This is a short video clip of a few people from Enfield Vineyard sharing their wisdom regarding what Jesus meant when he said that to receive the kingdom of Go we need to be as little children.
Here is the image that I used as aide to raise the question how will you react when you meet Jesus face to face?
Here’s the text for the Good Friday meditation 14/04/2022 at Enfield Vineyard. I tried to offer people an opportunity to reflect on the descent of Jesus from his heavenly abode into the midst of human life on earth, rather than concentrate on the awful physically pain of the last events.
If you would like to print you can download it as a pdf.
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Phil 2:5ff
Today is Good Friday. We don’t do a lot of the church calendar at Enfield Vineyard. If you were asked what is the most important day in the church calendar I wonder how you’d reply to that? I don’t suppose you could really say there is a most important day – you’d end up with a list, and certainly Good Friday would be on most people’s list
We have listened this morning to a few readings from the various gospel accounts. We have thought over something of the physical, emotional, and spiritual pain that was endured by Jesus. It can be hard to relate to the suffering – perhaps over time we grow a little immune to it, jaded even as we have heard it all before. It is good to wonder at what these final hours of this part of the act of the drama mean. They are deep, dark, profound and awful. There are endless levels of meaning to these events. Some say that the whole of history points towards this day. Events before moving forwards to Good Friday, and future events flowing forth from it.
For those who have ears to hear there is endless significance for our lives today.
If the Christian life, and perhaps the lives of us all, can be compared to ascending a mountain towards the presence of God then Paul paints for us a detailed picture of a divine descent. A descent that was costly, but one that ultimately pleased the Trinity. This divine descent was a restoration mission, driven as it was by love. Key to this descent is the idea of humility.
Paul describes Jesus as being ‘in the form of God’ a thought so profound that it has quieted the fervent discussions of the most self-assured theologians. How are we to think of this, ‘in the form of God’ as we go about our normal daily lives? The early church worked hard to, if not so much to say exactly what it meant for Jesus to be in the form of God, but rather to try and express something of the beauty of it and to say what it did not mean. Jesus in the form of God.
A few lines from the Nicene Creed express this idea:
the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made; of the same essence as the Father.
We humans, beloved as we are, find ourselves to be limited. We are bound by time, and time forces change upon us. Picture if you can what it was like before creation. Given that creation includes the creation of time itself, even that word ‘before’ is wrong of course. I cannot find the words, so I must draw from my own experience.
One springtime, while walking in a park on the edge of London it occurred to me that sound of the birds singing was louder than usual – clearer, sweeter, more defined somehow. And the sky seemed a blue I hadn’t noticed before. Was this possible? Lockdown, with all its consequences, had caused the continual drone of traffic to be silenced, and had held back the exhausting pace of life – at least for me in that moment – but clearing the atmospheric haze as well? Glimpses through the veil
Picture a warm, sunny day, a crystal clear stream flowing over smooth stones. This water is so clear and so very cold. The sound of its flowing is gentle, childlike, emotive. But emotive of what? The stones seem so solid, and the detail on their surface which I can see through the water’s sparkle takes my attention. There is no-thing on my mind – I am at liberty to just ‘be’ in this place. No sense of time pressing in, no tyranny of urgency, no vague sense of unplaced dis-ease or uneasiness or threat or insufficiency. No fear of what is to come. There is no need of anything. I am still, in the moment and at peace. Glimpses through the veil
You will have your own version of these “thin” places where something almost so other worldly you could miss it, called out to you. Such fleeting moments are pearls of great price, rare and ethereal They stir a longing, unrecognised and deep, a whisper of something more.
Now consider the purity in which the trinity dwelt before Jesus began his descent. My attempts at painting a picture fall away. There are no words for the blessedness of that state. Nothing of all the myriad of stresses that come against us to diminish the joy, the peace, the love. It is good for us to reflect on these things. They bring light to Paul’s words.
Jesus, Paul says ‘emptied himself’ of all this. What is this emptying that leads to a being which remains fully God yet becomes fully human. Most often an emptying of something implies a diminishment. An empty glass might be fine, beautiful even, but there is more to what the glass was intended to be. Here is the mystery. How does Jesus empty himself, yet remain fully God? How does the perfection of God walk among us???
And put simply, we struggle to comprehend this. And is this not how it should be: wonderful as the human mind undoubtedly is, some things one not meant to be understood.
The apostle does give us some insight though. This emptying of Almighty God necessitates Jesus taking the form of a servant, & being born as we are, leaving the clarity & splendour of his previous habitation & manifesting into human flesh to live out a life as ours.
Once in human form Paul tells us that Jesus humbled himself. Allow your mind to soak in this humility. What kind of God would take on a life of reduction? Consider the life of royalty. Not for the Christ this style of life. As he moves toward the final stages in his human life behold the God-man, around whom the whole story revolves, takes up a towel & washes dirty feet. God from God, light from light of the same essence as the Farther in human form as a servant. The upsidedowness of the kingdom.
Previously Jesus declared to an astounded audience:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Matt 5
This remains so counter cultural, so inverted, so upside-down. True humility is a step up the mountain towards the divine life. Jesus said so, & Jesus lived so.
The Apostle tells us that Jesus humbled himself as an act of obedience. This obedience led to the crucifixion.
The cross is many things. The events leading up to, & culminating with hammer & nails, spear, blood & water are weighty & mysterious. They speak of humility and descent. They speak of emotional torment & physical pain. They speak of identification. Jesus, God, endured what we endure. He has known rejection, mockery, isolation. He has known physical pain, his body shutting down, life ebbing away. He has experienced the horror or the final enemy, death itself. Imagine that. The Lord, the giver of Life, the only source of life itself, humbles himself to the point of death. Let know one say, let no one say that God is ignorant of our the nature of our lives.
What kind of God would allow himself to be spat on? To be blind folded, hit & asked to name the assailer? What nature of being surrenders his head to thorns & his heart to such degrading mockery? How is it that the eternally blessed Creator submits his hands & his feet, & allows himself to be staked out, & suspended vertically? How does the uncreated one endure the life draining out of him? How far has this One descended? God from God, light from light of the same essence as the Farther.
In the last post we considered the division that existed between the Jewish people and the Gentiles, ie everyone else, in the time of Jesus. A ‘fence’ between them had been erected that protected the Jews from ethical decay, forbidding intermarriage, cultural appropriation or even eating with Gentiles. According to Williamson Jews saw Gentiles as ‘less than human’ and in response gentiles regarded Jews with suspicion. (1)
As a child I soon learnt that I had a rare, somewhat deliberating condition. This aliment, because that’s how this condition seemed to me, often left me feeling like a ‘side dish’ as the kids say today. There seemed to be a code, that the other males fell seamlessly inline with. Despite my best efforts to learn and use this code, I was always several steps behind. It seemed all the other boys effortlessly received regular updates regarding this code, and that these updates were easily understood and incorporated into that most cruel of environments, the primary school playground.
In this post we look in a little detail at what it means to be dead – no not like that. How did Christ make us alive according to Paul? We also see that a cabbage has much to teach us of the Divine Realm. But we begin with The Essenes.
The Essenes, authors of the ‘dead sea scrolls’ wrote that as a member of their sect you were “raised from the worms of the dead”. The language seems somewhat overstated to us. Paul however, embraced it. We can see similar thoughts as he kicks of Chapter two.
Ever found yourself floundering as you read Paul’s letters? Do you wonder if you’re missing something? Do you start reading a chapter full of determination, and then find yourself at verse 5 thinking about if you’ve fed the dog with little idea of what you have just read? If you are someone who finds Paul easy then good for you! This post is not for you, but rather for those, like me, who have a somewhat more difficult relationship with Paul.
Previously in the first two verses we marveled (!) at how Wesley and Whitfield were able to paint such a cornucopia of theological goodness in so few words. We considered the barrage of triggers that were thrown at the singer by phrases such as ‘joyful all ye nations rise’ and ‘pleased as man with man to dwell’. Unsurprisingly verse three doesn’t disappoint as another volley of Christology is planted in the consciousness, setting free the ‘white horses of imagination’ to kick up their heels and gallop joyously. Such is the power of the poetry and biblical allusion.
In the first part of this mini- series on Hark The Herald Angels Sing I got excited about verse 1, where the writers of this awesome carol describe the manifestation into our physical realm of the angelic realm and God’s presence. Celebrating the day of Jesus’ birth leads to the final restoration of the nations into their God-ordained place of perfection. Wow. But for now…. nothing is eternal. Everything we experience is subject to decay.
Hark The Herald Angels sing is a fantastic romp through some truly inspiring theology. It is too good to be only sung at Christmas – its going to feature at my funeral. The more mystically minded Christians speak about the participation with God as being like swimming in the sea. You can paddle in the shadows or go in further until you are surrounded. Either way you are participating in the experience and being of the sea, yet there remains a vast body of which you know nothing stretching out beyond.
At long last it is time to launch into one of the theories of the atonement, or more correctly one of the early church Father’s writings about atonement. In study group one of these went down very easily, and the other required a bit more wrestling. I could see that their horizons were being opened up – which is exactly what happened to me when I first heard these ideas too. On reflection though, as I look back, it seems to me that I was being in introduced to ‘a half remembered tune’ playing ‘softly in my mind.’ [1] … See what you think!
The very early church certainly proclaimed the cross, yet seemed to not spill much ink explaining how it provided salvation[2]. Sure, the New Testament (which they didn’t have then of course) mentions various metaphors as we have seen. From the second century Irenaeus (130-202) and others began to think of cross in terms of conflict with the powers of the day. This goes beyond the ‘Jesus is Lord’ vs ‘Caesar is Lord’ that we might think we understand, off into the spiritual, cosmic realm.
Three different questions were raised with me after the talk I gave on 2 Peter 2 at Brig. I thought I’d quickly respond to them here.
I do appreciate the conversations and the feedback so feel free to keep the conversation going if you’re interested.
What were those ‘Celestial Beings?’
In 2Peter2:10, speaking of false teachers, Peter writes ‘Bold and arrogant, they are not afraid to heap abuse on celestial beings’
I mentioned how there was a lot of debate about the word/phrase translated ‘celestial beings’ – a better translation of it seems to be ‘glories’ – so the question is what does Peter mean by the glories. I spoke about two possible translations – ‘dignitaries’ in the sense of those in authority and ‘angels’ (note there is no reference to good or bad angels). A third option was mentioned to me, which I did come across i my reading – that of it being the ‘apostles’ – so the false teachers were abusing the apostles – the glories. Whilst indeed this is in the commentaries that I read, it didn’t seem that popular – but it is interesting option.
Am I A Heretic?