things” (e.g. Rom 11:36). God is YHWH, “I Am…” (Exod 3:13-15; and yes, the ellipsis is intentional).

Much of historic Christian theology and wider religious thought also points beyond this way of thinking about God as “like us only bigger.” Even just a bit of thoughtful reflection in light of the universe in which we find ourselves should dispel this idea.

So how then should we imagine God?

Well, we can start by ridding ourselves of the idea that we can come up with some kind of “pure description” of God, a way of thinking and speaking about God that is exactly as God is. All our language and thought reflects our human experience, our human cultures, and this is just as true of our language for God as it is of our language for dogs. In fact, this is even more the case when we are speaking of the Transcendent, the Infinite, the Divine—our language is inevitably metaphorical, it can only and always be analogy.

Understanding this can help us to properly use the language of the Bible for God, or the traditional terms of Christianity, or even popular God-talk. There is nothing inherently wrong with speaking of God as “he” or “Father,” for example. This language can even be helpful and good, as long as we understand that these words are mini-metaphors: “he” points to God’s personhood and not God’s maleness, and “Father” suggests that God reflects some ancient Jewish ideals of fatherhood and not that God is literally the male progenitor of offspring.

Of course, the flip side of this means that the biblical and traditional language for God is not the only language that can be used for God. There is no biblical or theological or wider religious reason why God cannot be spoken of as “she” and “Mother,” for instance. And sometimes the traditional language may cause problems in a particular culture and should be avoided. Imagine speaking of God as “King,” for example, in a culture where the only examples of monarchy have been irredeemably bad.

But is there a kind of bottom-line, trans-cultural, universal way to imagine God? The short answer is “no” (go back and read the last three paragraphs again). But there is a longer answer that qualifies this “no” somewhat, a way of thinking about God which I’ve found helpful.

You can get at this by looking at ways of thinking of the Divine that are common to historic Christian theology and even shared among the major religious traditions. When you do this, there are a few general notions that, though still mini-metaphors shaped by our human experience, are probably about as close as we can get to describing the essence of the Divine.*

Cianelli - Warm EmbraceFirst, God is Being. God is not a being, one being among many others. God is Being itself. God does not possess energy, as things in the universe do. God is Energy itself, pervading and sustaining the universe. God does not exist, as all things in time and space exist. God is Existence itself, and all things exist because God is, all things exist from and in and through and for God (pause on each of those prepositions for a moment). God does not live, in the way that living things are alive and not-dead. God is Life itself, the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

Second, God is Person. God is conscious self-awareness, conscious self-distinction, Consciousness itself. God is personal, relatable, the ultimate Subject who is and who acts in relation to the other. Just as God is the ground of being, so God is the ground of personhood: all things can be only because God is, and all persons can know and be known only because God sees and knows all things.

Third, God is Love. God not only relates to all things as a personal self, God relates to all things always and only in other-delighting, self-giving love: God loves. Even more, God is love: God cannot be anything other than love, the self joyfully given for the other. If God is Being, and God is Person, and God is Love, then the goal of all persons, who exist in God and are known by God, is love: loved by God, loving God, and loving others, in mutual enjoyment and delight.

Being. Person. Love. This is God.

Of course, this sharpens the claim at the heart of the Christian faith: it is this God who “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) in Jesus of Nazareth, “in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col 1:19), in whom “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9), who is “the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Heb 1:3).

And this—transcendent Being, Person, and Love, embodied in the man Jesus who lived, taught, healed, suffered, died, and rose again—this is how I imagine God.

How about you? How do you imagine God?

Note: These thoughts run roughly parallel to those of David Bentley Hart in his book The Experience of God, though he uses the triad of Being, Consciousness, and Bliss to describe God and our experience of the Divine. I’ve been thinking of God in terms of Being-Person-Love for some time, but Hart’s book has helped solidify this for me.

© Michael W. Pahl