Abstract
‘The Time for Renewal Has Come’
Those preaching this Trinity Sunday are treated to a scriptural banquet of possibilities, indeed a scriptural excess of meaning and application, whose issues will range from the transcendence of God as magnificent (Is 6:1) and overwhelming and yet as terrible to behold (Ps 29:5–10), to the meaning of prophecy and truth-telling (Is 6:7–8), to the power and tenderness of God’s spirit of adoption which renders us children of God and joint heirs with Christ (Rom 8:15, 17), to the person and meaning of Nicodemus within both the Gospel of John and in our own contemporary church communities, to the biblical and cultural power of being born from above (Jn 3:7), to one of popular culture’s most often invoked verses from John and indeed the whole bible (Jn 3:16), to yet another example of anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John which will need to be faced and confessed squarely by preachers and congregations for today’s New Testament reading to become a living word, a just word, in our hearing. There is plenty here for congregations to celebrate about the mystery of the divine life’s inner and outer three-in-oneness, of the praise and worship of the one God made known as Father, Son and Spirit. As a direct result, there is also plenty here for congregations to celebrate about the Christian life.
Isaiah 6 begins with the prophet’s vision of ‘the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple’ (Is 6:1). Isaiah sees seraphs attending the Lord above him, each with six wings. Two wings cover their faces, two cover their feet, and the remaining two are for flying, as each seraph calls thunderously to the other proclaiming ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory’ (6:3). The scale of the setting (the mere hem of the robe fills the temple), the conduct of the seraphs (proclaiming in shaking and shattering voice what their winged behavior already reveals) speak to the transcendence of the one God, the otherness, also the purity. As the seraphs’ wings shield feet and faces from the Lord’s wholly other presence, Isaiah correctly recognizes himself and his people as counterpoint to the Lord’s presence, and thus turns his mind to confession, condemnation, and proclamation: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts’ (6:4).
While the verses continue to narrate the cleansing of Isaiah’s lips with the hot coal taken from the altar, readying Isaiah to assume his role as prophet to be sent, it bears noting that the prophetic office—and by very rough analogy, the celebrant and preacher this Sunday—are by definition overwhelmed by the excess of God. In the first sense, this excess presents itself in Isaiah 6 as the transcendence of God as wholly other from creation (hence Isaiah’s vision, and one that advertises its struggle with language to portray a scale and scope which language cannot access). In a second sense, the excess also presents itself as the prevenient grace of God, which comes to the prophet as the condition for the possibility of the office and its requirements. In ministerial parlance, we think of vocation as a distinct if also at times bewildering calling or prompting by the Spirit that makes possible what we actually do, for good, in response to that calling, so that it cannot be said that the doing is our own. While not our own, the ministerial call and work nonetheless very much involve our cooperation.
In Paul’s word, we are ‘debtors’ (Rom 8:12). Those in ministry discerning Isaiah 6 may be led to confess their own lack of inherent qualification for ministry, opting instead, as does Isaiah, for an eagerness and readiness for the calling, but one stamped by an acknowledgement of what God has already done to enable both the call and response, a calling with which oneself merely—if truly—cooperates. Here a slightly subtle reading provides us with anti-clericalism possibilities in the sense that the focus, the acknowledgment, the inherent ability and even choice of ministry stem not from ourselves, not from our own proper and earned abilities, but from the prior enabling of the one who is wholly Other. Yet even that acknowledgment must be made with care so that the inherent transcendence of God is preserved, and with it our distance. The centering of self, grandiosity, and the painful drive to be acknowledged run against this grain, compromising ministry and the community one is called to serve.
As ‘debtors’ Paul invites his audience to live by the ‘Spirit’ rather than the ‘flesh’. The dichotomy between ‘flesh’ and ‘Spirit’ in Paul should not be confused with condemnation of the physical, as with Manichaeism. Congregations may need this to be stressed. In both Paul and in John, where the final verse of today’s gospel passage reads ‘Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him’ (Jn 3:17), the signification of ‘Spirit’ as opposed to ‘flesh’ pertains to the destiny to which we have been called, namely, participation in the divine life. That which is flesh, by definition, is mortal. It perishes. Its perishing does not mean it is bad, that it is not a good of creation. Simply, it is mortal. That which is of the Spirit, however, is of God differently in its destiny to be preserved in and by God, for communion in the eternal life of Father, Son, and Spirit. That which is of the Spirit does not pass away. Romans 8 this Sunday can be preached so as to avoid what congregations often ‘hear’ in the dichotomy of flesh and spirit, a shaming of their physical body and what it represents. In verse 15, an implication of living in the ‘flesh’ is spelled out: to live according to the flesh is to live in fear. Against fear, Paul testifies to our adoption by God as children of God and, with Christ (and therefore in glory), joint heirs to God. Congregations can be encouraged, invited, to believe themselves even in their mortality to be adopted by God for God’s purposes of communion and love eternal. For Paul, the Spirit of God bears witness with our own mortal spirit that, in faith, we have been made children of God. This is done, now. Amen, rejoice, hallelujah. Yet the Christian life is marked by struggle to believe and quiet moments of doubt and loud moments of sin and self-contradiction. Against fear, adoption. Against fear, trust in the God who adopts makes people anew as his own children. The Spirit encountering us on Trinity Sunday is the Spirit of adoption.
In Jn 3:1–17 Nicodemus figures prominently, helping to school the reader in a faith that is partial toward a faith that is fuller. Sadly, this narrative involving Nicodemus bears traces of anti-Jewish polemics that are present and well known throughout the Gospel of John. These polemics provide the reader not with static notions about darkness and light, faith and unbelief, children of God and children of the devil. Rather, they offer a transparent window into a communal polemics resulting from the painful divorce in John’s community between the Jews who believed in Christ and the majority of Jews who did not. That separation had occurred by the time the Johannine author writes his gospel, and the latter reflects the former. In our contemporary moment of increased anti-Semitism (so too, anti-Muslim sentiment), the preacher bears particular responsibility to announce why and how John can be read and interpreted without adoption of late first century anti-Jewish distortion, even as we recognize that the sad divorce occurring within that religious family turned to condemnation and even demonization, as Jews and Jewish-Christians increasingly viewed each other as beyond the pale, and painfully.
Nicodemus, a Pharisee, comes to Jesus ‘by night’, a clear allusion to the Gospel’s parallelisms of faith and unbelief; light and darkness; knowledge and ignorance; Christian and Jewish. Yet Nicodemus had previously recognized Jesus as a teacher, and he reappears twice later in the gospel to defend Jesus (7:50–51) and to offer him a royal burial (19:39–42). Further, here in 3:2 Nicodemus recognizes that nobody can do what Jesus does apart from the presence of God. Yet he is admonished by Jesus upon failing to understand what Jesus says in response: ‘Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above’ (3:3). It seems Nicodemus is admonished, and so is Israel, for not perceiving new birth. ‘Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?’ (3:10) The wound of non-reception is revealed: ‘Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony’. Jesus’ point: to perceive the Word of God for what it is, one must be born from above, born of the Spirit, born anew, into a new life with new identity, family, and commitments. From the perspective of faith, this is a new insight, dependent upon Jesus as the one who has come from the Father. But from the perspective of divine action, the Spirit of God present in Jesus cleanses and reorients people toward their calling. Faith is not achieved but given, as a possibility requiring movement.
The mystery of who recognizes Jesus and who does not cannot be preached facilely or conclusively; it remains a mystery and is related to the prevenient grace of God in Isaiah 6. Speaking ill of Jewish brothers and sisters past, present or future, can be interpreted through the confessional language of Isaiah 6 when the prophet acknowledges his own ‘unclean lips’ revealed to him in and by the presence of God. But rather than perpetuating anti-Jewish tropes naively or inadvertently—a counter witness to faith—preachers this Trinity Sunday do well to pause and familiarize with recent biblical and homiletical teachings from various mainline Christian denominations and scholars on how to preach about scripture containing anti-Jewish possibilities. Afterall, many Christians have mixed families, and for those that do not, Jewish people are our friends and, theologically, remain our brothers and sisters in the covenants that God has never revoked. And the truth is that we al—especially those in positions of leadership—recognize ourselves in the great teacher Nicodemus, seeing and yet missing, recognizing and yet only partially, with a gaping remainder. If God intends no condemnation (3:17), neither must we. The example of Nicodemus’ teaching can be directed not toward sectarian purposes—empty and dead words those would be—but toward ourselves and to those in positions of leadership in our churches who are ‘teachers of Israel’ and yet ‘do not understand these things’ (3:10). The time for renewal has come.