HIM

Pleasing God

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:21:00 +0000

Can we, then, please God? Is it now possible, if we are united to Christ by the Holy Spirit, if we are justified and adopted into the very family of God – to delight the Father, as the Son delights him? There is a sense in which we have been so careful to assert that you can’t earn your salvation through meriting it that we have forgotten the way the New Testament writers talk about the Christian life, not as a mere moral duty, but as a way of seeking to please God. The good works of the New Testament are not good in and of themselves but because of who they please and praise.

We know, as Paul puts in Romans 8:8, that those controlled by the flesh cannot please God. But that is not what we are now, if the Spirit lives in us. And so Christians ought to make their goal to please God, just like Paul did (2 Cor 5:9) – not because they win their salvation this way, but because is what they were saved to do. It is then, not only possible, but imperative that we live to please God!

We please God in two ways: by exalting his name in praise, and by sacrificing ourselves for the God of others. Have a look at Hebrews 13:15-16:
15 Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise-- the fruit of lips that confess his name. 16 And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.

Firstly, God delights in the praises of his people. It is a sacrifice we are now, in Jesus, free to give him – ‘through Jesus’. This praise is a verbal activity, emanating from the mouth, and involving confession of his name. Whose name? Making great the name of Jesus makes great the name of God. Exalt Jesus, and God is pleased.

Praise is not just evangelism, though it surely includes the proclamation of the good news in the world. I think God is genuinely delighted by the words and songs and prayers we address to him - not just because others are overhearing them but because they are directed to him. He is not needy for it, but he revels in it. When we praise him we offer him a sacrifice which delights him, because it is directed to him (see Ephesians 5:19). When we sing in church, for example, we are not merely singing to each other – we are singing to God, for the pleasure of God. SO: praise him with your lips, with a sincere heart, because it delights your Father when you do.

Secondly, in Jesus we are finally free to do what we are made to do as creatures: to please God in our acts of self-sacrifice for the good of others. We offer our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – and it is hard not to think that Paul has in mind here the possibility of our suffering on behalf of others in an echo of Jesus’s death. Not of course that our self-sacrifice atones for sin, but it does serve others and it does please God. We bear with one another, carrying each other’s burdens, as he did. It is a sacrifice that delights God’s heart, not because it wins his acceptance but because it hallows his name. Through Christ, our self-sacrifices makes a sweet smell in God’s nose. SO: make an offering of your whole self to God, because it pleases God when you do.

When I run, I feel His pleasure. What kind of a statement is that? God was pleased by the running of Eric Liddell; and pleased, too, by his decision not to run in honour of God; and pleased by his laying down his life in the service of others. But he was pleased because it was the Son of God who pleased him, and who made a sacrifice for his sins.

With him I am well pleased

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:15:00 +0000

Our problem is still there: how can we please God? We know the answer to the question. What he wants from his creatures is their true worship - their heartfelt praise and their obedience to him. But we are unsure if anyone is clean-hearted enough to be placed to offer him this praise.

As Israel found, you couldn't stroke him under the chin to get him purring. He sees past all that, straight into the heart. And the human heart is where it all gets complicated. The naive dream that we humans have of feeling God's pleasure as we do what we are created to do seems very distant.

But there is one with whom he is well pleased indeed. That was what was declared from heaven when Jesus was baptised, and the Spirit of God descended on him like a dove. The Father is well pleased with the Son - he is pure in heart and obedient, submitting his will always to the will of the Father. Here finally we can see a human being turned and tuned to its true purpose.

And in Jesus we finally see a worthy sacrifice offered to God - an atoning one, that takes away the sins the world, sent to us from the loving heart of God. He was the worthy sacrifice and the worthy sacrificer, appearing once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. We have in him a fragrant offering and sacrifice (Eph 5:2); finally and decisively an offering from the creature to the creator that is truly acceptable to him.

To obey is better than sacrifice

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:22:00 +0000

As if that wasn't enough, the sacrifices themselves became a point of further complication for Israel. Merely performing acts of sacrifice as outward actions misunderstands who Yhwh is. It treats him as a simpleton. Cheating on sacrifice by offering defective animals was not like you or I fudging our tax returns. You can't cheat a God who sees into the human heart - he is pretty much unimpressed by outward performances - in fact they are a matter of deep offence. In the first place, it treats God as if he can be conned or manipulated, as if the right gift is an item in an exchange with God that he guarantees to honour, like some bank cheque.

What's more: it acts as if God is not already the owner and giver of all things. If all things already are God's by right in any case, then the point of offering sacrifice to him is not to give him something he hasn't already got, but to really please him by offering him the praise that is his due. It isn't the aroma of burning meat that he enjoys; it is the sweet scent of the worship and obedience of his people. That's what Cain did not grasp; nor many in Israel, either. Samuel says to Saul:

Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams. (1 Sam 15:22)

It's that sin problem again: the sacrifice is only pleasing to God if it is a true reflection of the heart. And yet the human heart is so wayward and devious - who could ever hope to please God? Not because God is too hard to please, after all, but because we incapable of turning our hearts to the business of worshipping him as he deserves.

It is interesting to see what David wrote when he fell into that terrible spiral of sin - in Psalm 51:

15 O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise. 16 You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. 17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. 18 In your good pleasure make Zion prosper; build up the walls of Jerusalem. 19 Then there will be righteous sacrifices, whole burnt offerings to delight you; then bulls will be offered on your altar.

David can see that he is even incapable of praising God without God's help. If only it was as easy as offering a sacrifice; if only God's pleasure was a calculable thing. If only he could be bought off. But he takes no pleasure in material sacrifices. It is the broken spirit, the contrition of the humbled man, brought to his knees by the awful shock of seeing his own sin and by the realisation of his own helplessness - this which God himself worked in David, we remember - that God will answer. Only then (v 18), within a restored city, will God allow righteous sacrifices to begin againfor his own delight.

What pleases God?

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:37:00 +0000

But does the running of the runner please God, really? Does the playing of the saxophone please God, or is it just blowing his own trumpet? Does the art of the artist, or the work of the worker please him? Does what you do bring pleasure to God - do you know his delight?

What can we offer to God that will please him, after all? Some people are very hard to please, and God appears very much to be one of those. It isn't like he hasn't got everything already. What does he lack that I could presume to give him?

It's an ancient problem; and its why human beings have always offered sacrifices in the hope that God would be pleased - that he would look favourably on the offerer of the gift. The sacrifice is proof of the offerer's devotion - and pretty much all human cultures have had them. To offer sacrifices is an almost instinctual human action.

The story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 revolves around two competing sacrifices - and the meat that Abel brought pleased God, whereas Cain's fruit and veg did not. It seems so unfair, and the text of the Bible doesn't give us much of a clue as to why God approved of Abel and not of Cain. What did Cain do wrong? Do we not have some sympathy for the first murderer?

Later of course Israel would be given a whole elaborate system of sacrifices by God himself, a system which was to govern their whole lives. But these sacrifices were reminders that the human problem was not only a matter of not knowing how to please God - it was knowing how to placate him. Human sinfulness meant that atonement needed to be made, not to please God but to appease him. So far are human beings from delighting the creator.

'When I run, I feel his pleasure'

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:22:00 +0000

I believe that God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast. When I run, I feel His pleasure.

The movie Chariots of Fire had the Scottish Olympian athlete and rugby international Eric Liddell say these words. Whether he did or not - and an evening using Google has been unable to clarify this for me - these words are so powerful that they have stuck with Liddell's name ever since.

They are not flippant or self-justifying words - not at all. Neither were they just the result of his endorphins kicking in.

Liddell was the man who refused to run on a Sunday at the Olympics in the 100 metres, an event he stood an even chance of winning; and was to give himself for missionary service in China where he would die in a labour camp. When he said 'I feel his pleasure' - if indeed these were his words! - he was expressing what we would all like to believe are true: that the creator is deeply delighted when his creatures do what they are made to do, and do so in honour of him.

Christ, our wisdom

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:00:00 +0000

We began by observing that we live in a knowledge economy. Knowledge is power - and because of this it is worth a great deal. Feeling increasingly bewildered and drowning under avalanches of information, we seek salvation from experts. Where else have we poor ignorant beings to go? Who else can we trust? Unable to judge rightly, we trust the expertise of the legal system.

But though it may appear wise to trust the experts with our money, our health and our careers, these are ultimately nothing compared to the wisdom of God. These experts are only reading from a script that God has already written. And when we turn to God, what we don't get is more expertise, or more overwhelming facts. What we get from him is the wisdom that begins with the fear of the Lord. It's a wisdom, a craft, that is expressed most consummately, most beautifully in the cross of Christ. That is how he has patterned and order things - around this centre, the cross, the death for sin.

Which means it is not a power-knowledge that seeks to control or abuse: it is a wisdom that is for us. The wisdom of the cross, which is embedded deep into the fabric of the universe - not that human beings in their wisdom get it - the wisdom of the cross is the secret of life itself.

And the only right response to the wisdom of God is to trust it. There is no need to be dismayed or to feel defeated by the technical mastery of others, just as there is no grounds to be impressed by it; there is no need to fear the courts of men, which judge imperfectly because they will only ever know imperfectly.

Wise Guy

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 04:42:00 +0000

In a sense this could have remained for us just a nice piece of poetry. But the New Testament adds something extraordinary to this idea of God's wisdom - by claiming that Jesus Christ, a human being, embodied this wisdom of God that was with him before everything began.

He is, as John says, the Word who was with God in the beginning; and, as Paul says, he is the one through whom, and by whom, and for whom all things were made. In him is summed up the purpose of the whole cosmos - he is the bottom line of the whole lot. He is both its beginning and its end.

It seems like an impossibly grand vision is boiled down to one figure, one person, one individual, who becomes the hinge around which it all turns. But what does this mean?

It means that in his life and death - in all his work - Jesus was living out that same wisdom that called things into being and ordered them and rules them. And that's what Paul wants to say in 1 Corinthians. Now the Corinthians were in the sway of some know-it-all fancy preachers, self-proclaimed experts, who boasted in their possession of a secret knowledge of divine things. Either they were puffed up with superior knowledge, or they were feeling dumb. Certainly they were claiming that Paul's message was neither clever or powerful. At least, that is how it seemed:

1 Corinthians 1 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

The cross is great subversive surprise for the world, whose wisdom is a self-serving powergrab. As it turns out, God has enough power in his little finger to expose it for what it is. The wisdom of God, it turns out, means the sacrifice of the Son, for sin, on the cross. It exposes the pride of human wisdom by overturning it.

God's craft

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:58:00 +0000

Israel understood this knowledge that God has as more than just having a large IQ: and they called it 'wisdom'. There are two great passages in which this gets played out: Proverbs 8:12-31 and Job 28: 20-28.

Here's Proverbs, which starts with wisdom herself talking:

12 "I, wisdom, dwell together with prudence; I possess knowledge and discretion.
13 To fear the LORD is to hate evil; I hate pride and arrogance, evil behavior and perverse speech.
14 Counsel and sound judgment are mine; I have understanding and power.
15 By me kings reign and rulers make laws that are just; 16 by me princes govern, and all nobles who rule on earth...

22 "The LORD brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old;
23 I was appointed from eternity, from the beginning, before the world began.
24 When there were no oceans, I was given birth, when there were no springs abounding with water; 25 before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills, I was given birth, 26 before he made the earth or its fields or any of the dust of the world.
27 I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep, 28 when he established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep, 29 when he gave the sea its boundary so the waters would not overstep his command, and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.
30 Then I was the craftsman at his side. I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in his presence, 31 rejoicing in his whole world and delighting in mankind.

This not merely expertise, is it? This is not a specialist knowledge in a particular area. It is not merely the knowledge gained by surveillence either. It is not just the knowlegde of things but the craft needed to make them, to order them and pattern them. It can only be called artistry this knowledge, so creative is its power.

This extraordinary wisdom, the craftsman by God's side, is the means by which God ordered of the natural world and by which he rules the world of human affairs.

God knows

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 23:42:00 +0000

If there is a God, then almost all are agreed that he will be the kind of being that knows quite a lot. We know this, because we can see there is so much to know out there, and we clearly DON'T know it all.

In fact, however we try to describe it, his capacity for remembering the past, for monitoring the present and knowing the future far exceeds the limited perspective of human knowers. We can't begin to imagine this, because our organ of knowledge, though quite incredible - actually, REALLY incredible - is a lump of flesh called a brain. One thing we know is that we forget, overlook, misunderstand, and fail to see what is coming. Even with our enhanced knowing-machines - computers, that is - we can only get the garbage out that we put in. The very existence of computers should be a reminder to human beings that we need assistance to know stuff.

But not God - he has no need of extra hard disc space. He has no problem with storage of data. As Hannah says in her song in 1 Samuel 2:2-3:

2 There is no one holy like the LORD; there is no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God. 3 "Do not keep talking so proudly or let your mouth speak such arrogance, for the LORD is a God who knows, and by him deeds are weighed.

For God, knowledge is not merely the job of discovering or observing what is already out there. That's how human beings know things. Because he is the creator, his knowledge is of the very inner workings of the world. It is extensive, and incisive - it is wide, and deep. He knows not only its parts, but how the parts hang together as a whole - and he knows from before the foundation of the world.

Every move you make...

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 23:00:00 +0000

The second way we compensate for our lack of knowledge is by surveillance. Surveillance is what we need to in order to judge each other - or at least to enforce the behaviour we want in others.

Have you ever had the feeling that someone's watching you? That's probably because they are. One of the effects of the power of knowledge is that we have developed the technology to record...everything. Someone - or rather thing - is recording your every click of the mouse. Something is watching you as stand in the queue at the bank. Something is watching you as you stumble down the street at 2am having drunk just a couple too many... and it's all going on file, along with your DNA and your fingerprints. And all the information on your Facebook page, which, if you haven’t worked it out yet, was why Facebook was set up in the first place.
And it is being given to companies who want to sell you products.

Well that might be a little paranoid, or little too sci-fi. But still, it illustrates the way knowledge gets us leverage over other people. We can make them behave in certain ways if they think they are being watched. Surveillance gives us the power over people to judge them.

We live now in a world where those who know will rule those who don't. Those who are not informed or educated will always lag behind those who are. Thos who know will always judge those who don’t. What choice will there be? Our belief in the power of knowledge to deliver great goods for humankind is so unquestioning that those who know will always have power.

The power of knowing

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:58:00 +0000

It is not a novelty to observe that 'knowledge is power' - Sir Francis Bacon wrote it sometime in the seventeenth century; but it is one of those truths that keeps getting truer. In an age in which information is thought of as the one thing worth having, knowledge - which implies being able to get something useful out of all that data - becomes a priceless commodity.

I don't know about you, but I find the sheer volume of information that I can readily access completely overwhelming - disempowering even. The internet has intensified this feeling many times over. How can you know anything when there is so much to know? And if knowledge is power, and the one thing I know is how much I don't know, then it is pretty disempowering, isn't it?

There are two ways in which we try to compensate for lack of knowledge.

The first is that we turn to experts. What would we do without them? We rely on them to fix our cars, to give us financial advice, to heal our bodies, to manage our diets, and to tell us that the computer is completely cactus because of the faulty mother board. I have no way to really check the expert's advice. I can get another opinion, but then it is just a case of expert against expert, and I am no better off. We just have to believe them: which means they have an incredible amount of power over us. The case of climate change is a good example. Is it the case that the climate is changing because of human created environmental damage? Well, many of the experts are agreed that this is the case. I might say 'science says so'; but when I do, I am just saying that the expert scientists are saying this at the moment. I personally have no idea whether it is or not. I am completely unable to evaluate the scientific data for myself - and if I could I wouldn't have time. So I am in the hands of the experts, who will decide government policies and how I should bag my rubbish.

But whose interests do experts serve? And why should I trust them? Having expertise means that you have extensive knowledge of one area – but it doesn’t mean you know how to live, does it?

The spreading oneness

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:15:00 +0000

This is where for Paul the oneness of God in Christ is really makes a difference to how we live. It isn’t mere knowledge that gives you a superiority complex and allows you to scoff at the silly concerns people have for the sacredness of food: it is a matter of being known by God and seeking the good of the other. The oneness of this God is not the crushing oneness of the tyrant, enforcing conformity at every turn – it is oneness that is expressed in forbearance of the weakness of the other person, and in allowing difference to flourish.

So: in our knowledge of the great supremacy and exclusivity of this singular God, are we forgetting the means by which his victory was won? Are we perhaps riding roughshod over those whose knowledge of God is not so advanced? You will certainly be impatient with your congregations and their clinging to silly and unnecessary beliefs about the significance of things. Can you bear with them? Can you endure without sneering the imperfect and incomplete knowledge of others?

And can we build a church that reflects the unity and distinction of God himself – just as Paul will argue in Ephesians 4:4-6? Can we live out our calling to a united interdependence – or must we make people after our own likeness? It takes a great security and ego balance as leaders of churches not to enjoy it when people start to mimic us, and to even encourage us. In the name of the oneness of God the Father, Son and Spirit and as an expression of the unity of the Spirit, can we release them from that burden? Can we celebrate the weaker parts of the body?

The oneness of this God is not just a matter of his splendid isolation. It is a missional oneness – a declaration of his intention to draw people everywhere to himself. It is an end to all tribalisms, even the ones churches have built for themselves. The one God is not the preserve of a single nation but a message for the whole world. It is not a message that advances by conquest but one that proceeds by dint of costly service. His kingdom takes the form of the cross – that is his power on the earth. The God of this gospel then does not belong to us but is our privilege to share. Proclaiming his oneness is not just a declaration of his victory over all other pretenders to divine status – his exposure of the idols and other alternate objects of our worship as fraudulent on a Madoff scale – it is an invitation into his very life.

And that is a great relief in the face of the apparent chaos and insecurity of contemporary life. The existence and the life of the supreme and unique God, the God of Jesus Christ, is not just an idea or a principle – it is a personal reality in the actual life of the planet. And it is truly an end of anxiety and the introduction of hope. It is not just a message proclaiming a superior knowledge about God, thought it is that of course; it is a declaration of the possibility of being known by this God, and united with him by the power of the Spirit and the work of the Son.

Being known

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:15:00 +0000

But Paul knows even more about the one-ness of this God. As he says, this one-ness is the oneness of God the Father from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live...That is, the God of Israel is now to be known as the Father of Jesus Christ – revealed in the gospel of the messiah. His exclusivity as the source of all life and existence, and directedness of all things, including our lives, towards him is now revealed in Jesus. You could see his purpose for the world there, in Jesus, in his death for sin and resurrection from the dead. This is the very character of his oneness, its very heartbeat: that he has acted in Jesus Christ, the Lord, to bring us life.

Unlike the idols, and their alleged ‘gods’ – who knows, after all, what they are or if they exist or not! – Jesus is alive. God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself – so closely aligned to Christ that we now know God by a new name – the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. The title ‘Lord’ is now applied to Jesus Christ without blasphemy – so close is their identity. He may receive our worship without compromising the very oneness of God on which the faith of Israel was built. You could still recite Deuteronomy 6:4 and declare with your lips ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’. In fact, the very oneness that Israel declared was most fully revealed in the unity of Jesus with his Father in the purpose of reconciling the world to himself.

This was not the one-ness of the Greek philosophers, the oneness of the One, an abstract and impersonal principle, pure, still, unmoving. This is not at all the same oneness of Allah - irascible, distant, transcendent. This is the oneness of Father with the Son and the Spirit – whose plans are brought about and are being brought about in the midst of human history and make possible the reconciliation to God of people from every tribe and tongue.

This is no mere knowledge. This is not a philosophy: as Paul says, in fact The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. But the man who loves God is known by God. That is, the oneness of the true God which means the defeat of the idols means the overthrow of all kinds of false worship including even the pride of a knowledge that puffs up. It is not so much a matter of knowing, but of being known, it turns out.

The singular God

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:15:00 +0000

But the oneness of the God of the Bible changes everything in unexpected ways. The one-ness of the God that Paul knows is not just a philosophical concept or some abstract principle discovered by superior intellects. It is not a discovery made from observation of the natural word. He knows this one-ness from the gospel of Jesus Christ.

This one-ness was in the first place the one-ness of the God of Israel. Israel’s God was remarkably singular. If Israel was to be a nation among other nations, and not people a tribe of slaves, then they needed their tribal deity, as the other nations had.

And this God demanded exclusive, singular allegiance from his people. They were not to tolerate a plurality of gods, or to introduce foreign gods to spice up their religious life a bit. This was not a matter on which it possible to compromise. You shall have no other gods before me. In the first instance, then, the one-ness of this God was a testimony to his fierce jealousy. The one-ness of God is not some powerful intellectual concept: it is a demand for his people to the exclusive right of worship. His redemption of them gave him that right – who else had saved them? Who else had exposed the divinity of the Pharoah as a sham, and his magicians as mere tricksters?

But Israel discovered, as they followed him out of Egypt and into the desert, that this Yhwh, their redeemer, was also the God who made heaven and earth. He was the creator.. Not just their creator – he was the creator. His exclusivity turned out to be uniqueness So, even though they had been chosen by him, the people of Israel could not understand their God as merely a tribal deity, a local divinity. He was the God of all people, everywhere; the maker not just of Moses and Miriam, but of Adam and Eve. He was the maker of all things: not just a reflection of their national character, but the ultimate reality.

And so, Israel’s testimony, her daily recitation - Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one – had missionary implications. It was a word for all to hear and obey. Not that this was a polite invitation – if you were the Philistines, it meant that your god Dagon was not really any sort of god at all (which is what they discovered when they placed the ark of the covenant in front of the statue of Dagon, and returned in the morning to find that the statue had bowed down before the ark…)

Knowing better

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 19:15:00 +0000

Believers in one god only have always looked down their noses at anxiety-ridden idol-making polytheism. Before Christianity, the cleverer of the Greeks had realised this, whatever their myths told them. Having only one god made everything so much simpler. And it was a belief that led to knowledge – it showed you that things were connected to each other. It liberated you from the expensive superstitions and stupefactions of idol worship. It took from you the sense that there was a god lurking under every rock and hiding in every tree.

Monotheism is an extremely powerful idea because it works so well. It disenchants the natural world, and leaves it to be explored and discovered and understood and used. It speaks of order, and purpose, and connectedness in the world.

There is something of this superiority-complex in the Corinthians, who are proud of their superior knowledge – revelling in it, in fact. That’s why, when Paul starts talking to them about food offered to idols, he immediately starts in on the issue of ‘knowledge’:

Now, about food sacrificed to idols: We know that we all possess knowledge...

If you can see that idols are nothing but things of stone and wood; that they are mute and blind and they have no power in fact; that the deities behind them are nothing but pockets of hot air – then the food placed in front of them is not to be feared. It has no significance at all. It just tastes good. So, Paul says, in verse 4:

...about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world, and that there is no God but one.

Those Christians who had perhaps written in great fear about the spiritual significance of eating this meat – about the possibility of being corrupted by it – their fears were groundless. Their concerns were not about to be vindicated by Paul, that’s for sure... this we know: an idol is nothing! Powerless! A statue and nothing more.

There is only one God. There is no need to credit – or to fear – any other God, for there is only one. It is not a crowded category.

For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many "gods" and many "lords"), yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.

That is a piece of superior knowledge – something worth knowing. Even if there are beings that we might call ‘gods’ – Paul doesn’t rule that out, but he counts it as unimportant. There are many things that serve for people as god, or lord. But for us ‘there is but one God’. And that changes everything.

Practical Polytheism

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 02:41:00 +0000

It seems normal to us that when it comes to how many gods there are, we only have two choices: one, or none. God is pretty much like a light switch – either on, or off. He either exists, or he doesn’t.

But of course we know that is not how people have seen the world for the greater part of human history. Have you ever wondered what it must be like to live in the world believing that there are many gods? For the ancients, the world was shot through with deity. But this was of no comfort, because it was only a reminder of the sheer complexity and uncertainty of things; that at the centre of reality was a power struggle in which human beings were only the play things.
The polytheist knows how precarious human existence is, how out of our control. Human life was a balancing act, a matter of managing as best you can the uncertain powers that threatened to upset your fragile security. You had to forestall their wrathful moods and irritations. Like some heavenly soap-opera, they were always bickering and squabbling and turning into animals and raping beautiful nymphs. [Basically, like Rugby League players...]. The polytheist looks out on the world and sees only chaos.

It meant of course that there were many claims on your worship. It was a theology of options, but of course your choice had to be made in the absence of all the data – which is why polytheistic religions tend to admit all contenders to the rank of deity just to be sure you have covered all the bases. What looks at first like freedom to choose, descends into a matter of insurance. It is ruled in the end not by security, but by anxiety.

My suspicion is that, although our contemporaries would choose either ‘one god’ or ‘no god’ in a survey, a better description of their outlook would be ‘practical polytheism’. From where we sit, the underlying reality of the universe is actually multiple, disconnected, chaotic. Spiritual and/or physical forces compete with one another like the great tectonic plates on the earth's crust - and we puny humans get caught up in the quake.

That’s reality as the tabloid newspapers paint it. That is the essence of things according to A Current Affair.

God's future joy

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 03:33:00 +0000

God delights in his creation; he is spddened by the faithlessness of his creatures. He laughs to scorn those who would challenge his authority. And God the Son laughs as only one with a diaphragm and a throat can laugh. But a future laughter of God remains: the laughter of the new heaven and the new earth — the transformed and unsurpassed joy of the new creation. The picture of the city of God in Revelation 21-22 is our key text. There the divine presence radiates from every stone. Every tear is wiped away, and the nations are healed by the tree of life.

But there are exclusions here. Evil has been shut 'out — the exclusion that God's Psalm 2 laughter predicted. This new joy will even surpass God's delight in his new creation; because it will rejoice in his triumphs over evil and death. This hope is an answer to the bitterness of a world which absolutizes laughter for its own sake. God's future laughter laughs in the face of those who have contempt for the weak and the poor. Some types of laughter in the vision will not be needed anymore — the laughter that protects us from great sorrow, the cynics laugh, and the laughter that demeans. But this promise of future joy allows us to laugh today, despite everything.

The body of God?

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 03:30:00 +0000

The main problem with our question is that God is spirit, and has no body; and laughter is essentially a bodily phenomenon. What we have seen is not God laughing per se; anymore than when the Bible speaks of God having a right arm we assume that this is literally true of him.

Although at this point we may want to ask the important theological question "why are jokes about bodily functions funny", we instead move to the most dramatic event in the life of God — the incarnation of Jesus. Assuming "the likeness of sinful flesh", Jesus became "one who is like us in every way." He submitted to a human body with all its oozings and squelching. But instead of it staining him, he somehow sanctified it; and redeeming it made possible its transformation into a glorious flesh.

How could this assuming human bodily reality not include laughter as it also contains tears? How could the one of whom his opponents asserted that he was "glutton and a drunkard", a "friend of tax collectors and sinners" have made laughter taboo? How could we sustain the ancient charge, that "Christ never laughed"? How could we say this of the one who taught with such grotesque imagery, bold parables, absurd comparisons, disarming answers to curly questions, radical paradoxes and perplexing riddles?

If the Christian faith teaches that God in some way suffers because Christ Jesus died — then it must also teach that all aspects of human being, including laughter, are taken up by God the Trinity

The divine delight

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 03:27:00 +0000

But perhaps we have plunged into the present order of things without properly accounting for the past. The creation was ordered, as described in Genesis 1, for the delight and joy of its creator. The Sabbath is a pointer to the aesthetic or "wow" response of God to the cosmos. A natural theology of God's delight is possible too, and expressed in the latter chapters of job: the absurd and bizarre creatures of God give testimony to his sense of humour.

But jokes and joy need to be shared. The creation of the man and the woman in the likeness of God are the completion of his work. And he allows them the risk of freedom. The naming of the animals by the man shows a God who allows himself the possiblity of surprise as he appears not to know beforehand what the man will say...

CS Lewis suggests that laughter is a peculiarly human thing we share with God. Only talking animals laugh, despite what hyenas and kookaburras might think. Rather than being a symptom of our baseness, laughter reveals our holiness. God made us in order to have someone to share his delight in whathe made. Laughter after all, is not solitary — it is contagious, shared, an expression of fellow-feeling. I laugh with you because I am on your side. As communal beings, laughter is an essential feature of createdness. This is also true of our relationship with our creator. The twists and turns of nature, the surprising magic of language, the ridiculous joy of sex — how could we not laugh along with the comic genius who thought of them?

I hope that this now does not sound too trite against the backdrop of the tragedy of evil and the bathos of human arrogant power. But it is not the end of the story either.

God's political satire

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 22:22:00 +0000

The scriptures record God as laughing, however, at human pretensions to power. YHWH laughs to scorn the petty attempts of human rulers to best him. This laugh is subversive of kinds and emperors and serves the purpose of comforting those oppressed by abuses of political power.

Psalm 2 is the prime example:

Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against
the Lord and against his Anointed One.
"Let us break their chains', they say, "and throw off their fetters."
The one enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them...

Here, the defiance of kings and rulers is a matter of mirth for Yhwh because it is pathetic, because it over-reaches. God's laughter in this way is quite disturbing — it is not the cutre laughter we would prefer. It is terrifying, because it ndicates that himan power will not successfully oppose him. However, it is a laughter of deep comfort to those of his people who live
under anti-God and oppressive regimes.

God had whacked Saddam's face with a shoe long before it happened on the streets of Bagdad.

The ludicrous nature of human power is best seen in big architecture. This joke is picked up again and again in the Bible — beginning at the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, where the pride of human technology is so puny that God has to come down out of heaven to see it; and of course finds its most fulsome expression in the book of Daniel, where the folly of anti-God rulers is further exposed. Nebuchadnezzar (a favourite of Saddam Hussein's by the way) builds an enormous gold statue and at the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipes and all kinds of music the citizens must bow down and worship the images of gold. It is stupidity writ large. Yhwh and his followers, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego meet the challenge of the statue
easily. (Esther, and Mary's song pick up this theme - a feminine insight into the vanity of masculine power, perhaps?).

That God finds human' pride and pomposity so risible is a warning and a comfort. It means his protection for those who serve him; but it means defeat for those who oppose him. It means that evil has no place in the future of which God dreams.

God weeps

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:00:00 +0000

If we are to assert that God laughs, we must first answer Job: he is not laughing at our pain. Rather his response to our suffering is to embrace it. Perhaps there is no greater mystery in Christianity than this — that the absolute God is a God who grieves. The God of the Bible is the God who says "My heart is changed within me, all my compassion is aroused". The tears of Jesus are not just his weaker human side coming through; they are something experienced in his whole being, including his divine nature, however mysterious it sounds...

God's tears — his grief - are rather subversive in an age where laughter is an absolute. They teach us that not everything is funny; that a huge part of the human story is deeply tragic...

Ha ha! Who cares?

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 03:18:00 +0000

Postmodern laughter is an absolute where absolutes are denied, in contrast to Nietzche's sneering superiority. Instead of the gloomy suicidal despair of high modernism and existentialism, postmodernism has decided that laughter is the best medicine. But it is probably more an anaesthetic than a medicine.

Like the Wizard of Oz, the absence of God is frankly a great practical joke; don't you see the funny side? Yes, funny in the way a clown is when you are kid, funny with that awful pit of the stomach terror added.

This giggle has developed into a guffaw in the writings of philosophers beloved of postmodernists, such as the Russian Mikhail Bakhtin, Frenchman Jacques Derrida and Italian Umberto Eco. It is the laugh you have when everything has stopped making sense. In other words, postmodern thought majors on the playful and the humorous rather than, or perhaps even despite, the tragic. It is a laughter that verges on madness; and may even consciously flirt with the loss of reason.

Is there a knowable order in the world? Are there binding truths? Or is the world a labyrinth of chance events, indecipherable signs, masquerades and lies — to be played with in an infinite regress of irony? As two Gen-X teenagers say to each other in the Simpsons: "Hey are you being sarcastic?" "Man, I don't even know any more."

Right wing comedians

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 03:13:00 +0000

Nietzche saw in Christianity's denial of laughter a great flaw, a great suppression of the true human spirit. As he wrote of Jesus in his classic rant Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

What has been the greatest sin here on earth? Was it not the saying of him who said: 'Woe to those who laugh!' Did he himself find on earth no reason for laughter? If so he sought badly. Even a child could find reasons. He — did not love sufficiently: otherwise he would also have loved us, the laughers! But he hated and jeered at us, he promised us wailing and gnashing
of teeth..."

Like dancing, laughter is a common feature of Nietzche's idea figure, the heroic "overman". Nietzsche considers laughter to be the activity of someone looking down on someone or something else. It is the laughter of superiority. The overman has risen above everything and everybody, so there is nothing, including himself, that he does not laugh at.

This denial of laughter, that Nietzche spotted in the Christian tradition and so deeply loathed, is to our contemporaries not loathsome but baffling. We do not live in an age of restraint; rather we embrace indulgence. We value feeling above thinking, spontaneity over planning. Our Only sacred cow is that there are no sacred cows. There is an anti-authority, subversive spirit about.

After all, how many right-wing comedians are there?

But seriously...

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:25:00 +0000

The Christian theologians of the first few centuries were serious men. And they did not feel it right that God should be thought of as a laughing God. Laughter is uncontrolled, physical, spontaneous. The divinity is not subject to these constraints. Laughter is too human a phenomenon.

But if it is unthinkable that God should laugh, then neither, then, is laughter appropriate for his creatures. LaugifIng, said John Chyrsostom, distorts the face which is the image of God. Is it a trap of the devil:
Human being laugh and weep, and it is a matter of weeping that they laugh.

It all had to do with an awareness of history. The age in which we live is counted "one of tears, not joy." Around 390AD Chrysostom preached that "this world is not a theatre, in which we can laugh, and we are not assembled together in order to burst into peals of laughter, but to weep for
our sins." A century and a half later, when the Rule of St Benedict was written, it stated "as for coarse jests and idle words or words that lead to laughter, these we condemn with a perpetual ban". The times were clearly for repenting in.

At the heart of this condemnation of laughter was the assertion that "Christ never laughed" — something for those wearing What Would Jesus Do bracelets to think about. The supposed seriousness of Jesus has been a point of agreement by some distinguished friends and foes of Christianity even in the modern era. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzche writes of Jesus, "He knew only tears and the melancholy of the Hebrew...Would that he had remained in the wilderness and far from the good and the just! Perhaps he would have learned to live and to love the earth--and laughter too."

Sacred laughter?

noreply@blogger.com (michael jensen) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:16:00 +0000

Perhaps there is nothing that promises to be less funny than talking about laughter — just as one sex may not prove particularly arousing. When you dissect laughter it behaves rather like a lab rat does when you dissect it: at the end you have a lot of interesting information, but what do no have is a rat.

But despite all that, I want to ask: is God Laughing? Does God laugh?

To we millennials, laughter is about the only sacred thing left, and so we find the question absurd. Of course God laughs. But to those of us whose experience of life has been accompanied more by weeping than guffawing, the question may have a sinister edge: is a cruel God laughing at the plight of his suffering creatures like some sadistic torturer? Shakespeare's King Lear felt this might be true, comparing us to flies and the gods to young boys who gleefully "pluck us for their sport".

Indeed, this despairing at our pain is even found on the lips of Job in the pages of the Old Testament. In the midst of his terrible suffering, Job cries out:

When a scourge brings sudden death, he [God] mocks the despair of the innocent.
When a land falls into the hands of the wicked, he blindfolds its judges. If it is
not he, then who is it? (9:23-24)

An alternative suspicion, and a more ancient one, is to view God as a being with no feelings at all — "without body, parts or passions" as the Anglican 39 articles have it. In
wanting to ensure God is not prey to his emotions, as we humans are, many Christian theologians have followed the Greek thinkers in casting God as without emotions. His wrath and his love are then not real feelings, but the way he acts according to his promises and his covenants. They are anthropomorphisms: human projections on a divine screen, using the emotions we find within ourselves to try to understand the ways of the holy one.

But this is the kind of theology that leads with impeccable logic to absurd conclusions. There is something in this view: the God of the Bible is portrayed as consistent and true to himself. He is not at all like the irascible Allah, who seems prone to have off days. God is not the owner of hormones or liable to tiredness; he is not addicted to substances, and he is rarely surprised. So — can he laugh? And is it appropriate to his holy character for him to laugh?