Tonight at house church Mandy read an excerpt from N.T. Wright’s “Surprised By Hope” regarding the bodily ascension of Jesus into heaven and his subsequent relationship with the church and, consequently, how that informs and directs the church’s mission. I took some notes and allowed my thoughts to develop. Jesus is in heaven in bodily form (heaven is simply the realm of God, and the classifications between physical and spiritual are leftovers from Platonism and Gnosticism and shouldn’t inform our understanding of what heaven may be like). The church is the community of God’s people in the world, redeemed in Messiah Jesus; the church is constituted by its placement between the Now and Not Yet, by its placement between Easter and Consummation. Jesus is bodily in heaven and yet present with us; my best understanding of how this works is that Jesus is in bodily form in heaven, reigning in heaven and over and against the church, present with his people through the Spirit. In heaven Jesus reigns. He is Lord, which means that he is both the Judeo-Christian God YHWH (the Greek kyrios was often used in the LXX in place of YHWH) and the King, the Emperor, the Master—Caesar’s rival, the king of which Caesar is a mere shadow and parody. Jesus is king, and the church is comprised of his loyal subjects. As loyal subjects, the church is to serve the role of advancing the kingdom of God which Jesus inaugurated in his death and resurrection. We are to be his emissaries and ambassadors, his agents in his kingdom-work, summoning the world to obedience to the rightful king and putting into practice his kingdom of justice, peace, beauty, hope, and love. When it comes to our relationship with God (and Jesus), the Bible is full of metaphors. Jesus is our friend and he is our King. The friendship we have with Jesus, I think, is founded upon the status we have before him: he is our king, and we are his subjects. I’m not going to bow down before any of my friends, but one day I’ll be bowing down before Jesus (Phil 2.10-11, I believe).
Those were the notes I took down during the actual discussion. When we went into prayer and meditation, the Spirit spoke to me. Amidst my studies in repentance, I have written a lot about what God desires and demands of us: loyalty. The crucified and resurrected Jesus of Nazareth is the world’s true Lord, reigning from heaven; and one day the veil between heaven and earth will be ripped asunder, and all those who refused to put loyalty in him will experience death and all those who put their loyalty in him will experience resurrection, glorification, and participation in the new heavens and new earth. What God demands of us in faith isn’t merely mentally assenting to the truth of the gospel. Nor is it simply trusting in him for our salvation. It isn’t the legalism of being good enough to merit his grace. It is loyalty, and within the pail of loyalty all those other aspects of faith come together into a beautiful panorama. Amidst all of this talk about Jesus being King and demanding loyalty from his subjects, one can easily slip into the mindset of perceiving Jesus as this cold, sterile, angry King who is eager to punish. Many kings in the world are quite like that, and our historical experiences of kings can and do influene how we understand Jesus and his kingship. I thank God that I don’t picture Jesus like that; I used to (as my friend Mandy said she did, too), and it was hell.
That Jesus is King is wonderful news. The world’s true king is not like all the other kings that have gone before. Jesus is characterized by self-giving love: self-sacrifice. He is compassionate, merciful, slow to anger and eager to forgive (I have always suspected that God is more eager to forgive us than we are eager to receive his forgiveness). We who have put our loyalty in him will, as James say, stumble many times and in many ways. Amidst these stumblings and sins, God doesn’t reject us. He drowns us in his love and grace, refreshing our broken and wounded hearts, mending us and healing us, lovingly guiding us and directing us. He knows that we are not yet glorified; he knows that we are accosted by all sorts of temptations and that we are made of dust. He is understanding and graciously, generously, and lavishly forgiving. His disposition towards us, even sinners as awful as me, is one of love and benevolence and favor. It is comforting that the King of the World is the one who healed the lepers, forgave the adulterers, and embraced the unclean. He is the one who begged the Father to forgive those who executed him on a shameful cross. He is the one who offered himself on a cross not for the faithful but for the faithless. The kings of this world are self-serving, brutal, two-timing and manipulative, caring more about their thrones than about their subjects. And even if an unjust king can be patient and graceful, how much more a king who stepped down from the throne to secure the rescue of his subjects, even taking his place between the rebellious and their fate, going through their fate and carving a path straight through it. It is a joy and a privilege to serve a king like Jesus. May we gaze upon the cross and bow down before our gracious, loving, and merciful king, submitting any part of ourselves that we have continued to hold back from him.
No comments:
Post a Comment