More on the Pot of Nard

Mark 14: 3-10

³ While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.

⁴ Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, “Why this waste of perfume? ⁵ It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor.” And they rebuked her harshly.

⁶ “Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. ⁷ The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me. ⁸ She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial. ⁹ Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

¹⁰ Then Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve, went to the chief priests to betray Jesus to them.¹¹ They were delighted to hear this and promised to give him money. 

Jesus in revolutionary mood

This story has intrigued me since I first read it years ago.  A couple of things: firstly, her action with the nard was outrageously extravagant to the point of being offensive.  A tiny amount would have produced a very nice effect at more than half the cost.  Secondly, Jesus seems to become suddenly blase about the poor.  His words are suggestive of an ideological stance that willy-nilly accepts the socio-political and economic constructs that support mass poverty.  Thirdly, why should this story, above all stories, be one that is remembered in connection with the spread of the gospel?  That is, there is very little to be found in the story of forgiveness, or of helping one's neighbour, or speaking in tongues, etc.  Fourthly, the comments of those present (whom John informs us were led by Judas Iscariot) actually make good common sense.  Jesus didn't need a years wages worth of perfume poured on his head, and the money raised could have helped a lot of people.   

I think that the reason why this story is so closely associated by Jesus with the spread of the gospel is that it exposes us very strikingly to the way in which the gospel is offensive to both common sense and conventional morality.  Mary's act of generosity flies in the face of even the most generous human action through being so excessively wasteful; it's the gift that gives over and above any conception of need.  As perfume it is wholly a non-essential luxury product, and as a consumer product it is worth a fortune.  Lavishing such a non-essential, expensive good even on Jesus exposes the cramped meanness at the heart of much that passes for generosity in human terms.  I'm not just referring to a few quid in the collection plate, or tithing, or whatever.  Mary's act must have come from the Holy Spirit himself, poured out in her heart.  It was a supernatural, superabundant act of which she would have been incapable, no matter how much she loved Jesus from her natural self.  That is precisely why it is a GOSPEL act; it does not represent how much she loved him, or how generous she was, etc; but rather it represents Mary being caught up in the love of the Father for the Son through the Holy Spirit.  The gospel is the invitation to become a participant in this extravagant movement of love.  A little sprinkling of oil would never do.  Not least, more evidence that Mary was acting under the Holy Spirit's guidance is that her action was likewise prophetic of Christ's impending death and burial.  That her action should be prophetic of the cross, Christocentric, and offensive to good manners/sense to boot means that what she did was done from within the very heartbeat of the gospel.

Incidentally, while the last verse makes Judas specifically look bad, it also casts judgement on the kind of human-inspired generosity that purely human love and understanding veer towards.   

The Tree planted by God and the Tree planted by Men

My brother recently asked me to read this post by Joe Hayward at Evangelist Changing on the penal substitution debate.  Needless to say, I haven't read it just yet (deadlines, deadlines, and more deadlines...), but it got me thinking of what it is I actually believe was effected at the cross - was it a simple legal transfer of God's righteousness onto humanity, or is there something more?

A few thoughts came to me as I wandered here and there upon the earth...

Firstly, the doctrine of penal substitution certainly hits the mark with regards to the efficacy of our standing before God.  That is, 'God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.'  This much is fairly clear to me.  

Secondly, however, to stay at this level of a legal transfer of sin and righteousness seems to miss the mark of what actually occurred at Golgotha.  On the cross the glory of God is revealed through the obedient death of the Son.  This brings up two questions: what is God's glory, and how is it revealed on the cross?  The first can be answered by saying that God's glory is his substance, his innermost being.  This can be further understood with reference to Hebrews 1:3, that 'the Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being...'  The pattern of God's glory is fundamentally one of Trinitarian kenosis.  That is, that in pouring himself out in his entirety to the Son, the Father's glory is revealed in the Son, who reflects back that glory to the Father.  The glory of God is his kenotic, self-emptying love, which spreads ever outward through the Holy Spirit, who breaks up any possibility of God being simply a dialectic of self-contained love between Father and Son, like a kind of mutual admiration society.  For the second question, one can say that on the cross, through his (relatively) unwilling obedience to the Father's will, Christ enacts this same kenosis of self-emptying by dying a horrifyingly lingering death.  In this, the glory of God (his kenotic substance of mutual, out-going love) his revealed.  See: Isaiah 40:5.

What does this mean then?  It means that along with penal substitution, on the tree planted by men Christ reverses the original sin of Adam's disobedience on the tree planted by God.  The tree planted by God was desirable (to look at, to eat, and to make one wise), whereas the tree planted by men, as an expression of man's wickedness, is wholly undesirable.  By submitting himself to total self-emptying without remainder on the tree planted by men, Christ reinstates humanity's position before God, recreates the species in the image of God, and pays the penalty for our original sin.  The concept of penal substitution, then, can be upheld, but with the proviso that it doesn't go far enough.  The cross is not simply a legal transfer of righteousness, but a reversal of humanity's fallen state of disobedience through obedience.

Anyway, must go and read that blog post...:)   

Mike Reeves on Youtube

Mike Reeves has three excellent youtube sermons in which much of his output to date is massively condensed into short video presentations.  For some reason the Youtube account is only open if someone has the exact link, which I got from somewhere - probably from Glen at Christ the Truth.

I'm Going to be a Daddy!

Only five more days before the wife and I meet the little two year boy we've been lucky enough to be matched for adoption with.  Our whole lives are going to change, but - importantly - I'm going to be a daddy, and Carolyn is going to be a mummy!  

We're so excited!!  

The Blade that Cuts also Heals

Excerpt from Mike Higton's Difficult Gospel: the theology of Rowan Williams

We are all of us precarious creatures.  We live in environments we cannot control, and are hedged about by limits we cannot overcome.  We face frustrations, we face competition for scarce resources, and we are jostled in a confined space by the egos of others.  There is only limited difference that we can make, and we have only a limited control over even that difference; our actions are inevitably shaped by what others have done to us, and they mix uncontrollably with the actions of others and the unpredictable resistances of our environment, and they escape us.

Our unavoidable dependence on and involvement with others is distorted by their selfishness, and the inevitable dependence of others on us and their involvement with us is distorted by ours.  And in the midst of all this, we constantly invent ways of pretending that all of this is not true, or of refusing the responsibility with which it leaves us.  We inherit and invent endless ways to deny our finitude.  We ruffle our feathers to make ourselves big enough to scare the world; or we try to move the world to pity us.  We try to force the world to feel its moral obligation towards us, or we try to make ourselves so small the world will not notice us.

We pretend that we can shape the world to our will, or we despair and assume that we make no difference at all, and that we are therefore not responsible.  We are finite, we are mortal, we are weak - and in the absence of any sure foundation, these truths are too bitter for us, and we hide them behind layers and layers of fantasy and illusion.

We try to persuade ourselves that there is some territory in the world, or some core to our selves, in which we alone are in control, in which we alone get to define what is valuable.  We scratch away at the world to produce some space in it that is definitively ours, that we can defend against all comers - knowing that, deliberately or inadvertently, imperceptibly or violently, others would colonize it if they could.

'The Gospel', says [Rowan] Williams, 'frees us from fear and fantasy...it is the great enemy of self-indulgent fantasy.'  The Gospel is the message that we are held in a loving regard which we cannot coerce or fight off, and which has no shadow of selfishness about it - no shadow of our being so-opted into someone else's strategies, somebody else's fantasy.  And so it is the message that we are set free to see and accept our finitude, our limitation, our mortality, and to surrender that limited, mortality to the love which upholds us. 

pp. 17, 18
SCM Press
London
2004

Creationism vs Evolution

(I wrote these comments in the comment section of an article about Michael Gove in the Guardian: here)

The debate about creationism vs science is a very bizarre one because it seems to me to be a red herring. This is shown when you try and answer the question as to why it matters in any real sense if one person or a whole group of people believe that God made the world in 6 days a few thousand years ago, or if our evolution from lower life forms took millions of years. In terms of most of our relationships, our ability to make good choices, our careers, and so on it makes no difference at all. Why then is there all this fuss?

It is because such belief is, either way, indicative of a general stance towards things that effect us in the here and now. This is the point of contention. Creationist beliefs suggest and support (in a very poor way, granted) the view that our human dignity and fundamental equality is something inalienable and given by divine fiat. Evolutionary beliefs stand in, not for evolution in particular, but for the whole panoply of scientific achievement, which the opposing view appears to challenge. It is only from this perspective that the hot air generated by a debate about origins makes any contemporary sense to me. They are arguments about and for different things.

In both cases, evolution and creationism stand in for what they are not, which is general arguments about separate issues (our preciousness and equality versus our hard won achievements as a species), and as such ought not be opposed to one another since they both speak of different things. Moreover, proponents of evolution misunderstand that creationists are responding to the logical conclusion towards which a purely evolutionary account tends (that humans are fundamentally unequal); whereas creationists misunderstand that one does not need to oppose evolutionary science to uphold the idea that God made and loves us. The fact that virtually non one intellectually assented to the idea that Genesis 1-3 was historically/scientifically "true" before the rise of science in the 17th Century, to which creationism itself rose in misguided response, suggests that this debate lacks any self-awareness.

It is a pointless debate.

It's not even a debate....

Matcham @ the BBC

My brother, the minister from Devon, was on the BBC (again!) just last week on the Sunday Service program.  As of today there is only 5 days left to listen.  In between worship songs, he spoke about his recent study of Amos, forgiveness, and the plight of the Palestinians.  Personally, I thought that the show ought to have ended with 'There is a Tavern in the Town' as a nice contrast, but his singing voice wasn't quite up to it.  

The recording can be found here.