O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

1 Samuel 12:19-24
Acts 16:16-34
John 17:20-26
Psalm 68:1-20

We are in the seventh week of Easter, and we are reminded that we live in the shadow of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  Now, when many of us think about and talk about the resurrection, we often think about and talk about the wrong things.  We typically get into discussions and debates over whether or not it actually happened.  Because it’s outrageous to actually believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, many people doubt that it happened.  So Christians often do lots of defending the facticity of the resurrection.  It did happen!  There were witnesses!  You could prove it in court!

But this is to miss the point, according to Scripture and according to Christian confession.  There’s a rich logic to the resurrection.  Here’s how it goes.

Sin and Death had enslaved God’s world so that people were not flourishing and enjoying being humans in God’s beautiful world.

God called Israel to be a light to the nations, but they failed.  Their failure made it obvious that there was a more profound problem with God’s world than just that people didn’t know they were supposed to obey God.  It wasn’t merely that the world needed a nation of priests (Israel) to get the word out that God wanted to forgive their sins and set them free to enjoy being humans in God’s world again.  The more profound problem is that God’s enemies—Sin and Death—were holding God’s world captive.

So God sent Jesus into the world, not merely to die for sins, but to do lots of other stuff, as well.  Think about all that Jesus did in his life on earth.  He went around healing people, because God wants humans to be free from the devastating effects of brokenness.  He loved people fully and truly, which meant that his heart was broken quite often.  But he did so because God seriously loves people.  Jesus also got angry at religious leaders who used their positions to exploit people rather than to bring God’s life-giving blessing to people.  Jesus also told people to call upon God and receive God’s forgiveness and restoration.  And he taught people how to live in that restoration so that they could truly flourish and be people through whom God could unleash his flourishing on the rest of creation.

And Jesus didn’t sin.  The one major temptation that Jesus had throughout his life was to accomplish God’s purposes through power—through force.  Sin and Death are ruining God’s world through tempting people to assert themselves over other people—to dominate, to rule, to exploit.  And the result is the further corruption of the world.  But Jesus said ‘no’ to that way of doing this.  And what happened?  It got him killed.  He refused to fix God’s broken and power-grabbing world through more intensified power-grabbing.  Rather, he gave himself up in weakness and was killed for it.  Death, apparently, had won.

Well, here we have some of the significances of the resurrection.  First, when God raised Jesus from the dead, he defeated Sin and Death.  Sin and Death took their hardest shot at Jesus they possibly could—they totally climbed all over Jesus and shoved him down into the grave.  They killed him and buried him.  Their ultimate weapon, however, was crushed by God when God raised Jesus from the dead.  So, the resurrection is God’s triumph, his victory.  Now, for all those who are followers of Jesus—even though we might be afraid to die—we know that on the other side of death is new life, resurrection life, which is a zillion times better than this life—it’s true life! 

Also, Sin and Death no longer have a stranglehold on this world.  They’re still seriously winning lots of battles, and when we look around we do see lots of tragedy.  But at the same time we see the evidence that God is doing something new, that he’s bringing healing to his world.  Where do we see that?  In the church.  As Jesus says in John 17, when the church is unified and when we love and serve another, this is the evidence that God actually did send Jesus into the world to fix it.  That makes our being truly the church pretty important, doesn’t it?

Second, when God raised Jesus from the dead, it was God’s way of saying “YES” to Jesus’ way of life.  Jesus healed and loved and blessed others and grieved over God’s broken world and never grabbed for power or asserted himself over others.  Of course, it got him killed.  But by raising him from the dead, God was saying, “this is exactly how I want humans to live.  This is the kind of life I want from people.” 

God vindicated Jesus by raising him from the dead.  That means he was showing Jesus to be in the right all along.  People would have looked at Jesus during his life and said, “what in the world kind of a way to live is that?  He’s a nobody and seriously weird.  He’ll never survive if he just keeps on forgiving and loving, and Israel will never be rid of her enemies if we just keep forgiving them and loving them and trying to do them good.” 

But all along, God was totally approving of how he was living.  All along, Jesus was living exactly how God wanted a person to live in his beautiful but broken world.  In a sense, the resurrection is proof—not to pagans, but to us—that living a servant way of life and a non-retaliatory way of life actually “works.”  It won’t make you always come out on top in this life, and it just might get you killed.  But it will guarantee that you’ll also be raised from the dead.  Jesus’ resurrection is God’s proof to God’s people that living the way God says to live actually is worth it.

Third, when God raised Jesus from the dead, he put Jesus on God’s very own throne, ruling over the universe.  God exalted Jesus to his heavenly throne.  And what is Jesus doing there?  Two main things.  First, Jesus is in process of subduing his enemies.  His resurrection was the fatal blow to Sin and Death, but he’s not done fully defeating them yet.  It’s kind of like D-Day near the end of WW II.  It was a fatal blow, but the Allies hadn’t fully defeated the enemy yet.  In the same way, God has begun to heal his world, but isn’t fully finished.  The second thing God is doing is what we see in our passages for this evening.

God is empowering people with his presence to do good.  God empowers Paul and Silas to heal the slave girl.  God empowers them to sing praises even while they’re suffering.  In the Samuel text, we see that God does good to his people even though they reject him and act foolishly.

Look at the Psalm—it’s a victory Psalm—what sort of things does God do to show his goodness?

And in John 17, we see how we’re supposed to respond.  Our proper response to God raising Jesus from the dead and seating him on his heavenly throne is to love one another and cultivate a community of unity.

So, when we think about the resurrection, the question isn’t so much “did it happen?”  But “what happened when it happened?”

And the answer is, lots of things.  God defeated his enemies, God began the process of fixing his world and freeing it from the ravages of sin and death, and God sent his presence—his life-giving Spirit—to dwell among his people, empowering them to do good.

But I think the class was a success and I’m satisfied with the course’s structure.  It was certainly an education for me!

We used James Thompson’s and David DeSilva’s excellent commentaries as course texts.  Their discussions complemented each other quite well and they proved to be reliable guides for graduate-level seminary students.  I also used a number of readings from The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology. 

Students wrote three major essays on Hebrews’ Christology, Hebrews’ conception of Judaism, and the theological challenges posed by the warnings passages.  On the latter topic, I asked students to engage the essays by Thomas Schreiner (SBJT 2 [1998]: 32-62.) and Scot McKnight (TrinJ 13NS [1992]: 21-59), in  addition to the presentations of Thompson and DeSilva.

When I teach it again, I may add a brief introduction, perhaps Barnabas Lindars’s, and I’ll look forward to working through Gareth Lee Cockerill’s new volume in the NICNT.

I’ve been struck recently by how much contemporary American evangelical leaders are unlike those of the past.  Evangelical leaders who emerged between 1945 and 1970, such as Carl Henry, Harold Ockenga, and Kenneth Kantzer were quite unique.  They were conversant with wider cultural trends and their leadership was “big-hearted.”  It would be easy to see things as far rosier than they were, but they sought to be catalysts for the development of evangelical culture and theology.  They expected and celebrated diversity, cheered on the work of others, and didn’t get hung up on the parochial issues over which evangelicals may disagree.

Evangelical leadership today seems to be consumed with drawing lines, picking petty fights, and discussing nothing other than the parochial issues over which evangelicals disagree.  They aren’t conversant with cultural trends, except to see them as signs that the sky is falling, and their leadership is “small-hearted.”  A spirit of competition has overtaken the generous and hopeful vision of a very different generation.

There’s doubtless much else and much more to be said about this.  But I just find it unfortunate.

For the most part, however, such postures maintain the destructive power dynamics between the rich and poor and perpetuate, rather than resolve, problems associated with generational poverty.  Christian practices involve so much else and so much more.

Check out my friend Siu Fung Wu’s wonderful article on Paul’s community vision in Romans 12 and how it might be embodied in an Australian context.

We typically focus on the source and purpose of the stress.  Did this come from God?  If so, why is he doing this?  What’s he trying to tell me?  Have I done something wrong and he’s punishing me?  Or, if he didn’t cause it directly, did he allow this trouble to overtake me?  For what reason did he do this?  What’s he trying to teach me?

These are the wrong questions, sending us on quests for answers we’ll never find and exposing faulty thinking about God and his relationship to the world.  I’ll have to leave those larger issues for another time, but for now I want to note the connection the writer of Hebrews makes between suffering and God’s “training” of his children (the Greek term he uses is paideia).

The Scriptures do indeed connect suffering with God’s training, as indicated by the quotation of Prov. 3:11-12 in Heb. 12:5-6.

But he proceeds to put the responsibility on his readers to endure their suffering so that it might become God’s training.

The writer does not say that God has brought suffering into their lives for the purpose of teaching them some specific lesson.

Rather, in v. 7, he exhorts them to endure, to persevere through their difficulties, so that their suffering might be transformed into God’s training of them.  They are to “endure hardship as training.”

They must take the initiative to persevere in faithfulness through their suffering and stress so that God’s grace might be activated among them and their endurance become the Father’s training.

Alternatively, they could respond to their hardships destructively. 

They could grow discouraged, lose heart, and give up on persevering in faithfulness.  In this case, their hardship would not be God’s training but would become the cause of their departure from the faith, their falling away.

The writer returns to the need for the readers to take initiative in v. 9b.  He notes that earthly fathers train their children for their good, so they ought to submit to God as their Father because the good results of that will be so much greater—it will bring about their participation in the coming world.

Again, in v. 11, he says: “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”

All of this is to say that throughout this passage on suffering and training (Heb. 12:5-11), the writer emphasizes their need to take the initiative and transform their hardship into God’s training.  They can do so by obeying his commands throughout the letter.

They’re being tempted to abandon the community of faith, but they must strengthen their commitment to it.  They’re being pressured to return to an old way of life, but they must press ahead in faithfulness to Jesus.

As they renew their efforts to follow Jesus in the midst of suffering, God will empower them and train them as children, preparing them for blessed participation in the eschatological order of rest (Heb. 4:1-11).

This is, after all, precisely Jesus’ experience.  He, too, received his exalted position in the coming world by persevering in faithfulness through suffering:

During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission, even though he was a Son.  He learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him and was designated by God to be high priest in the order of Melchizedek (Heb. 5:7-10).

So then, the readers of this letter have the opportunity to be assured of the Father’s love and tender affection for them.  But the responsibility lies with them.  They must take the initiative to persevere in faithfulness.

Their hardship can become either the Father’s training or a cause of stumbling.

Turning back to our day, this text ought to shape the sort of questions we ask when we encounter suffering and hardships.  We ought to ask, How can I respond to this hardship so that it is transformed into the Father’s training?  How can I persevere in such a way that it becomes something that God uses to clear the way for my full participation in the coming heavenly city?

O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Isaiah 45:11-13,18-19
Acts 11:19-30
John 15:9-17
Psalm 33:1-8,18-22

I have titled this homily “After Easter,” for those of you keeping records or taking notes.  I am usually careful to mention the title of my homily every time I give one—it satisfies something in me, I have no idea what.  But it may give you a bit of a clue as to the logic of the passages upon which the homily is based.  One further incidental benefit is that it also helps our church historian, the one tasked with chronicling for future generations, the great history of Midtown Christian Community.  As it happens, I think I titled my previous homily, “After Easter,” but I don’t care that this may confuse the Midtown historian.  I’m feeling downright ornery.

This is the sixth Saturday after Easter, according to the church calendar.  This serves to remind us that we live in the shadow of the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Easter is not a holiday that we celebrate and then forget about.  It is a reality that must continue to dominate our life together.  Easter must fill out our lives and our life together as a community.  Like water that runs into every nook and corner when it is spilled in places where it shouldn’t be, like the kitchen floor, or a coffee table in the living room, and becomes sometimes hard to clean up, Easter must find its way into all the corners of our lives and all our relationships and especially our common life that we share together here as Midtown Christian Community.  Easter is the thing.  Easter makes everything else possible.

And this is the meaning of Easter: The world was enslaved to sin and death—radically broken—but God has begun to fix it.

This world was meant to be a place of goodness and life.  Humans were meant to be happy, to be fulfilled, to enjoy good relationships.  We were made by God to share with one another, to hear great reports of good things about what was happening in the lives of other people.  We were made to have gardens, to plant seeds and then to watch with excitement as flowers and vegetables came up.  God meant for us to build things like tree-houses and bridges and machines that lift things or fix things or move things and then for us to be satisfied when houses or bridges or machines make things easier or better or when they make people happier.  And we were supposed to give each other gifts and rejoice with each other as we opened them and said truthfully, “man, this is what I really was hoping for!!”  And in all of this we were supposed to delight and say “thank you” to God because he is the one who set us free in this great world to enjoy it.  That’s how things are supposed to be.

But everything has gone horribly wrong.  Sin has entered the world along with its partner in crime, death, and Satan is the ruler of this age, not God.  This is very bad news, because now people are not happy, people are not satisfied, and people do not share their stuff with others.  People now build things to hurt other people.  We now build bridges so we can grab other people’s stuff or so that we can harm one another.  We now love to hear reports from other people about how bad things have happened to someone.  And when we do hear good reports about how something good has happened to a friend, it’s hard not to get envious and begin to complain that good things never happen to us.

This world was supposed to be a place where God was everywhere, where we ran into God in wonderfully unexpected places and we’d have the time to visit and sit down and talk about how amazing things were and how it’s so fun to be part of God’s world along with other people. 

But the world is not like that.  We do not run into God everywhere.  In fact, we keep having experiences that make us believe that there is no God, and we look around and think, “how on earth can things be like this and God doesn’t seem to care enough to actually fix it?”

And God should fix it because he promised he would.  He made all these promises in the Scriptures that he was going to make everything right, he was going to heal our hearts so that they don’t hurt so bad anymore, and he was going to make us new so that we didn’t hurt each other anymore, and he was going to make it so that every kid grows up in a home with people who love them, and God was going to fix the world so that people don’t die anymore and so that there are no disasters anymore where people see their precious stuff burned up or lost in piles of rubble.

This is where Easter comes in.  Easter is God’s way of saying to the world, “I remember.”  “I know I made those promises and I do intend to keep them.”  At Easter, God says, “I know how badly everyone wants the world to be made right, to actually be awesome and joyful and wonderful the way it’s supposed to be.  And I want that, too!  In fact, I want it so badly, I’m willing to take on myself all the horror, the brokenness, the sin, the injustice, the pain, the killing, the abuse, the name-calling, the insults, the beatings . . . , and I know it’ll kill me.  But I’m willing to do it because I want so badly to enjoy my world and my people, and I want so badly for people to love and enjoy one another and to rejoice in being alive in my wonderful world.  And this is the only way I can begin to fix things.”

So God sent Jesus into the world and Jesus died and God raised him from the dead as a way of saying to all of us, “I remember my promises and I fully intend to keep them.”

One further thing is significant about Easter.  When God raised Jesus from the dead, God actually began to fulfill those promises.  On Easter Sunday, God began to fix the world.

It started with Jesus—with God raising him from the dead.  Things aren’t supposed to work that way, right?  How does the world work?  What are the rules the world follows?  Things go from good to bad.  Things break down.  Life ends in death.  Clean things get dirty.  Beautiful church buildings get old and get to a state of being pretty scary.

In Jesus, God began to reverse that.  According to the Easter logic, the dead come to life.  The way of Easter spread to the church when Jesus went to heaven and sent his Spirit.  God’s Spirit is among us to bring Easter here, to make sure that God’s resurrection power is here among us.  The same power that God used to raise Jesus from the dead is here.

That is the meaning of Easter, and learning together as a community what that means for us is how we are supposed to live in the shadow of Easter.

God goes to outrageous lengths—he moves heaven and earth—in order to do good things to his people.  We all acknowledged this when we prayed a minute ago the collective prayer – “you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding.”  And we see this in the Isaiah passage, where before Cyrus was even born, God prophesied that he was going to raise up this great Persian King to shake up the ancient world, just to do good to his people, Israel.  In the same way, God sends Jesus to die and raises him from the dead in order to do us good, in order to bring salvation among us.

Okay, so God is among us with power and we are supposed to live in light of the resurrection, have a community oriented by Easter, but what does this mean?  How might it look?

We get a clue in the Acts passage.  Here we see some amazing things happening.  We see two churches behaving like humans are supposed to behave.  They’re doing what we said humans are supposed to be doing.  The Jerusalem church heard that a bunch of people became followers of Jesus in Antioch.  Now, you need to realize that the people in Jerusalem were not very friendly with people up in Antioch.  “Those folks up in Antioch are a different race from us, which means they’re probably bad.  And we’re pretty sure that since we don’t like them, God probably doesn’t either.”  That’s how the people in Jerusalem should act if the world were still completely broken.  But God had sent his Spirit to this church, so they start doing things that look very  . . .  well . . . “Easter-like.”

They sent Antioch a gift.  In fact, they sent Barnabas.  That’s like the Cleveland Cavaliers saying to the Boston Celtics, “hey, we know that you guys might need a little bit of help, so we’re sending you Lebron James.  We hope he’s as helpful to you as he’s been for us.”  Seriously!  Barnabas was one of the major leaders in the Jerusalem church—a very wealthy man who gave loads and loads of money to the church.  He was awesome to have around and was an encouragement to everyone.  There were probably a bunch of little kids who called him “Uncle Barnabas.”  But because Easter means that you don’t play by the same rules anymore—the rules that are destroying God’s wonderful world—if you have something great, you share it.  So they sent him to Antioch.  And the result was loads and loads of blessing—in fact it was in Antioch that the followers of Jesus were first called “Christians”—little Christs, people who live like Jesus.

But there’s more here.  The church in Antioch hears that there’s going to be a famine all over the world, so what do they do?  Well, if Jesus had not been raised from the dead, they probably would have thought, “let’s close the doors, not let anyone else in, put a freeze on our giving, and store up because hard times are coming.”  But Easter changes things—remember, the rules have changed because God raised Jesus from the dead.  They say, “hey, let’s send word around our area and take up a huge collection.  The Jerusalem church might need help—they don’t have Uncle Barnabas anymore, so let’s send them a gift.”  So that’s what they did.

Because God raised Jesus from the dead, you give gifts.  The church is the place where we’re supposed to see what the world looks like when God is at work fixing it—making things move not from good to bad, life to death, clean to dirty; but death to life, bad to good, dirty to clean.

According to the two passages from the Apostle John, the best way for us to make it look like Easter is real is to love each other.  We prayed in the collective prayer that God would pour into our hearts such love towards him, that we, loving God in all things and above all things, may obtain his promises, which exceed all that we can desire.

God’s promise is that we will one day enjoy true life in the world when God makes it new, when resurrection life spreads through every last particle of this world.  We’ll get to enjoy life the way it was supposed to be, with people laughing and rejoicing and giving each other gifts and building fun stuff and watching gardens grow and accidentally bumping into God all the time and talking with him about how amazing his world is and how much we love living in it.  That’s what God has promised us.  And the way we obtain those promises is by obeying God’s command to love one another—basically to start living that new world as a community, even though it isn’t fully here yet.  That world is on its way, but the church is the place where we’re supposed to see little outbreaks of it.  And those little outbreaks are acts of love.

Living in light of Easter means being a community that knows that God is present among us trying to find ways for death to lead to life, for bad to become good, for what is dirty to become clean.  Do you see that this makes it possible for us to love one another?

In conflict, one of the hardest things to do is to think the best of another person.  I have nothing against Don Humphreys, so I’ll use him as an example.  It’s easy to think this way: “I am so fed up with Don.  He’s always doing such and such.  He’s a pro!  Perfectly consistent!  Always screwing things up!  I say something to him and he always forgets!  And it’s not even worth mentioning it again, because I know exactly what he’s going to say.  He’ll say this and this and this and then fly off the handle and it’ll be a big mess, so it’s not even worth it!  He’s impossible, there’s no hope!”

What’s wrong here is that I’m playing by the rules that are destroying the world.  Life to death, good to bad, dirty to clean.  If I play by the Easter rules, everything changes.  I am now free to assume the best about Don, that God is working Easter in him, transforming him from death to life, bad to good, dirty to clean.  I can now think about Don like this: “Man, that was really hurtful what Don did to me.  But I know that God is at work powerfully to change him and I bet that if I mention this to him, he’ll totally want to be restored to me and make it right.  I know that in this situation, because Easter has changed everything, what is a hurtful situation can become one that is even better than it ever was.”

Well, there is so much more to be said about this, but I’ll close with this.  We’ve been a community for about 4 ½ years, and things are better than ever—praise the Lord.  We’re about to kick off a season of reflection on how things are going here at Midtown.  This is not easy for any of us, especially when there are many close relationships, some with lots of history.  But let’s draw upon God’s Easter power—let’s work along with God—to assume the best about each other, to really love each other.  Let’s confess with our lives our faith in the reality of Easter—that God has begun to fix the world, making things go from death to life, bad to good, dirty to clean.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

An essential component of this is prophetic truth-speaking.  This is often confused among many Christian people today who applaud the angry and hysterical political rhetoric that dominates public life in the West.

Prophetic truth-speaking is something far different.  It involves speaking plainly and faithfully about injustice, exploitation, misuse of power, and oppression of the weak and defenseless.  It has no time for public relations obfuscations, the smoke screens of political scheming, and the rhetorical justifications of imperial domination.

With reference to John’s Gospel, Wright puts it like this:

Jesus explains (18:36) that his kingdom is not the sort that grows in this world.  His kingdom is certainly for this world, but it isn’t from it.  It comes from somewhere else—in other words, from above, from heaven, from God.  It is God’s gift to his world, but, as John already pointed out in the prologue, the world isn’t ready for this gift.  The key is this: if Jesus’s kingdom were the regular sort, the kind that grows all too easily in the present world—the sort of kingdom, in fact, that James and John had wanted!—then Jesus’s followers would be taking up arms:

“If my kingdom were from this world, my supporters would have fought to stop me being handed over to the Judaeans.  So then, my kingdom is not the sort of that comes from here.” (18:36)

The difference between the kingdoms is striking.  Caesar’s kingdom (and all other kingdoms that originate in this world) make their way by fighting.  But Jesus’s kingdom—God’s kingdom enacted through Jesus—makes its way with quite a different weapon, one that Pilate refuses to acknowledge: telling the truth:

“So!  said Pilate, “You are a king, are you?”  “You’re the one who’s calling me a king,” replied Jesus.  “I was born for this; I’ve come into the world for this: to give evidence about the truth.  Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”  “Truth!” said Pilate.  “What’s that?” (18:37-38).

The point about truth, and about Jesus and his followers bearing witness to it, is that truth is what happens when humans use words to reflect God’s wise ordering of the world and so shine light into its dark corners, bringing judgment and mercy where it is badly needed.  Empires can’t cope with this.  They make their own “truth,” creating “facts on the ground” in the depressingly normal way of violence and injustice (pp. 144-145).

If this story of Jesus is the story of Israel reaching its climax, it is inescapably political and will raise questions the Western world has chosen not to raise, let alone face, throughout the period of so-called critical scholarship.  The post-Enlightenment world was born out of a movement that split church and state apart and has arranged even its would-be historical scholarship accordingly; and that same Enlightenment insisted that Judaism was the wrong kind of religion, far too gross, too material.  Rejection, from the start, of a “political” reading of the gospels and of a “Jewish” reading went together.  Fortunately, genuine history—the actual study of the actual sources—can sometimes strike back and insist that what a previous generation turned off this generation can at last turn back on.  It is time, and long past time, to reread the gospels as what we can only call political theology—not because they are not after all about God and spirituality and new birth and holiness and all the rest, but precisely because they are (p. 140).

I think he’s exactly right here, but I suspect that many will misunderstand this sort of statement.

We imagine that the political lay of the land in our various contexts is a given.  For the Gospels, however, that is completely not the case.  Jesus came to create a new polis (a new people) and an entirely different sort of politics.

And Wright correctly notes that the language of “holiness” is thoroughly appropriate to speak of God’s new political reality—the Kingdom of God.  It is a set of political behaviors characterized by power-surrender and not power-grabbing; forgiveness and not manipulation; love and not retaliation; kindness and not demonization; sharing with an open hand and not hoarding or selfishness.

The Gospels’ political dimension is certainly that aspect that has suffered the greatest neglect.  Again, I do wonder if that’s because it’s the one area most in need of radical transformation.

I’m thinking of revising a previously-taught course for the fall.  In addition to exercises in working through the text itself, I plan to use the following books as course texts:

• Bruce Longenecker, The Triumph of Abraham’s God: The Transformation of Identity in Galatians.
• Richard Hays, “Galatians,” in Vol. XI of The New Interpreter’s Bible.
• J. Louis Martyn, Galatians (The Anchor Yale Bible Commentaries).

I may go with only one of the above commentaries and add another recent work on Galatians, such as Susan Eastman’s, Recovering Paul’s Mother Tongue: Language and Theology in Galatians.

I’ll be employing a number of other readings, too, on interpretive issues related to apocalyptic, pistis Christou, and “works of Law.”

But I’m just wondering, have you taken or taught a course on Galatians and found any resources especially useful?

The designation interprets the divine name found in Exodus 3:14, which associates the name of the God of Israel with the verb “to be”—“I am who I am,” or “I will be who I will be.”

According to Richard Bauckham, John’s interpretation of this designation is not a reference to God’s mere existence in the future, but to his identity as being on his way to the world to save and to judge.  It is a reflection of his commitment to creation, to reclaim it and to judge the agents of its corruption.

This interpretation is confirmed by the use, in 11:17; 16:5, of the abbreviated form of the designation: ‘the One who is and who was’.  At these points in the vision the eschatological coming of God is taking place.  It is no longer future, and the hymns which use the designation praise God for the occurrence of this eschatological fulfilment of his purpose.  Especially clear is 11:17: ‘We give you thanks, Lord God Almighty, who are and who were, for you have taken your great power and begun to reign.’  The achievement of God’s eschatological rule over the world is his coming.  Necessarily the future element in the designation of God is replaced by the thanksgiving that this rule has begun.

Thus John interprets the divine name as indicating not God’s eternity in himself apart from the world, but his eternity in relation to the world.  This is the biblical God who chooses, as his own future, his coming to his creation, and whose creation will find its own future in him (pp. 29-30).

Revelation depicts a number of scenes in which God is highly exalted, ruling creation with supreme authority and transcendent sovereignty.

But, unlike so much theological reflection, God’s sovereignty is not abstracted from creation or his concern for his world.  God’s sovereignty is displayed–and his very identity consists–in his commitment to his world and his coming to it in order to redeem, renew, and rid it of all that corrupts.