Some of this appears in the comment tread on yesterday’s post, but I thought it needed to be expanded into a post in its own right as well. As we consider what it means to think in terms of “place” and the church’s life, I want to be clear. My point is not that the church should not seek concretely dwell in and be concerned for its particular context. Rather my point is that we need to look not to “place” as a sort of cultural-theological category but rather need to ask “What place? Which spaces?” Inhabiting the culture of suburban affluence is not the same thing as inhabiting the culture of the urban ghetto, and we cannot include them both under the rubric of “place”, at least not if we are talking about how to avoid ideology.

In some of these discussions, as is often the case the language of “incarnation” has come up. If we relativize “place,” does that amount to a denial of the incarnation, in which God in Christ comes and dwells in a particular place and culture? If we are to be in the world as Christ himself was, does that not also mean that the church ought to enculturate itself, establishing rootedness, identity and longevity by stabilizing its life in a particular place, thus imitating and participating in Christ’s incarnation?

This use of “incarnation” I take to be an extremely widespread problem in a lot of contemporary ecclesiological and missional discourse and practice. It relies on an an unbiblical expansion of “incarnation” into a theological category that neglects the actual meaning of that doctrine in terms of the concrete history of Jesus Christ. That is to say, “incarnation” does not name a broad theological principle or metaphysical-ecclesiological quality. Rather it is a doctrine about Christ’s singular person and work that is derived from the radical event of his crucifixion and resurrection. “Incarnation” must be understood concretely in terms of Christ’s own history, his concrete story.

Taken in that light it becomes clear that the incarnation does not sanctify “place” (rootedness, cultural identity, etc.), though it continues to be taken that way. Rather we learn that the Word became flesh and tabernacled (skenoo) among us (John 1). Indeed when the Word comes to those who were “his own”, those who are his own people, those who concretely dwell in the land and the Holy Place of Jerusalem, it is precisely they who “did not receive him.” The mode of God’s “dwelling” is not that of rootedness, of Temple, but rather of Tabernacle, of sojourning without a secure “place.” And thus Jesus never “roots” his ministry anywhere but rather is found traversing all sorts of places, going to the Samaritans, Galilee of the Gentiles, and even to the houses of the Romans. He does indeed come to “the holy place” — only to be reject, driven out, and crucifed outside the city gate (more on this later). His ministry is not one of “inhabiting place” but rather of traversing place, venturing into abandoned spaces with the unclean and the marginalized. As such it is a profound theological mistake to jump from “incarnation” to a vision of rootedness, stability, a sanctifying of place. That is decidedly what Jesus does not do. Rather his whole ministry consists in the relativizing of “place”, especially the Temple, which of course was a major cause of his crucifixion.

Likewise, in the New Testament the incarnation never functions as a way of describing the scandal of the Gospel, rather it is an afterthought, a doctrine that is a mere consequence of the earth-shattering fact of the resurrection of the Crucified One. The notion that God would come and dwell with his people is not the scandal of the Gospel; that was Israel’s earliest hope as well attested throughout the Old Testament. The Scandal of the Gospel was that God would come among Israel as the Crucified One, the one cursed under Torah (Deut 21:23). It is Christ Crucified, not “Christ incarnated” that is the scandal of the Gospel. And it is always to crucifixion-resurrection, not “incarnation” that the Apostles call the church. That’s why I’m hesitant to allow “the incarnation” a sort of independent status to determine the nature of the church and its ministry. The pattern of the New Testament gospel is not from incarnation to “incarnational ministry”, but is rather from crucifixion-resurrection to cruciform self-abandonment. We need to understand “incarnation” from the cross, not the other way round.

Thus I must say again that the call to discipleship of the crucified leaves us in an unstable relationship with “place” and “rootedness” and “culture.” I’m haunted by statements like those in Hebrews: “Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Heb 12:13-14). Jesus comes among us, not as one who “inhabits place”, but as one who is driven out of the security and peace of “place”, rootedness, culture, etc. He is found outside the city gates, driven into the abandoned spaces along with the lepers, prostitutes, and the godforsaken. If, as Hebrews suggest, our calling is to “go to him outside the camp”, I think that should orient us, not towards the lure of stability, place, and culture, but towards the forgotten and hidden spaces in this world, the spaces that “place” crowds out and paves over, where the despised and the worthless of this world, “the poor of Jesus Christ” are abandoned, having no “place” to lay their head. That, it seems to me is where the church should be found, and towards which it should continually move.

In the last few weeks I’ve spent a good bit of time in Acts, and more than a little of it on the story of the martyrdom of Stephen (Acts 6-7). The more I read it, the more I’m struck by its profoundly explosive nature, and especially how it stands as a witness against what we commonly think of as “narrative theology.”

Stephen’s “defense” (a more profound misnomer I’m hard pressed to think of) recounts the whole story of Israel in a new way, a deeply offensive way. Indeed there is nothing defensive about his speech. His constant emphasis is that God’s people have consistently rejected God’s agents and God’s actions and have refused to obey. All this culminates in their rejection of Jesus, the presence of God himself. This is very crucial to see: Stephen tells the story of God’s people against themselves. He narrates their history as a history of their failure and refusal of God’s intentions and actions. In effect, his telling of the story of Israel is his own attempt to rob them of their assumed possession of that story.

It is a common tenet of most accounts of narrative theology that the telling of stories is crucial to how communities fashion and shape their life. We tell our stories as myths that support and sustain us; our telling of our story is a source of coherence, stability, and formation. Stories are meant to reinforce, strengthen, form us into a common identity, and that is how the church is directed to appropriate its Scriptures and traditions.

Interestingly, Stephen does the exact opposite of what we normally think of as “narrative theology.” He tells their story to literally “undo” them and all they have built themselves up to be. He claims that what God’s people have made of themselves is a failure so great that they have become the very murders of God come among them. He tells their story, not to shape, form, and maintain a community, but rather to blow the hinges off the doors that enclose this community (note that this whole conflict arises out of a controversy involving religious/cultural divisions, cf. 6:1). In his witness to the Gospel, Stephen explodes the very story that secures them, that binds them together. He is not building up, he is out to destroy. To destroy in the service of the new creation which the Gospel proclaims, to be sure, but this proclamation cannot simply be accepted (or “overaccepted”) into the existing narrative inscription, rather a break, a fracture must occur if the Gospel is to be truly spoken of and lived.

What Stephen’s opponents cannot see, and what they violently (cf. 7:54, 57) refuse to see or hear is the freedom that Stephen’s destructive narration has to offer them. The event of the resurrection, and the judgment it speaks is too much for them. They cannot accept anything other than the Old World run by Death, which is the weapon they choose to use against Stephen. And yet in the very event of wielding the power of death to try to silence his witness, the reality of the resurrection and its repetition in the martyr-witness of Stephen is made only too clear, as he dies willingly, with words of forgiveness for his killers, seeing and testifying to nothing other than the lordship of Jesus Christ, who stands at the right hand of the Father.

A proposition: Whenever the problem of continuity and discontinuity between the reality of Jesus Christ and the interpretive authority of the textual tradition(s) of Israel are negotiated in the New Testament, it is always those advocating for continuity that are judged by the apostolic witness to be unfaithful to the Gospel.

For the apostolic witness, continuity is a problem, for their adversaries discontinuity is a problem. In contemporary theological circles this situation is strikingly reversed.

In the Lord’s Prayer Jesus instructs his disciples to pray “Give us this day our daily bread.” From this one phrase a whole aura of sentimentality has been generated about “depending on God” for our food, a task that is ever so hard for middle class American Christians because, after all, we are so used to thinking that our food is something secure, that we provide for ourselves and we really don’t have to pray too hard about. Praying for “our daily bread” then, is little more than an exercise in reminding ourselves that, after all, ultimately God is in control and we need to not forget that.

In reading through Exodus last night it struck me how utterly wrong this whole way of thinking is in light of the biblical referent that is surely attached to “our daily bread.” What image could “daily bread” conjure up if not the daily gift of manna that God provided for Israel during their sojourn in the desert after leaving Egypt? The only “daily bread” that Israel has ever known was the daily allotment of bread that they received during those forty years wandering in the desert, bereft of any sort of landedness, security, or resources. There indeed, “daily bread” has real meaning. It is an utterly unproduced, unearned, insecure gift for which they can only hope in God’s promise.

When Jesus then instructs his disciples to pray for “our daily bread” ought we not — instead of thinking that this is just an injunction to remember God’s providential enforcement of that which we have already secured — realize that in calling his followers to pray in this way Jesus is calling us back into the desert with Israel. Out of the security of land, possessions, cultural production and into a life of sojourning in which we, once again, are given to depend, quite literally on God for the essentials of survival? Jesus envisions his community of followers, not as a restored Israel, or as Israel returned from exile. No, quite the opposite, he envisions his followers as a new Exodus community, a community liberated from slavery, and finding themselves so liberated (and often not knowing what to do with, or wanting that freedom) are now thrust into a complete loss of all securities save God and his unprecedented and unearned sustenance.

In short, it seems to me that for Jesus “daily bread” really means “daily bread,” not happy thoughts about how God is in control. He envisions his followers as a new band of post-Exodus nomads who possess nothing but hope in God for daily sustenance.

So this may just be a throwback to some of my conservative evangelical roots, but I’m sure many of us are familiar with the common pastoral injunction that Christians, biblically speaking, ought not to ever even consider marrying one who was not a Christian. After all, this is what Paul referred to in 2 Cor 6:14 when he commanded us not to “be unequally yoked [Gk: heterozugeo] with unbelievers.”

Now, I think a contextual reading of the passage makes abundantly clear that what Paul is arguing against is not related to marriage and sexuality at all, but rather in trying to convince the Corinthians to adhere to his teachings rather than those of potential (unbelieving) competitors. But whatever, leaving the exegetical reality of that behind, lets take a look at what it might mean for marriage if we took the common appropriation of this text seriously.

The most striking part of it is the “unequal” business. If the text is taken (correctly) to be referring to non-Christian teachers in conflict with Paul’s message it makes sense. Their message is one that is mismatched, unfitting, inferior to the good news that Paul is trying to bring the Corinthians. But if this is somehow about marriage, doesn’t that imply a fundamental inequality between partners as being inscribed into marriage itself? It seems to me that there is a hidden enthusiasm among proponents of “don’t marry non-Christians” interpreters of this verse about the potential door this opens to construing marriage as a hierarchical relation of power. But maybe I’m just being paranoid.

If the prose is any gauge, it would have been quite enjoyable to listen to Ernst Käsemann preach:

Entering upon discipleship, who knows what lies ahead? Each day keeps us in suspense, so that boredom does not emerge. Discipleship does not merely involve our own salvation. This too must be learned, since Christians, no less than others, incline to circle everlastingly about themselves, to incessantly feel their pulse and that of their friends, to regard their own navel as the center of the world, and to forget that our God is not only concerned with the salvation of pious people. He creates his kingdom on earth, and it does not grow where religious and brave citizens stay by themselves. Advent breaks into a demonized world in which humanity continually retreats before barbarism, in which so-called factual constraints drive us into the war of all against all—for example, in the capitalist economy, where thousands of children die daily of hunger because the haves rake in power and money and harness all of us with our desires and duties to their wagons. God’s salvation embraces the godless as well as the pious, counts the poor, abandoned, oppressed, despised, and dying dearer than the strong, satisfied, and self-secure. God’s Advent stands as sign that humans must become more humane instead of competing with their Creator and outdoing one another.

In following Jesus, not only apostles fish for people but all the disciples whom the Christ forms after his image and calls to his mission, where over the wastes and the graves he wakens the community of those who become joyful companions of the needy, bearers of salvation. Only the one who is active in the service of freedom is free, a messenger and witness to the glorious freedom of the children of God. Freedom in and toward humanity is God’s will for his people and the meaning of every Christian life. God became man in order to capture humans for his glorious freedom. His servants are not to become divine. Through his Spirit they must become more human to bring freedom to a world racked by tyrants. Their service is not needed for heaven, but for the earth, which for the majority of its inhabitants has become a hell from which there is no escape. (On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene, 323-24.)

Somehow I just today came across Ernst Käsemann’s recently-collected book of essays, On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene. It’s packed with provocative and profound reflections on the Gospel in the New Testament. Here’s a taste:

Christian love as bodily surrender and daily worship confesses what it believes when it regards the earth as the field of its Lord, thus in its ideas and in its arms embraces those most distant, as well as the brother, the sister, or neighbor at the door. Only a love that extends worldwide, that does not merely give alms, corresponds to an ecumenically open faith. This assumes, first, that middle-class morality and tradition no longer serve as criteria for Christian behavior and, second, that risk, whether personal or in the church, is not to be avoided in service to God’s creation. Genuine love does not remain within itself. Faith points beyond itself and to all who have fallen among robbers and murderers. Genuine love ties the imagination of the Good Samaritan to the reason of those who recognize in the other God’s gift and their own task. Religious schizophrenia threatens us more and more. It separates Sunday from the everyday life of a meritocracy in which the whole creation groans and the Christ still dies among revolutionaries. In the school of Jesus we reflect on the fact that he preferred self-denying surrender to remaining in heaven and went as cross-bearer into the embattled no-man’s-land between interest groups and ideologies. Whoever cannot get free of all the entrenchments as he did will deny faith and love. Love is an export, and the cross is its distinguishing sign. Christian faith is unfruitful where it does not bear this sign. (pp. 164-65)

Now by this we may be sure that we know him, if we obey his commandments. As the Elder makes clear throughout his treatise, one of the main goals of his writing is to give true and reliable modes of discernment to the church as to where they stand in relation to the God of Jesus Christ (cf. 5:13). In a situation similar to that of Paul in Galatians, the Elder is dealing with a new teaching, indeed a new (and thus false) gospel being proclaimed by a faction in the church (cf. 2:19, 22-24). It is precisely in response to the disturbance created by the presence of these teachers that the Elder writes, to instruct those who follow Christ in how to be confident in the reality of the new life that they have been given in the Spirit (cf. 3:24).

However, at this point the Elder does not point to a doctrinal formula or codify a set of dogma from which the church might be assured of its orthodoxy and rightness (though, as we will see, truthful Christological confession is of the utmost importance to him). Rather he moves straight to the issue of obedience to Christ’s commandments. As 1 John takes great pains to lay out repeatedly, “his commandments” always and only means belief and confession of Jesus as the Son of the Father, and loving one another just as Christ has loved us (cf. 3:23).

It is love that is the commandment of Christ. Love one another just as Christ, in his death and resurrection, loved us (cf. John 13:34). For the Elder it is precisely in being given over to love one another with cruciform, self-expending, death-embracing love that we know that we belong to God. It is in the action of loving, of giving yourself away for your sister or brother that we know that we are God’s children. This is the one and only assurance that the Elder offers to the doubting minds of his flock: that in their loving one another, even unto death, they will know that they belong to God.

Whoever says, “I have come to know him,” but does not obey his commandments, is a liar, and in such a person the truth does not exist; The Elder now moves on to state the inverse of his previous assertion, in a move directly levied against the teachers he writes against. Any of those who claim knowledge of God but who refuse to give themselves over to Christ’s own mode of love, are liars. Truth and action cannot be separated for the Elder. Regardless of the content of their teachings, for 1 John there simply is no truth in those who place themselves outside of Jesus’s own concrete call to love one another unto death. In such persons there simply is no truth. For, in Johannine perspective, Christ, in all his historical singularity, is the truth (cf. John 14:6). In 1 John the utter and indissoluble unity between truth and action lies at the center. There is, definitively no orthodoxy that is not simultaneously orthopraxis, both of which are utterly defined by the cruciform identity and teaching of Jesus Christ.

but whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God has reached perfection. We do well at this point to remember these verse’s proximity to 2:1, which holds the reality and possibility of sin ever before the believing community. By virtue of Christ and the Spirit we indeed “may not sin”, but even in that hopeful statement of the newness that is opened up in Christ we are thrown back upon Christ’s own act on our behalf as that alone on which we can ultimately depend.

Thus, when the Elder speaks of the love of God reaching perfection (or completion) in the act of faithful obedience we must always remember that this is not statement about a level of spiritual achievement or formation into perfection. Rather it is to say that in the very act of obedience to Christ’s way, that is, in the act of self-expending love for the sister or brother, in that moment, we abide fully, truly, and perfectly in the love of the triune God. “Perfection” for the Elder is not a state which we attain or into which we enter in any static sense. Rather it is always and only the event of finding ourselves given over to one another in self-expending love, the love of Jesus himself.

By this we may be sure that we are in him: whoever says, “I abide in him,” ought to walk just as he walked. Finally, the Elder moves on to restate again what he first articulated in 2:3, namely how we may know that we truly dwell in God. Again the answer, though worded differently is the same: we must walk as Christ himself walked. For the Elder our confidence in our participation in the life of God is grounded always in living toward one another in cruciformity.

And this encapsulates the unique dynamic in 1 John of tying together inextricably the reality of participation in the triune life of God, and the concrete, fleshly, material, particular history of Jesus of Nazareth. It is precisely by walking in the steps of the Jew from Nazareth that we are caught up into the very life of the trinitarian God. The fullness of our deification, our participation in God’s own life is always and only explicable in terms of being united to Christ’s own particular historical life of self-divesting, kenotic love. Only in him, in his complete and utter singularity of love do we find ourselves caught up in God’s life. Any other articulation of union with God, in Johannine eyes, can only be a lie of the antichrist.

David Rensberger, in his helpful article, “Conflict and Community in the Johannine Letters” points out the deeply revolutionary and apocalyptic nature of the Joahnnine message, especially in relation to Christology and the ethics of agape:

The author of the Letters defends incarnational Christology not just because it is “what you heard from the beginning” (1 John 2:24), though that is part of his appeal, but because it rightly expresses the nature of the God who is love.What is at stake, in this author’s view, is not the authority of tradition but the most fundamental theological insight of Johannine Christianity: that God, out of love, entered fully into the human condition, risking and suffering death itself in order to bring life to human beings.

This is not an essentially conservative theological position. It radically challenged the established religious cultures of its time, both Jewish and Greco-Roman, by insisting on the freedom of God to act in a way utterly unanticipated by tradition, a way that upset not only commonplace theological and philosophical assumptions but hierarchical social structures as well. What is happening in 1 and 2 John is not so much a struggle against revolutionaries as a struggle within a revolution. Neither side questions that the way of God is contrary to the way of the world (though the author tries to associate the opponents with the world in 1 John 4:3-6). The battle is over how the revolution is to be conceived: in its original terms as radical divine intervention in the world, or in a new way as radical divine opposition to the world. In a sense, it is a struggle over how to maintain the purity of the radical Johannine way, whether by preserving the pure teaching “heard from the beginning” or by purifying it still further from contamination by the flesh. The Elder is trying to prevent, not the success of a revolution, but the diversion of a revolution onto a path that he fears may cause it to fail.

It never ceases to amaze me how deeply the Johannine corpus delves into the most fundamental issues of Christian faithfulness, never disentangling but always bringing to the fore the inextricable connection between Christological confession of Jesus as the fullness of God, come in the flesh, and the ethic of radical, self-giving love. All of this is predicated on God’s own descent into the world in Jesus, this radical divine intervention that can only, to my mind, be described as apocalyptic.

In Jesus God’s Trinitarian agape has invaded “the world” (i.e. the system of powers and principalities whose dominion over creation is predicated on the power of death) and created a rupture within it, a rupture of self-abandoning love that goes to the cross for others. And in the sending of the Spirit this Christic rupture of love continues to break into history, giving men and women to one another in this same pattern, rhythm of cruciform love, the love that seeks not its own but willingly lays itself down for the other. The church is the sign and sacrament of this rupture within the rule of the fallen powers, this rupture of agape, of self-abandonment into love. It is only by this radical gift of God’s Trinitarian love, the love that breaks through the powers of death, that we are given to one another, to live together within this Christic agape. And thus it is only in a common life of constant prayer and doxology by which we continually offer up our own our bodies (Rom 12:1-3) to God’s agape that we can live and embody the gospel, the gospel of self-abandoning love.

And it is precisely in this self-offering, this abandoning of ourselves in love for one another that we stand, fully in the utter fleshliness of the Jesus’s revolution. There is nothing more concrete, nothing more fleshly, nothing more earthly, than this love, the love of Jesus Christ, and him Crucified. Which for us always must mean “Love one another, just as I have loved you.”

Yesterday I (re)read most of Michael Gorman‘s excellent book, Cruciformity. Gorman’s paraphrase of Paul’s encomium to love in 1 Corinthians 13 stuck out to me in a new way:

Cruciform love is faith in action. It does not seek its own good but the good of others. Indeed, for the good of others it renounces the use of certain rights. Cruciform love edifies others and never harms them, not even enemies. It never retaliates or uses violence. Cruciform love welcomes diversity. It is not judgmental, but neither is it tolerant of values antithetical to the cross, and at times it can be tough.

Cruciform love is hospitable and generous, especially to the poor and weak — those marginalized or rejected by others. If it has worldly status, it becomes downwardly mobile in order to life others up. It gives of itself and its material possessions. Cruciform love, in a word, continues the story of the cross in new times and places. Cruciform love is imaginative. (p. 267)

It is truly my hope, cry, and prayer that this sort of cruciform love, this truly radical agape will come to more fully define my life and the way I do theology. Thanks to Michael for the powerful words, words that shake me from the many compulsions and self-seeking movements I succumb to.

Michael Gorman has a good post up on the Book of Revelation and its view of mission. Here’s just part of it:

“Come out” is not a summons to escape, and the spirituality of Revelation is not an escapist spirituality. The withdrawal is not so much a physical exodus as a theopolitical one, an escape from civil religion and the idolatry of power-worship. It is a creative, self-imposed but Spirit-enabled departure from certain values and practices, which may entail, for some, a geographical move as well. (I am thinking here of the New Monasticism and its commitment to moving into places “abandoned by Empire.”) It is the necessary prerequisite to faithful living in the very Babylon from which one has escaped. That is, the church cannot be the church in Babylon until it is the church out of Babylon….

It is important therefore to stress that Revelation does not call for the wholesale rejection of culture and of engagement with the world; it calls for discernment. It is one thing, in other words, to live in an empire or superpower, to live in the shadow of the beast, trying to avoid participating in the evils of idolatry while bearing witness to another empire, the kingdom of God, and thereby working for the good of the world as salt and light. It is quite another to endorse that empire—or any culture—unconditionally, or to sacralize it. Yet that is what many Christians and churches have done; they have baptized their culture and/or country into the name of the triune god of political, economic, and military power, wrongly thinking that this is the power of God.

If this is a taste of what’s to come in Gorman’s forthcoming book Reading Revelation Responsibly (Cascade) we’re in for a solid book.

When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:31-35)

“Love one another as I have loved you.” As far as I’m concerned this has to be what we would take as the “hardest” commandment ever given in the history of all of God’s dealings with Israel and the church. And it is, decidedly, a commandment. This is God in the flesh, laying down his law. Jesus, after washing the feet of his disciples, welcoming them into the Father’s household, tells them what they must do. Here comes the requirement: You must love one another just as I have loved you.

Now, the text is clear that what Jesus was talking about was something the disciples could not understand until later (John 13:7). “Love one another as I have loved you” is not something that they ever could have understood apart from the cross and the resurrection. Indeed, “Love one another as I have loved you” simply means, “Live my cross and resurrection toward each other.” To love one another as Jesus has loved us means to do the very thing that Jesus did: to abandon oneself wholly to the loving service and nourishing of others. And if we do this, Jesus claims that “though we die, we will live” (John 11:25).

But how? How can we even countenance loving one another as Jesus has loved us? That is a word too deep to bear – and I mean that literally. We, being who we are, as human beings bound in slavery quite simply cannot bear the word that Jesus lays on is. It is too much. It takes us beyond the bounds of what a people, born into slavery and deeply comfortable there, can stand. Like Israel, when we are called into the wilderness of loving one another just as Christ has loved us we find ourselves crying out for the fleshpots of Egypt:

“They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.” (Exodus 14:11-12)

And so also, when we hear Jesus’s new commandment, “Love one another just as I have loved you” we respond with cries of desperation and despair. This is just too much! This is a wilderness of death and toil! We cannot abide Jesus’s call to uncalculated, unconstrained, unhesitating love. We just can’t. After all, look at what Jesus’s loving looks like in this very passage. Jesus humiliates himself for those he loves, and those he loves aren’t exactly the easiest bunch to love. The feet Jesus washes are the feet of Judas the betrayer and Peter the denier.

This is a point that must not go unnoticed when we read the gospel and letters of John with their constant call to love “one another.” Don’t for a second think that this is somehow the easy version of “love your enemies.” The “one another” that Jesus loves is the company of betrayers and backstabbers, of cowards and utterly irritating simpletons who utterly and completely don’t get it.  It is a crowd of sleazy corrupt bureaucrats and guerrilla revolutionaries. This is the “one another” that Jesus loves and which he calls into sharing that same love, the love that washes feet, the goes to the cross and the grave.

No matter what, whenever we read Jesus’s call to love one another just has he has loved us we all have a sense of its radical hardness. And even if we believe it is possible, we know its not very likely. However, if we avoid lifting these discourses of Jesus out of their narrative context, things get more interesting. They get interesting in that Jesus seemed to think the very opposite in regard to the message he was preaching: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

In Jesus’s view, the call to abandon ourselves in cruciform love that he was preaching was not something hard and burdensome, but rather a call to leave such burdens behind. Jesus seems to think that this self-abandoning is easy, and that by contrast it is restless striving of the Gentiles and the burdensome commands of the priestly elite that is hard (cf. Matt 6:32; Luke 11:46; 12:30). In other words, Jesus viewed his call to love one another in a way that is exactly opposite from how we view it when we encounter it. What is to us an impossible demand that must have some other explanation is for Jesus liberation, resurrection, indeed the very life of God the Father. What we cannot bear is the depth to which this love will liberate us from the dominating forces of slavery and death.

Because after all, we are used to living in a world run by control and calculation. This is the logic of all existence under sin. This the logic that says “Hey, this guy is raising the dead. We gotta kill him” (cf. John 11:47ff). But most of the time the logic of control, calculation, and management doesn’t seem so insidious. We figure out what we can handle, what we need to limit, the boundaries we need to draw to do right by ourselves, or maybe our families, possibly even some friends. We learn how to be reasonable, to manage, to get by with what we have and acquire what we need. Is this so wrong?

Yes. A thousand times yes. Or rather, this is slavery. This is the life that accepts death and the final outcome of all things. Death is the limit, the boundary for all our doings. All the resources we have, all the things we can do, all the methods and calculations we can employ are ultimately a dance with the inevitable: death. Where death is the ultimate boundary there can finally be no truly new possibilities, no complete and utter transformation, and certainly no loving one another “just as I have loved you.” If death is the boundary that finally rules, then yeah, it sure would be better to be a slave in Egypt than to die in the wilderness!

And this is why the resurrection of the crucified is our only hope. Indeed only if Christ is raised is there any such thing as hope. If Christ has been raised, then death, which hovers at the boundary, defining our lives of calculation and control, has no power to shut things down anymore. If resurrection, new creation. If resurrection, new possibilities. If resurrection, love one another even as I have loved you.

The word of self-abandoning, cruciform love is indeed a word that we cannot bear. It is so unbearable that we must undergo a complete death to everything that we are. Our whole identity of possession and calculation and qualification must wither away and die on the cross with Christ so that we may be raised to new life with the Risen Jesus. We cannot bear to love one another, but the unbounded word of the gospel is that we have been born by Christ, by the one who lived his life wholly for others, giving himself away in love to the fullest, to the point of death. And this One, this man, who recklessly threw himself away in love, the gospel proclaims that he lives. And if this true, if he really does live, then everything is made new. Nothing whatsoever is the same anymore. The old world—the world run by death at the boundary—that world has been crucified with Christ! Your old life, the life ruled by calculation, by control, by management—that life has been crucified with Christ!

The word to abandon yourself in love for one another—and remember who the “one another” is—is simply the word of the resurrection written into our lives. It is a commandment that is a non-commandment, a law that is non-law. What we see here is not a demand for self-improvement, moral effort, or righteous action; those are the province of the old world, the world ruled by the law of death. No one I know of has said this better than Robert Jenson:

The gospel’s specific morality is a matter of opened opportunities, of what we may reasonably do because Jesus lives, that otherwise would have been foolish. The normal morality is a matter of imposed constraints, of what we must do, that otherwise we would have liked not to. [. . .] the gospel’s specific morality is a morality of freedom. Insofar as the gospel moves us, we do what we do because we may, not because we ought. And a good act is one which finds the way to love, to the affirmation of the brother’s freedom.

We hear the from the gospel what we may do, when the gospel affirmatively interprets the hopes and fears that move our lives. The gospel makes our hopes possibilities by making them hopes for the love that is indeed coming. When the gospel is spoken to a [person] or a community, it speaks to the particular inhibitions that keep that [person] or community from [. . .] their own humanity. The gospel dismisses those inhibitions. It’s pattern is: “You may . . . because, if Jesus is risen, there is no need to fear . . .” [. . .]

Thus the specific morality of the gospel is not a mater of “laws.” The gospel’s moral discourse does not say “Do this and do that because you ought/must/would be best advised/will be rewarded.” It does not have the “if . . . then . . .” form. It imposes no conditions whatever, on anything at all. It does not say “Do . . . , because otherwise you won’t get into heaven.” It does not say—with a bit more religious sophistication: “Do . . . , because, although of course God will accept you anyway, that is what good Christians do.” It does not even say: “Do . . . , because virtue is its own reward.” The moral discourse of the gospel says only: “You may do . . . , because Jesus lives” (Robert Jenson, Story and Promise, 81, 82).

The gospel’s commandment, to love one another just as Jesus has loved is precisely the proclamation of liberation, of freedom into God’s resurrecting life. You may love one another fully, to the end, without reserve, because Jesus lives and therefore there is no need to fear. The reason we need not fear is that Jesus, the man who existed wholly as love, as self-abandoning agape, is risen. Death has no dominion over him. And if death has no final dominion over love, then we can joyfully throw ourselves away into love. To again quote from Robert Jenson’s beautiful articulation of this truth:

[. . .] Jesus was a lover who went to death rather than qualify his self-giving to others; the love which was the plot of his life is an unconditional love. Of this person it is said that he nevertheless lives, that he is risen [. . .] for love means an unconditional self-giving and an acceptance of death, and a successful love would be an acceptance of death which nevertheless did not result in the lover’s absence from the beloved, but in his presence. Love must finally mean death and resurrection. For this particular man, resurrection, if it happened, was therefore but the proper outcome of his life.

And if this lover’s resurrection happened, then there also now lives an unconditional liver with death—the limit of love—behind him, so that his love must finally triumph altogether, must embrace all people and all circumstances of their lives. If he is risen, the human enterprise has a conclusion: a human communion constituted in its commonality by one man’s unconditional self-dedication to his fellows, and so embracing each individual and communal freedom established in the history so fulfilled.

Thus, if Jesus is risen his personal love will be the last Outcome of the human enterprise. If he died, his self-definition has been written to its end, as each of ours will be, but if he also nevertheless lives, [. . . then his life] is not thereby a dead item of the past but an item of living, surprising time, an item of the future and indeed, of the last future. (Robert Jenson, The Triune Identity, 22-23)

And this is precisely why Jesus’s call to us to love one anther as he has loved us, to throw ourselves away in love is paired this Sunday with the most holy vision of John the Revelator of the new heavens and new earth:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.” (Revelation 21:1-6)

This vision simply expresses the truth of the gospel that the outcome of everything is the victory of Christ’s radical, self-abandoning love. Just as Christ threw himself away in becoming flesh, walking among us, healing us, feeding us, teaching us, weeping with us, dying for us, and rising for us, so also the fullness of God will finally throw itself away on us. The infinity of God’s unbounded radical love will descend and it will consummate and manifest what has already been achieved in Christ’s resurrection.

Because of this God, this self-abandoning God who throws himself away on us, we can love one another in the same way. Because this God’s self-abandoning life will be the outcome of all things—down to the most minute, petty, precious slaveries we still cling to—because of this we are freed into self-abandonment. We can throw ourselves away on each other without fear. For, as Paul proclaims, we “did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom 8:14-17).

The word of the gospel is that we are freed into loving one another just as Christ has loved us, that we can do this without fear because God throws himself away on us, and that reckless act of self-giving is power that sustains all creation. We can love one another because Jesus is risen, because God is the God of Jesus Christ. In Jesus we see God as God truly is, as God will be in the outcome of all things. In Jesus’s abandonment of himself we get to see what true human life is, and we get invited into that life of joyful self-abandonment. Herbert McCabe speaks to this in a way worth recalling:

In Jesus [. . .] we can watch God understanding himself. God’s understanding of himself is that he throws himself away in love, that he keeps nothing back for himself. God’s understanding of God is that he is a love that unconditionally accepts, that always lets others be, even if what they want is to be his murderers. God’s understanding of God is that he is not a special person with a special kind of message, with a special way of living to which he wants people to conform. God’s understanding of God could not appear to us as someone who wants to found a new and better religion, or recommend a special new discipline or way of life—a religious code laid upon us for all time because it is from God. God’s understanding of God is that he just says: “Yes, be; be human, but be really human; be human if it kills you—and it will.” The Law of God is a non-law; it has no special regulation. The Word just says: “I accept you as human beings; what a pity you have such difficulty in doing this yourselves. What a pity you can only like yourselves if you pretend to be super-humans or gods.” God could never understand himself as one of the gods; only as one of the human race.

[. . .] To be able, through faith to share in Christ, in God’s understanding of himself, to be in Christ, is to be filled ourselves also with this joy, this Holy Spirit. It is a joy so vast that we can only faintly sometimes experience it as our elation and joy—just as our sharing in God’s self-understanding hardly at all seems to us an understanding, a being enlightened. We have a life in us, an understanding and a joy in us, that is too great for us to comprehend. Quite often it has to show itself as what seems its opposite, as darkness and suffering. The Word of God is Christ crucified. But it is God’s way and the truth of God and the life and joy of God. And this is in us because we have faith. We have been prepared to go into the dark with Christ, to die with Christ. And we know that this means that we live in Christ. And that life, the divine understanding and joy that is in us, will one day soon show itself in us for what it truly is. And we shall live with the Father, through the [. . .] the Word made flesh, in the joy which is the Holy Spirit for eternity. (Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters, 104-6)

Life, resurrection life, is coming and is now here. When Jesus commands us to love one another as he has loved us he tells us to do nothing more than give ourselves over to his love, throwing the consequences to the wind. This is abject and utter foolishness. A stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. But Christ has been raised. And therefore this is the power and wisdom of God. This is God’s own self-understanding that will finally triumph over every authority and ruler and power.

The love that Jesus commands will ultimately have its way. It will be victorious. Our infantile dreams of calculation, control, and qualification are doomed, one way or the other. Lay them down. Give yourself over, in all the concreteness, contingency, and hardship of your life to the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. He has come that we may have life and have it abundantly. Everything else, every other word steals, kills, and destroys.

Because Christ is risen, you are free to love one another. You are free to throw yourselves away in love. You are free to waste yourself on the worthless, on the trivial, on the stuff that no reasonable person should put up with or care about. You are free. Death no longer has dominion over you. You are no longer enslaved to fear, to calculation, to qualification, to self-protection. You are free to just throw yourself away, to lavish yourself in all your imperfection on one another in love and on God in worship. And this is life. This is the life of the gospel. The life of the crucified and risen Lord. The life that death cannot touch. The life of the world to come. Amen.

Apparently Israeli bookstores are systematically eliminating a book that criticizes the extremely violent and illegal settler movement in Palestine. Not too surprising, I guess. But the authors raise some utterly undeniable points, such as this one:

Israel is a democratic, Jewish state. If we remain in the territories we will have to choose: either Jewish or democratic. It won’t work together, because in a democracy the majority rules and soon [Arabs] will be the majority between the Jordan and the sea. If we want to remain a Jewish state, we will have to deny the rights of the majority and we will turn into an apartheid state. If we insist on remaining democrats, an Arab prime minister will soon be elected by a majority of votes.

I have no idea how anyone can possibly consider this to be false.

In the account of the passion in Matthew, the crowd responds to Pilate’s declaration of innocence with the cry “His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matt 27:25). A curious irony is found here. In that the people here are taking on the responsibility for Christ’s death but do so in language that seems utterly Passoverish. And indeed, as it turns out Christ’s blood will be “on” them and their children. Just as the blood of the Passover lamb protected the families of Israel in Egypt from the angel of death, so also Christ’s blood will protect and save the very ones who shed it without regard for him.

But it doesn’t stop there. With the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost and the attending proclamation of the gospel of the resurrection, Peter claims that “This promise is for you and your children” (Acts 2:39).

Here we see the ironic and futile nature of our resistance to Christ and the radical superabundance of God’s self-giving in response to our hatred and violence. We go out for blood, thoughtlessly throwing our children in with us. God responds to us by coming to us again, as our victim, with words of forgiveness and promise. Where we would condemn ourselves and our children, God continues to come again to us with promise, with the Spirit, with new, vivifying life.

Okay, I know that chaisms are a major literary feature in Hebrew poetry and elsewhere throughout the Scriptures, and that’s all fine and good. However I really can’t stand the tendency to try to find them absolutely everywhere in Scripture. For example Wes Howard-Brook’s Becoming Children of God: Radical Discipleship in the Gospel of John divides up every single section of Scripture in the entire book into chiasms. Every single one. All of them.

Come on.

I’m all for literary analysis, but the ubiquity of chiasms seems way too forced to me, at least in many, many cases.

So what’s your biblical studies grumpkin?