Standing Under the Scriptures
June 22, 2008

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

The readings we are considering this Sunday are the following:

Jeremiah 20.7-13: With extraordinary candor the prophet laments his lot. Verses 14 to 18 are worth looking at too.

Matthew 10.16-33: Jesus sets forth the reality of what awaits his disciples as they go on mission.

The importance of these passages is such that we cannot overlook either of them. The problem will be to fit our consideration of them into the now especially limited time available.

Last Sunday we in fact failed to get all the way through our Matthew passage (9.35-10.15) and we mainly filed our Romans passage (5.1-11) by title. Despite this lapse (mainly mine) we arrived at the threshold of important discoveries. The Romans passage holds a key to the concept of sanctification, which I discoursed on the previous Sunday to somewhat blank stares. A class member contributed an insight concerning the Matthew passage with profound christological implications. And the two things may be seen as connected.

Regarding Romans, in the pew Bibles the heading for our passage was “Results of Justification.” I remarked that it was more complex than this, that it contained several strands. It gives the basis for justification as well as the results, in particular that “while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” (verse 8). And the outcome, or rather accompaniment (the two though distinguishable are not to be separated) of justification is sanctification. For some the concept of sanctification may be a bit difficult to grasp. But I think this is in part because we tend to view it negatively, as freedom from sin, as becoming a kind of goody two shoes. And we know that we ourselves remain in need of forgiveness. (Even so there is a difference in that we become “disturbed sinners” [Barth’s term] as discussed in last week’s notice, no longer at ease in our sin.) But sanctification has also a positive component, a freedom for as well as a freedom from, which may actually be more significant. This “freedom for” accords in fact with Barth’s view of sanctification. Moreover, our passage provides a clear instance of it. After saying, “we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God, “it continues, “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings… (vs. 3). Here is a real twist, something that as unjustified we could never do. For our whole human impulse is to avoid suffering. Only as justified do we break out of our worldly bonds, the way of looking at things that the world in its fallenness imposes on us, so as to become free to take this, the Pauline view. It ties in actually with the Beatitudes: Blessed are the poor, the hungry, the meek, those who are persecuted. As such it is the fulfillment of what Jesus even prior to his death and resurrection pointed to.

The prime instance of this freedom for, this positive aspect of sanctification, which I would cite (which Barth did not although I think he could have), is that of the martyrs of the early Church, under the Roman Empire. (They were condemned not for anything that they had done as Christians or even anything that Christianity consisted of, as Tertullian in his Apology (c. 200) incisively pointed out. Instead it was merely for being Christians: non licet esse vos; it is not lawful for you to be a Christian.) On hearing their death sentences pronounced they regularly demonstrated their freedom by responding, Deo gratias, Thanks be to God.

Turning now to our Matthew passage, we noted Jesus’ compassion for the crowds, who were “like sheep without a shepherd.” He expressed this same compassion before feeding the 5,000 and the 4,000. We noted also his urgency about the harvest thus coming into view and about the need for laborers to gather it. This urgency may be seen as applying also today, in the West as well as the Global South, although less apparent in the former than in the latter. And Jesus commissions his disciples---and also us---to go out as harvesters. In doing so he exhorts them to make no material provision for their mission, in effect to rely for such things totally on God. In line with our discussion of the Romans passage, their ability to do so can be seen as a manifestation of sanctification.

But it is in the “Matthean exception,” which our passage contains, that the most striking connection between our two passages can be found. The “exception” is set forth in verses 10.5 and 6: ”Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” As for why this limitation, which contrasts so markedly with the position of Paul and others, a class member contributed an insight. This was that Jesus needed to overcome the opposition of Israel’s élite, its religious and political establishment, before the gospel could be taken to others. And he indeed overcame them, through their apparent overcoming of him in his death on the cross.

The implications of this insight are as I said profound. For it casts sin and redemption not just as an individual matter, as it has tended to be regarded since Augustine, but also and more as a corporate one. And this is to recover a dimension which Christianity of the early Church had but which has tended to be lost subsequently. The consummation of its loss may be seen in Augustine’s defeat of the Donatists of North Africa in the late 4th century. Historically, the closest approximation to its recovery was probably in the Anabaptist movement, the Radical Reformation as it has been termed that accompanied the main one in the 16th century. The individual dimension is of course not unimportant; it needs to be maintained along with the corporate one. Otherwise Christianity would go off in a Marxist direction. Moreover there is a way I think in which both may be maintained. It is through regarding the Fall, Adam’s and ours, as essentially putting ourselves in the place of God, or attempting to. The temptation arises on both the individual and the corporate levels. But on the corporate level, manifested chiefly in the state and its ruling elite, it is particularly enticing---and in particular need of countering.

I have a special reason for welcoming the class member’s insight: it supports my book’s account of the early Church. The tendency of historians of that period is to focus on Patristics, the study of the early Church Fathers. But I took the Roman persecution of the Church, and the Church’s response to it, as the key element. This of course was a contest with the élite, which the Church overcame by its non-violence, by allowing itself to be overcome in the persons of its martyrs cited above. And they could not have followed this way unless Jesus had already opened it, freeing them for it through his sanctifying death and resurrection.

The foregoing is only the beginning of the implications of the class member’s insight. But it may be sufficient to show that they are of major importance. To develop them fully would be a major undertaking, quite beyond my strength and ability. But my account of the early Church, which takes up a chapter of my book, may be considered a step in this direction. Accordingly I will attach not the chapter but the lecture version of it, part of a course I developed on the book. It may make up in succinctness what it lacks in detail.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted