Luminescence, Volume 2. C. K. Barrett

Councils, governors, Kings, confessed Christ, and were tortured to death. Others with the same confession who have gone out to spread and be spent in the service of the Gospel and their neighbors. Their lives have spoken louder, made a clear confession, more than words could do. If says Paul, you make that kind of confession . . . but there is another “if.” If you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead.

      THAT GOD RAISED HIM FROM THE DEAD

      You may well complain, “you are picking out the most difficult things this morning. The most difficult to do, and now the most difficult to believe.” Yes, it is difficult. It has always been difficult. It was difficult in New Testament times. There is no resurrection, says Aeschylus, dead people don’t rise. Eternal death awaits us, said Lucretius. Socrates went further; as he left the court that had condemned him to death he said “It is time to go, for you to life, for me to death, but which is going to the better thing, is known to none but God.” Even that is negative in comparison with Paul’s desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better.

      What is more, if you would like a plain account of what happened at the resurrection of Jesus, you will not get it from me. I was not there, and the New Testament doesn’t tell me. It is a matter on which people have been exercising their imaginations from the second century to the twentieth, and what they say, all of it, is imaginary. The absolute minimum of what is indisputably historically true is that the ignominious death of the leader of a small religious movement in a turbulent outlier of the Roman Empire was followed not by despondency and despair but by an explosion of spiritual moral energy which in less than twenty years (with no jets, no radio, no television to help) had carried the movement to the heart of the Empire, and in a hundred years had covered most of the known world.

      That is impressive enough, but Paul has more to say. “Now is Christ risen, the first fruits of them that sleep.” As a Jew he had believed that at the end of time God would raise his people from death. He now knew that this had begun. Jesus had begun it. God had begun it with Jesus, and had done so in such a way that though the rest of us must still face death as Jesus did, there is already a sense in which we may share his risen life. We are mortal, and we still pray, day by day, “forgive us our trespasses.” We share the educative discipline of life with all the human race. But we do it with the confidence that he who has begun a good work in us will finish it at the day of Christ.

      Accept Jesus as Lord, begin with him the life that will be victorious over sin and death. There is the salvation of which Paul speaks. There is one more thing to say: Christ and the law.

      CHRIST AND THE LAW

      Or, better, put it this way. Do you remember the Old Testament lesson? You can see at once the place where Paul found the picture that he uses in this chapter. Deuteronomy is talking about the Law and saying to the Jewish people, it is no good pleading that this is too hard for you and “you can’t expect us to do it.” “It is not too hard. It is not in heaven; you don’t have to climb up there to get it. It is not on the other side of the sea; you don’t have to get into a boat and sail the stormy ocean in order to reach it. It is immediately present; it is in your mouth, and in your heart. You can do it.”

      With one small variation, Paul takes this text over, and applies it to Christ. No distant figure whether in heaven or in hades, but alive and present with you, in heart and mouth. If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart. . .

      I felt all the time I was writing this sermon that it was stiff work today, though there is no harm in remembering from time to time that Christianity is for people who are prepared to do a bit of thinking up to their limits. But we have come home now. For Paul the Jew the Law was the truth about God and the way to God. But for Paul the Christian the Law is transcended and fulfilled in Jesus, and Jesus is nearer than the old Law could ever be. If you take him as Lord, you have the whole Law fulfilled in his one word, love; if you recognize that he is alive, you have both the motivation and the power for the fulfillment of that word. In other words, you will be, to use Paul’s word, saved, now and for whatever future the universe may have.

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      “THE KINDNESS AND SEVERITY OF GOD”—Romans 11.22

      [Preached four times from 12/21/82 at St. Chads College, Durham to Bishop Auckland 8/2/87]

      You heard these words when they were read a few minutes ago from the Epistle. Whether you found them familiar or not, I am not so sure, unless indeed you are a theologian with Romans as a set text. I doubt whether even with theologians it is a popular text. It has perhaps some of the virtues but all of the unattractiveness of a cold shower, and it is precisely for that reason that I have plucked up my courage and decided to preach on it. If your body is flabby, debilitated, lethargic there is a good deal to be said for a cold shower; and judging in the first instance by myself, I suspect that many of us are inclined to be flabby, debilitated and lethargic in our religion. So I am inviting you to join me under the shower and to begin by noticing how cold the water is.

      The nine words I have read to you occur in the midst of one of Paul’s most obscure passages; and when he really set about it, Paul could be pretty good at obscurity; plenty of work for the writers of commentaries, but I’m afraid that this morning we shall only take a glimpse at the paragraph as a whole. And the text seems to give us a singularly unattractive picture of God, as an arbitrary oriental potentate, a super-Ayatollah, handing out kindness and severity with indifferent disregard for human deserts and desires.

      And of course, no one likes severity anyway. “Dieu me pardonnera. C’est son metier.” (H. Heine—“the good God will forgive me, it is his job”). Or Peer Gynt on a funeral sermon “that is what I call Christianity, nothing to make anyone uneasy.” In all this I am simply underlining my point. There are circumstances in which the good God will not forgive; there are circumstances in which the first—perhaps the only—effect of the Christian message is to make us properly uneasy. Try the cold shower.

      That means asking the blunt question—What has this piece of first century theology to do with us? What can it tell us that is relevant to life as we live it today in twentieth-century England? In fact, it has something to say about humanity, that is about ourselves, and something to say about God.

      ABOUT HUMANKIND

      How do we get at this? I think by way of Elijah, whom you may remember, we met in the Old Testament lesson. This, of course, could only give you a little bit of the story, but it is all well enough known. Elijah on Mt. Carmel is usually looked at in its effects on the life of the people. The prophets of Baal have an unprofitable day calling upon their god, who seems to be sleeping—anything but answering prayers, whereas Elijah’s God sends the fire from heaven which consumes the saturated sacrifice on the saturated bonfire—“The Lord he is God! The Lord he is God!”

      The response does not seem to have lasted long, but it was impressive at the time, and when the event is looked at from Elijah’s side it is clear that it must have been tremendously good for his ego. He had done it; he had brought down the fire; he had slaughtered the prophets of Baal and the Asherah; he had converted the nation. But the worst of riding on top of a wave is that it crests and so is infallibly followed by a trough, and this one was helped by Jezebel’s thrust—“it’s your turn next.” So off goes Elijah to Mount Horeb in a depressed state of mind—“I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the people of Israel have forsaken the covenant, thrown down your altars, and slain your prophets with the sword, and I even I only, am left, and they seek my life to take it away.”

      Elijah was convinced that he was the only good faithful Israelite left; and he would not be left much longer. There was no one left on whom God could rely. But he was wrong! There were 7,000 of the faithful in Israel, waiting in the wings, ready to come on the stage, including kings and a new prophet.

      From this, back to Paul. It is not for nothing that he brings Elijah into Romans 11. There are many aspects of truth in Romans and any exclusive generalization about it will be wrong; but it does not exaggerate to say that one of its main themes is the deflation of any sense of superiority in religion. It starts with the Jews, convinced that they have the visible crystallization of truth in