God and the Japan Tsunami

I was horrified to hear the news of a Tsunami that had hit the east coast of Japan at Sendi. As of today, the estimated toll is about 12,000 confirmed dead and 17,000 missing.

I had been meaning to blog this issue since the tsunami hit on 11 March 2011, but it’s something that I approach with a great deal of fear and trembling. No matter what I think, or whatever “explanation” I might postulate, the fact remains that some 29,000 people have lost their lives. It’s a monumental tragedy, and I will not allow myself to treat it in any other way. Each one of those people who died was a valuable, meaningful person, not just some shock statistic on a banner headline. I imagine that in that population were men and women, young and old, saints and sinners.

This is a time for grieving, not explanation.

Yet, it is human nature to search for meaning in what goes on around us. To various degrees, everyone who is affected, or who can see this event will turn from grieving to explanation. That search for an explanation will include some impassioned questions; did they deserve to die?

I have to say that I been immensely impressed by the response of the Japanese people, as seen on the TV coverage. There are the images of the ordinary women, searching the wreckage of their homes for their lost families and neighbors with a public dignity that seems impossible to maintain. There’s the story of the chief fireman, who lost his entire crew as they battled, unsuccessfully, to close the flood gate. There’s the manager of the nuclear plant, who visited the refugees one by one to apologize to them personally for his plant’s contamination of their food and their homes.

The word that the press has used is “stoic”. It might be an appropriate word, but its possibly incongruous because its Greek and has more to do with the heritage of Europe than the Far East. It seems to have been exported from west to east. Is there a better Japanese word, that we can import into our language? I ask because I’m wary of imposing Western interpretations on how an Asian people are reacting to this.

Another imposition on the Japanese understanding of this event might also be the prevailing Western idea of God. I’m unsure if the Shinto and Buddhist people of Japan might frame the question in this way, but I know the small Christian community might; did God send the Tsunami?

If He did, what was His purpose in it?

If He didn’t, does He interact with our world at all?

There seems to be much less public interest in these questions than the debate that followed the Boxing Day Tsunami in December 2004. Maybe its because the casualty count is much lower. Maybe its because the predominantly Muslim people affected in 2004 would have been more inclined to process their reaction by questioning God.

I have not done any sustained research on the matter, but I only came across one article that attempted to answer these questions from a Theist perspective. It’s a podcast from the website PleaseConvinceMe.Com, run by Jim Wallis and his team of “one dollar apologists”. Even so, this was not an extended reflection on this one event, but rather Jim Wallis giving his initial reactions.

I listened to the podcast and, whereas I don’t disagree with anything Jim Wallis has to say on the specifics, one thing that struck me about his approach was that he seemed to be interpreting the tsunami, and all of life’s triumphs and tribulations, in terms of what benefits us. His conclusion seemed to be that God sent the tsunami because it would ultimately benefit us, including those who died.

If I were an atheist, I would easily dismiss this position as absurd. How can something possibly benefit you if you end up dead? Jim Wallis counters (and I paraphrase) by saying that our lives go beyond death, so even our journey through death has relevance to what happens to us thereafter.

I’m not entirely satisfied with Jim Wallis’ position here. Psalm 6:5 says, “Among the dead no one proclaims your name. Who praises you from the grave?” The salvation that the Psalmist sings about is all about preserving this present life.

As for the atheist position, I would have to respond that the lives of those who died had no meaning at all because, to put it bluntly; who cares? I might care, and you might care, but when our days are over, and we have long since been forgotten, what possible meaning remains?

Maybe its because I have an austere soul that I tend to believe that I’m really insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I find it hard to believe that God would summon a tsunami for my sake.

However, Jim Wallis does make a point that I need to hear. The Christian Gospel states that, though it’s not about me, God is interested in my welfare. Romans 8:28 tells me that “…we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” By “all things”, I presume Paul includes tsunamis. God loves me, and He can order things for my benefit. Even so, I wonder what “benefit” God intended to those who died in the recent tsunami. I don’t have a satisfactory explanation.

Another part of my brain has been occupied with cosmology. In particular the Incarnation of the Word of God (as you might see in the song I wrote last week). The issue here is how God reveals Himself through his creation, of which I am but a miniscule part. I’ll conclude with a comment that I posted on FaceBook;

If we are looking for God in this tsunami, we should not look to the tsunami itself but to the lives of the people who were affected, and who are reacting to it. Why? Because God has chosen to create His image in people, not tsunamis.

We are the witness of the Word - Music score

Last week, I posted the lyrics to a song that I had been composing. After a week of tinkering, I've settled on a score. My first efforts had the same melody, but with quite exotic harmonies. This is more symmetric, and it plays better.

I've tried to be sparse in the arrangement. This is because its a song that should be carried by the voice, not the accompaniment. In fact, it's suited to a cappela, or even Barber Shop, which is probably beyond the capabilities of your average church-goer. So, the accompaniment is intended to give it the subtlest texture and sense of direction, as if were standing behind the singer saying, "go ahead, you can do this".

This work has been prepared and authored by Martin Jacobs in 2011. You are free to share this work (i.e. copy it and perform it) under the following conditions: 1) You must attribute the work to Martin Jacobs, 2) You may not use this work for commercial purposes, 3) You may not alter or transform this work.

We are the witness of the Word

This weekend I have been preparing a paper for the Stormwater Industry Association, Queensland's conference. However, as often happens when you apply your mind to something, it finds something else to occupy it. I confess that I yielded to my wandering thoughts, and finished off a song that I had been writing.

It started out as a poem, then I found a tune for it, which required some modifications to get it to fit within the strict meter. It has quite a pretty tune that's easy to sing (it passes the "shower test" - if you can sing it in the shower, it's got a good tune).

The words, however, might require a brain-stretch. What I wanted to do was to capture some of my recent meditations on the Incarnation, following John 1:14 and Colossians 1:15. What intrigues me about the Biblical idea of "witness" is that it is not just a passive observation of something (as in "witness to a crime"), but it is something we "do". We are the witness of the Word because it (technically He - we're talking about the Second Person of the Trinity) becomes incarnate in us. We are also the creation of the Word, and it becomes expressed, or brought to tangible life through the Church.

It's not that we "generate" the Word, because He was there before all else (Genesis 1:1-3, John 1:1 etc). No, but he does take on recognizable and meaningful dimensions in what we are and what we do. He is "incarnate", made flesh, in us.

Any feedback will be welcomed;

We are the witness of the Word
The declaration of the Lord
So eye can see what ear has heard
That heaven speaks in love to earth

That same Word spoke creation’s name
Gave time and space both form and frame
Heard before ears had listening
Before all else, spoke life to being


But see, he takes on human flesh
He binds Himself within our mesh
Invites our senses on him wash
Baptized into our world afresh

See Him, the One who walks on sea
The unseen Word seen visibly
He calls our name in love that we
May rise to touch true Deity


They ate with Him, who rose again
Who cooked, and blessed after His pain
Submerged in death by sin’s foul stain
He now lifts high the highest name

They saw him rise beyond the cloud
Now ears can’t hear his voice out loud
He speaks on through their story told
No more by sight, but by faith beheld


And yet we hear the Word that lives
We see the life His living gives
Our dark tumult His voice now moves
To save us through the parted waves

We are the witness of the Word
He speaks to us, through us He’s heard
And having heard, we say the Lord
Shall now speak life and love to earth

Does the Bible teach that trees eat people?

…the forest swallowed up more men that day than the sword. 2 Samuel 18:8

When I read this recently, the first image that sprung to my mind was the scene from the movie “Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”. In the movie, and in Tolkein’s book, the good guys have just defended the fortress of Helm’s Deep, the cavalry has literally charged over the hill, and the enemy army is sent fleeing into the forest where the trees take their revenge by devouring the survivors.

The Biblical account, which is, of course, 2,500 to 3,000 years older, follows a similar story line. King David has ascended the throne in Jerusalem, but is faced with a rebellion by his own son, Absalom. Through a sustained campaign of subversion, Absalom manages to mobilize a sizeable army of Israelites and David musters his forces to meet it. Here’s an excerpt from the Biblical narrative (2 Samuel 18:6-8, NIV):

David’s army marched out of the city to fight Israel, and the battle took place in the forest of Ephraim. There Israel’s troops were routed by David’s men, and the casualties that day were great—twenty thousand men. The battle spread out over the whole countryside, and the forest swallowed up more men that day than the sword.

So, does the Bible teach that trees eat people?

I don’t think so.

This, I believe, is a figure of speech. A quick survey of the surrounding text demonstrates that it is a detailed chronicle of this particular episode in David’s career. It is “naturalistic” in the sense that it does not overtly concern itself with the miraculous, or even the divine (in the text from 2 Samuel 17:24 to 18:18 God only gets a mention in the salutations of David's messengers).

The story is concerned with the relationship between David and Absalom, and projects a warning against disunity within the People of God. So, it would seem out of place to interpret the phrase literally, and a figure of speech appears to be a safe conclusion. Perhaps Absalom’s men took to the forest and simply deserted, or they got lost in the confusion, or they took to fighting among themselves, or they fell at the hands of bands loyal to David or even third party brigands or spies. Any, or all, of these possibilities can be adequately communicated with the convenient phrase “the forest swallowed up…men”.

So, if the Biblical texts use figures of speech, is all of it figurative?

No.

But, how do we know when we’re reading a figure of speech and when we’re not?

There are many instances in the Bible where the conclusions appear clear-cut. Just as I consider the trees-eating-people thing to be a figure of speech, I also think that nobody who seriously engages the Biblical text would argue that it treats Jesus, John or Paul as figurative people. That’s not to say that it might not describe them in figurative terms, and this is where Christian theologians and apologists begin to argue.

One such hot topic (please forgive the pun) this week is Hell. Conservative Evangelicals have reacted strongly against suggestions by Rob Bell that the traditional understanding of Hell (eternal, conscious torment for non-Believers after death) is not satisfactorily supported by the Biblical texts.

I first read about it in a Christianity Today article, and then on a FaceBook link. I’m not going to rehash what has been written already, but suffice to say here, that Bell might understand references to “everlasting fire” (Luke 16:19-31, Revelation 20:10 etc) to be figurative, which the Calvinists don’t like. In my brief reading of the blogs and opinions, what I see here is not a dispute about the reality of Hell, but rather its shape, and how we might understand what the Biblical texts say about it. It’s not even a dispute about the authority of the Bible. At is heart is a dispute about how figurative the texts are.

Two thoughts;

Firstly, in deciding what is figurative and what is not, we tend to follow our own preconceptions. Personally, I find the idea of trees eating people to be absurd, which is why I readily categorize it under “figurative”. And I have good reason to do so, or so I believe. But, I also believe in a “real”, not “figurative” resurrection of Christ, which might sound absurd to others. OK, so the latter case gets much more exegesis in the New Testament than the former, but what if the forest actually did eat Absalom’s army? I guess we’ll never know for sure, but I think it’s worth reminding myself that I don’t domineer my preconceptions as much as I’d like to think.

Secondly, the evidence is not conclusive. If it were, the match between Bell and the Calvinists would be called off. That’s not to say that one side’s case is not weaker or stronger than the other, or that neither side can be right or wrong. Absalom started with a truth (2 Samuel 15:3). He used it to foment a full-scale rebellion against his own father, but it was a truth nonetheless.

Finally, there is the issue of what we do with the evidence. It demands a verdict, but what do we do when it’s not enough to bring us to the verdict? It occurs to me that we defer to the evidence, when God has mandated that we judge it.

Another FaceBook link (thank’s Aaron) introduced me to net.bible.org, which is a comprehensive on-line commentary and translation resource. Launching from Genesis 1:2, and surfing the articles on the Holy Spirit, I came across this wonderful quote from Daniel B Wallace about his personal struggles in life and how they interacted with his profession as a (conservative, reformed) theologian:

Evidence alone cannot bridge the gap between us and God. As much as I wanted the evidence to go all the way, I couldn’t make it do so. At one point there was real despair in my heart. I had gotten so sucked in to the cult of objectivism that I forgot who it was who brought me to faith in the first place. Only when I grudgingly accepted the fact that some faith had to be involved—and that through the Spirit’s agency—could I get past my despair. The non-verifiable elements of the faith had become an embarrassment to me, rather than an anchor.

Evanliberal

This week, I propose a new word, or category, if you like: Evanliberalism.

My intention is to combine the best of evangelicalism and liberalism, whilst leaving out the worst.

What? I hear my evangelical colleagues say; is there a good side to liberalism?. Yes there is.

Say again? I hear, when the wheels start to grind and engage; is there a bad side to evangelicalism?. Yes there is, and in recent weeks I have run into it on a number of occasions.

Kindly allow me to explain.

My starting point is the person and work of Jesus Christ, as described in the canonical Bible. For better or for worse, I have decided that He is the way, the truth and the life, and no-one has access to the Father except by Him, just as He claimed in John 14:6. To me, this is not simply an intellectual proposition, but something that provides the script by which I live my life. I have adopted this perspective of Jesus because this is how the Biblical authors describe Him, and they should know better than I, having enjoyed a closer proximity to the historical person of Jesus.

(That’s a posh way of saying “they were there, dude, listen to what they’re saying”).

Expanding this further, I believe firmly that Jesus taught a Gospel of Grace, followed by Paul and the other authors of the New Testament, though they each had different ways of expressing it. Jesus framed it in terms of the Kingdom; Paul framed it in terms of justification. Both railed against the sense of self-entitlement that arises when we rely on something other than the Grace of God, even in part.

For example, in Matthew 3:9 and Luke 3:8, Jesus says to the Pharisees and Sadducees And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. I believe that Jesus’ point here is that they were relying on their Jewish ancestry to justify their inclusion in the People of God, and hence their access to God.

According to Genesis 12:2-3 and Genesis 15:19, God entered into a covenant with Abraham and his children, to be their God for all time. The Pharisees and Sadducees knew this, and they knew they were Abraham’s descendants (they had the genealogies), so they thought they were “set”. However, as Jesus points out, they weren’t. The reason, according to Jesus, was that they didn’t rely on God’s Grace, but on their own qualifications. They believed they were entitled to God because of something they had, and Jesus rebukes them for it. He refutes their claim to be Abraham’s children, despite the geneaologies, because they didn’t do what Abraham did (John 8:39), and if there was one thing that marked what Abraham did, it was his faith (Genesis 15:6). They relied on themselves, not on God.

Paul later wrote For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9). I am of the opinion that by “works” Paul does not strictly mean “moral good deeds”. What he has in view, broadly, are “religious” works. This makes sense because he equivocates between “works” as something we do, and “works” as something done to us, particularly in his letter to the Romans.

Consider the “works” that made a Jew a Jew; circumcision and breeding (things done to him) and “moral good deeds”, rites and festivals (things done by him). What Paul argues is that, as fully qualified Jew, he cannot use these works to get God to save him; if he could, then he would have something to boast about but he says he doesn’t. From Paul’s perspective, the re-centering of the legacy of Abraham on faith restores the divine mandate; we are Abraham’s children if we share in his faith, and this is what justifies our claim to the covenant of God.

Incidentally, this also opens the Gospel up to the gentiles – those of us who cannot claim to hold some of Abraham’s DNA – because we can become his heirs if we enter into the kind of faith he had, despite our gentile heritage.

Please forgive the apparent digression, but I hope to have demonstrated how crucial this Gospel of Grace is to the message of Jesus and His followers. It is rooted deep within the Biblical tradition and the Christian Church, at its best, has clung to it fiercely (for a brief review of what the Church Fathers taught, see here - though the website is “JustForCatholics”, I cannot think of any evangelical who would baulk at any of these statements).

I acknowledge that the Gospel of Grace can be explored in a variety of ways, but at it’s core, as I hoped to have demonstrated, is the impulse that we do not merit our privileges to God by anything that we have. Our access to God rests exclusively and solely on the work and person of Christ Jesus. We need faith to make the connection, but faith is what happens when I reach outside of myself to Him and I put my reliance on what He has. Put another way, we do not pre-qualify for God’s mercy and there’s nothing we can do to improve or increase it. (If anything, we pre-qualify for His wrath.)

I have found that evangelicalism, at its best, is rightly proud of maintaining and fostering this tradition, expositing it from the Bible, from which it gets its authority. However, there are elements within it that have become the very thing it contends with. These elements need to be challenged, and this is where liberalism, at it’s best, should be allowed to speak.

For example, this week I caused something of a rupture among the Evangelicals posting on MRM by suggesting that the Documentary Hypothesis had some merit. To me, this is a discussion about the authorship of the “Books of Moses”, or the Pentateuch (the first five books in the Bible - Genesis to Deuteronomy). It is not a discussion about the historicity of the stories in the Books of Moses, or the theology that they convey.

The Documentary Hypothesis holds that the “Books of Moses” were probably written by a number of authors and not by Moses alone, or even by Moses at all. The basic reasons for this are that the text is uneven (it speaks with several different “accents”); some statements are anachronistic (e.g. the Chaldeans might not have been in Ur at the time of Moses – see Genesis 11:28, 11:31 and 15:7); and there is nothing in the text itself that compels us to believe that Moses wrote it, though he frequently speaks in first person, particularly in the closing sermons at the end of Deuteronomy.

As some have rightly pointed out, Jesus believed that Moses was a historical person (they even had a conversation at Jesus’ Transfiguration, see Matthew 17:1-12, Mark 9:2-13, Luke 9:28-38), and he associates the giving of the law with Moses’ story. But, He doesn’t downright say that Moses wrote the entire compilation. Even Jesus does not compel us to believe the authorship of Moses throughout these books.

The responses I got from evangelicals were varied, but mostly negative. Some were willing to concede that Moses might have incorporated earlier traditions within his composition; others recoiled at the prospect that I had swallowed the Graf-Wellhausen theory in its entirety (which I haven’t – it postulates that the religion of Israel started out with folk polytheism and was later recast to fit the monotheistic agenda of the Temple Cult, as evident from the postulated JEDP redaction of the Scriptures). The worst reactions suggested that I could not possibly hold to a faith in Christ, whilst querying the authorship of Moses in these books.

Actually, I am quite open to discussing the merits of the case, one way or another. I don’t discount the possibility that Moses wrote the “Books of Moses”, but it looks like he didn’t (at least, not in their entirety). The notion that he did comes from an extra-Biblical tradition, and evangelicals are usually dismissive of what they perceive as extra-Biblical traditions.

The problem with the more extreme reactions, in my opinion, is that they are self-defeating. They were posted in the context of trying to get Mormons engage the evidence, particularly the known history of Joseph Smith and the history of the movement. Yet, here were evangelicals who could not hold themselves to the standards that they expected of those on the other side of the table – their reaction to the evidence was to deny it.

Worse, they had conflated a discussion on the authorship of the Books of Moses with the theology of faith in Christ. They questioned my faith in Christ because of it.

Hold on there, didn’t we previously say “saved by grace alone through faith alone”? Now, it seems, I can only be saved by believing in Christ and by believing that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible.

This is where I get very worried about evangelicalism.

As soon as we put the ”and” in, we open ourselves up to all sorts of silliness (this is one of my chief criticisms of Mormonism). We slide into believing that we are saved by Christ and our strictly traditional interpretation of scripture; or Christ and our membership of a certain Church or tradition; or Christ and our baptism; or Christ and my successful marriage and family life. All of these additions, and it doesn’t matter which formula you use, ultimately give us something that we could boast in; they provide us with a foundation upon which we can claim some kind of entitlement to God. Ultimately, then, they defeat the Gospel of Grace that evangelicalism has so rightly held forth.

Liberalism has something to say in this context, and it is this; the Bible (which I believe is the word of God) is literature. Until it becomes something else, it is therefore entirely appropriate to treat it as such.

As a work of literature, it spends a significant amount of its time conveying its message by story; story makes up about 40% of the Bible. In other words, it is an important feature of what we believe to be the Word of God.

This feature ought to be welcomed by evangelicals because it provides a highly robust response to those who get tangled up with issues such as interpretation. What I mean is, it is easy to see the grace of the father welcoming back the prodigal son, for example, no matter what variations of words you use.

As I have tried to explain earlier (clumsily), the Bible invites us to live in these stories, and if we're solely concerned about affirming their accuracy or historicity, then we've lost the plot. I took some flak over that one, to the point of refusing to publish the more noxious posts.

I’m a big fan of the Bible. I like to describe myself as a Bible-fan and hopefully not a Bible-basher. It’s a book with a message that deserves better treatment than it usually gets. When I think of the poor treatment dished out on it, I think of the silliness of the skeptics on one extreme and the silliness of those who don't get what "story" is about.

The Bible might be Divinely Commissioned, but it still invites us to engage it within its own context in a meaningful way. It begs us to wrestle with it, just as God wrestled with Jacob until daybreak at the Jabbok ford in Genesis 32:22-31.

When Jesus said “Let the little children come to me” (Matthew 19:14, Mark 10:14, Luke 18:16), I don’t think He expected them to arrive in an orderly, subdued and dead-serious manner. I believe He expected them to jump all over Him, climbing on Him, prodding Him and tickling Him as kids do. It was His disciples who tried to defend Jesus from this boisterous onslaught, and He rebukes them for it. Since when did Christians start to believe that they have to defend Christ by shepherding honest inquiries away from Him?

I believe that when we scrutinize, probe, query and, yes, wrestle with the Bible, we actually uphold and honor the tradition in which it was written. This is what some elements of evangelicalism appear to deny, and if that’s the case, you can call be an evanliberal.

Does John 20:17 disprove the Trinity?

I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.

I have found this verse to be used on more than a few occasions as an objection to the doctrine of the Trinity. So is this a “proof text” that the Christian Church got into apostasy around the fourth century AD to the extent that it’s worship of Jesus Christ is blasphemy? Here’s my response.

The Text

Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”

“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”

Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”

Jesus said to her, “Mary.”

She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).

Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her.

John 20:11-18

The Book

This passage occurs towards the end of the Gospel of John. The evidence for the authorship of the Gospel is not incontrovertible, but, as the New Bible Commentary concludes, “In the face of … various opinions it is difficult to be dogmatic, but it is reasonable to suppose that the internal and external evidence points to John the apostle as author.” Given that John probably died in the first years of the second century AD, the timeframe for the writing of the Gospel is probably around the end of the first century AD.

So, it is likely that the whole Gospel was written by a single (human) author. Alternatively, we could postulate that it was redacted by a number of authors (which seems to be the case for the “Books of Moses”), but the Gospel has an internal literary consistency and an outlook that points to a single author, or at least a group of authors with a common style and outlook.

My point here is simply that the author who wrote John 20:17, also wrote the rest of John (with the possible exception of John 7:53 – 8:11). If he was proposing that Jesus Christ was separate to God, he would have contradicted his own opening statements in John 1:1-3. That’s actually a possibility if you believe the Bible to be a disparate collection of confused and unrelated texts, but if, like me, you believe that it is Divinely Commissioned, then this possibility is not an option. What we are left with, then, is not that John was confused, but that we might be confused in understanding what he was trying to say.

The Story

Jesus has just been crucified and buried. John’s account of Mary’s witness of the resurrection is one of five such accounts in John 20, which are arranged in a chiastic structure. The first and fifth deal with people who do not see him; Mary’s story (number 2) and Thomas’ (number 4) deal with people who see him, yet struggle to believe what they see; and the central account deals with a public, shared encounter with the risen Christ. Such a literary structure indicates that the author has deliberately and consciously arranged his material, and it may be inferred that the inclusion Jesus’ statement in John 20:17 is likewise deliberate and intentional.

The flow of the narrative in Mary’s story is remarkably natural and unforced. Though John sees special significance in what’s going on, there’s no sense that it is somehow rehearsed or staged. Mary goes to the tomb to mourn for her dead son. When she finds the tomb empty, her first reaction is that someone has taken the body, and her immediate suspicions fall on the person she thinks is the gardener. When she realizes that he’s not the gardener, but rather the son she thought was dead, she grabs him. It is at this point that Jesus says, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’”. Mary then goes to the disciples and tells them. She effectively becomes the first Apostle to the Apostles – the first with the gospel of the Risen One.

There is an on-line commentary at BibleGateway that's worth reading.

The preamble to the BibleGateway commentary infers from John 20 that Jesus deals with five barriers to faith; in Mary’s case it is grief. She grieves for her dead son, but when she finds him alive, she grabs hold of him, and Jesus has to command her to let go. We cannot let the cherished memory of a loved one halt our walk of faith.

My reading also indicates that we should not attempt to tie Christ down. He is Lord, and He does things His own way. Having found Him, Mary does not want to let Him go to do His own business, but this impulse is not faith. We have to let Christ do things in His own way, trusting in Him to come or go as He sees fit. We cannot “mother” him. Despite her instincts, Mary summons enough faith to obey, and she lets Him go. If the Mother of God needs to learn obedience, then so do we all.

The reason why Mary needs to let Him go is provided by Jesus Himself, who tells her that he is still “in transit”. He is on a journey that He must complete, else the promised Holy Spirit will not come (see John 16:7).

The Theology

Plainly, John 20:17 shows that the Father and the Son are not the same. (John 16:7 also demonstrates that the Holy Spirit is not the same either.) This is not the only instance; there are several accounts of the Father speaking to the Son (Matt 3:17, Matt 17:5 etc). For me the most striking differentiation is when the Son declares that He does not know what is on the Father’s mind in the context of His own return (Matt 24:36).

Though this has been used in an attempt to disprove the Trinity, it actually disproves Modalism and Sabellianism, both of which are opposed to Trinitarianism. So, it doesn’t contend with Trinitarianism, rather it contends with the enemies of Trinitarianism.

The doctrine of the Trinity actually supports the idea that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are distinct. However, the Trinity frames their distinctness by referring to them as “persons” within the One Godhead. However, the Trinity also acknowledges that there is One God (e.g. Isaiah 45:5), which discounts the possibility that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are separate “Gods” in some kind of divine council. The Christian Creeds enjoin Christians to worship the One God, not three, else they would be polytheists, contradicting the first of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:3).

If you’re reading this and wondering how it is possible to hold onto the seemingly contradictory notions that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are three persons and yet One God, then you would not be the first. The fact is, however, that the Bible teaches persistently that there is One God whom we should worship, yet the first Christians had no problem in worshipping Jesus Christ, as if He were that One God (see Matt 28:9, 28:17). Hold this in tension with the fact that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are separate persons (as John 20:17 ably demonstrates), and you have the basic ingredients for the doctrine of the Trinity. If you don’t like the term “Trinity”, then I would be happy to hear from you if you’ve got a better suggestion.

Conclusion

John 20:17 plainly demonstrates that the Father and Son are distinct. However, the doctrine of the Trinity supports this distinction, whilst maintaining the One-ness of God. If it disproves anything, John 20:17 disproves some of the main rivals to the Trinity, not the Trinity itself.

Further, the Gospel of John was written well before the Fourth Century, so the introduction of the idea of the Trinity is there, within living memory of Jesus' first Apostles (those who saw Him in the flesh). It was not until later, when competing theories arose, that the Church Fathers saw fit to articulate it in the language of the Creeds.

God questions from a 6 year old

This week, a colleague of mine sent me an email. She explained that her 6 year old son had been asking her questions about God, and could I help answer them. I wrote back as soon as I could with the following response.

(NB I have edited it lightly, by gathering my footnotes in the "footer")

Who is God and how was he born?

I’ll try to relate this in language that a 6 year old can understand, but I’ve put in some “adult” notes to try to help you make sense of it, too.

I’ll stick to the Bible on this, but I think it is fair to say that different people and different religions have very different views, and they are not all the same. Not everybody is going to agree on this (1).

God is bigger, and stranger, than any of us can possibly imagine. If you can imagine how big the universe is, then you also need to imagine that the universe exists within God to get an idea of just how big He is. That means that we will never fully understand everything there is to know about Him. However, we can know Him. You might not be able to understand everything about your Mum and Dad, but you know them because you talk to them, you know what they like and what they don’t like and in many ways you are just like them (2).

So, God created the universe, the world and you and me. We live in the world that God has created. God was there before the universe started, He is there now, and He will be there after it has finished. God wasn’t born and He will not die. He was always God and He always will be. This is one thing that’s very different between God and us (3).

One day, God decided that he wanted us to see Him as He truly is. He knew that we could look at all the stars and read all the books and ask everybody who knew something about Him, but it would never be like actually meeting Him. So, He came into our world. He came as a baby that grew into a man – Jesus Christ, who was born on Christmas Day, died on Good Friday and rose again on Easter Sunday. Finally, we could see for ourselves what He is like (4).

If I were God, and I were to come into the world that I made and ruled over, I think I would make myself King. I think I would set myself up in the most expensive palace, and I’d get my servants to run around after me, doing all the chores, doing all the boring stuff, and looking after my interests.

When the real God came into our world, He did things differently. Instead of getting us to serve Him, He served us. Instead of grabbing all the toys for Himself, He gave everything away. Instead of setting Himself up in a Royal Palace, He made Himself homeless. Instead of setting things up so that He could live forever, He died on a cross so that we could live. The story doesn’t end there, though. The Bible tells us He was raised to life, and He lives today.

So, when you ask me “who is God”, the face that comes to my mind is the face of Jesus. When you ask me “what is he like”, the story that comes to my mind is the story of Jesus.

There’s a poem in the Bible that was written shortly after Jesus had come to our world. It tells us how we should react to this story:

Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself.
He had equal status with God but didn't think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what.
Not at all.
When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human!
Having become human, he stayed human.
It was an incredibly humbling process.
He didn't claim special privileges.
Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that—a crucifixion.
Because of that obedience, God lifted him high and honored him far beyond anyone or anything, ever, so that all created beings in heaven and on earth—even those long ago dead and buried—will bow in worship before this Jesus Christ, and call out in praise that he is the Master of all, to the glorious honor of God the Father.

Philippians 2:5-11. This version from “The Message”. See also the NIV translation for a more “formal” rendering.

Notes:
1 Some people have tried to reconcile the world’s religions through syncretism. IMO, syncretism doesn’t work, and we just have to come to terms with the fact that the religions cannot be reconciled theologically
2 Much of this stems from the opening chapter of the Bible in Genesis 1, particularly Genesis 1:27. Also, there is a difference between understanding and knowing, and anyone who claims to fully understand God has plainly lost the plot.
3 Much of this stems from the title “Alpha and Omega” that is applied to God in Revelation 1:8, and a slew of other verses that I regularly refer to when I contend with people who insist that God was created, or that he had his own heavenly father and mother, e.g. Mormonism.
4 This is what theologians call the Incarnation – the Word made flesh, as in John 1:14.