9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 11:1-10 : Romans 15:4-13 : Matthew 3:1-12
In the film Jurassic Park the chaos theoretician, Dr Ian Malcolm, delivers some of the most pointed and insightful lines. Horrified at the thought of theme park scientists reproducing dinosaurs, Malcolm is also sceptical about the long-term effectiveness of the apparent safeguard of genetically engineering the beasts’ DNA so that every dinosaur born at Jurassic Park is female, thus ensuring that they cannot breed.
At one point an exchange between the chief scientist and Malcolm goes like this:
Henry Wu: You're implying that a group composed entirely of
female animals will... breed?
Dr. Ian Malcolm: No, I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way.
Life … finds a way.
That’s eventually what happens in Jurassic Park: some of the dinosaurs begin to breed.
But long before Jurassic Park our scriptures were running this theme in various ways. We can think of Sarah in Genesis, Elizabeth in Luke, and the all-surpassing example of Mary the Mother of Jesus, who apparently conceives without human intervention.
Life finds a way.
Except of course that life here means the Living God and we might prefer to say that God finds a way – a way to ensure humankind’s movement from circularity and despair to forward movement and ultimate hope.
The story of John the Baptiser – the one known as the Forerunner in Eastern Orthodox tradition – is another example of God finding a way to bring life and hope to a humanity digging itself into a deeper and deeper hole as it wanders aimlessly in circles substituting rules, methodology and religious formulae for a living relationship with the Living God.
John stations himself on the outskirts and in doing so he forces the people of “Jerusalem and all Judaea” to leave the familiarity of their current life-nullifying homes and workplaces and religious institutions to journey to the borders of the wilderness.
In that sense these people come to meet John where things are pared back. They’re returning to some kind of starting point in order to discover a new beginning – a place where God can encourage them to receive the gift of new life, a place where life, paradoxically in the environment of wilderness, bare natural elements and essentials, finds a way.
And this is exactly what Matthew tells us –
"The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:At least, that’s what Isaiah sez in the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures. In the actual Hebrew version the quote is
'Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.' "
The voice of one crying out:
In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord …
I used to think the misplaced comma didn’t appreciably alter the meaning of the text. But now I’m not so sure.
I think it IS especially significant that God has John preparing the way of the Lord in the wilderness. I think it IS especially significant that God causes life to find a way in a place where life is hard, dangerous, unpredictable – and even unlikely.
And as we know a little later on the dude from Nazareth rocks up, gets done in the Jordan and then, instead of heading straight to the Big Smoke to enact his reforms, the Holy Spirit drives him right into the wilderness. And it’s from the wilderness that Jesus emerges. And he emerges from the wilderness preaching exactly the same message as his cousin, John the Forerunner.
Now this may surprise us. Shouldn’t Jesus have a new message? Isn’t he the New Thing? Doesn’t he have a New Take on the Old Story?
Yes and no. Because the Story doesn’t change. The Story is about getting back to God.
As Joni Mitchell archetypally wrote and sang in early 70’s
We got to get ourselves back to the garden …
The garden – the place where humankind first meets and forms a relationship with the Living God. A garden that becomes blasted and withered and barren – a wilderness where God continues, in a sense, to reside.
Human searching for the garden is humanity searching for God – the God who causes life to find a way.
And so we have the same message from both John and Jesus:
Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!
That one word - repent – encapsulates everything that Jesus was about.
And it’s NOT, as we so commonly suppose, a moral demand. It’s bigger – far more outrageously humungous than that. Repentance is not about moral sins but about spiritual redirection and return to the Living God in a way that gives life.
Again, it’s about life finding a way through the distractions and distortions of rules and religious red tape. It’s so easy to reduce Jesus’ message to a set of moral imperatives. The rational mind copes best with these neat niceties: good, evil; right, wrong; black, white.
But the call to life and the call of life – life finding a way under the loving prompting of the Living God – is a call to the spirit within us. As Paul reminds us, the good news is for all people, for Gentiles as well as Jews.
This is the merging, in one sense. It is the end of the dualism that the human mind enjoys so much. It is the unifying and reconciling of opposites. This is the ultimate goal of life finding a way.
Repentance, then, is not at all about sorrowing about moral transgressions. How much simpler and easier it would be if that was what it was all about and nothing else!
Repentance, however, is about this return to God. In its English form it means re-make. God calls us into the new life, the life that finds a way in Jesus, by allowing us to accept a total spiritual makeover. This is not easy and it’s not painless.
How much more straightforward it is simply to take the moral and dualistic path! I do wrong. I say, Sorry. I do right. Here’s the thing. I can do all that, all the time, my entire life, without ever changing, without ever coming even one tenth of a millimeter closer to God. Even hardened criminals know the difference between right and wrong.
So don’t imagine for second that hardened Christians are truly closer to God just because they know a few moral imperatives.
Remember, the message is repent. Change. Come back. Return. One-on-one. If we’re thinking Greek it comes out as “change your mind”, or as we might say today, “change your mindset”, change your way of thinking about God. See God, not as a terrifying school principal with an unbreakable cane, ready to give you six of the best every time you break one of the rules – but as the welcoming, inviting, loving Creator who yearns for reunion.
In other words, change your thinking about the moral tyrant so that you understand the loving giver of life, the One who causes life to find a way into our hearts and converse softly and gently with our own spirit.
It’s by no means an easy task. But, as ever, we don’t have to do it alone. So are we prepared to take that risk? Will we – can we move from the safety of the known world of dualisms and set out for the border country, the outskirts of both civilised religion and the wilderness where the Living God dwells? Can we set out to meet the Forerunner – and ultimately find Jesus, in whom life finds a way?
No comments:
Post a Comment