Want to Know Why N.T. Wright's Books Are So Great?

Whether writing for general audiences, for clergy, or for Biblical theologians, the qualities of deep reverence for God and thorough scholarship are apparent in the writings of N.T. (Tom) Wright. This short post tells you why. Humility before the Lord and the world has made Wright a powerful spokesperson for Christ in this confused and confusing age.

Here is a link to the N.T. Wright page on Amazon. Laypeople, clergy, and scholars alike will really enjoy his 'For Everyone' commentaries on the books of the New Testament. They're great for anyone wanting to understand the New Testament.

Heaven

"Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life--God's dimension, if you like. God mad heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and join them together forever." N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, 2008.

Let Christ In; He'll Do the Rest

Over the past several Sundays, as we've looked at Jesus' Sermon on the Mount during worship, I've been struck by how impossible the way of life Jesus describes in it truly is for us. (So far, we've looked at Matthew 5:1-37. More of the sermon will be shared in coming weeks.)

If any of us read the sermon and say, "I'm resolved to live like this," it might very well be commendable.

But, if undertaken in the power of our own grit and determination, we're sure to crash and burn and it will leave us feeling guilty or ashamed and defeated. We might even give up on the whole notion of being a Christian.
 
But consider what Tom Wright says about the Sermon on the Mount:

The Sermon on the Mount isn't just about us. If it was, we might admire it as a fine bit of idealism, but we'd then return to our normal lives. It's about Jesus himself. This was the blueprint for his own life. He asks nothing of his followers that he hasn't faced himself. And, within his own life, we can already sense a theme that will grow larger and larger [as we read further in Matthew's Gospel] until we can't miss it. If this is the pattern that Jesus himself followed exactly, Matthew is inviting us to draw the conclusion: that in Jesus we see the Emmanuel, the God-with-us person. The Sermon on the Mount isn't just about how to behave. It's about discovering the living God in the loving, and dying, Jesus, and learning to reflect that love ourselves into the world that needs it so badly.

As I see it, in the entire Sermon on the Mount, Jesus describes that life of perfect surrender to God that He and He alone has lived.

And in describing a life that shows us "a new way to be human," He also shows us a way of life that we imperfect, forgiven sinners can only appropriate as we let Jesus into the center of our lives.

In Revelation 3:20, the risen Jesus speaks to a congregation in a town called Laodicaea:

"Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me."

Don't take the words of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount as a judgment over your life. That's not Jesus' ultimate intent! See them instead as an invitation to let Him live in you and as you keep letting Him in, His life will be replicated within you.

Paul explains how this works in the New Testament book of Galatians. He speaks of how God's law--the Commandments--alerted him to the reality of his sin, his distance from God, and his need for a Savior. Then he says:

For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing. (Galatians 2:19-21)

Riffing off of this passage of Scripture, Martin Luther talked about what happens when Christ lives in a believer and is confronted by the temptation to violate the radical ethic of love for God and neighbor that Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount:

When [the devil] comes knocking upon the door of my heart and asks, ‘Who lives here?’ the dear Lord Jesus goes to the door and says, ‘Martin Luther used to live here but he has moved out. Now I live here.’ The devil, seeing the nail prints in His hands, and the pierced side, takes flight immediately. 

Let Jesus into your life and, no matter how imperfect you know yourself to be, He will change you from the inside out. Only the grace of God obeys the loving will of God and Jesus is the only One Who can bring that saving grace into your life.

All you have to do is open the door to Jesus each day. Don't worry; just keep letting Jesus in to the inner recesses of your life. That's all you need to do. Christ will do the rest.

Jesus Brings Comfort AND the Demand for Allegiance to Him

In studying the text for this coming Sunday's sermon, Matthew 3:1-12, just read this from New Testament scholar, N.T. "Tom" Wright:

Jesus'...mission was quite different from what people sometimes imagine; the comfort and healing of his kingdom-message was balanced by the stern and solemn warning that when God comes back he demands absolute allegiance.

Many people, including many pastors and theologians, seem to want the Jesus of comfort and healing, but not the Jesus Who demands are absolute allegiance. Truth is, like the rest of the human race, I'd rather that Jesus didn't demand my allegiance. I would rather that He not demand my utter acquiescence to His Lordship and His will.

It reminds me of a joke I heard Mel Brooks tell once on The Tonight Show. According to Brooks, God originally gave fifteen, not ten, commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. When the Israelites saw that, they immediately claimed that was too many commandments. So, Moses went back to the top of the mountain to renegotiate with God. When Moses came back, the Israelites asked, "Well?" "I've got some good news and some bad news for you," Moses told them. "The good news is, I got God down to ten commandments. The bad news is that the no-adultery one is still in there."*

Jesus has come, as the New Testament reminds us, to free us from the condemnation of God's Law, as embodied in the Ten Commandments. None of us is capable of keeping God's commands and, if it weren't for Jesus, we would all stand condemned and bound for hell. "The wages of sin is death," is how the apostle Paul puts it in the New Testament book of Romans. But Jesus, God in the flesh, took the punishment for our sins. He calls us to repent and believe in Him and so be spared the punishment we deserve.

Yet Jesus also insists God's commandments are not to be ignored:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. ¹⁸For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. ¹⁹Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:17-19)

The good news is that Jesus, the perfectly obedient representative of the human race, destroyed the power of God's law to condemn all who trust in Him. The bad news--or at least, what we may see as bad news if we choose to hold onto some sins that God commands us to turn away from--is that, in response to this enormous gift, we're not just to give our total allegiance to Jesus. We also are, out of our gratitude, to seek to live obedient lives. (God gives the Holy Spirit to help us in this quest. But that's another story.)

The problem for those of us who want some of Jesus, but not all of Jesus, is that Jesus can't be divided. I can't let His comfort, healing or grace into my life without letting that other part of Him--the God in the flesh Who commands me to follow Him alone and obey the commands of God--into my life as well.

The forgiveness, life, and blessings that come as free gifts--examples of what the New Testament, in its original Greek, calls charitas, grace--are absolutely free. We can do nothing to earn them.

But if we want to take them from Christ's hand, it will entail laying aside every other allegiance we have, whether to ourselves, our families, our jobs, our possessions, our countries, or anything else.

Each of these things will have their places in our personal priorities, their importance often changing depending on circumstances. But Jesus says that, if we're to have His comfort and life, none of them may take first place.

Consider this speech where Jesus' insistence on "absolute allegiance" to Him is given in "stern and solemn" tones:

Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions. (Luke 14:25-33)

Jesus is not here commending the emotion of hatred. In Semitic languages like Aramaic, which Jesus spoke in everyday conversation, hate was a comparative word, a priority word. He is saying, "Unless you love Me more than you love your mother and father, husband or wife, etc., you can't be part of My kingdom." Those words are "stern and solemn" enough. But He is not commanding us to hate our relatives! (Or anybody else, for that matter.)

Some will wonder whether Jesus isn't exhibiting some kind of megalomania here, demanding allegiance to Him. Jesus once said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me" (John 14:6). If Jesus is the only means through which the power of sin and death over our lives can be destroyed, it's hardly an act of arrogance on Jesus' part to insist on our allegiance to Him alone. If the only way for a drowning man to get to shore is to hold onto the lifeguard, you would hardly call the lifeguard arrogant for saying so to the thrashing victim.

Our problem, of course, is that we're control freaks. We want the Jesus Who will love us as we are, but we're not as keen to have the Jesus Who sets out to make changes in the lives of those He saves. But Jesus leaves us no choice in the matter: We will either have all of Jesus or we will have none of Jesus.

May God give me the grace, faith, and courage to choose all of Jesus every day. And if life with God is what you want, may God give you these things, too!

*You can read the real story of God giving the Ten Commandments and other commands to Moses in Exodus, chapters 19 to 24. Brooks later incorporated something of this joke into his movie, The History of the World, Part 3. Only there, his Moses held three tablets, one fell from his arms, and Moses announced that God had given "these fifteen...[one tablet falls] Oy! Ten commandments for all to obey!"

Never Ashamed!

"Christians commit themselves to God, like someone putting their most precious possession into safe keeping in a bank or a secure vault...at the same time God commits something to us: a particular calling, a new set of responsibilities, and ultimately...new life, the life we have in the present through the spirit. Our task is to be faithful and responsible before God, as he is utterly faithful and reliable for us. Along the path lies the kind of life which will never be ashamed, in whichever direction the winds of fashion, political fortune, and popular opinion may blow." (N.T. "Tom" Wright in his commentary 2 Timothy 1:8-14)

Set Free!

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

Galatians 4:1-7
A woman I worked with years ago, a Roman Catholic, was trying once at the end of a workday, to clarify what Lutherans believe about Mary, the mother of Jesus. “You don’t think she was a virgin, right?” she asked. I was surprised, but assured her, "No, we say that Jesus was 'conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary' when we worship on Sunday mornings, just like you do."

I guess that I shouldn't have been too surprised though, because, oddly enough, there’s always been a lot of misunderstanding and disagreements among Christians over Mary.

Today, August 15, is a special day on church calendars all over the world. For our Roman Catholic friends, this is the Feast of the Assumption, commemorating the day they believe that Mary was taken up into heaven, rather than dying.

Lutherans find no Biblical evidence to support that such an event took place. But we do believe that, like other saints whose days we remember each year, Mary has a lot to teach us about what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

We also are amazed by the way in which God used this young teenager from an obscure village to bring the Messiah into the world.  Mary herself was amazed by that and amazed too, that, based on her own experience, God so obviously cares about the eternal destinies of all the world’s "ordinary" people. (One thing we know for sure, though, is that while we all may be "ordinary" people, God's love for each of us is extraordinary!)

In today’s Gospel lesson, composed of the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise which comes during her visit with Elizabeth, Mary sees God reversing the fortunes of both those who trust in God’s grace and of those who trust in the "gods" favored by most in the world. God, she says, “has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.”

Mary understood that in Jesus, God was turning the world on its head, ensuring that eternity will belong not to those who claw and take and scheme and reason their way to power or prominence or influence or other worldly advantages, but to those who trust totally in Christ.

Our Gospel lesson came up this past Advent Season. So, I want to turn our attention away from it and, in a move of which I think Mary would approv, away from Mary, toward the Lord she served.

Pull our your bulletins, please. In the very middle, you’ll find the text of our second lesson, expanded by three verses from what’s officially appointed for today. It’s Galatians 4:1-7.

Galatians, you’ll remember from our sermon series based on that book earlier this year, is a letter written by preacher and evangelist Paul to a church in an area that we know today as Turkey. The letter was written back around 50AD. The church in the city of Galatia was composed of Gentiles, that is non-Jews. Paul was anxious to refute false teachers who told the Galatian believers in Jesus that in order to be truly saved from sin and death, they not only needed to believe in Jesus, but also had to adopt Jewish religious law, like circumcision for men and certain food and feast days for all.

In Galatians, chapter 3, which immediately precedes our lesson, Paul has asserted that we justified in God’s eyes not by what we do, but by our faith in Christ; that all who are baptized in Christ are clothed in His forgiveness and the righteousness—or rightness with God—that Jesus came to give those who trust in Him; and that in Christ, all who repent and believe in Him, have the same status before God.

Then, at the start of chapter four where our lesson begins, Paul comes up with a great way to illustrate what religious law, even the Ten Commandments, can and, most importantly, cannot do toward securing a right relationship with God for we sinful human beings. Read those first two sentences from Galatians—verses 1 and 2--with me out loud now.

“My point is this: heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves, though they are the owners of all the property; but they remain under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father.” 

What Paul is saying is that before God acted decisively by sending Jesus to the cross to take our punishment for sin, paying the debt we owe, our world was kept under control by the laws of God. The law acted as guardian and trustee over people too immature and too imprisoned by sin to live life the way God designed it to be lived.

Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright says that this passage shows how the story of the human race before the arrival of Jesus was one of “people who stand to inherit a fortune (of sorts) but who are quite unaware of the fact.”

In the meantime, like a parent hemming in toddlers who are bound to get themselves into trouble otherwise, God gave His law as a way of keeping things under control until the time was right.

This was true even of non-Jews who had never heard of Moses or the Ten Commandments because, as the Bible reminds us elsewhere, God has written His law on our hearts. No matter how much we may try to deny it, violate it, or excuse our breaching of it, the whole human race knows that there is a law of right and wrong.

One evidence of this may be that while human laws may be unjust or designed to serve the interests of certain groups, even the most corrupt of dictators will claim that his law conforms to a notion of right and wrong that all his citizens would agree on without having ever discussed it. That's because our  notions of what's right and what's wrong come from God; it’s the law of right and wrong we all seem to know that hems our world in, at times just barely, from total chaos.

This is exactly what Paul is talking about when he writes in the next verse—read along with me silently:

“So with us; while we were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world.” 

Now, for some people, that’s the end of the Christian story. They think that being Christian is about trying to live according to some rules, or trying to be nice people, or working to never make anybody upset or mad, or to fighting injustice. All of those things should be part of daily living for Christians. We should try to obey the law of God and, to glorify God and make the lives of our neighbors bearable, abide by the rules of society. We shouldn’t go out of our ways to cause strife or arguments and we should by all means fight injustice.

But none of those things, however faithfully or impeccably executed, will transform you and me from minors or slaves in need of constant goading or hemming in by the law of God into the free inheritors of all that God wants to give to us. As Martin Luther writes in his commentary on this passage, “…mere outward decency does not constitute Christianity.” He goes on to explain, “The heathen observe the same restraints to avoid punishment or to secure the advantages of a good reputation. [But in] the last analysis such restraint is simple hypocrisy.”

It’s in the next two sentences, verses 4 and 5, that Paul gets into what can move us from slavery to becoming children of God, from minors hemmed in by God's law to heirs set free by God, inheritors of forgiveness and everlasting life with God. Read those next two sentences with me aloud, please.

“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.”

That phrase, “the fullness of time,” is important. The New Testament, including Philippians, was written in Greek, as you know. In Greek, there are two main words for time. The first is chronos, which refers to chronological time. The other word is kairos, which means God’s time. Paul is saying that at the right time, at the precise moment chosen by God, after everything had happened that needed to happen, God acted to free us, to give us our inheritance.

And how did God do that? He sent the Son, Jesus. Jesus came from God and was God. But, He was also born of a woman, voluntarily born subject to the same law to which you and I are subject. Only Jesus perfectly kept the law so that when the law accused Him and put Him on a cross, it had the wrong guy. When Jesus was executed for our sins, Jesus redeemed—that is bought out of slavery all of us who live under the law. The result is that we are God’s children no matter what!

Paul does some celebrating in the last two verses of our lesson. Read along with me—with all the enthusiasm the words deserve, please:

“And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.” 

Ever been desperate enough to cry out to the God you know in Jesus, but not been sure what to say? Then know this: In those moments...in those moments when you knew that there was no one and nothing else you could turn to...that God’s Holy Spirit was telling you something. The mere impulse to pray demonstrates that you belong to Christ! Your desperation proves it because it's only in desperation that any of us are truly open enough and humble enough to admit our need of the God Who loved you so much that He went to a cross, open enough and humble enough to receive the inheritance of life and forgiveness we can't earn, but that God gives to all who trust in Christ. May we always be that desperate!

Your conscience need never accuse you for sins you committed and for which you already repented!

You need never think that because you aren’t perfect, God doesn’t care about you!

The Savior you somehow just know can reach out to in your times of desperation, Whose Spirit prompts you to do just that, will stand by you and love you now and always!

The Savior Who came into the world to share our lives and deaths so that all with faith in Him can also share in His victory, His life, and His eternity with God, wants you to know that you are no longer hemmed in, no longer a slave to sin, no longer a minor pining for the day when you will be acceptable to God.

If you are baptized and trust in Christ alone, you are absolutely acceptable to God! And no one can take you from your Father's hands! In Christ, we are free to be God’s people, free to look forward with confidence to the certainty of eternity with God.

In his commentary on Galatians, Martin Luther quotes Saint Augustine, a great Catholic theologian revered as much by Lutherans as Catholics: “every [person] is certain of [their] faith, if [they have] faith.” Luther goes on to write, “We ought to feel sure that we stand in the grace of God, not in view of our own worthiness, but through [what Christ has done for us]. As certain as we are that Christ pleases God, so sure ought [the believer in Christ] be that we also please God, because Christ is in us.”

This was the faith that sustained Mary: faith in Christ and the good will of God for those who trust in Him. May that be our faith too!