The Word between Worlds

We were studying the ministry of John the Baptist in Mark 1 this week. I was struck again by the eschatological nature of preaching. John’s proclamation, just as the preaching of Jesus a few verses later, is not merely a flat call to repentance, to make a new start, to change simply because life might be better that way, or because it is the right thing to do. It is a call to repent in the light of the imminent action of God in judgement (Malachi's prophecy) and salvation (Isaiah). 

That action of God was, of course, in and through the arrival of Jesus himself. He came, also calling for repentance and faith, and pulling those two prophetic threads together in his own person. He brought salvation by bearing judgement. Believe it!

 

John’s ministry looked back (as did all the OT prophets) to the standards of the covenant that God had made with his people, but, more than any other prophet, he looked forward, because the Day of God was now arriving. Our ministry is no less eschatological, but we look back to God’s past work in the person of Jesus, and look forward, announcing his second coming and final judgement. He bore judgement, bringing salvation; he will return, bringing judgement and salvation that will define eternity for all of us. 

Our tendency is to lose that eschatological driving force in our preaching. Desperate for “relevance” we preach how Jesus transforms life now – which he does – but all too easily flatten out the proclamation into a mere moral appeal, which ultimately degenerates into what is little better than a self-help exhortation.

When the word of Christ is ministered, in whatever context, setting or style, our minds and hearts are brought into sharp confrontation with three “moments”.  As we proclaim Christ, we take people back to the moment of God's mighty working in the coming of his Son, and especially the complex of cross-resurrection-ascension-Pentecost which form the focus of that work. We take people forward to the return of this same man Jesus: history is not wandering aimlessly, but is moving, or is being moved, inexorably towards that moment, the End. There will be glory, ultimate justice, complete resolution to the whole story – and to your story and mine. 

And in between those Moments, we have the moment in which the word is being ministered. The preacher is conscious of his or her position in the Now, this moment that hangs suspended in the vast universe of space and time, held by invisible threads between the Victory and the Coming. The preacher’s job is to bring those who hear into consciousness of those other Moments and their bearing on the present; it is to make clear that this moment called Now is the time to act, to repent and believe in the light of the only two other Moments that really matter. This day when we preach has an official name - it is called Today, and is the day God has appointed for all of us, preachers included, to repent and believe the Good News.  

... by any means possible...

All preaching, in one way or another, needs to occur in the consciousness of those three Moments, and to bring hearers into that consciousness. Preaching that disconnects from Christ’s Past and Christ’s Future ceases to be preaching. Preaching is, in fact, eschatological activity in and of itself. It is the most important thing happening in the world today. When Christ word is preached, we hear the voice that said “Father forgive them” from the cross, and we hear the voice that will divide sheep and goats on the last day.

To preach Christ’s word is terrifying; not to preach is far worse.

Threads

In a recent post, I referred to the two threads of judgement and salvation that come together in the gospel accounts of Jesus' baptism by John. It strikes me that the "threads" concept is such a powerful tool for understanding the Bible, and yet one which is not always appreciated.

To use that particular example, and explore it a little more deeply: the synoptic gospels refer to Malachi 3 and Isaiah 40 as they describe John's ministry. In Mark 1 the two passages are actually glued together, and introduced as if both by Isaiah, but on looking closely they are two quotes. The NIV does the work for us with carefully separating punctuation:

Mark 1:2-3 ... as it is written in Isaiah the prophet:“I will send my messenger ahead of you,who will prepare your way”— “a voice of one calling in the wilderness,‘Prepare the way for the Lord,make straight paths for him.’” 

What is striking is that the two verses quoted are the sections of the two passages which are most alike, and Mark weaves them into a virtually seamless whole.  But when we look at the context of the two verses, the contrast is stark: 

Malachi 3:1-5 “I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the Lord Almighty. 
But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. 
Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years. 
“So I will come to put you on trial. 
I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers,
against those who defraud laborers of their wages, 
who oppress the widows and the fatherless, 
and deprive the foreigners among you of justice, 
but do not fear me,” says the Lord Almighty. 

Isaiah 40:1-5 Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God. 
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, 
and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed,
that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. 
A voice of one calling:
“In the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 
Every valley shall be raised up, 
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain. 
And the glory of the Lord will be revealed,
and all people will see it together.
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” 

Both prophets speak of a voice or messenger, preparing the way for the Lord's coming. But that is their only point of similarity: Malachi's coming is terrifying, full of burning judgement against immorality and hypocrisy; Isaiah's is full of comfort and the assurance that punishment is done with. 

I don't know, and I don't know if anyone knows, whether any thinker or movement had put those two texts together before Mark did, but what is clear is that in drawing them together and making quite obvious that he sees them as referring to John and (more importantly) to Jesus, Mark is "doing theology" on a grand scale. He is joining threads, linking themes from past revelation and affirming that they both come to fulfilment in Jesus.

Those two threads, Judgement and Salvation, go way back, of course. At the very beginning of the Bible we see them under different names - they are Cursing and Blessing, which seem to alternate as themes in early Genesis. It is only as the universal nature of the curse of judgement is revealed in practice that blessing becomes inextricably linked with salvation - blessing can only be experienced when the curse is lifted, when sin is paid for, when judgement is removed. This is why Isaiah 40's promise of comfort is because sin is paid for - in the context a reference to exile, but illustrating a broader principle. 

Ultimately we may say that God has only two ways of dealing with the world: salvation and judgement. Extend those into eternity and you get the names Heaven and Hell.  The gospels draw those themes together and say that Jesus is God's agent in bringing both; he is Lord of both. 

The point is that there are many such threads, of greater and lesser prominence. Others could include the Presence/tabernacling of God with his people, or sacrifice, or the Son of Man, or the Shepherd, or the Servant, or the Messiah, or the Rock, or the Word, or Wisdom. It is the gathering of these threads into an interwoven whole in the coming of Jesus that constitutes a specifically Christian reading of the Old Testament. We could go so far as to say that whoever brought together the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 and the Terrifying Messiah of Psalm 2 invented Christianity. And the evidence is that this was Jesus himself.  

Contemporary criticism has often dismissed the idea of any unity of thought in the Bible. We are told that the book is a collection of incompatible theologies, and that any idea of an overarching theme or truth is an unworkable construct. Such an approach, it seems to me, rides roughshod over the Bible's own awareness of its internal diversity and yet its affirmation of unity. The New Testament's testimony to Jesus is precisely that he is the One in whom all those diverse and apparently opposing threads come together.  

Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand

Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. 

One of the perpetual pitfalls for the church in its preaching is the tendency to moralism. We love telling people to do this, to not do that, and to change. And we have so many biblical passages to clobber and coerce people with. One is the phrase here, as preached by John the Baptist and then by Jesus. 

The problem is that we tend to see the command to change, but divorce it from the "Kingdom of God is at hand." When we do that we flatten out the time dimension in the passage. God was doing something, or about to do something. The repentance was to be a reaction to what God was doing. The FACT of his work was to lead to the urgent COMMAND to change. Indicative driving imperative, if you like your grammar old fashioned! 

This is how true Christian proclamation is always to be, of course. Not moralism, but good news; God acts, and in the light of it, commands do come our way. Moral command without good news is not Christian preaching - as is communication of gospel facts with no imperative cutting edge, of course! 

"Repent" in John the Baptist's preaching is therefore not a command floating free of a context, a general urge to pull your socks up, turn over a new leaf and change. It is all about impending action and change that God is doing. 

What was God doing? Judging from the texts that the gospels quote as speaking about John the Baptist's preaching - Malachi 3 and Isaiah 40 - two great threads of hope were about to be fulfilled, and fulfilled together. God was about to step into history, with comfort and salvation on the one hand, and with judgement and wrath on the other. It was in the light of that just-around-the-corner action that John's hearers were putting their lives in order. They were baptised because, though they had longed for God's arrival in salvation, they realised they were unprepared for his judgement. After all, who can abide the day of his coming?? Submission to John's baptism was the recognition that you were under a terrible judgement which was about to fall, not a glorified New Year's resolution. 

This perspective really helps us with the oddity of Jesus' baptism by John. So long as we see John's baptism as part of a general repentance process for sinners, then we are flummoxed by Jesus' need of it. But his "fulfilling all righteousness", as he said to John, was not repentance. It was the recognition through baptism that God was about to act.  Judgement and salvation were arriving. The Kingdom of God was at hand! 

Of course, the Kingdom was arriving because the King had arrived. Jesus is the King of the Kingdom. People were preparing for his coming. The shock for John, and for us, is that instead of inspecting, commanding, judging and punishing, the King comes quietly, like a Lamb, and says, right from the start, "I'm under the soon-to-come judgement."

And that's how the salvation comes to the rest of us.