Sermon: Wicked Thoughts

Text: Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ ... and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. Romans 5.1,5

Those of you who know me at all are aware that I am rather prone to wicked thoughts. And my most recent one was, Was Paul right?

This thought was inspired by listening to a reading of 2 Corinthians 3, which tells of ... Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside. And it continues: But their minds were hardened. Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is still there, since only in Christ is it set aside. Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds.

This is an astonishing thing to say about the Jewish people - even for a Jew indulging in a piece of self-mockery. But how did he know that what he said was the case? Who was he thus to set aside the whole of Israelite history and theology and to say that it was now simply redundant? Where does that leave Jewish people today, two thousand years later? Was Paul right?

We, of course - Gentiles mostly - rejoice in Paul's gospel insight: that the grace of God embraces all nations, including ourselves. But - if we know anything about it, or if we have friends who are Jewish, or if we hear a Rabbi on the radio - we often like to think that there is something in this homely and commonsense religion, even if we were brought up to think that Judaism was no longer necessary, or true.

Unless, unless.... Unless it is not a question of 'right', or 'wrong'. Maybe Paul's tortuous self-justification and argument represented the attempt to come to speech of an almost possible, almost impossible, sense of the new: the unsaid - albeit implicit - logic of what it is to be human in the face of the end of all things.

Paul's argument in Romans 5, which we read earlier, follows on from what he says in Galatians about Abraham. Paul wants the financial support of the church in Rome for a trip further west, to Spain (though it is unlikely that he ever made it); and he has to 'clarify' what he has said in earlier in his letter to the Galatians.

In Galatians 3.6-9 he had asserted that those who have faith in Jesus are the real offspring of Abraham, rather than those who were circumcized, because Genesis 15.6 says, And he believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness. Now, of course, that text cannot of itself bear the weight that Paul attaches to it. What it means in its original context is that God reckoned that Abraham's believing him, when he promised him that he would have a son, was simply a meritorious act. But Paul takes that text and uses it to establish a whole new understanding of God's salvation. And - not surprisingly - it seems that there were some who questioned this use of the scriptures.

So Paul had to justify himself, if he was going to convince them of the desirability of their supporting his efforts to go to Spain. He repeats himself and expands what he wants to say, and he uses other texts, such as Psalm 32.2, Happy are those to whom the LORD imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit; for here the word imputes is the same as reckoned, and so he is able to draw a parallel between God's imputing, not iniquity, but righteousness.

And he develops his argument by pointing out that Abraham believed the promise before he was circumcised; so therefore the promise comes first. So therefore believing - the promise - comes before obeying - the Law.

And Paul is committed to doing all this because he is now convinced that the end of the ages has come. And he is convinced of that because of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. To the Jewish mind, that meant that the final vindication of God's people had happened; if Jesus had been raised, then they and all nations were to be raised, and in the final judgement, Israel would be vindicated and the nations would be judged who had previously oppressed them - whether Egypt and Babylon long ago, or Syria and Rome more recently.

But Paul's particular take on this was his own commission from the risen Christ to preach to the Gentiles - to the enemy, in fact! - and to say that God's promises were for all nations; that all of them were now included in God's plan. The invitation to faith was precisely to believe that!

Therefore, since we are justified by faith [- that is, as opposed to works of the Law -] since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ ... and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

I repeat, Was Paul right? According to Harold Bloom, the American-Jewish literary critic, all literary texts are a strong misreading of those that precede them. And religious texts, for these purposes, fall into the same category, for they function as 'classics'. Paul was carving out a new understanding of the basic Jewish texts.

So the question, Was Paul right? is not an objective one, and cannot carry an objective answer. The more appropriate question is, In what ways might he be, not right or wrong, but valid? How shall we read him? What might we learn from him? How shall we use what he says to formulate our understanding of God and of what is going on in the world?
Paul is thinking wicked thoughts! New circumstances demand new responses. New knowledge suggests new wisdom. New experience requires new formulations. New wine, as somebody once said, into new wineskins!

And the saying in John 16.12-13, I still have more to say to you, but when the Spirit comes, he will guide you into all truth, is similar; it heads out into the future; it launches out into the deep and lets down the nets for a catch. It is a way of allowing the readers of this Gospel to read out of it the openness of the future to the newness of God's action in Jesus Christ.

And - and this is the point of today's celebration - the doctrine of the Trinity is one element of such a newness. The doctrine is not explicit in the Bible, though it is suggested by it. It was worked out classically by great minds, who thought their wicked - 'post-biblical' - thoughts during the early Christian centuries.

And the point is entirely this God, this Man Jesus, and this Breath, by which the one lives in the other and the other lives in the one - and who is to say which way round? - and both have taken up residence among and within humanity. For the breath of the one and the breath of the other are one breath, and inseparable. Yet they are identifiable in the unity of what they bring - he brings - about within the human race. And for all the life-giving Spirit, there is something about this God which is a breath-taking Wind!

Colin Gunton, Professor Christian Doctrine at King's College, London, until his tragically early death last year, was a fine scholar in the Reformed tradition and, in my experience - for he taught me years ago - a good and kind man. His last book was published just a few months ago, after his death: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In it he suggests that the doctrine of the Trinity, for all that it is grossly underrated in the Western tradition, can function as a tool for reading and a skill for living.

And believe it or not, the doctrine of the Trinity is about the fundamentals of practical living. It alerts us to the possibility that we called to a faith that has to do, not so much to swallowing pills, but with imagining possibilities, not dwelling on the non-negotiable past, but on the potential inherent in the present and future, which are and remain open to hope and to the God who is Father of Jesus Christ, who accounts us all righteous, Jew and Gentile, Israeli and Arab, English and continental European, Iraqi and American, and who lives among and within us by his Spirit.

We too face the End of all things - both the End which is implied in the resurrection, and the End which we currently observe on our television screens and in our newspapers. But the apostle Paul's suggestion is truly startling:

i. We are all up against it;
ii. But we belong together; iii. And we are, never mind fallen, actually raised!
iv. So let us stand, and not allow ourselves to be judged; but vindicated an forgiven; v. For God is not our judge and jailer, but our advocate and liberator.
vi. This reading entails a new take on God in the Hebrew text - and it is Jesus Christ. vii. And this entails, moreover, that the character of Jesus is firmly central to a reading of God;
viii. It entails the imparting of God's, of Christ's, breath of new life to everyone: we are all bearers of the divine, and sharers in it, too. ix. We are invited - the whole human race - to live as newly made - Adams, Eves, every one of us.
x. As everything is rolled away, only Eden is worth imagining and inhabiting.

There you have Ten, not legal Commandments, but gospel Considerations. That is one way of reading Paul's wicked thought; and so learning from him that wicked thoughts are not such a bad thing.
For when you think about it, this could well be the most wicked thought of all: Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ ... and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.