His Mercy Is More w/ Jeremy Begbie W4

Anthony: Our final passage of the month is Romans 12:1-8. It is the Revised Common Lectionary passage for Proper 16 in Ordinary Time on August 27. Jeremy, read it for us, please.

Jeremy: So, brothers and sisters, because of God’s mercies, I encourage you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice that is holy and pleasing to God. This is your appropriate priestly service. ² Don’t be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you can figure out what God’s will is—what is good and pleasing and mature.³ Because of the grace that God gave me, I can say to each one of you: don’t think of yourself more highly than you ought to think. Instead, be reasonable since God has measured out a portion of faith to each one of you. ⁴ We have many parts in one body, but the parts don’t all have the same function. ⁵ In the same way, though there are many of us, we are one body in Christ, and individually we belong to each other. ⁶ We have different gifts that are consistent with God’s grace that has been given to us. If your gift is prophecy, you should prophesy in proportion to your faith. ⁷ If your gift is service, devote yourself to serving. If your gift is teaching, devote yourself to teaching. ⁸ If your gift is encouragement, devote yourself to encouraging. The one giving should do it with no strings attached. The leader should lead with passion. The one showing mercy should be cheerful.

Anthony: We’re in the season of Ordinary Time on the Christian calendar, and I see it as a season of response empowered by the Holy Spirit. And it’s in relationship to the new creation, we are inaugurated by Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension.

And if we take new creation seriously, what does it mean? And what does it look like to respond as a living sacrifice in few of God’s mercy?

Jeremy: Huge, indeed, cosmic question. New creation is what God is bringing about and what—and this is the crucial thing—that he has already brought about in Jesus Christ and supremely in the resurrection of the crucified Jesus.

A phrase I use more and more now is the “already-ness” of the Christian faith, or the “already-ness” of the new creation. When we think new creation, it may be—apart from that verse 2 Corinthians—that we jump to Revelation 21. We think of new heaven, new earth, the world being recreated, remade, redone.

But we need to—as far as the New Testament is concerned, it’s already happened in Christ. This is the “already-ness” of the new creation that’s been sealed, forged in the raising of Jesus from the dead. And it was Tom Torrance that helped me see this.

Actually, one of the very first Christian books I read was Tom Torrance’s Space, Time and Resurrection. (I recommend it to you.) There was so much I didn’t understand in terms of the detail, but the vast cosmic sweep of that book, just took my breath away. I remember Tom Wright telling me, N.T. Wright telling me that he was in tears by the time he got the end of that book; he was sobered by this.

Because it’s this extraordinary vision that Christ has already defeated the powers of darkness, the powers of evil, which ruin our lives, and ruined the created world as a whole. The end is assured. It’s happened in him. When God raised Jesus from the dead, he took, so to speak, a bit of creation and he remade it as a promise of the great remaking to come.

So, the “already-ness”—it’s already happened in Christ—is crucial. And I think although he’s not quite spelling that out, not at this point, we get plenty hints from Romans 8 and elsewhere in Paul (2 Corinthians). But it’s there, nonetheless.

Then of course, it’s not just already in the past in Christ, it’s  there in the future. The recreation, the great cosmic makeover as in Revelation 21 and in Romans 8 and elsewhere, God bringing all things together and God’s people in the center of the new world, honoring the lamb on the throne.

But then this addresses the last part of your question. What does that mean? Of course, new creation is accessible now through the Holy Spirit. In Paul’s worldview, it’s the Spirit who comes from the future and the Spirit of Jesus Christ who comes to turn our lives inside out, so that if anyone is in Christ (2 Corinthians 5 new creation), it’s the Spirit who makes all this possible.

What does it mean? Fundamentally, it means we can, of course, say Abba Father, we can call God, Father. It means that we now belong to a new community called the church. We have brothers and sisters for eternity. We are loved to the very depths of our being. And therefore, it means that everything in our lives will be magnetized by the love of God. Everything will point to God ultimately.

Okay. When I was talking about music, when I came to faith music became so much more interesting because now I could think about ways in which it could magnify God and stop being an idol, stop being something I worshiped.

Now related to that. A very interesting thing about Romans 12. And it was my colleague here in Cambridge, Michael Thompson, who pointed this out to me. Indeed, he wrote a whole dissertation on it called, Cloth in Christ. What he noticed was, if you go back to Romans 1 where Paul, among other things, is outlining—more than outlining, painting in very lurid terms, the effects of idolatry.

That is, we worship the creation rather than the creature. And he spells out this awful downward spiraling of idolatry. What’s really interesting is by the time we get to Romans 12, and this is after Paul has spelled out the whole kind of logic of salvation, election, all whatever, now he’s saying to the community, not just to individuals, saying, how are you going to live?

And my colleague Mike has shown in this book, that point by point in this section of Romans, Paul is answering Romans 1, that now you don’t have a worship of the creation rather than the creature. You have the worship of God. Present your bodies as living sacrifices as wholly and pleasing to God. This is your appropriate priestly—it can be translated there—worship.

Now everything you do can glorify God, so you don’t have to be trapped by this awful running down that idolatry brings, when you just worship creation, then you worship yourself and you just disappear down an idolatrous [inaudible] hole.

So, it’s a fascinating thing. What you have now, because of Christ in the Spirit, you can have the reversal of idolatry. Now God can be honored above all, and not the human self, not the human sinful self. So just a bit of background there. Reread that and you’ll see he’s talking about the mirror opposite of what he talked about in Romans 1.

Anthony: You mentioned N.T. Wright, and my wife and I have been journeying through his daily devotional called, On Earth as in Heaven. And you can see hints of Torrance in his thought process. But one of the things that comes emerging so beautifully out of that book is we too often think of what is to come. And we think of it in terms of escapism. We just can’t wait to get away from this place. But God has remade it in himself, and it is unfolding before our very eyes. And what I hear you saying is, how can we get in on that? How can we actively participate in that reality that is already true in Jesus Christ?

Jeremy: And I think that the arts are one very powerful way in which that can happen. The arts, at their greatest, are not just creative, but recreated. That is, the artist, musician, whoever, can take the very worst and remake it.

There’s a wonderful sculpture. It used to be in the British Museum, no longer there now, but it was called, The Tree of Life, which of course comes from Revelation 21. And it’s from Mozambique and it’s a large sculpture of a tree. But the whole thing has been made out of decommissioned weapons from the Civil War in Mozambique, so that the you’ve got AK-47s and pistols and every conceivable kind of armament. And out of those dreadful things comes the tree of life.

I think every church ought to have something like that in it. Something where the very worst has been taken to the very best, because that’s what God is about, ultimately. It’s what he’s already done with Jesus raising him from the dead. And now it can begin to happen in and through us. And the artist, at their best, I think can witness to that, can be making things in a way that shows that things can be remade, that nothing need be discarded. The ordinary, the banal, or not just evil people, but awkward people and the people we’d rather have around, God’s in the business of remaking them. That’s what it means to participate in the new creation.

Anthony: Yes. We look to the artists, the poets, the singers, the musicians, and it gets to something that I think C.S. Lewis and Tolkien understood, that you can get at a truth, a theological truth in a way through fiction or storytelling or artistry that you can’t, with just logic all the time.

It just gets to your soul without you knowing it happened.

Jeremy: Absolutely. Which is a beautiful thing, which is why of course so much of the Bible is in metaphor and parable and simile. We need the direct statements. Of course, we do. We also need this, the imaginative flourishes that you’ll find in Paul.

2 Corinthians is full of it, wonderful parallelism and rhetoric, and so that you’re capturing the imagination with the possibility of new creation.

Anthony: My personal opinion, Jeremy, is that we often have an anemic understanding of what it means to belong to each other. As Paul proclaims in verse 5.

I’m just curious, do you think the same way, and if so, how so? And how does our belonging to Christ inform our belonging to each other?

Jeremy: Here I get a bit uncomfortable because I think my love for others in the church is very weak a lot of the time. And I do what I think many of us do, that is we tend to like and love the people that we like.

And we then have a church where people choose each other. I think the great thing about the Christian church is that we don’t choose each other. And God puts us right—or ought to put, or we ought to let him, rather, put people next to us who we would never choose in a million years. And they come with a gift tag on which God writes the message, this person is for you and your sanctification.

So, it’s the idea that election means that God will choose the most unlikely people and he will bring you together in a way that only he can and that only the cross could achieve. I often say to myself and to others too, either the cross is God’s answer to the sin that divides us, or it isn’t.

And we’ve got better ways of holding ourselves together through common interest groups or common likes or class or dress or locality or whatever it is. Now church witnesses to a kind of togetherness that isn’t—if we really believe in the crucifixion and living in the Spirit—a kind of togetherness that isn’t actually possible anywhere else. And if there’s nothing in our churches which shows that, we have to ask, maybe there’s a kind of sickness here?

And the consumerist culture just pushes against that at every stage, unfortunately. You go to the church that’s going to cause you the least pain. It’s just, no, I’ll just go somewhere that will get me through the week and with people that I like.

That is just a very—as you say, anemic is a very good word for it—anemic understanding of belonging. God makes possible a kind of belonging that cannot be created anywhere else. Now, as I say that, it stings at me because I go to a very sort of associational, pretty monochrome, like church. And they’re wonderful people. And I’ve learned a great deal.

But I sometimes I wonder, my goodness, if someone walked in here, would they say, how on earth is this lot together? Would anyone say that? And I think that’s the challenge of the cross and the resurrection.

It was Les Newbigin who helped me see that more than anybody else. I think he saw that and was appalled by the consumerism that had taken over, particularly the British church.

Anthony: It’s like you said, the local church is made up of people that would probably not be friends otherwise. But as Ephesians 4 tells us, that’s a work of the Spirit who has provided the unity. And Paul asks us to work at it, to maintain it, to live into that reality that we do belong to each other. We’re unified each other through Christ, even if you wouldn’t have naturally chosen them to be your friends.

Jeremy: [inaudible] work out your salvation with fear and trembling, that’s not addressed to the individual to pursue their salvation. He’s writing to the community there.

He’s saying, you’ve got to work at being together, folks, because you’ve lost what it means to be servants to each other. Hence the great servant hymn of Philippians 2. So that’s tough stuff he’s saying. It’s not going to be easy, but as long as you keep your eyes on Jesus and the cross, it’s the only way you can really go.

Anthony: Yeah. It reminds me of what Karl Barth wrote, and I paraphrase, but Jesus is the Lord of all, and he’s the servant of all, and in him, we do likewise, don’t we?

Jeremy, I thank you so much for being a part of this podcast. It was rich and it’s beautiful, and I know the listening audience will benefit greatly from it.

I want to take a moment to thank our podcast producer, Reuel Enerio, who’s been crushing it, doing a great job, as well as our transcriber, Elizabeth Mullins, who is just doing a smashing, smashing job. We couldn’t have this podcast without them.

Jeremy, it’s our tradition here at Gospel Reverb to invite our guests to close in prayer. So, would you please pray for us?

Jeremy: I’d be delighted.

Thank you very much, heavenly Father, for this time together. We give you thanks for the extraordinary calling that you have given us, whoever we are, whatever we are. For the way in which you have adopted us, unworthy as we are, not because we are better than anybody else, but because your Spirit, you’ve opened your heart to us, and opened our hearts to you.

Thank you for that miracle, for the miracle of grace. Challenge us to see the cost of unity within the church and what you have made possible. We thank you for Paul’s dogged determination with the Jews and the Gentiles in churches, quarreling full of pride, full of division, and yet he keeps returning to the cross, to the death, and to the resurrection of Jesus.

We ask all these things in his glorious name. Amen.

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