Comments

I've been getting a lot of comments submitted for recent (and not so recent) posts over the last few weeks, and I'm frankly a little puzzled!

The confusion comes because I've gone from getting a comment once in a blue moon to suddenly receiving loads of anonymous comments. They're all very affirmative but in a vague way which never engages with the content:-

"Fantastic website. A lot of useful information here."

"I every time spent my half an hour to read this website's posts everyday along with a mug of coffee."

As a quick look at my blog history will show, my posting frequency really doesn't support daily visits. But, apart from that, my last post, Like Jesus, has attracted 44 comments, none of which mention Jesus, beatitudes, nor anything else in that post's Labels list. So what is going on?

My first thought was 'spam', of course. But I don't see what benefit anyone can get out of an anonymous comment with no links in (there has been definite spam as well, of course, but that gets purged before comments are published).

My second thought is that there might be someone who has posted a comment with the genuine intention of engaging with me and with the article's content, but has just been a little sideways about it. I would be disappointed if I failed to respond to such.

So, a couple of requests: firstly, does anyone have any idea what the cause of all these vague and anonymous posts might be?

Secondly, if you do want to engage with me, please give a name and mention something in the post's content so I know you are a human being not some mysterious bot. I realise Blogger/Blogspot doesn't have the friendliest commenting system around, but please use your comment to let me know you are a real person and I'll do my best to answer any questions or respond to any comments.

In the meantime, do have a great week.

Grace and peace,
BlackPhi

One God In Community

The Christian picture of a Trinitarian God does have some important consequences.

A key implication is that the Trinity in some way reflects an important property of God's nature: that he is in an essential way relational; that community is somehow central to the creator of the universe.

One has to be really careful here, of course, not to go confusing a Trinitarian picture of God with some kind of cosy human family gathering. God is much, much more than that; but it is likely that He is not less than that.

Notwithstanding the Western Church, over recent centuries, slowly but surely moving to a focus on individualism and on each individual's relationship with God, the pattern of the Bible is very different.

From Genesis, where it is not good for man to be alone, throughout the Old Testament, with its emphasis on God's dealings with His people, to the New Testament, where the story moves from Jesus with his disciples, to the Spirit working in and through the Church, Jesus' body, the Bible is about communities of people following (or not) God.

One way of presenting the 'big picture' of the Bible is about relationships: broken in the opening chapters and being restored by Jesus' sacrifice and the power of God's Spirit. Relationships between people and God, between people and other people, and between people and the natural world, God's creation. These are still issues in our world today - the Bible story doesn't end with the final page of Revelation, it carries on through the lives and work of Jesus' followers throughout history - until the day Jesus returns and makes all things new.

I would argue that this is how you can tell the true Church, Jesus' real followers: are they in the business of restoring relationships or of harming them? Not that even the best churches don't make mistakes and wander off the path, but one can still question both the overall pattern, and the quality of the hopes and dreams of the members: do they build up and welcome in, or do they knock down and exclude?

The Bible tells us that "God is love", and love is the essence of true relationship. If God is love then his followers must also be love, and must ensure that their understanding and practice of that love follows the radical patterns laid down by Jesus. Love isn't about gooey feelings and sex, but about genuine and practical care for someone else, backed with a willingness to sacrifice oneself to meet their deepest needs. To love is to to take up one's cross for the sake of another.

Love starts with loving God with all that we are, continues with loving our neighbour as our selves - even when that neighbour is strange, foreign, or in some other way 'alien' - and ends with God's people loving one another.

Remember that God's love for you is far greater than any human love.

God loves you, He died for you: he is on your side. God is not out to get you, He is out to save you. But He always gives you a choice: love respects freedom of choice. As a parent of young adults I suspect I have a very faint insight into how hard that must be ... even for God.

One God Indivisible

As the early church became separated from its Jewish roots, it became more and more important to pin down just what the New Testament writers meant by some of the things they had written about Jesus.

Paul and John were both religious Jews, and therefore strongly monotheistic. So what did they mean by phrases like:

"For in him [the Son] all things were created ... he is the head of the body, the church ... the firstborn from the dead ... God was pleased to have all his fulness dwell in him," 

from Paul's letter to the Colossian church; and

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us ... the one and only Son, who came from the Father," 

from the opening of John's Gospel?

It took several hundred years of argument, but in the end the church settled on the idea of a Trinitarian God - one God in three Persons - and that Jesus was both fully God and fully man, in one person.

Jews don't like this solution, Muslims don't like it either, and an assortment of Christian offshoots over the centuries have rejected it as well. So why is mainstream Christianity so attached to the idea of a Trinitarian God, what does it mean, and how is it monotheistic?

In my view, at the heart of the issue is the reality that God is essentially unknowable. How can anyone get their heads around a being who created the whole space-time universe out of nothing? If He created time, when did He do it; if He created space where was He when He did it? God is beyond space and time, but we have no way of understanding that. It's a reality which Kierkegaarde and Karl Barth described as infinite qualitative distinction (that Wikipedia reference isn't very good - if you know a better link please let me know).

So how can we talk about God as a person (or even as three persons)? How can a being beyond space and time relate to ordinary people in any meaningful sense, and how can we engage with, or even worship, such a being?

The answer has to be through God's self-revelation. We can't understand God (someone once said that anyone who claims to understand their God worships an idol). Nevertheless God can reveal himself to us - in a necessarily limited way - such that we can engage with that revelation. The Abrahamic religions understand that self-revelation to be through their scriptures and through creation, God's handiwork.

To Jews God reveals Himself through the Torah (and the Prophets), to Muslims through the Quran, and to Christians through the Bible. Scriptures are famously obscure and ambiguous in parts, so that revelation is modulated by the universe around us - God's creation - and by the way God has dealt over the centuries with His people.

Note, incidentally, the problems of language in describing God: God doesn't have gender, yet his self-revelation in the various scriptures is personal, so none of 'he', 'she' or 'it' really works well, but one must use something. So I'm using the traditional 'He', in spite of its limitations.

One self-revelation equates to one understanding of God which sits comfortably with monotheism. But what if God reveals himself in other, significantly different, ways?

What if God somehow revealed himself in a person? A person who in some mysterious way was both fully human and fully an expression of the one God? We can't begin to understand how that works of course, but then God is essentially not understandable - all we can do is appreciate his presentation(s) of Himself to us. A person is qualitatively different from a book; a human being localised in time and space has to be understood differently from the creator of that time and space. One God has revealed Himself in two fundamentally different ways.

Then there is the Christian experience of some sort of inner presence within them, which in some mysterious way unites them with other Christians, with Jesus, and with the otherwise unknowable God. A kind of Spirit which connects the human and the divine - inevitably almost indescribable and incomprehensible, but subjectively experienced as God revealing himself to us.

Three ways in which one God reveals himself to mankind - to you and I if we have eyes to see, ears to hear, heart and mind to experience. Creator and author, redeeming human being, and uniting restoring Spirit. One God revealing Himself through three 'persons' - self-expressions with whom limited humanity can relate.

A Trinitarian God who remains one God indivisible.

Mark: Turning Toward Golgotha

Halfway through Mark's Gospel suddenly the penny drops ... partly.

"You are the Messiah," says Peter, but promptly loses the plot when Jesus talks about dying.

Jesus has been proclaiming good news to the poor, has been gathering in the lost and the outcast, has cast out demons and healed the sick, and has provoked reactions wherever he went. Pretty convincing behaviour for a prophet and a holy man.

But Jesus has also calmed a storm, fed five thousand with five loaves and a couple of fish, then walked across a lake and fed four thousand more with seven loaves and a few small fish. What sort of prophet does these things? The disciples were confused and didn't understand. Then Peter makes a mental leap.

At once Jesus' mission changes direction, and the pace drops. Now Jesus is headed toward Jerusalem and to death. Poor old Peter is left bewildered again. “Get behind me, Satan!” seem harsh, but maybe something strong was needed to start to get past Peter’s mental block?

Peter thought he'd got it sussed: he knew what the story was now, and where things were going. When Jesus goes off in another direction he is lost and confused.

Mark was writing for readers who were lost and confused. Their world had turned upside down: in persecution, rebellion and civil war there seemed to be no justice, no peace, no hope. What comfort could Mark offer them? Or us?

What Mark offers is mystery. A mountaintop experience, where Jesus is joined by Moses and Elijah - symbolising the Law and the Prophets fulfilled in Jesus. God's voice again comes down affirming Jesus, this time for the disciples to hear too: “This is my beloved Son, listen to him!”

Jesus is not starting a new religion. What he is doing reveals the proper understanding of the Hebrew scriptures. The Scribes and the Pharisees had lost their way; Jesus calls them, and us, to a true understanding of what following God means. And part of that understanding involves dying to the old and being raised for the new.

Part of that ‘new’ is a new approach to importance, to status and power. “Who is the greatest?” The one who seems least and serves most is the greatest!

What sort of Messiah, of King, is Jesus? Maybe more to the point, how much regard and reputation can his followers expect. Status, respect, authority – the disciples weren't the only religious leaders to want such things; now they are being told the price.

Just as the one who seeks their own life will lose it, so the person who seeks status and authority will not be important in God’s eyes and in God’s kingdom. It is only those who throw away such things who will gain them.

Mark is generally believed to have got the material for this Gospel from Peter, several years later. Maybe the way Mark portrays the disciples' confusion, and Peter's continual cluelessness, reflects that Peter has finally learnt this lesson. How happy are we to look like idiots, if it helps others see more clearly?

The first half of Mark leads us to this point of confused recognition; from here onward the road leads to suffering and death ... and beyond that to new life.

Maybe this was hope for the suffering Christian community in the late 60's AD; maybe it is hope for us now when life goes badly wrong. But that hope remains shrouded in mystery and confusion.