The Power of God unto Salvation

(Isaiah 9:1-4; Matthew 4:12-25; I Cor 1:10-18)

The last couple of weeks the awful floods across our country, and especially in Queensland, have dominated the minds and hearts of our nation. Those terrible images of raging water surging down the main streets of towns and villages; cars and trucks tossing around in them like twigs; trees uprooted and flung against the pylons of bridges until both are twisted like string; people standing on lonely roof tops surrounded by a sea of dark water; animals, domestic and wild, marooned on tiny islands of ground not yet inundated; and rain streaming from thunder clouds like a torrent from the heavens. Shocking, pain filled images.

And alongside these, pictures of great courage, grit and selflessness. A young man gently carrying an old woman through the flood toward a boat that would take her to safety. An older man in an orange coat dangling from the end of a swaying rope, the roaring blades of a helicopter thrashing above him, his hand reaching out to a couple huddled on the roof of their drowning house. A woman with a harness around her shoulders, chest deep in water, working her way against the tide toward a car in which a number of people were trapped. And hundreds of ordinary people just there to do what can be done, in their hands a shovel, or a basket of scones, or bottles of clean water, or bandages and aspirin. Wonderful, inspiring images.

These pictures crowd my mind as I come to the texts that are set for us today. And for better or worse they have shaped my response. The thing that stands out for me from Isaiah and from Matthew is the description they give of God’s way in the world; the path that God cuts in the dense thickets of time. Five things are named. (i) Light. Both the prophet and the Gospel writer use the same words. ‘The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.’ (ii) Joy. ‘You [meaning God] have multiplied the nation, you have increased its joy; they rejoice before you as with joy at the harvest.’ (iii) Liberation. ‘For the yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you [God] have broken …’ (iv) Healing. ‘Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.’ (v) Finally, life. Matthew reads Isaiah’s words about light, and joy, and liberation as referring primarily to Jesus. In the light of the resurrection of Jesus, he reworks Isaiah’s words: ‘the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, (a direct quote; but then …) and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.’

Two things to note about all this: (i) These five actions of God appear most obvious in face of their opposites; that is in circumstances where they are in conflict and threat. The light shines brightest where people sit in darkness. Joy emerges in its true colours where grief and loss are most acute. Liberation is experienced when burden, bondage and oppression are most painfully felt. Healing is known best where pain and sickness abound. And life is felt in its true beauty and depth where the shadow of death seems triumphant. God’s grace in known best, perhaps, in the conquest of its opposition. And (ii) the 5 actions of God described here are not very religious. Light, joy, freedom, health and life are the stuff of being in the world, not just in the church; they are very much to do with bodies and not just with souls. And that’s important.

For this reason, if no other. The SES and other workers in Queensland and elsewhere are a living expression of the life of God in the middle of human struggle, if Isaiah and Matthew are reliable guides as to God’s truth in human experience. They, the SES, may not see themselves in this way, of course. They probably don’t. But Isaiah does. The light of a helicopter lamp slashing the watery dark and picking out a teenage stuck in the branch of a tree; the joy on the face of a mother reunited with a child that had been missing; the liberation of a family from the threat of rising waters through a boat that rides them to safety; the doctor’s touch that brings relief to terrible pain; the gift of life where there seemed only the threat of death. These things we have seen time and again on the tele. And this is where God’s Spirit works in the world; this is God’s way in the world; this is God’s bearing of the world. Believers or unbelievers, all Australians have seen in these days, what light, joy, liberation, healing and life mean in concrete, fundamental, grass roots ways to all of us, but especially to those in need. And we have seen also, how important it is to take our part where we can in the expression and extension of these basic goods. Life cannot flourish, and especially in situations of danger, unless these good things also abound in our society, and abound the more as adversity increases.

As a human being, I feel both a great sorrow and a great gratitude in face of these terrible events; sorrow that such suffering has happened; gratitude to all those brave people who lived out the five great gifts: light, joy, liberation, healing, life in our midst. But as a believer, and in the light of these biblical texts, I feel also that both sorrow and thanks transcend the human realm and point to that final context of life’s experience, the truth and love of God. The suffering of people in darkness, grief, bondage, sickness and death is the suffering of God with the very same enemies. The redemptive realities of light, joy, liberation, healing and life in the face of threat are the redemptive qualities of God in and through the very same circumstances.

I know that such theological claims are hotly debated. Someone who has suffered through these terrible times may well feel plain offended by them. If God has any involvement anywhere in the world, why didn’t God just stop it before it all got going? I am silent before such depth of human feeling. It speaks an experiential truth, a truth undergone. And it has my deepest respect.

I risk such theological thoughts, not because I can prove them on the basis of experience, mine or other people’s. Though I must confess again how moved I have been by the light, joy, liberation, healing and life that are playing out in our land these days. It is very impressive. But it doesn’t establish theological truth.

So I want to turn finally to the little section of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that we read alongside the great Isaiah and Matthew texts. If in these latter texts we are in the heady clouds of light, liberation and life. With Paul we are smack bang in the middles of ordinary, messy church life. ‘I hear from Chleo’s people,’ writes Paul, ‘that there are quarrels amongst you, my brothers and sisters.’ Go on! Quarrels in the church! Yep, even then, and with Paul as senior minister! ‘I’m for Paul,’ says this one. ‘No I’m for Apollos,’ says the next. ‘No you’re both wrong,’ says a third. ‘Cephas (ie, Peter’s) the ticket.’ Paul is frustrated. ‘You’re looking in the wrong direction,’ he says, ‘and as a result you’re not seeing clearly what is to be seen. Don’t look at Paul, or at Apollos, or at Peter. But look with them at what God is in Jesus Christ.’ And if you do that you will find that God has done something for you and God has done something in you; that you cannot do for yourself or in yourself. And that ‘for’ and ‘in’ are crucial.

The ‘for’ has to do with the cross of Christ. ‘Was Paul crucified for you?’ asks Paul, in a voice dripping with irony. Of course not; not in any sense that matters. It is God in Christ that underwent something for you on the cross. It is God’s ‘for you’ that is in play here, not any human ‘for you’, Paul’s or anybody else’s. And that gives it universal significance. When God undergoes something, the ground of all reality, the Creator of all, undergoes something, and that effects everything. What? What does God undergo in the cross that is relevant to what we have been facing? That’s a big question. But in this context I would say that God in Christ on the cross undergoes all the threats, pains, negations, losses that characterize the opposition to light, joy, liberation, healing and life. God takes into God’s own heart, that is, into God’s own eternal life, darkness, grief, bondage, infirmity and finally death; the things that threaten and hurt our human life, and the life also of the more than human world. God’s takes these things and makes them God’s own concern. The cross means God takes us, especially when we are swamped by such threats, into God’s own life and bears us up and in the threats; bear us up and in darkness, grief, bondage infirmity and death. God’s pain is the pain of the world. But God remains God in that pain, which means remains sovereign Lord of the enemy. So that not darkness but light, not grief but joy, not bondage but freedom, not infirmity but wholeness, not death but life has the final word in the struggle between God and the negativity that threatens God’s world. And that final word is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. God undergoes but does not go under in this struggle. And God undergoes it ‘for us’ so that we, too, might not ‘go under’ to nothingness.

And that brings us to the second of Paul’s claims: God in Christ does something ‘in’ us. ‘Were you baptized in the name of Paul?’ he asks, again with heavy irony. Of course not. You were baptized in the name of Christ. Baptism means to be drawn into the reality of this crucified and risen Christ; which means to be drawn into, to participate livingly in, the victory which God in Christ achieved over darkness, grief, bondage, infirmity and death. Christ’s conquest of these threats becomes open to us. In faith, baptism gives us living access to God’s light, joy, freedom, healing and life. That is what it means to live the baptized life.

And that is why for me, as a believer, seeing the actions of the SES and other helpers, inspires me, moves me, and makes me, in a strange way, feel much at home in the church and in Australia at this time. For this is what God is about in all the world. This is what Christ’s journey to the cross expresses and releases in the life of God’s whole creation. God undergoes the sorrow and pain and threat that so often shape and mar our human lives. And in undergoing it reveals the divine determination and divine promise that the darkness, whatever it is, will not finally extinguish God’s light; that grief and loss, however severe, will not vanquish God’s joy; that bondage, however experienced, will not finally defeat God’s freedom; that infirmity, however pervasive, will not finally break God’s wholeness to pieces; and that, strangest of all, death, however impenetrable, will not finally triumph over God’s life. And if that is the final truth, the eternal truth, God’s truth, then we are emboldened to give that truth whatever partial and practical expression we can in penultimate struggles we face with famine, flood, fire, injustice, war, sin, death and whatever other threats rise up around us. And to celebrate this with others, believers or unbelievers, who with us give themselves to this truth.

This is the message about the cross, according to Paul. And yes it may sound strange and even foolish to many, and maybe sometimes to us, too. But we have seen it with our own eyes at work in our land. And to us, who have known God’s actions in the world in Christ, it is the power of God to salvation.

Graeme Garrett

Canberra Baptist Church

Third Sunday after Epiphany

23 January 2011