The harrowing of hell

The harrowing of hell

The story so beloved of medieval mystery plays around Christ’s harrowing of hell has a complex and much disputed history. There are two primary interpretations of the spirits in prison: either they are the disembodied spirits of Noah’s contemporaries imprisoned in Hades, who in rabbinic tradition are excluded from resurrection, or they are the fallen angels of Genesis 6.1-6 [the majority view, and one which some rabbinic material alludes to.]

The expansion of the latter suggestion dates back to the Book of the Watchers, a 3^rd or 2^nd  century BC comprising the first 36 chapters of 1 Enoch 36, embellishing Genesis 6. The tradition includes a punishment through flood for such miscegenation, so it is possible to read it in this way. However, allusions to Christ preaching to those who died in the old dispensation occur in the early 2^nd century Shepherd of Hermas, one of the so-called Apostolic Fathers and in the apocryphal Gospel of Peter and Odes of Solomon.

Underlying both traditions is the Christological theme of the victory of Christ, and his Lordship over all that is above the earth, on the earth, and under the earth. The detail can be endlessly argued about, though Hades/Sheol is clearly the place of the dead in general rather than a place of final [and often eternal] punishment post-judgement.

In summary, the tradition, carried on widely through the Middle Ages and then falling into disrepute in 16^th Protestant Europe, celebrates the power of Christ to save, the comprehensive reach of that salvation, the justice of God’s salvific acts in potentially incorporating all, and the cosmic dimensions of the battle between good and evil. Maybe it is time to recover this celebration for the Saturday of Holy Week, rather than simply going shopping for Easter eggs in a consumerist anticipation of the return of spring!

Sharing my body, my soul, my store - a monumental hopeI

There is a monument in the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary [!] at Harlton in Cambridgeshire to a saint of God, Thomas Fryer. The details are easily accessed elsewhere, and there is a picture of the monument below. What particularly caught my eye was the English poem that commends Thomas' piety:

Incloisterd in these piles of stone

The reliques of this Fryer rest,

Whose better part to heaven's gone;

The poore mans bowels were his chest.

And 'mongst these three: grave, heaven, poore,

He shard his corps, his soule, his store.

Holiness is an elusive thing, but I aspire to the values expressed here.

First, I long to be well-prepared for death now, that I may fully live the rest of my life here on earth, in gladness, in gratitude, alert for the moments, opportunities and revelations of each day. I long, in other words, to 'share my corpse with the grave.' I wish to be reconciled to Sister Death [St Francis' words] and to know that death no longer has any sting for those who are in Christ.

Then, I long to be heavenward bound. I do not like the inherent dualism implied by the use of the word 'soul' here, but the Fryers were recusants, Catholics and crypto-Catholics in a Protestant Elizabethan England. The language is the language of medieval theology, but there is a deep truth embedded in it, that the 'true and complete me' that I am is designed for eternity with God. I will find no rest until I find my rest in him. So, as I explored at great length in my PhD, my life on this earth is exilic, and the OT exilic writers deserve much more attention as spiritual guides in today's church, often far too earth-bound.

Finally, I long to share my store with the poor, perhaps the simplest, clearest and most challenging of all. I will die without any hard work on my part. I will inherit heavenly life through Christ's hard work on the cross. But for now, my work is to share all that I am, and all that I have. Today, then, I pray for the grace to be open, hospitable, aware and generous with those who by accident of life and circumstance, are today's neighbours. May the same be true for you.

 

The apostle is distressed, and what he does about it

Three thoughts on Paul's Athens experience

Paul in Athens is faced with two dilemmas: how to capture the attention of the chattering classes, and how to retain it in the face of many competing – and often superficially more attractive – philosophies.

Here’s how he does it.

By being distressed at idolatry. We are surrounded by idolatry all the time, much as Paul was, and it is tempting to take it for granted as part of the scene. It’s the way life is, we think. Not so Paul. His example reminds us that we need to pray for a sharper response: not paralyzing fear, but a distress which propels us into the public arena. Pray for the Holy Spirit to drive you into places of influence, exposure and risk, and pray for all of us, as pioneers and visionaries in God’s church, that we may be equally distressed on behalf of God’s Kingdom. IDOLATRY SUCKS!

By being able to talk the languages of the age. No one knows who the poet is whom Paul quotes in building connections between the inchoate spirituality of the Athenians and the Christian gospel. But clearly his hearers knew, and it was part of his strategy for holding them long enough to speak about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Pray for apologists, theologians and thinkers – and pray for your study, that we may have the discernment, insights and skills needed to speak the languages of the age. CULTURE COMMUNICATES!

Paul’s refusal to compromise with the spirits of the age. He may build bridges for his audience from the known to the unknown, but he is uncompromising in his proclamation. Jesus alone is Saviour, Jesus’ resurrection is the only hope for us. Our failure to respond to the good news leads directly to judgement. And so finally we pray for all who in telling the truth face mockery, apathy, and in some cases virulent opposition, and we ask for God to place his angels and watchers in protection over them, and us. TRUTH MATTERS!

Running for gold or running for God?

I've never been particularly competitive, except against myself, and I didn't stand a chance of getting into the school football team in 1960s Brazil. My sports have always been solitary, first cycling, and now - because the Fens are too flat for interesting cycling - running.

I began running when I was 60, to stretch myself, knowing that I was not a natural runner. Or so I thought. Over the last five years, with 5 half marathons under my belt, I have discovered three things: that I am built to run, that running makes me feel really alive, and that it is the most wonderful way of going on retreat.

The thing is, God's always there anyway. We don't go on retreat to find a place where God is more present than somewhere else. That would be silly. We go to a place where we can be more attentive, more receptive, more in touch with ourselves and the lives that we lead. And so the running works well for me.

• It gives me the silence I crave in a word-weary world, and I am resolved never to run with headphones in my ears.
• It enables me to listen more carefully to the world around, whether it's the buzz of traffic or the yaffling of green woodpeckers [lots of them in Coton], or even the complete silence that is still available in the English countryside if you look hard enough [read Robert McFarlane to find out where].
• It allows the clutter in my head to unravel, and so I go through the strands one by one, pray for them, log them for further attention and move on. Now I carry a little notebook because I can't trust my memory.
• I've also discovered that I can give [offer?] my running to God as a living sacrifice, not to earn any favours, but because when I run, that's who I am, and I do it for God, mostly with rejoicing. 
• And finally and most importantly, I make myself available for God to speak to me if he wants to. Often he doesn't, and I just enjoy his good pleasure and company. But when he does, I stand a better chance of being all ears.

If you haven't stopped reading yet on the grounds that you can't run, you might like to think of ways in which my running might serve as a metaphor for your some part of your life that is just waiting to burst into prayer and praise. To this end, a mundane or everyday necessity or a freely-chosen activity will serve equally well. 

Do we carry spare flasks of oil?

One of our students preached a thought-provoking three minute sermon in Ridley Hall this morning, and I'm grateful that she's allowed us to publish it.

Matthew 25:1-13

She says, some years ago my friend’s father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. One morning she came downstairs and found her dad, on all fours behind one of the arm chairs. Jane said “ Dad are you all right, what are you doing down there?” He was going around the house checking all the fuses in the plugs! 2 days later he died.

This story has stayed with me - this gracious man not just getting ready for his own death, but preparing others for a time when he would no longer be with them!

Just after New year my next door neighbour Mike died suddenly overnight. He was 64 and although he suffered with emphysema, It was still a shock. Mike was alone and it struck me not only how unprepared I was for his death, but left me wondering ‘how prepared was he’? As Matthew tells us “ Keep awake therefore for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

Earlier in Matthew's gospel Jesus calls us to be salt and light in the world. As I thought about my relationship with Mike, I wondered how well had I reflected that light, what kind of picture had I presented of the Kingdom of Heaven? Had my lamp been spiritually full of oil, lighting up the path so that he could see the way? In theological College we spend a lot of time focusing on our own journey: it’s easy to be forgetful and leave behind what really matters.

We can find ourselves turning our backs, heading off in the opposite direction and when we return, have missed the opportunity. Are we the foolish bridesmaids, whose lamps are going out. Do we present a dim view of the Kingdom, or do our words and actions ‘shut the door’ to others, long before our lamps go out ?

Or are we the wise bridesmaids? Do we carry “spare flasks of oil”, the spiritual resources to trim our lamps? The willingness, to love, serve and nurture. The openness to share Christ’s amazing Grace, preparing all people so that they are ready to meet him and go with him to share in the wedding feast ! 

Darkness, light and the Servant Messiah

The first Christians, in the light of the Easter events, shared their stories with one another. And as they did so, they looked back into their scriptures to try and make sense of this new narrative of Jesus’ death and resurrection. As they looked into what we now call the Old Testament, key texts emerged for them, and they began to develop themes and chains of texts.

For these early disciples, the whole of Isaiah was rich pickings. One of the dominant texts, inevitably, was that of darkness, light, and the Servant Messiah, and it’s this that is the theme of this blog.

DARKNESS: Throughout the book, darkness and the associated theme of blindness speak of

• sin and injustice, corporate, individual, committed against the people of God, committed by the people of God. Ah, you who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! [Isaiah 5.20]

• rebellion: And he said, ‘Go and say to this people: “Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.” Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.’ [Isaiah 6.9-10]

• judgment, separation, exile and chaos. Those who consult the dead rather than the living - They will pass through the land, greatly distressed and hungry; when they are hungry, they will be enraged and will curse their king and their gods. They will turn their faces upwards, or they will look to the earth, but will see only distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish; and they will be thrust into thick darkness. [Isaiah 8.21f] Similarly in 13.10 on the Day of the Lord, the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light. Everything is out of joint - The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, says Hamlet, That ever I was born to set it right!

By the time we get to Isaiah 59.9-15, we are rapidly approaching the answer to the challenge and conundrum of darkness. In 59 we are shown the sheer human impossibility [picked up by Shakespeare in the tragedy of Hamlet] of setting it right by ourselves. The best we can do, even after the restoration from exile is that

• we grope like the blind along a wall

• like doves we moan mournfully

• we wait for justice but there is none, for salvation, but it is far from us…

LIGHT: And so we turn, with the prophet, to the coming light. Having established that the human way forward is a dead end, chs. 60-62 take us to the sovereign solution of a redeeming God, expanding on the phrase his own arm brought him victory of 59.16:

God will save his people; he will give light to them: the light of his glory, the glory that Moses asked to see in Exodus 33, the glory of which the seraphs sang in Isaiah’s own vision, the light of his presence, of his self-disclosure. Your sun shall no more go down, or your moon withdraw itself; for the Lord will be your everlasting light, and your days of mourning shall be ended. 60.20

But even more extraordinary than the glorious presence of a sovereign God is the fact that this glory spills over. He will share his glory with them. Isaiah is able to say that Zion will be radiant – in the reflected glory [60.5] and, wonderfully in v.7, God says I will glorify my glorious house!

THE SOURCE OF LIGHT: Light's only source is the Servant-Messiah: And this is what holds it all together for the first Christians: the one who self-identified as Servant is the Light-bringer, as Anointed one – Messiah – through whom the darkness will be dispelled, the glory of God made present, and this glory reflected in and through us: All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. [2 Corinthians 3]

RESPONSES

Three of the gospel writers  give us hints as to how the church will respond to the abiding presence of his Epiphany. For Matthew it is overwhelming joy, and abandoned, or self-abandoning worship and homage. For Luke it shown by the shepherds’ glorifying and praising of God, Mary’s treasuring of these words in her heart, and Simeon’s I have seen it all now but also his prophetic insight into the battle royal between the light and darkness that is still to come.

John in his gospel gives us the response of a measured, thoughtful philosophizing song that from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. And for us?

Well for us, whether in the season of Epiphany or at any other time, it must surely be:

Unrestrained celebration – dance it like Miriam…

Submissive prostration – honour and adore him like the woman in Simon the Pharisee’s house…

Unfettered proclamation – shout it like blind Bartimaeus, or the man born blind in John 9…

And in the times when the darkness threatens to crowd in again, we are daily called to rehearse the great Epiphany truth that the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not…

Gifts, givers and the cost

I am hoping to post many of the sermons preached at Ridley Hall this term, so here is the first Thursday Communion sermon, preached by our Director of Pastoral Studies, Ali Walton:

Matthew 2:1-12 The Gifts of the Wise Men

Introduction

Steve and I had to change our plans for Christmas because of my shoulder injury. We had to cancel our trip to my brother in S Wales because of my shoulder – I wasn’t able to sit in the car that long and it would have been a lot of driving for Steve on his own.

However, that left us with the problem of what we were going to do for presents for them all.

I spoke to my brother on the phone who gave me a list of suggestions of what to get for him, my sister-in-law, nephew and 2 nieces. It took me 40 minutes on Amazon to find and buy everything and I was able to have everything delivered direct to them. It was easy, straightforward, and required very little thought or effort. It was just what we needed at the time.

The story of wise men visiting Jesus and their giving of gifts is a similar story – but these are gifts with hidden costs both to the givers and the recipients.

The Givers

The word that Matthew uses for ‘Wise men’ is the Greek word from which we get ‘Magi’ – those who possess secret wisdom – astronomers/astrologers – two were inseparable in that culture. They were men who gained spiritual insight into world affairs from their observations of planets and stars.

They were prompted by what a ‘star’ they saw in the sky to go on journey to seek out new born king. The ‘star’ was probably a natural phenomenon. Possibly:

• conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn (that happened 3 times in year 7-6 BC)
• a comet (Halley’s comet passed over in 12-11 BC)
• a supernova – an exploding star

Whatever the star was these men associated it with the Jewish expectation of the coming king and so they set off to find this king.

They did the obvious. They went to the capital city of Israel – to Jerusalem and to the King’s palace,  to see King Herod to enquire where the child was who was born king of the Jews.

In doing that they stirred up a hornets nest. Herod was paranoid, with a reputation for cruelty and violence. He was threatened by the thought of a rival king. That made the whole of Jerusalem afraid. They knew he’d already killed his favourite wife and two sons from feeling  threatened. What would he do in response to this new threat?

He couldn’t just send wise men on their way. He needed to know where this child king was so he could remove the threat.

So he pretended to be helpful, using the excuse that he too wanted to pay homage to this king. He gathered together the religious leaders who would know where to seek this long expected Christ. With this we see emerging a strand that runs through so much of Matthew: the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy about the life and death of the Messiah. In this instance the prophecies showed that Bethlehem was the birth place of the child born king of the Jews.

The star continued to lead the wise men to Bethlehem, to the place where Jesus was.

Matthew describes their reaction on seeing Jesus emphatically. He says, literally, ‘they rejoiced with a great joy exceedingly’. The depth of their joy is typical in the context of Messianic fulfilment.

This deep joy prompts the wise men to bow down and pay homage to Jesus. They knelt on the ground, leaning forward with their foreheads touching the ground. The homage that they gave to Jesus was that due to a king.

The wise men themselves may not have recognised Jesus’ divinity but Matthew intends his readers to understand that the wise men worshipped better than they knew. The worship and homage of the wise men was to be a pointer to the worship to be offered by those who grasp not only Jesus’ kingship, but also his divinity.

Then they opened their treasure chests and gave Jesus gifts. Gold, frankincense and myrrh. These gift were very expensive. They had to be wealthy men to give these gifts because they were so valuable. This is probably where idea of them being kings comes from – the value of the gifts.

Matthew doesn’t draw out the significance of the gifts. The wise men were wealthy men who would have travelled with treasure chests to finance their trip. They didn’t have credit cards or foreign exchange bureaus etc from which to draw cash. So they carried assets of universal value in chests so they could liquidise these assets for cash as required to provide finance. We can imagine them rootling around in their chests, looking at what they had and then thinking ‘Ah – that would be good’ and presenting it to Mary and Joseph.

In those ways the gifts of the wise men were perhaps similar to my Amazon shopping for my brother’s family: the gifts were easily to hand, they didn’t take that much prior thought, and  the monetary value of them was negligible to these men.

But there were the hidden costs for these wise men in giving  these gifts to Jesus: costs they would not have anticipated when they first saw the star, realised its significance and started to follow it:

• the cost (not financial) of the journey itself: the discomfort – heat in the day, cold at night; the difficulties of finding food and water; the  physical dangers of accidents in travelling through rough terrain; the dangers of attack by wild animals; the even greater danger of attack by robbers.
• there was the cost of their visit to King Herod which they didn’t realise – the potential danger they’d put themselves in by bringing the birth of a rival king to the attention of a paranoid, cruel despot. Fortunately this was averted by God’s warning to them through a dream, not to go back to Herod, but to take a different way home.
• but then that produced the cost of them having to stay out of Herod’s attention by going a much longer route home.

If they had known about these hidden costs in advance would they still have decided to follow the star? We don’t know. What we do know is that we’re often in similar positions. We commit ourselves to stepping out in faith and doing what we feel God is asking us to do – and once we’re on the way, we discover the cost and sometimes wonder why we ever set out on the journey in the first place. We think that if we’d known what it was going to cost maybe we wouldn’t have set out. It may well be that some of you here tonight think that about preparation for ministry – it’s proving costly in ways you could never have imagined and you wonder why on earth you started out on it.

May be, on the journey home, when the wise men felt like that, they remembered the great joy they had experienced on seeing Jesus and reminded themselves that the hidden costs of the journey were nothing compared to the joy of seeing Jesus.

Perhaps when we too feel like that – that the costs of the journey are too much and are greater than we can bear, we need to look again to Jesus and the joy of being in his presence and worshiping him.

The Recipients

What would Mary and Joseph have made of arrival of the wise men and the gifts they gave? They understood more than the wise men, about who Jesus was and why he was special. I think it’s possible that Mary understood even more than Joseph.

We’ve already discovered that Matthew attached no significance to the gifts. It was Origen in the 3^rd century who was first to give the significance of the gold as a gift to a king, the frankincense as a reminder of worship and suffering, and the myrrh as a symbol of death, used in embalming dead bodies.

It’s possible that Mary, understanding more of who Jesus was and what he would do – realised the significance of these gifts for Jesus, and the suffering for him that these gifts indicated. They were quite possibly not the gifts that she would have chosen for her precious son.

The very presence of the wise men created an even greater cost. It was their visit to Herod and the revealing to him of presence of the one born to be king of the Jews that triggered his plot to kill all the children under the age of 2 in Bethlehem.

It was bad enough for Mary, a young mother in a strange place without her family – but now she has to escape as a refugee into a completely foreign and unknown country.

Maybe the gifts of the wise men financed Mary a nd Joseph’s escape to Egypt with Jesus, and their survival there but given the choice of receiving the wise men’s visit and their gifts and thereby having to flee to Egypt, or not having the wise men visit, not receiving their gifts, but at least being able to stay in her own country, maybe Mary would rather not have received them.

But at the same time, holding the Christ child, keeping him safe, remembering what the Lord told her about him, nothing could take those things away. Luke tells us that she treasured all these things in her heart.

This is clearly speculation, but knowing what we do of human nature, it makes sense.

Maybe there are times when we feel the same. We’re grateful for the gift of God’s love and grace in Jesus, but sometimes the cost of that gift, in the sacrifices we have to make, the discipline and self-control we have to exercise to live as God wants us to, what we deem to be our rights that we have to surrender, sometimes even the cost and burden of exercising the gifts for ministry that God has given us (I remember all those Saturdays of sermon preparation when I’ve said ‘Lord, I just can’t do this’, or those unjustified criticisms when I’ve said “Lord – that’s just not fair’).

But at those times we hold on to how great a gift to us is the love of God in Jesus, and we allow that to strengthen and encourage us.

Conclusion

The story of the wise men journeying to find Jesus, the new born king of the Jews and giving him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh involves a giving of gifts with joys for both the givers and receivers, but more importantly, huge costs for both givers and receivers.

We know the gift that we receive in Jesus of his love and reconciliation with our heavenly father.

Just as he gave himself as a gift for us, we so give ourselves as a gift for him. We know that giving ourselves to him will bring joy – but we know too that it will have a cost for us.

At the start of this new year, as we think again about the joys and costs in the giving and receiving of the gifts of the wise men, we’re going to pause and think and pray as we give ourselves again to Christ for this year.

Look at the copies you have of the Methodist covenant prayer. This is a costly prayer.

In silence, read it and think about it. Think about the hidden costs as well as the obvious ones. After a short silence I’ll lead us in praying it out loud. Please join me if you want to make a gift of yourself to Jesus for this year, whatever the hidden costs might be. If it feels like too hard a prayer to pray then pray quietly for strength for yourself for whatever this year will bring. The words will be on the screen or you can use the copy you have in front of you. Then take it away and put it up somewhere you can see it every day to remind you and encourage you to keep going on the journey. 

The Methodist Covenant Prayer

I am no longer my own but yours.

Put me to what you will,

rank me with whom you will;

put me to doing, put me to suffering;

let me be employed for you or laid aside for you,

exalted for you or brought low for you.

Let me be full, let me be empty,

let me have all things, let me have nothing.

I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things

 to your pleasure and disposal.

And now, glorious and blessed God,

Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

you are mine and I am yours.

So be it.

And the covenant made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen.