The cliffs of Glory
Luke 20.27-40
2 Kings 6.8-23
Preached Canberra Baptist Church 11 Nov 2007

I want to reflect with you today about stewardship, our management under God of creation. We often think (as we did last week) about stewardship of resources, of assets, skills and wealth. But stewardship also involves the management our community exercises of policy and law, of politics and diplomacy. We are collectively given control not only of money but of legislation, of the ordering of human affairs, of education, of international relations. How do we deal with these in our common life?

The engagement of Jesus with the Sadducees in Luke 20.27-40 points to how we might engage some of these issues.

The Sadducees were an elite priestly movement which emerged in Israel after the period of Exile in Babylon. Part of their theology was to say there is no resurrection. They came to Jesus with a trick question. The question involved the custom of ‘levirate marriage’. Where a man died and left his wife childless, it was the job of the man’s brother to take the widow as another wife and father children by her for his dead brother. Details of this practice can be found in Genesis 38 and Deuteronomy 25.5ff.  At this point in the conversation people start thinking uncomfortably about their in-laws but we don’t need to go there because even in Jesus time there was a question as to whether the custom was still active.

The Sadducees had a clever trick question. There are seven brothers. The eldest one marries a woman but then dies before she becomes pregnant so the second brother marries her. But before she can have children he dies so the third brother marries her. Before there are any children of their union he dies and the fourth brother steps up to the marriage and so on until all seven have been her husband and all have died. Whose wife will she be in the Resurrection? 

Before we go any further many are uncomfortable about the implications of this law for gender relations:

1. It depicts women as chattels to be handed from man to man. This is offensive to modern sensibilities and raises a feminist critique of the place of women in Israelite society.
2. It reflects a society without social security or a place for a liberated, ‘unconnected’ woman – it sought to provide a measure of security and belonging for women who would otherwise be vulnerable and to perpetuate the name and heritage of a man who died.

We will return to the moral and social evaluation of the practices at the heart of this story once we have explored the nature of the Sadducees’ method in their argument and the method involved in the reply of Jesus.

The logic of the Saducees constructs the major premises of the argument in terms of existing legal arrangements, the practice of levirate marriage. Having established the unlikely but possible example of the woman married to seven husbands, the Sadducees then project these existing legal arrangements onto the future expectation of Resurrection to show how pointless and even ridiculous are these future expectations.

In reply Jesus does exactly the opposite:  he places current arrangements within the horizon of the future. Marriage itself is revealed as something that is transitory, something that is only intelligible within the structures of the present age. He then expounds the nature of the age to come where we live out of a new reality and know ourselves in new ways – not as husband and wife, widow and deceased, but primarily as children of God, children of resurrection. The present, Jesus says, must be understood and lived in the light of the future, not vice versa.

At the heart of this encounter is a deep struggle between tradition as known in present experience, and a transformed future. This struggle is still going on very much in the general community but very much within the community of faith. There is a great struggle in the church about whether existing arrangements for the ordering of human affairs are going to determine the shape of the future.

There is much in the Bible that reflects the existing state of human affairs when it was written. This is seen in the some of the regulations and laws and stories that it tells. The law of levirate marriage has long been discarded but, for example, only 200 years ago people were using the Bible and its laws and principles to defend the institution of slavery. William Wilberforce and his friends had a long battle to get people to see that, however much the Bible seemed to approve slavery there was no room for it in God’s future. The customs of the present world, however well attested in the book, had to yield to a vision of humanity embodied in God’s coming kingdom.

Far closer to home and thoroughly contemporary is the debate within the churches about the place of women. Last month and in this city, the Anglican Church in Australia has debated whether its own laws, based on the Bible, will allow women Bishops (happily accepting the view of their own Appellant Tribunal that it does). Only on Friday the Anglican Synod on Melbourne changed its By-laws to permit women bishops. But there are still dioceses and churches from preventing women becoming priests, let alone bishops.

In very recent years the Presbyterian Church in Australia has retreated from ordaining women as ministers and is now even retreating from ordaining women as elders. I don’t talk about this to criticize these churches, but to illustrate that this theological contest between the method  of the Sadducees and the method of Jesus is thoroughly contemporary. The Sadducean logic is that the way things were in the Bible are held to determine the future. Some laws (like the requirement to marry your brother’s widow) may be no longer operative, and yet others, like women not having authority in the church, are held to continue.

But some of us want to follow Jesus. We see the way things are destined to be in God’s future is the fundamental reality. How we order affairs within the church and how Christians want to order affairs within the world must be worked out in the light of God’s future. It is not the way things are that will determine the future, but the future that must be allowed to critique the way things are. This even includes how we are to read and interpret the Bible. Where we can see clear teaching about the shape of God’s future that has to be the interpretive lens through which we evaluate the Bible’s description and ordering of what was then its present context and custom. So, to come back to the place of women in the church, we would the text “In Christ there is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3.28) God’s future in the Kingdom of God and the authoritative principle for the church.

On the edge of Cairo stand the hills of Mokhattam. Mokhattam as a locality houses a town made up of the city’s rubbish collectors. It is a dirty smelly place where hundreds of thousands live. They are mostly Christians. They go out each morning on their donkey carts to collect the rubbish of Cairo and bring it back to their quarter, to sort through it to see if anything can be recycled. On the cliffs behind the town, a Polish artist has carved and painted vast images of Christ in glory: Christ transfigured, Christ resurrected and ascended into heaven. When these people come back carrying  their rubbish they face these images of glory on the cliffs. Then they remember that they are not just the citizens of Mokhattam. They are even now citizens of the Kingdom of God. In the cliffs of glory their present experience and status is confronted by the transfiguring message of the future that is seen in the risen Jesus. For those of us who believe all human activity has to be understood and undertaken in view of the cliffs of glory.

This is exactly what happens in 2 Kings 6 when the Arameans rose against Dothan. The king of Aram had a serious security problem: someone was leaking his decisions to the enemy. When he confronted his officers they told him that it wasn’t a leak, it was the prophet Elisha who ‘tells the king of Israel  the words that you speak in your bedchamber’ (v.12). Having discovered the nature of the security threat the king decides on military action and travelling in force by night he encircles the city of Dothan.  Confronted by the terrifying reality of earthly power Elisha’s attendant cries “Alas, master what shall we do?” Elisha then prayed that the man’s eyes might be opened to see the vast array of horses and chariots of fire, the great host of heaven, on the surrounding mountains. He could see the cliffs of glory, the power of God that totally changed the balance of realities that others were trying to understand and manage. Throughout the story we can see this collision between God’s framing of problem and response and the usual Realpolitik that operates in human affairs. When the armies of Aram are led quietly into the city of Samaria where they are powerless, you can almost hear the childish glee in the words of the king of Israel – “Father, shall I kill them? Shall I kill them?” No, says Elisha, feed them and send them home! The text says “The Arameans no longer came raiding into the land of Israel”. Seeing the cliffs of glory and the soldiers of the future, Elisha was able to transform current realities, turn battle into banquet, and overturn the threat of long term war.

It is one thing to talk about being guided by a vision of the future, but how we do tell which vision? What is written on the cliffs of glory? Is it the projection of our fantasies and magical answers to today’s issues?  There are suicide bombers who go about their murderous work convinced that Paradise and pretty companions await them. Their vision of glory does not critique but validates their violence. There are fundamentalist Christians who are quite happy to blow up the Middle East in violent conflagration because their vision of glory holds this a vital part of the future in which Jesus miraculously returns to saves the world. How can we discern the shape of the cliffs of glory?

Again the answer is to be found in Jesus who in responding to the Sadducees anchors his vision of the future, his evidence for resurrection, deep in the foundational experience of Israel’s God – the encounter with Moses in the burning bush. Similarly, each of us has to reflect on us what are the foundational aspects of our vision of the future, what teachings of Jesus and the NT inform us most accurately of the Kingdom of God, that in-breaking reality that is the power which is to shape the human future.

There are two projects that we are exploring together as a church that reflect the cliffs of glory. (still being worked through – not finally agreed)

1. The Young Adults Peace House.  Working for peace in the family, in our streets, on the international stage.   It has all the marks of a little donkey cart operation – a rented house, a bunch of young adult volunteers, a youth minister working half-time. But it reflects some of the great themes painted on on the cliffs of glory, the Biblical vision of future reconciliation, the preaching and work of Jesus, the Prince of Peace.

1. Community garden. In a time of unprecedented concern about climate change, about water and about the future of food production in a drier Australia. There are concerns about agri-business, about factory farming, the patenting of seeds and genetic manipulation of food stocks. Against this background an initiative like the community garden presents a laboratory for the practical exploration of our stewardship of creation, of a vision of a future of abundance, of sharing.

Whether its shared projects like these or the individual activities of work and community service, we all. like the citizens of Mokhattam, go out day by day with our little donkey carts, collecting the detritus of each day and sorting it through.  Some of us are workers on the policy front.  We sort stuff through and see if there is something we can use or recycle or make good out of. Some of us are retired people, serving our community where we can. Some of us are lawyers, some are teachers, some workers in the health industry. Some of us can do nothing actively, yet, as John Milton saw “they also serve who only stand and wait.” All of us are reading the papers and working out how we will vote – what shape we think our future government should give to our common life. Few of us have our hands on the levers that will make huge impacts on the shape of our future. But all of us are working before the cliffs of glory, resplendent with the drama of the risen Christ.  He is not just a religious figure but the Lord of the future, the Pioneer of tomorrow, and we are called to lift up our eyes, catch that vision, and do our everyday work within the light of his reflected glory!