Transcript
The particular theme for this morning is the mediation of reconciliation in which I wish to lay stress upon the relation of the incarnation not only to Israel but to fallen humanity. Yesterday we considered the mediation of Christ in the light of God's self-revelation to mankind in and through his historical dialogue with Israel. It was, we noted, the divine purpose to adapt Israel in its whole mission and life, in its mind and understanding and in the
Scriptures, its worship and thought, to adapt Israel as the medium of God's revelation to all peoples. But that adaptation involved tension and conflict between God and Israel. And also its existence, that Israel suffered from God as the bearer of divine revelation, suffering from the purity and the fire of divine truth as it consumed the preconceptions that we human beings bring with us in understanding or in listening to God. Yesterday, however, I noted that we cannot think
of the mediation of divine revelation apart from the mediation of reconciliation, for revelation and reconciliation belong together. The reciprocity which God establishes in revealing himself and making himself known involves a reciprocity between God and human being so that the very existence of Israel, its very being, came under the impact of God's self-communication. Now here we have, if you like, a basic epistemological principle that we must bear in mind, that genuine knowledge involves cognitive union and
overcoming of estrangement or alienation. And that applies, I suppose, to all spheres of our knowledge and not simply to our knowledge of God. I have sometimes argued that you can be a good scientist or a good mathematician without being a morally upright person. We know all of us, I suppose, of certain scientists or mathematicians who have not been morally good. In fact, some of them have been quite immoral and irresponsible people. Let's say I've argued that
an immoral person can be a good mathematician, but you cannot be a theologian without being a good person. One day when I made a statement something like that I found an eminent European mathematician, the late Professor Gungset, objecting to me and he insisted that to be a good mathematician where you are dedicated to integrity and rigor, your whole character is affected. In fact, he argued that mathematics brings with it a sanctity of mind and certainly that
was true in his case and in the case of many others that we could refer to, Pascal or scientists like Einstein. Nevertheless, it is relatively true that in mathematics where you are concerned with impersonal or abstract truth, your personal being is relatively unaffected. Now that is not possible in our relations with one another when you know other human beings. You cannot engage in that kind of knowledge without being affected by it. In fact, you are able
to know another only insofar as you enter into such a reciprocal relation with the other that you are affected by the other and it is certainly not possible in our relation with God. If it is an ultimate scientific principle that you can only know something in accordance with nature, you know it only as you allow its nature to dictate to you the mode in which you must know it and therefore determine for you the way in
which you must behave toward it, then it is certainly true that in knowing God in accordance with his nature as he discloses himself to you, you need to be adapted to the nature of God. Knowing God and being reconciled to him, knowing God and being called to holiness belong together. It is a pure in heart that see God. This is something of course that whole areas of Christian theology have emphasized. We think of the ascetical theology
in the patristic period where they were concerned with the fact that if you really are to know God, your whole life must be lived in disciplined obedience in relation to him, to know and to be holy, to know God and to worship him and to commit yourself to him in utter dedication and consecration they go together. So here then we have this principle that genuine knowledge involves cognitive union with God and genuine knowledge of God which
is in accordance with his nature as holy love cannot but involve radical transformation of our being and reconciliation to God in our estrangement. Now that is precisely what we find in God's relations with Israel where revelation and reconciliation went hand in hand together. God's relation with Israel affected its fundamental existence and as I indicated yesterday that is why in a quite distinctive and idiosyncratic way Israel has become a peculiar people in several nuances of the word
peculiar because Israel has been so intimately bound up with God and God's self-revelation, God's suffering, God's mediation of reconciliation that the whole existence and nature of this people has been affected. Knowledge of God and holiness then are locked together and in an intense interrelationship and that's how we are to regard the covenant partnership between God and Israel. I am holy, be ye holy. The self-revelation of God to Israel then involves not only a conflict
between the word of God, the truth of God and the understanding of Israel but a movement of closer and closer and more intimate relation until Israel and God are brought together and estrangement, alienation is overcome. Now there are several points in this that I wish to draw your attention to and the first is a very significant one that the covenant between God and Israel was not a covenant between God and a holy people but precisely the
reverse. It was a covenant between God and Israel in its sinful and rebellious existence. No matter therefore how rebellious or sinful Israel was, it could not escape from the covenant love and grace of God. That's the theme for example of Hosea. No matter how much Israel adulterates its relation with God, God will not divorce Israel but the bonds of God's covenant love hold Israel together in relationship to God. Although in bonds like that there are intense
moments when Israel would do anything to break loose from God and the suffering and the radical transformation that relation with this holy God involved. No, the covenant is not made with a holy people. It's an unconditional if you like a unilateral covenant which God out of his pure grace makes with Israel and he lassoes Israel by the bonds of his love and draws those bonds more and more tightly together as the historical dialogue between God and
Israel advanced through history. Secondly note that the covenant partnership between God and Israel had the effect of intensifying the conflict between God and Israel. So long as the covenant was a loose one, so long as God remains at a distance from us, the conflict between God and man is not great but the closer God comes to us the more we find our own self-will asserting itself. The more we want to become independent of God and
that's what happened in Israel. When God took this race and brought it into peculiarly close relation with him and drew the cords of the covenant tighter and tighter lo and behold it intensified the conflict between man and his self-will and God and so the more God gave himself to this people the more he forced this people to be what it was what we all are in our sin and self-will rebels against God. The very
self-giving of God to Israel in covenant love not only revealed Israel's sin but intensified it intensified the enmity between Israel and God. Then it follows from that the third point note here is that in God's purpose the intensification of Israel's conflict the intensification of Israel's sin was designed so that God might reconcile himself to man with man at his very worst at his most rebellious so that the reconciliation between God and man does not depend
on our worth but God makes our very sin our very rebellion the bomb by which he binds himself and us together. Now in that light look at the incarnation because in the incarnation you have God not at a distance Israel not at a relation of removed from God. God and Israel now come together and indeed as we shall see in a following lecture they come together in the constitution of the mediator himself in Jesus Christ the
creative word and man are one in Jesus the Jew God and man are brought together so that the intense conflict between God and man and God and Israel now reaches its supreme culmination in Jesus and right from the start we find that indicated by Jesus mother to whose heart a sword was pierced and when it was prophesied that Jesus was set for the contradiction between God and man and so with the coming of the incarnation the
resistance of Israel to God reached its most intense form the intensity of the conflict was the obverse of the intense fulfillment of reconciliation and the two advanced to their climax in the crucifixion of the messiah Now when we look at the crucifixion of Jesus historically we see that Jesus was crucified because he refused point blank to have anything to do with being a political or a national messiah and so we see in the tension between the
Jews and Jesus a rehearsal and an intensification of the inner conflict we noted yesterday between Israel in its calling to be a people a church and Israel in its calling to be a nation the conflict between the laic and the ethnic aspects of Israel came to its peak in the relation between Jesus and another nationalistic Israel and they wanted to put upon him the role of a political messiah and Jesus refused that in fact the term
messiah had become so identified in the minds of the people precisely with a political role that Jesus wouldn't even take it on his lips except at certain crucial moments and in particular contexts no his mission was a very different one he had come now God incarnate in order to penetrate into the depths of Israel's existence into the ontological depths where man and Israel representing man had become from God and to bind God and man together in
the ontological depths of human being and therefore he came to penetrate into the innermost existence of Israel gathering up its history recapitulating all its relation with God its historical dialogue with God in order to deal with the basic enmity at the heart of mankind and to deal with it at the very point where it had been provoked to be so sharp and intense at its extreme point and there to deal decisively with it in atonement and
so his calling conflicted sharply with the role that contemporary Judaism wished to push upon him that is to say let's be quite frank about it Jesus was crucified by the political theology of his day and Jesus continues to be crucified when we politicize his role because that is not the way he came by the power structures of this world to reconcile man to God but to the weakness of the cross to incarnational penetration into the depth
of our guilty being to lay hold upon us from low where we are at enmity to God the source of all violence to conquer and destroy it by atoning sacrifice now let us look at this in a somewhat different way Israel and God are bound together in bonds of covenant love from which Israel cannot break free and Israel is bound in covenant partnership with God to me to be the vis-a-vis not only of divine
revelation but to be the vis-a-vis of reconciliation so Israel is called to exercise a vicarious role and function in the mediating of God's covenant purpose of reconciliation and redemption for all mankind now when we look at that in the light of revelation and we think again of the struggles of the word of God with Israel how the word of God calls forth from Israel obedience and yet provokes disobedience and the word of God lays
hold of Israel even in its disobedience in order to use that disobedience as the instrument for deeper and deeper penetration into the very structure of mind and culture and religion so it is with revelation Israel is called here to be the covalented vis-a-vis of God in his movement of reconciling man to God but that involves a movement in which the love of God cuts against the grain of our estrangement in that situation Israel elected
to be the covenant partner of God mediating reconciliation to all mankind was caught up in a movement in which reconciliation could only be worked out in the heart of conflict with our human estrangement in such a way that our sinful estrangement from God becomes the very bond whereby God worked out his reconciling purpose for mankind now that's a difficult thought but look at it in another light for a moment a light with which we are familiar
in the Christian sacrament take the astonishing story of James and John going up to Jesus as he ascended toward Jerusalem before his crucifixion and they asked that they might sit one at one side and the other at the other side of his kingdom and the other disciples are appalled at the at the selfishness of these two who want the first seats the prime places in the kingdom but the gospel does not tell us Jesus rebuked them
he said on the contrary to James and John are you able to drink the cup that I drink and to be baptized with the baptism with which I am and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with and a few hours later he took the disciples and he sat down with them at the Passover and he inaugurated the new covenant with them in which their bond with the Messiah was was tightly drawn and it
was a bond in terms of forgiveness the new covenant for the forgiveness of sins several days later they found themselves standing in the crowd of those who mocked and betrayed Jesus and there he was alone upon the cross and they were utterly estranged from him now because they had betrayed the very love with which he had bound them to himself then they remembered the sacrament Jesus had intended them to remember in the sacrament he had taken
their very sins the very betrayal of him and use that as the bond by which to bind them to him the sacrament is not for the holy but for the sinner and then they understood the passion of Christ not as one for the holy but for the sinner and therefore it was their sin their rebellion their betrayal their shame their unworthiness which became in the act of God the very thing he laid hold of and turned
into the bomb that bound them to the Messiah to the salvation and the love of God forever now that is surely how we must see the relation of Jesus to Israel Now Israel was elected to be God's covenant partner as I've said in mediating reconciliation to all mankind but in doing so and here we must speak with forgiveness in our hands upon our mouth in doing so Israel was elected also to reject the Messiah its covenant
partnership with God meant not only that the conflict between God and Israel was intensified but carried to the supreme point where Israel could do no other but refuse the Messiah and it was intended so that God would deal with our sin at its point of ultimate refusal do you remember the words of the metaphysical poet about the cross of Jesus it bore all other sins but is it fit that it should bear the sin of scorning
it precisely that is precisely what the is about it bore all sins above all the very sin of scorning it it Jesus bore all the sin of Israel and above all the sin of crucifying him and it was in bearing that sin that reconciliation was then driven into the ontological depth of Israel and Israel was forever bound up with God that is Israel's salvation so the cross becomes the great sacrament by which Israel and God are
bound together in the new covenant now it's important for us Gentiles to regard the Jew in his unique role you see if the Jew in his covenant relation with God to put it in isianic terms the servant of the Lord was blinded who is blind but my servant if the Jew was blinded in the covenant relation with God and blinded to the Messiah he was blinded for your sake and my sake if the Jew caught up
in this covenant bond could not but reject the Messiah he was doing that in your place and my place so that God's salvation could be worked out and stayed in the ground of our being forever so the Jew has that vicarious ontological role and we can only regard the Jew in that life so however you may look at the Jew you've got to say he is what he is for my sake he you can only look
upon him then in the light of Jesus the Jew the carnage son of God who died for all men and our understanding of the Jew and our understanding of Jesus are inextricably woven together in the mediation of atoning reconciliation now how are we to understand this look at in light of one of the most haunting elements in the ancient liturgy the liturgy for Yom Kippur the day of atonement which you find in Ezekiel 16 do you
remember on the day of atonement the command was they should take two goats and one goat should be taken and altered in sacrifice for the sins of the people the high priest was to lays hands upon the head of that sacrifice and as it bore the sacrifices of people it was to be offered as a slaughtered goat and sacrifice and the other goat had also to have the hands of the high priest laid upon it and
the sins of the people laid upon it then it was driven out into the wilderness a so-called scapegoat now the interesting thing about that ritual that has haunted the soul of Israel through the generations is that it takes both kinds of sacrifice for us to understand what God was about because the liturgy of the of the tabernacle or the temple had no meaning in itself it mediated it spoke about God himself bearing the sin of
the world and that's how we're to understand Jesus Jesus comes not simply as the lamb of God bearing away the sin of the world through sacrifice of his death he comes as the lamb of God bearing away the sin of the world as the despised and rejected of men therefore you remember immediately after his baptism where he is consecrated as the lamb of God to bear away the sin of the world he's driven into the wilderness
like the scapegoat and to this day Jesus is the despised and rejected of men now I believe that it's in that duality of sacrifice symbolized by the ancient ritual that we have to try and understand what happened at the crucifixion of Christ the Christian church went out from the cross as the church of the lamb that slain on the resurrection side of the cross the Jewish church went out from the cross as the church of the
scapegoat on the shadow side of the cross it's very difficult not to hold that with the crucifixion of the messiah the destruction of Jerusalem had to follow and the dismemberment of the state of Israel had to follow the Bar Kokhba revolt but what we see going on here is that while atonement can only be understood in the dual aspect of the sacrifice of the lamb and the one who continues to bear our disgrace Jesus and Jesus
identified with the Jew a schism broke out between church and Israel and so after the Bar Kokhba revolt we find that the church is divided into Christian church which arrogates to itself the name church and the Jewish church which is designated the synagogue and it is owing to that schism the deepest schism in the in the whole history of God's people since Christ that both Judaism and Christianity have been distorted yesterday we talked about the damaged
understanding of Jesus Christ that we have in the Christian world when we do not look at Jesus in the light of God's self-revelation to Israel now today we must also think of the fact that the schism between church and Israel has damaged our understanding of the atonement think of the whole history of theology and of the problematic nature of the atonement theories after theory is thrown up and each one is inadequate usually each one has
some fundamental truth in it but we are unable to bring them together in such a way that we can grasp or understand the the wholeness of the atoning sacrifice in Christ now I believe that the history of Israel after the crucifixion of Christ and above all the history of Israel in modern times has an immense amount to teach us and in our day where Israel has suffered in the most incredible way through holocaust our eyes are
open to understand Israel in a new way not only Israel as the scapegoat throughout all the the ghettos and of the world and the diaspora bearing the reproach of the messiah but Israel now drawn into the very heart and center of calvary as never before because here we see in the modern history of Israel something that seems to gather up all Israel's history in incredible suffering and agony and the vicarious role of Israel in holocaust for
mankind strikes back at us in a way that it has not done before now I believe that here we have lessons to learn jews and christians have lessons to learn and perhaps the fundamental point that christians have to learn is that the incarnation means that god has come to redeem us and save us in the heart of our fallen humanity where our humanity is at its very worst at its wickedest where it is most violent and
abominable it is in the heart of that that god has come and there that he makes atoning sacrifice now that means that the incarnation has to be understood as the coming of the son of god to take upon himself our fallen humanity our humanity that is laden with guilt and sin our diseased humanity diseased in mind and in soul and in culture and existence now this is a doctrine you find everywhere in the early church from
Irenaeus in the west to origin in the east but above all you find it in the great theologians of the fourth and the fifth century and then with leo's tome particularly 415 it begins to retreat in the west and we find that practically all western christianity the roman catholic church and protestant evangelical Christianity particularly rejects the idea that the son of god took upon himself our alienated fallen sinful humanity the flesh of sin the saint paul
calls it now if that is the case then atonement means that it is worked out in terms of the external relations between jesus christ and sinners atonement therefore can only be construed in external judicial relations whereas in point of fact as the new testament and the early fathers taught us atonement is worked out in the ontological depths of our human being into which jesus penetrated in as a jew look at the genealogies of the gospel and
see the line of sinners into which jesus was incorporated he bears all that and gathers all that upon himself he came therefore as one who took our our sinful nature upon him and in taking it from the virgin maria a sinner who required to be given and redeemed in taking it he sanctified and healed it so this atonement begins with the birth of jesus it begins as he takes our humanity under the judgment of god and
as he takes he heals and forgives and he carries this reconciling healing activity throughout his whole life up to the cross and the resurrection which we shall consider later but i believe that today the deeper understanding we seem to be getting of the relation of jesus to the jews and to the jew in holocaust where the jew suffers in the most abominable way from the piled up hatred and anti-semitism of christian europe that there we
have no other answer no other way of understanding the gospel except that god has taken here all this abomination on himself in his bond with the jew so how do the jews understand this now there's no doubt here that they are dumbfounded bewildered stunned the more they reflect upon it have ever of you been in in the yad vashem the holocaust museum in israel i find it a absolutely stunning experience to go there and have placarded
before my very eyes in documents and pictures the indescribable suffering of these people one day i was in a kibbutz in galilee in 1976 and i found one american couple there a jewish christian couple and all the rest were utter atheists and i asked them why are they unbelievers and they said these people came out of the concentration camps and they're the children of those that came out and they say god abandoned our fathers in the
concentration camps and we have abandoned god and he didn't know what to do and i said to him there's one message that you must give them and that's the message of eloi eloi lama sabachthani my god my god why has thou forsaken me it is the fact that god in jesus christ penetrated into that utter dereliction which alone can bring healing to those who find themselves abandoned by god in the fires of the concentration camps can
the jews take that didn't me close by telling you of two incidents that happened to me in 1976 the minst i went there as moderator of the church of scotland and so the ministry of religion took me around in special ways and several of them came with me and took me around and explained to me the holocaust museum and i said i was so utterly stunned by it i didn't know what to say and when we
came out they turned to me and they said what do you think of that and i said to them well how do you jews relate the god of the six-day war the god whom you thought of as the lord of hosts in the midst of us how do you relate that god to the god of the concentration camp i said unless you can relate god the living god to that terrible violence of the concentration camps
you have no god because that is not a god that is relevant to yad vashem and they said what do you say and my eye had caught a monument outside the yad vashem a rough hewn rock and on it in bronze letters words in hebrew from the 16th chapter of ezekiel words that are recited at every event circumcision and i looked upon thee in thy bloods and i said live i said you put that there and
that means that you're interpreting the holocaust in terms of the covenant cut into the generations of israel by the hand of god and the blood shed in the holocaust is the blood of covenant that means that you are bound up with god in a covenant relation in such a way that you must bring god into the heart of that and see that god is afflicted with all your affliction and god has taken your holocaust upon himself
that is your function in history and here you have surely a vicarious role for all mankind in teaching us about god then i said to them but speaking as a christian i must say that the only answer to your predicament is the cross of jesus because the cross of jesus tells us that god has not held himself aloof from our wicked abominable humanity with all its violence and crime and sin and terror but god has come
into midst of its unappeasable hurt and agony and taken it upon himself in order to redeem us and save us at the very point we are at our worst and to make our sins a very bomb by which we are forever bonded to him and are reconciled to god as i said that i had no words from them but they nodded their head silently and i realized that they were not far from the kingdom of jesus
christ but two days later teddy collic gave my wife and me one whom he said was the best and most informed guide that he had to take us around the old city of jerusalem and he showed us the excavations where the jews have uncovered the holy sites and protected them and opened them up in a way that they have never been opened up before and we were overwhelmed that the work that had been done and this
guide out of intention took us at last at the end of the day to the church the holy sepulchre and he took us at the end of our trip to the holy sepulchre to calvary the spot where as far as we can determine by archaeology and history was the spot of very near the spot where jesus was crucified and the pilgrims knelt there in silence and my wife and elk down in silence and our guide jewish
guide stood back a little and waited and as i we came away he pulled me aside and he said i can never understand why christians are divided at this place i was appalled never before have i realized the blasphemy against the blood of christ that we perpetuate by our divisions in the christian church how can we speak reconciliation to the jews when we christians are divided from one another and the division is horrible whether they're greeks
or latins or cops or ethiopians they quarrel with one another so much that as a muslim who has to hold the key to the church of the holy sepulchre and that is a symptom of the terrible wound in the church of jesus christ but i came away from that realizing this that jews and christians have to come together in the messiah if the world is to be reconciled and we christians have to be reconciled with one
another if we are to hold out to our jewish brethren christ jesus as the mediator reconciliation with god and we require the jews to help us to understand the depth the ontological depth that's a tony mediation which is so profound that even holocaust has taken into it and it is only and surely this is what saint paul has taught us only as jews and christians are brought together in christ jesus that we can have the fullness
of reconciliation in such a way that it is mediated to all mankind only when the deepest schism of all between christians and jews is healed in the body of the one people of of god of christ will it be possible for the gospel to cover the earth as the waters cover the sea the jew plays an essential role to this day in god's mediation of salvation of reconciliation for mankind and we christians cannot fulfill our witness
or mission except insofar as we are incorporate with them in the one mission of god's love for all his creatures let us pray holy father we confess the enormity of our sin the terrible wound we have inflicted in the body of thy son the continuous re-crucifixion of jesus through our divisions and our rejection of reconciliation in his body and blood grant us we pray so to be laid hold of again by the atoning sacrifice of
christ that our eyes may be opened and to the servant of the lord the jew from israel the incarnate son of god the one mediator between god and man the man christ jesus in whose name alone we may worship and love thee and love one another and to whom with thee the father and the holy spirit be our worship and thanksgiving this day. amen.