Biblical Inerrancy
Some time in the late 1960s I attended a meeting in Edinburgh. Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had appointed me to a Committee studying the possibilities of some kind of concordat between the C of E, English Presbyterians, The Scottish Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland: a somewhat daunting array from the point of view of possible ecumenical togetherness. We had had several earlier meetings in London, and I particularly recall Eric Mascall’s immovability on (surprise?) the issue of Episcopacy.
For the Edinburgh meeting, I traveled overnight to Edinburgh, joining the King’s Cross to Edinburgh night express at Newark. I shared a sleeping compartment with Dr. Jim Packer, and we had a pleasant dinner together interspersed with our recent teaching experiences and G.O. E. (the General Ordination Examination) horror stories, but ever since that evening, I have pondered over the phenomenon of highly intelligent people who hold to a rigid view of the inerrancy of scripture. James Barr, Dennis Nineham, John Barton and many others have written excellent books directly about or relevant to the issue of Fundamentalism, and Owen Chadwick’s Victorian Church tells much about the ferment of the mid 19th century, but still the question continues to nag rather like the rough edge of a tooth.
Recently, I have read two things that struck me as relevant to the issue, though they have hardly answered the question or removed my bemusement.
The Miasma Theory of Contagious Disease
The first is a fascinating book about one of the more terrible Cholera epidemics that struck London in the mid-nineteenth century: The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson (Riverhead Books, 2006). From the beginning of the century, cholera outbreaks had been endemic, but, says Johnson, “most…were located south of the Thames” (p. 22). That was abruptly to change in August 1854 in the area of Soho, bounded roughly by Regency Street, Great Marlborough Street and Wardour Street. By mid century the area of Soho where the epidemic hit “was the most densely populated of all 135 subdistricts (of Great London) with 432 people to the acre… The parish of St. Luke’s in Soho had thirty houses per acre. In Kensington, by contrast, the number per acre was two.” (Johnson, p. 19).
As back ground to the disastrous outbreak in 1854, Johnson points to the highly paradoxical part played by the invention of the W(ater)C(closet): invented and improved by 1830, water closets were, says Johnson, an immense breakthrough in the quality of life, “but they had a disastrous effect on the city’s sewage problem. Without a functioning sewer system to connect to, most WC’s simply flushed their contents into existing cesspools, greatly increasing their tendency to overflow”. (p. 12). Most experts now agree that this outbreak of cholera began with the sickening of a five-month old baby girl, the second child of Thomas and Sarah Lewis. What her name was and where she contracted the disease remain mysteries, but what followed certainly does not.
Dr. Snow and Commissioner Chadwick
The main actor in proposing the cause of cholera was Dr. John Snow, who had done very well as one of the earliest anesthetists. Soon after the arrival of cholera in the UK (1830) he became interested in the reports in medical journals, and, on analysis, came to the conclusion that the predominant “miasma” theory was hopelessly wrong: that theory held that the ‘agent(s)’ – no clear microbe theory yet – lingered in the air around unsanitary places, particularly slums. Johnson writes, “By the late 1840s the miasma theory had established…a prestigious following: the sanitation commissioner, Edwin Chadwick; the city’s main demographer, William Farr; along with many other public officials and members of Parliament”. (p. 69).
It is fascinating to follow Jobson as he moves day by day with John Snow the Doctor, William Farr, the Demographer and Henry Whitehead, the Curate of St. Luke’s Church, through the area, revealing the emerging solution, rather like a fascinating “whodunit”. Central to the story, however, was Commissioner Edwin Chadwick, whom Johnson describes as “the most influential miasmatist of the age”, with “plenty of illustrious company”. (p.121).
The Pump Water
There was ample, indeed, compelling evidence that it was not the smells of London (and they must have been frightful, causing blankets soaked in chloride of lime to be draped over the windows of the House of Commons) that were killing people. “All of John Snow’s detailed, rigorous analysis of the water companies and the transmission routes of the Horsleydown outbreak [of cholera in 1848 triggered by an infected seaman from the steamer Elbe] couldn’t compete with a single whiff of the air in Bermondsey”. (p.131). So even when the trail led inexorably to a main water outlet, the Pump on Broad Street that had been contaminated by fecal matter from the Lewis’s cesspool leaking into the water supply, the authorities resisted its closing down. Chadwick fought for the miasma theory to the end.
John Hick on the Incarnation & Pluralism
The second short paragraph I came upon is at the very end of John Hick’s The Metaphor of God Incarnate, (2nd Edition, 2005). Hick critically explores the possible ways in which sense can be made of the Chalcedonian Definition. He comes to the conclusion that the most the Definition can be said to achieve is simply to assert that Jesus was fully human and at the same time divine “without attempting to explain how this might be so”. (p. 60). All the attempts to explain the “how”, end up, Hick suggests either as unintelligible, or, by the Chalcedonian standard, heterodox. As the title of the book suggests this is because what is essentially metaphorical language has been read as though it were some sort of scientific formula. Central to Hick’s approach is the challenge to Christian exclusivism, the devaluing or even demonizing of all other religious traditions that is so characteristic of very conservative Christianity. In answering the question whether a new, radical approach to this particular dogma is possible, Hick points to the fact that much main-stream Christianity has come to terms with the scientific knowledge given to us since the beginning of the nineteenth century. He writes: “I anticipate that a process analogous to the slow and painful acceptance of evolution will take place in the acceptance that Christianity is one among a plurality of authentic human responses to the divine reality. There will be powerful resistance…leaving - as in the case of the controversies over science and the scriptures – a continuing and probably powerful fundamentalist wing”. (p.184).
What Price Evidence?
In closing, a fairly long passage from Hick’s book and a final thought:
Many people in this bewilderingly complex world [do] seek simple straightforward beliefs concerning… the long-term meaning of their lives. And fundamentalist forms of belief can provide this. Indeed they can appeal not only to the relatively uneducated but also to people who are highly educated in fields other than the study of religion. In this connection, the sociologist Peter Berger says that ‘there is some warrant for asserting that the propensity to believe evident nonsense increases rather than decreases with higher education’ (Berger, A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity, New York, 1992, 126)! Conceptions, however implausible, accepted without criticism within a supportive community can have immense power”. (p. 187).
In spite of the immense power of ideology that enables people to ignore mounting evidence (global warming, perhaps), in spite of the now fashionable trend to point to the epistemological and other problems with the accepted canons of scientific enquiry, and in spite of vast vested interests that militate against accepting new truths, Magna est veritas et praevalebit, the truth is great and shall prevail: perhaps, even, in the face of evident nonsense.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Monday, April 09, 2007
A Sermon for Easter Day
Note: I had no intention of posting this sermon, preached at the 9.00 a.m. service at All Saints’ Rehoboth yesterday, partly because so much blog material has already appeared around the Easter theme, and partly because I feel there is a great danger in presuming that people want to hear just anything I produce. I relented, however, because several parishoners presed me to publish it: so here it is.
The O.T. as part of Christian Bible
The Christian sacred writings from a very early date incorporated the Hebrew Scriptures. For the first generations of Christians, the writings of what we call the O.T. were their Bible: there was as yet no “N.T.”. By the time of the second century C.E., however, the presence of holy books of Judaism began to pose serious problems for the earliest Theologians, and, many would maintain, continue to do so. Yet, the decision to include the Jewish books was crucial, providing a context for the astonishing message of Judaism’s offshoot, the infant Christian movement.
The O.T. in the N.T.
So it is that our Christian Bible opens with a statement that God created the heavens and the earth, and goes on “the earth was formless and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep”. The Evangelists, steeped as they were, in the traditions of the OT, doubtless had this verse in mind when they produced the early accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus and wrote, “When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land” (Mk. 15.33). Similarly, when Luke begins his account of the Resurrection of Jesus with the words, “On the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women…came to the tomb” (Lk.24.1),” the continuation of the Genesis story is close to the surface: “God said, “Let there be light”. And God saw that the light was good…And there was evening and there was morning, the first day”. (Gen 1.4).
This kind of allusion to the OT is very common, and, in this case, the reference back to Genesis is found in other NT passages. For example Paul writes in II Cor. 5.17, “If any one is in Christ he or she is a new creation; the old has passed away, the new has come”. And the Evangelists in their more figurative way are telling us that as God created “in the beginning”, so now, on that first Easter, God is bringing into being a New Creation. Luke surely is telling us that without God all is chaos and darkness, but when God acts, light shines out, and all is new. The darkness of Good Friday was over shone by the decisive act of God that we call the resurrection; that is, perhaps, why the accounts note the visit to the tomb as the sun was rising and mention the bright light of the messengers’ presence.
It seems to me that that is about all that needs to be said on Easter morning, but it won’t surprise those of you who are regulars at All SS if I go on briefly to enlarge this central point.
Meeting Jesus
Is it possible that the burning faith of that little band arose from the precise placing of a head-scarf which Peter is reported to have noticed? Is even the center of the Easter faith the story of the tomb found empty by the women on that Sunday morning? It is striking that our very earliest witness to the resurrection faith is St. Paul who wrote his letters to Corinth around 52 C.E. What is central for Paul is the meetings of the risen Jesus: he never mentions the empty tomb tradition. Helmut Thielicke, a great German Theologian of the second half of the 20th century puts this well:
“They (the disciples) could never have believed that the dead Jesus had risen from the dead if they had not believed his Word...A miracle has never brought anyone to faith since it is always open to other interpretations. The empty tomb did not bring the disciples to faith. Something very different happened”. He continues: “In the Easter light of [that first day of the week] they suddenly saw that all the words and acts of Jesus pointed to the fact that death could not hold Him. It was of those words and acts that they now had to think.” The Silence of God, 83. (Eerdmans,1962).
The center of the Easter Faith is not a empty tomb but meeting with the living Jesus, and it was those experiences, recounted in Paul and the Gospels that brought about the living faith of the first disciples: as they experienced the presence of Jesus, they became convinced that God had acted to overcome death, giving a whole new kind of life to Jesus which he, in turn, was to share with those who came to believe, and continue to come to believe No amount of historical investigation, no philosophical ingenuities about the nature of the natural order and the possibilities of miracle can give us certainty. The only certainty we have is that we are part of that Community of faith which has staked its life on faith in God’s love for humanity; faith that God in Christ acts to save us; faith that death and evil do not have the final word in this universe. And the only certainty we can have is in sharing this faith.
So we come to the very center, the very nucleus of all the gospel accounts, disparate, and even contradictory as they may be. Moreover, we come, as it were, to the fuse that ignited the explosion that was to shake the Roman Empire. We come to the burning centre, not only of the written gospel manuscripts, but of the Apostolic preaching of the Good News, the Gospel, that, in Paul’s words “God in Christ has reconciled the world to himself” (II Cor. 5.18) .
Life from Death in the O.T.
We began by noting how the gospel passion narratives resonate with the creation story of Genesis. If we go further into the OT and consider the broad sweep of its story, we note over and again how the authors speak of light dispelling darkness, life emerging from death: the father of the founder of Israel, Sarah’s child, was born to “one as good as dead” says the writer; the very survival of the sons of Jacob/Israel was a result of Joseph’s position in Egypt; the remnant of Israel after the captivity in Babylon is an almost unbelievable restoration, but it is well attested by what we know of Cyrus the new Persian ruler and it is eloquently presented to us in the poetry of Deutero Isaiah. The list goes on and on, and prepares us for the greatest of God’s acts on that first Easter.
From Sabbath to Sunday
All the accounts note that it was “early on the first day of the week”. We tend not to notice that little detail, but it high lights a sea change in religion. What might we suppose someone steeped in the Hebrew scriptures and used to Rabbinic methods of exegesis would think if you asked him what is important about the first day of the week? I suspect there would be a very good chance that he would reply, “In the beginning when God created the heaven and the earth...God said, ‘Let there be light, and God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness….and there was evening and there was morning, the first day”. (Gen. 1.1-2) but, he would go, it is the seventh day that is paramount for us, for God rested on the Seventh Day, that is, the shabath. [Coming from Heb √, ‘to rest’]. This is the fulcrum of the week. So what you Christians call Saturday is the day of rest for all of Judaism.
But for the emerging Christian Community, the Sabbath was obsolete. For them it is the first day of the week, Sunday, that becomes the focus of the Christian week and, indeed Year, for everything is dated from Easter Sunday. So it is that on the first day of the week that we meet for Eucharist proclaiming again and again, that this is the day on which God has acted decisively in human affairs: “This is the Day the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it”.
The O.T. as part of Christian Bible
The Christian sacred writings from a very early date incorporated the Hebrew Scriptures. For the first generations of Christians, the writings of what we call the O.T. were their Bible: there was as yet no “N.T.”. By the time of the second century C.E., however, the presence of holy books of Judaism began to pose serious problems for the earliest Theologians, and, many would maintain, continue to do so. Yet, the decision to include the Jewish books was crucial, providing a context for the astonishing message of Judaism’s offshoot, the infant Christian movement.
The O.T. in the N.T.
So it is that our Christian Bible opens with a statement that God created the heavens and the earth, and goes on “the earth was formless and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep”. The Evangelists, steeped as they were, in the traditions of the OT, doubtless had this verse in mind when they produced the early accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus and wrote, “When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land” (Mk. 15.33). Similarly, when Luke begins his account of the Resurrection of Jesus with the words, “On the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women…came to the tomb” (Lk.24.1),” the continuation of the Genesis story is close to the surface: “God said, “Let there be light”. And God saw that the light was good…And there was evening and there was morning, the first day”. (Gen 1.4).
This kind of allusion to the OT is very common, and, in this case, the reference back to Genesis is found in other NT passages. For example Paul writes in II Cor. 5.17, “If any one is in Christ he or she is a new creation; the old has passed away, the new has come”. And the Evangelists in their more figurative way are telling us that as God created “in the beginning”, so now, on that first Easter, God is bringing into being a New Creation. Luke surely is telling us that without God all is chaos and darkness, but when God acts, light shines out, and all is new. The darkness of Good Friday was over shone by the decisive act of God that we call the resurrection; that is, perhaps, why the accounts note the visit to the tomb as the sun was rising and mention the bright light of the messengers’ presence.
It seems to me that that is about all that needs to be said on Easter morning, but it won’t surprise those of you who are regulars at All SS if I go on briefly to enlarge this central point.
Meeting Jesus
Is it possible that the burning faith of that little band arose from the precise placing of a head-scarf which Peter is reported to have noticed? Is even the center of the Easter faith the story of the tomb found empty by the women on that Sunday morning? It is striking that our very earliest witness to the resurrection faith is St. Paul who wrote his letters to Corinth around 52 C.E. What is central for Paul is the meetings of the risen Jesus: he never mentions the empty tomb tradition. Helmut Thielicke, a great German Theologian of the second half of the 20th century puts this well:
“They (the disciples) could never have believed that the dead Jesus had risen from the dead if they had not believed his Word...A miracle has never brought anyone to faith since it is always open to other interpretations. The empty tomb did not bring the disciples to faith. Something very different happened”. He continues: “In the Easter light of [that first day of the week] they suddenly saw that all the words and acts of Jesus pointed to the fact that death could not hold Him. It was of those words and acts that they now had to think.” The Silence of God, 83. (Eerdmans,1962).
The center of the Easter Faith is not a empty tomb but meeting with the living Jesus, and it was those experiences, recounted in Paul and the Gospels that brought about the living faith of the first disciples: as they experienced the presence of Jesus, they became convinced that God had acted to overcome death, giving a whole new kind of life to Jesus which he, in turn, was to share with those who came to believe, and continue to come to believe No amount of historical investigation, no philosophical ingenuities about the nature of the natural order and the possibilities of miracle can give us certainty. The only certainty we have is that we are part of that Community of faith which has staked its life on faith in God’s love for humanity; faith that God in Christ acts to save us; faith that death and evil do not have the final word in this universe. And the only certainty we can have is in sharing this faith.
So we come to the very center, the very nucleus of all the gospel accounts, disparate, and even contradictory as they may be. Moreover, we come, as it were, to the fuse that ignited the explosion that was to shake the Roman Empire. We come to the burning centre, not only of the written gospel manuscripts, but of the Apostolic preaching of the Good News, the Gospel, that, in Paul’s words “God in Christ has reconciled the world to himself” (II Cor. 5.18) .
Life from Death in the O.T.
We began by noting how the gospel passion narratives resonate with the creation story of Genesis. If we go further into the OT and consider the broad sweep of its story, we note over and again how the authors speak of light dispelling darkness, life emerging from death: the father of the founder of Israel, Sarah’s child, was born to “one as good as dead” says the writer; the very survival of the sons of Jacob/Israel was a result of Joseph’s position in Egypt; the remnant of Israel after the captivity in Babylon is an almost unbelievable restoration, but it is well attested by what we know of Cyrus the new Persian ruler and it is eloquently presented to us in the poetry of Deutero Isaiah. The list goes on and on, and prepares us for the greatest of God’s acts on that first Easter.
From Sabbath to Sunday
All the accounts note that it was “early on the first day of the week”. We tend not to notice that little detail, but it high lights a sea change in religion. What might we suppose someone steeped in the Hebrew scriptures and used to Rabbinic methods of exegesis would think if you asked him what is important about the first day of the week? I suspect there would be a very good chance that he would reply, “In the beginning when God created the heaven and the earth...God said, ‘Let there be light, and God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness….and there was evening and there was morning, the first day”. (Gen. 1.1-2) but, he would go, it is the seventh day that is paramount for us, for God rested on the Seventh Day, that is, the shabath. [Coming from Heb √, ‘to rest’]. This is the fulcrum of the week. So what you Christians call Saturday is the day of rest for all of Judaism.
But for the emerging Christian Community, the Sabbath was obsolete. For them it is the first day of the week, Sunday, that becomes the focus of the Christian week and, indeed Year, for everything is dated from Easter Sunday. So it is that on the first day of the week that we meet for Eucharist proclaiming again and again, that this is the day on which God has acted decisively in human affairs: “This is the Day the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it”.
Thursday, April 05, 2007
An Address for Good Friday, 2007
St Luke 23.39ff - Jesus Remember Me
This second word from the cross comes, as does the first, in Luke’s account of the passion of Jesus. It shares all the critical problems that attend the seven reported words from the cross such as the virtual impossibility of speech for someone undergoing the inhuman punishment of crucifixion, and then this passage has more. The offer of paradise today contradicts other passages in the NT and reflects a view of life after death that does not appear in Christianity until around the third generation of believers (who were almost entirely converts in the Hellenistic world).
The Anglican attitude to Historical Criticism
It is, I believe, one of the great glories of the Anglican tradition that it does not offer a diet of preaching and teaching that requires one to leave one’s intellect in the Church foyer and enables us to acknowledge these serious critical and historical issues. The great gain is that our Anglican tradition makes it possible for us to use the results of careful critical historical study to recognize that what we are given in the gospel narratives is frequently an insight into how the earliest followers of Jesus remembered him and understood what he had taught. The gospels are rather like a negative, which has had several exposures. (Remember how easy it was to do that with a trusty old Kodak?)
Just because it is historically quite improbable that Jesus delivered some of the sayings attributed to him, it does not mean that they do not have the status of scripture and are important for us. It does, of course require us to ask, “What exactly is the status of the Bible?” But that is a topic for another time.
A Word of Hope
Luke’s first word underlines the centrality of forgiveness; his final one, at the moment of death, expresses absolute trust in God; “I hand over my whole life to you”, he cries: this second saying in Luke’s account focuses on faith and hope. All three of the sayings from Luke contrast in some measure with Mark and Matthew. There is no hint of the despair that we hear in the cry, “Why have you forsaken me?”, which Luke replaces by “Into your hands I commend my spirit”.
It is important for us to remember that we are with a congregation many decades after the searing events of the day, looking back to those events through the vibrant faith in the Resurrection.
Reasons for Despair
They and we look at the terrible state of this world: at misused power, at innocent victims destroyed by that power; we are reminded of the evil done by violent people like the two real criminals being executed at the same time as Jesus; we are appalled by sectarian hatreds, racial divisions and deeply prejudiced views of differences in human sexuality. We look out on all this, often, by means of a flickering screen in our very living room and we may well be tempted to despair, to think either that there is no God and, indeed, never was one, or to feel that God has indeed forsaken us. Perhaps God has in the divine inner councils decided to abandon the wonderful experiment of life. As we look out on the apparently endless series of horrors that we hear of and are in some cases personally involved in, such despair does not seem all that inappropriate.
Luke’s Perspective
But then, we recall that we are standing with that congregation of the late first century C.E. for whom Luke wrote and hearing his version of what Jesus said and did. They and we recognize that awful as these events were, God’s power had not been destroyed: we realize this because we look back at the events of that Friday upheld by faith in what happened beginning on the following Sunday. We look back, that is, through the lens of the resurrection, and so can say with St Paul as he wrote to Corinth, “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (I Cor. 1.25).
Hidden Hope
The account of the “penitent” robber is full of hints that there is another side to the horrors we see in the world around us. The man represents humans who have come to the end of the road; for whom addiction, perhaps, seems beyond beating or grief beyond bearing. Neville Ward says of these situations, “Reports that come from the depths suggest a hidden hopefulness.” (Friday Afternoon, p 35). Of course many times hope does not emerge to prevent a suicide or a slide into irreversible depression. But it does happen sometimes, pointing to a deep intuition of the fundamental goodness of creation; an intuition, against all appearances perhaps, that love is greater than hate, hope more life-giving than despair and light, ultimately, resisting extinction in darkness.
The thieves are at the end of life and hope. The first one is full of bitter scorn. In some unfathomable way, the second prisoner, at the very end of the road, on the brink of final loss, finds hope and faith, and his words will bear a closer look.
‘Remember’ in the Old Testament
First of all, he rebukes the other condemned man, recognizing that, imperfect as it is, the human justice system can in some measure differentiate between guilt and innocence. Secondly, the thief uses a biblically charged word: “remember me”. The New Testament writers, steeped as they are in the Jewish scriptures, recognize that ‘remember’ implies much more than merely bringing up a mental image of a past event. It is used often in an address to Yahweh asking God to remember the covenant. This means, “make effective in action now the promises you made to us, that we should be your people”. Luke in his report of this man’s address to Jesus, displays the belief of the post-Easter church that even in depths of pain and despair, God has not deserted us and that the deeply embedded spark of hope can spring to a flame as we turn, as the second prisoner did, to this helpless bearer of the divine love suffering with us.
Critical Quagmire
Finally, Jesus’ answer: the words “Today you will be with me in Paradise” are a critical quick sand, apparently contradicting the later creeds, and using a rare word whose meaning is far from precise. It is this lack of precision in the word paradise that can cut through the thicket (if I may change the metaphor). Although Paradise had come to be applied to the Garden of Eden at the beginning of history and to an idyllic existence beyond the end of history, in its three NT uses it means little more than “close to God”. It is quite typical of the NT to eschew altogether speculation about the state of existence after death. Paul’s basic position is that the dead are “in Christ with God”. The later mediaeval maps of heaven, purgatory and hell were centuries in the future of the NT writers; we may continue to appreciate the magnificent poetry of Dante and Milton, but we should not be bound by their imagery.
Luke’s Message in the Word to the Robber
So Luke’s message for us in this word is that as we look out at this wretched world and as we suffer the pain, fears and awful losses it deals out to us, we can go on in hope with Christ who suffers alongside us; we can go on in hope that in spite of all appearances in the end, in Paul’s words, “God will be all and in all”.
This second word from the cross comes, as does the first, in Luke’s account of the passion of Jesus. It shares all the critical problems that attend the seven reported words from the cross such as the virtual impossibility of speech for someone undergoing the inhuman punishment of crucifixion, and then this passage has more. The offer of paradise today contradicts other passages in the NT and reflects a view of life after death that does not appear in Christianity until around the third generation of believers (who were almost entirely converts in the Hellenistic world).
The Anglican attitude to Historical Criticism
It is, I believe, one of the great glories of the Anglican tradition that it does not offer a diet of preaching and teaching that requires one to leave one’s intellect in the Church foyer and enables us to acknowledge these serious critical and historical issues. The great gain is that our Anglican tradition makes it possible for us to use the results of careful critical historical study to recognize that what we are given in the gospel narratives is frequently an insight into how the earliest followers of Jesus remembered him and understood what he had taught. The gospels are rather like a negative, which has had several exposures. (Remember how easy it was to do that with a trusty old Kodak?)
Just because it is historically quite improbable that Jesus delivered some of the sayings attributed to him, it does not mean that they do not have the status of scripture and are important for us. It does, of course require us to ask, “What exactly is the status of the Bible?” But that is a topic for another time.
A Word of Hope
Luke’s first word underlines the centrality of forgiveness; his final one, at the moment of death, expresses absolute trust in God; “I hand over my whole life to you”, he cries: this second saying in Luke’s account focuses on faith and hope. All three of the sayings from Luke contrast in some measure with Mark and Matthew. There is no hint of the despair that we hear in the cry, “Why have you forsaken me?”, which Luke replaces by “Into your hands I commend my spirit”.
It is important for us to remember that we are with a congregation many decades after the searing events of the day, looking back to those events through the vibrant faith in the Resurrection.
Reasons for Despair
They and we look at the terrible state of this world: at misused power, at innocent victims destroyed by that power; we are reminded of the evil done by violent people like the two real criminals being executed at the same time as Jesus; we are appalled by sectarian hatreds, racial divisions and deeply prejudiced views of differences in human sexuality. We look out on all this, often, by means of a flickering screen in our very living room and we may well be tempted to despair, to think either that there is no God and, indeed, never was one, or to feel that God has indeed forsaken us. Perhaps God has in the divine inner councils decided to abandon the wonderful experiment of life. As we look out on the apparently endless series of horrors that we hear of and are in some cases personally involved in, such despair does not seem all that inappropriate.
Luke’s Perspective
But then, we recall that we are standing with that congregation of the late first century C.E. for whom Luke wrote and hearing his version of what Jesus said and did. They and we recognize that awful as these events were, God’s power had not been destroyed: we realize this because we look back at the events of that Friday upheld by faith in what happened beginning on the following Sunday. We look back, that is, through the lens of the resurrection, and so can say with St Paul as he wrote to Corinth, “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (I Cor. 1.25).
Hidden Hope
The account of the “penitent” robber is full of hints that there is another side to the horrors we see in the world around us. The man represents humans who have come to the end of the road; for whom addiction, perhaps, seems beyond beating or grief beyond bearing. Neville Ward says of these situations, “Reports that come from the depths suggest a hidden hopefulness.” (Friday Afternoon, p 35). Of course many times hope does not emerge to prevent a suicide or a slide into irreversible depression. But it does happen sometimes, pointing to a deep intuition of the fundamental goodness of creation; an intuition, against all appearances perhaps, that love is greater than hate, hope more life-giving than despair and light, ultimately, resisting extinction in darkness.
The thieves are at the end of life and hope. The first one is full of bitter scorn. In some unfathomable way, the second prisoner, at the very end of the road, on the brink of final loss, finds hope and faith, and his words will bear a closer look.
‘Remember’ in the Old Testament
First of all, he rebukes the other condemned man, recognizing that, imperfect as it is, the human justice system can in some measure differentiate between guilt and innocence. Secondly, the thief uses a biblically charged word: “remember me”. The New Testament writers, steeped as they are in the Jewish scriptures, recognize that ‘remember’ implies much more than merely bringing up a mental image of a past event. It is used often in an address to Yahweh asking God to remember the covenant. This means, “make effective in action now the promises you made to us, that we should be your people”. Luke in his report of this man’s address to Jesus, displays the belief of the post-Easter church that even in depths of pain and despair, God has not deserted us and that the deeply embedded spark of hope can spring to a flame as we turn, as the second prisoner did, to this helpless bearer of the divine love suffering with us.
Critical Quagmire
Finally, Jesus’ answer: the words “Today you will be with me in Paradise” are a critical quick sand, apparently contradicting the later creeds, and using a rare word whose meaning is far from precise. It is this lack of precision in the word paradise that can cut through the thicket (if I may change the metaphor). Although Paradise had come to be applied to the Garden of Eden at the beginning of history and to an idyllic existence beyond the end of history, in its three NT uses it means little more than “close to God”. It is quite typical of the NT to eschew altogether speculation about the state of existence after death. Paul’s basic position is that the dead are “in Christ with God”. The later mediaeval maps of heaven, purgatory and hell were centuries in the future of the NT writers; we may continue to appreciate the magnificent poetry of Dante and Milton, but we should not be bound by their imagery.
Luke’s Message in the Word to the Robber
So Luke’s message for us in this word is that as we look out at this wretched world and as we suffer the pain, fears and awful losses it deals out to us, we can go on in hope with Christ who suffers alongside us; we can go on in hope that in spite of all appearances in the end, in Paul’s words, “God will be all and in all”.
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