Blasphemy, Heresy or Scandal?
From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul
Blasphemy, Heresy or Scandal? 25 September 2011: pm
The Revd Jenny Wilkens
- Psalm 124
- Ezekiel 37:15-28
- 1 John 2:22-29
http://wellingtoncathedral.org.nz/index.php/Sermons
Blasphemy, heresy, scandal - they are all words that have been bandied about this week to describe the 'Jesus is an All Black' rugby player icon we have had on display here in the Cathedral. Of course a lot of other words have been used too, by those who found it compelling or 'wicked' or thought-provoking or insightful or prophetic. I wonder which word you would choose?
At the very least, it has been a catalyst for lively debate and discussion about Jesus, faith and religion within a city, country and media dominated till then by Rugby Heaven! And that can't be a bad thing…
Naturally enough we here have been on the receiving end of a huge range of responses and feedback, both positive and negative. As I reflected on tonight's set Bible readings, I was reminded of one comment: "how dare we drag the creator of the universe down to being a mere sports person!" And it made me think that perhaps the church hasn't moved on too far from some of the arguments they were having in the very first Christian communities and centuries.
We seem to fall right into the middle of one of those arguments in tonight's reading from 1 John. We don't tend to read the Epistles of John as much as the Gospel, so it may help us to find out a bit more about their authorship and context.
The concerns of the Epistles of John seem to be quite different from those of the Gospel, and to reflect a different community setting. The author of 2nd and 3rd John describes himself as John the Elder, and many scholars think this John the Elder is an elder of church communities which followed the teaching of John the apostle and gospel writer during and after his lifetime. We call these church communities Johannine.
So John the Elder is writing as a church leader with the authority to speak into the lives of these Johannine churches and communities. They may have been in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) as by church tradition, the apostle John ended his life and ministry in Ephesus, on the coast of Asia Minor.
Just as John's gospel is thought to have been the last written of the gospels, so it's likely these Epistles of John were written towards the very end of the 1st century or even later. Already we find the church is facing conflict and division - there are those who've split off from the church and are going around spreading false teaching. John even calls them 'antichrists', a word freighted for us with centuries of misuse, but John here uses it literally as someone who is anti Christ: "Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son." (1 John 2:22)
John's 2nd letter unpacks this even more: 'Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh; any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist!' (2 John v 7).
It seems that these false teachers were so focussing on the divinity of Jesus, that they were ending up denying that he was really human. They were denying the physical reality of Jesus coming in the flesh into this world. And so they were ending up denying the very lynchpin of John's gospel - the incarnation. As we hear so eloquently expressed in John's Prologue read at Christmas, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, literally 'pitched his tent' among us (John 1:14).
In downplaying Jesus' humanity, they were also downplaying the significance of Jesus' willingness to enter into the messiness of our world, to suffer and to die on the cross as a sacrifice for our sin. It is expressed so poignantly in the ancient Christian hymn found in Philippians chapter 2: 'Being found in human form, Christ Jesus humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross'. (Phil. 2:7,8)
What was driving this sort of false teaching? It seems like we're seeing the beginnings of thinking that drove a wedge between on one hand the divine, the spiritual, the soul, and on the other hand, the human, the material, the earthly.
And increasingly the divine, the spiritual, the soul was seen to be good, and the human, the material, the earthly was seen to be bad.
It may be that some of this teaching was influenced by Greek philosophical thought, deriving from Plato. When it encountered Christianity, such teaching then focussed on the divinity of Christ, and the possibility of Christians becoming sinless and perfect through gaining some sort of higher knowledge and spiritual status. What was downplayed was the humanity of Christ, his being made flesh and getting involved in our fleshliness. Such teaching focussed on being super-spiritual, that you'd left behind your earthly life, and didn't need to worry about sin or could sin with impunity as you were really 'above' such things. Such teaching then down-valued the fact and the cost of Christ going to the cross, to deal once for all with our sin and to bring us salvation and restored relationship with God.
It seems like we're seeing the beginnings of this sort of teaching being opposed in 1 John. We know that in the 2nd century of the church's life, we see the development of a number of streams of thought, called by the umbrella term, Gnosticism, which the church would deem heretical. Features of this were denial of the significance of Jesus' human nature and his death on the cross, and claims to higher esoteric knowledge, sinlessness and perfectionism.
We're not seeing full-blown Gnosticism opposed here, but we might be seeing the beginnings of it. It may feel to us like it's splitting hairs, or just differences of emphasis, but I think it shows us how seriously the church had to grapple with issues of just who Jesus is, and why both his divinity and humanity needed to be held together. So much so, that they spent much of the first 4 centuries debating these things, working out what was truth and what was heresy, and formulating our creeds - it was just as important to say as we said tonight in the Apostles' Creed, 'I believe in… Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary, Suffered under Pontius Pilate, Was crucified, dead, and buried' (statements about Jesus' human birth, life in history and death) as it was to say, 'The third day he rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty (statements about his divinity).
We can see how the sort of Gnostic teaching which was floating around resurfaced in later religious history. Some think it influenced Islamic thinking about Jesus and the cross, where some Islamic thought has it that Jesus as a prophet could not possibly suffer the ignominy of death on a cross, and that Jesus was whisked away, with another suffering crucifixion in his place.
It all has to do with the scandal of the incarnation, the scandal of the cross. Indeed 'skandalon' is the word Paul uses when he says: ' we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God'. (1 Cor 1:23)
That is the scandal that the person who complained about the rugby icon is reacting to when he said "how dare we drag the creator of the universe down to being a mere sports person!"
For this is the scandal and the wonder of the gospel message - that the Creator of the universe did dare to become a mere human being; that God loved the world so much that he sent his only Son into the world, not to condemn it, but to save it; that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. God wants to hold heaven and earth together, not push them apart, as so often the secular world tries to divide church from society, private faith from public life. Let's resist such attempts and keep Jesus in the public square, as he has been this week!
This scandal is there too in the prophet Ezekiel's message to us tonight. He is addressed by God as 'mortal', which I always find strangely discomfiting and an uncomfortable reminder of my own mortality, and yet the rest of our reading shows God yearning for his mortal creatures, constantly reaching out to them, despite the vagaries of their affections, longing to be in relationship with them, offering again and again that covenant of peace, founded in the deeply grounding words: 'they shall be my people and I will be their God' (Ezekiel 37:23, 27)
This is the relationship with John calls the Christians of his community to abide in, when they are feeling unsettled and storm-tossed by those who would lead them astray. Abide in the Son and the Father, abide in this relationship of love in which we find our security and fulfilment - whether in the end we win or lose the rugby!
'And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he is revealed, we may have confidence and not be put to shame before him at his coming.' (1 John 2:28) Amen.
