Many years ago, in my first-year theology class, I heard a theological word that was new to me, “Revelation” (written with a capital “R”) or, more precisely, divine Revelation. The term was used as a shorthand for God’s intervention in human history in the person of Jesus Christ and extended backwards to all of salvation history and forward to the development of doctrines such as that of the Holy Spirt and the Holy Trinity.
The point of the word is that it is God who is taking the initiative and revealing the divine nature of perfect love through Jesus. We are not in the driver’s seat on this one. As Christians, we believe that Jesus is God’s divine Revelation, not a clever human invention or myth, and not something hidden by God to be discovered by some secret formula or knowledge. Divine Revelation takes place in human history. It is public. It is shared. It is reflected and acted upon. It is accessible to all people through the eyes of faith.
Our liturgical celebrations the last two weeks contain the heart of the divine Revelation and they have come to us rather like waves emanating from a stone dropped into the sea. After the preparation of Advent, there is Christmas, the coming of the divine Word into human history in the person of the child Jesus, worshipped by rude shepherds. Then last Sunday we marked the naming of that divine and human Word, as Salvation. A few days ago, on the feast of Epiphany, as the magi arrive at the manger, it becomes clear that divine Revelation is for all peoples, not just the Jews. And today we mark the Baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, with the divine commissioning of Jesus for his earthly ministry as the Anointed One, the Messiah or Christ, to reveal God’s perfect love to the world. Words even come from heaven: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
Our age, and ages before ours, have challenged this idea of divine Revelation in various ways. One approach is simply to deny it, whether through atheism, denying the existence of God, or regarding the story all as some sort of human invention or myth. Some would argue that a real God is so powerful and separate from us that he would not want to get involved in the muck of human history. Others might argue that Jesus was just doing his own thing and it had nothing to do with God at all or that Jesus was, at best, just a prophet, revealing God’s will, but not Revelation Himself.
Others like hiddenness and mystery and feel the story is just all to obvious, so there must be some further secret knowledge to be discovered (the shorthand for this approach is the theological category of Gnosticism): for example, perhaps Jesus did not really die on the cross, perhaps Jesus was an angel (maybe St. Michael), perhaps Jesus was married and had descendants (the Di Vinci Code approach); or perhaps some whole new book is required for further Revelation: the Quran or the Book of Mormon, for example.
But as Christians, and particularly as Anglicans, we come back to the simple mystery of public divine Revelation in Jesus Christ of Nazareth, born in a rude manger, revealed to the simple and to the wise, to Jew and Gentile, God’s Son, human and divine, revealed to the world in Palestine in the first century, what some theologians have called the “scandal of particularity”. Nothing secret, nothing hidden, God revealing the divine nature and the Rule of God in human history, through human history.
If we think of the last couple of weeks as waves of divine Revelation, what about the future? Is there still more to be revealed of the story? There is, of course, the simple life of Jesus, all his teaching and all his example; there is his death on the Cross, his Resurrection and resurrected life, his Ascension and Glorification. These too are part of divine Revelation. And beyond that? There is Pentecost, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the growth of the church around the Mediterranean world and beyond. The gift of the Holy Spirit, of course, is also forward looking, guiding us into the way of truth in the future, across ages, cultures, languages and civilizations. What we carry with us as Christians is divine Revelation, waves from this central event of Jesus’ birth.
One of the theological debates about divine Revelation is whether it is “open” or “closed”. Might God still have some new revelation to offer us beyond Jesus? Or is the Bible a closed book and we are to live according only to it? I think the answer is “yes” and “no” or “it depends”. Salvation is complete in Christ (the Bible contains all that is necessary for salvation) and there is no need for or reason to believe in another Saviour or Prophet or Incarnation to take us beyond Jesus. (Some groups, such as the Unification Church or “Moonies” do believe such a thing and in the Solomons we had a Methodist breakaway group, the Christian Fellowship Church, who added their founder to the Trinity to make to four rather than three.) As Christians, we believe that the essentials have been revealed in the divine Revelation of God in Jesus Christ: what we are celebrating in this season.
Yet, the gift of the Holy Spirit has a real open-endedness to it and Jesus himself indicates to his disciples that he cannot teach them everything and the Spirit of Truth, who will lead them into all truth, will be imparted. This gift of the Holy Spirit is also a part of divine Revelation. Jesus surely foresaw that his teachings, indeed, his divine Reign, would extend across centuries and cultures to come, to situations unthinkable such as space travel, genetic engineering, great varieties of human relationships, medical technology and the like. So it is also wrong to put the Bible in a kind of time capsule of the past and let only the situations of 2000 years ago govern what we do today.
Yesterday, I participated in the consecration of the three new suffragan bishops in the diocese of Toronto at St. Paul’s, Bloor Street. If you have been following the church news, you’ll know this was a very controversial event as one of the new bishops is gay and has a partner and there were formal objections to his consecration. Yet, here is a case where the church for at least the past 40 years has been reflecting on the nature of same-sex relationships and what is to be affirmed and what is to be discouraged. I believe the Holy Spirit has been informing those discussions and decisions, though the Bible says very little directly about loving and committed same-sex relationships, though a lot about violent and exploitative sexual relationships, both heterosexual and homosexual. I believe the event yesterday was a good example of the open-endedness of divine Revelation: it leads us to new truths, new understandings, new traditions.
All that leads to another word I heard for the first time in my first-year theology class 45 years ago, “hermeneutics”, how we understand and live ancient texts of other times and cultures (in our case, the Bible) in our cultural situations today. (The word hermeneutics, by the way, comes from the Greek messenger god, Hermes – what is the message brought forward from the past to today?) That is what good preaching and good Bible study is about: making divine Revelation alive for today.
To return to the metaphor of waves of divine Revelation: In Christ’s birth, it is as though a great stone has been dropped into the sea. In further waves, the divine Revelation is further defined and clarified. We look back to those waves in the Bible and in the work of the Holy Spirit in human history. We move forward on those waves.
Yet there are other waves. In my years as a bishop in the Solomons, I frequently travelled by small outboard canoe around the diocese, as often there simply were no roads. Looking back, I sometimes consider myself lucky to be still alive. The southern-most tip of Malaita, Cape Zelee, had extremely treacherous currents, with waves coming every-which direction, towering over the canoe as the east, west and south currents battled one another, especially at high tide. Some villages had only one breach through the reef that had to be travelled through at low tide on a big wave. In the end, I could only trust my skilled canoe drivers and sometimes I just turned by back to the waves and hoped for the best. We never sunk and I was only once drenched when an inexperienced driver coming out of a river did not know how to deal with the waves produced by the incoming tide.
I tell the story to suggest that not all waves lead us forward and the waves of divine Revelation will encounter waves of human selfishness, lust for political power, greed, hardheartedness, harsh judgement and sheer human stupidity. Yet Christian divine Revelation teaches that in the end (and even now), love will overcome evil, human greed will turn to dust, the powerful will be pulled down, and God’s Reign, God’s divine Revelation will triumph. Therefore, we are not to lose heart. Let us be like my skilled canoe drivers who knew how to navigate treacherous currents and count and ride the right waves.
So, today, at the Baptism of Jesus by John, we celebrate God’s declaration of Jesus as the divine Son and God’s endorsement of Jesus’ divine and earthly ministry (indeed, its beginning), part of divine Revelation. We pray that we may ride and live the waves of that divine Revelation, both today and in the years to come. Thanks be to God.
No comments:
Post a Comment