Tag: God the Father

Advent, The Prologue and Relationships: 1, Jesus and the Father (John 1:1-18)

Introduction to series

For Advent this year, I want to explore one of the great Bible passages – the one that above all talks about ‘The Mystery of the Incarnation’, as it is often called in carol services.

It’s the passage we more widely call ‘The Prologue’ – but people of a certain generation must not think about Frankie Howerd and Up Pompeii when I say that!

It’s The Prologue to the Gospel According to John, the first eighteen verses of the wonderful Fourth Gospel, in which the evangelist introduces many of the themes of his Gospel in the context of Jesus’ birth.

There are so many ways we could explore this passage, for there are so many riches there. A friend of mine wrote his PhD on it, and I could easily imagine preaching every Sunday for a year on these verses.

But I’m going to resist that temptation! This is just an Advent series. And one way of exploring the Prologue over the four Sundays of Advent is to take a particular strand in it about Jesus’ relationships. So we shall look first of all at Jesus’ relationship with the Father, and in other weeks at his relationships with Moses, John the Baptist, and human beings generally.

John 1:1-18

I am not the most avid television watcher, but I did set our satellite box to record Monday night’s quiz programmes on BBC2 – Only Connect, Mastermind, and the one that goes right back to my childhood, University Challenge. That was something we used to watch as a family on Sunday lunchtimes – that and Thunderbirds.

For some reason, I still remember one starter question from an early series: ‘Which two books of the Bible begin with the same three words in English?’

Now, leaving aside the awkward issue of differing translations, the answer they wanted was Genesis and John’s Gospel, both starting with the words, ‘In the beginning.’

And that’s where we’re going today – to the beginning, to that relationship between Jesus and the Father that existed before creation and led to creation. I follow those scholars who say that the inner relationships of the Trinity are demonstrated in their actions towards human beings and the world. In the case of the Incarnation, they tell us something about why Jesus came, and that’s what we’re going to explore today.

Firstly, unity:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 

Note those words ‘with God’, ‘was God’, and ‘with God in the beginning.’ The Word, that is, Jesus, and the Father are united in fellowship and very nature. Theirs is a perfect and pure unity of relationship. They are one in heart, mind, and spirit.

It is this inner experience of unity that Jesus comes to bring at the Incarnation. It is the knowledge that human relationships with God, each other, and creation are broken that leads him to come. This is not what was intended. Humankind was made in the image of God, the One God in Three Persons who is unity, but sin has distorted and destroyed that.

So when Jesus comes, his is a mission of reconciliation. He wants human beings at one with the Godhead again. He wants human beings reconciled to each other. He wants the alienation of human beings from the creation healed.

To bring this unity will involve a great cost. It will take him from Bethlehem to Calvary, from the manger to the Cross. It makes me think of a Graham Kendrick Christmas song, ‘Thorns in the straw’, where he imagines Mary seeing the thorns for Jesus’ crown of thorns in the straw of the manger.

Therefore as Christians we remember our need to draw ever closer to our God, as we receive the forgiveness of our sins. We remember our need to work for unity with one another, putting right our broken relationships, and finding reconciliation with each other. We remember that our reconciliation with one another is one of the deeds that witnesses to our preaching about reconciliation with God.

And we remember our calling to bind up the wounds of the creation – not out of the desperation many have over things like climate change, but in the Christian hope of the God who is making all things new.

Let us remember this Advent that the unity of Father and Son leads to Jesus’ mission to bring unity. And just as that was costly for him, let us be prepared to pay a cost to proclaim and demonstrate Christ’s nature and message of unity to the world.

Secondly, love:

3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 

Jesus is the Father’s agent in creation. But what has that got to do with love?

Let me ask you a question that the famous twentieth century Swiss theologian Karl Barth asked: was it necessary for God to create?

Barth answered that question with a ‘Yes’, and so do I. Here’s why. It’s certainly true that love between people can be personal and exclusive, but it is never private. If two people love each other exclusively but it never touches others for good, how is it so very different from mutual self-indulgence?

Take marriage as an example. The most common way in which a married couple express this love is when they are able to have children. Their personal and exclusive love naturally reaches out in a creative act and they sacrificially love their children.

Of course, I know that many couples don’t want children immediately and others cannot have children at all. So one of the things I do when I prepare a couple for marriage is I challenge them to show the love they have wonderfully discovered between themselves in service of others. Can they do something in their community? Is there a cause they could support?

I think something like that has happened on a cosmic, spiritual scale in the Godhead. Such is the love between the members of the Trinity that it has to be expressed beyond them. The Father creates through the Son and in the power of the Spirit. A universe is created beyond the Godhead for the Godhead to love.

And it is out of this love at the heart of God that Jesus comes in the Incarnation. Seeing the brokenness and lack of unity that I talked about in the first point, it is his very nature of love that brings him to earth. Remember that most basic of all statements about God in the Bible: ‘God is love.’

What I’m talking about here is what Christina Rossetti wrote about in one of her Christmas carols:

Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love divine;
Love was born at Christmas,
star and angels gave the sign.

Worship we the Godhead,
Love incarnate, Love divine;
worship we our Jesus:
but wherewith for sacred sign?

There it is: Jesus comes in love because the very nature of the Godhead is love.

And Rossetti also tells us what the only fitting response is:

Love shall be our token,
love be yours and love be mine,
love to God and all the world,
love for plea and gift and sign.[1]

If the Incarnation is about the love at the heart of the Godhead coming to us in Jesus, then our response is ‘love to God and all the world’ – love God and love our neighbour, as Jesus was to say the two greatest commandments were. Even the new commandment he gave was about love: ‘Love one another as I have loved you.’

Howard Thurman, who was a great influence on Martin Luther King, wrote a short poem called ‘The Work of Christmas.’ It says this:

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among others,
To make music in the heart.

Thirdly and finally, light:

4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

At the heart of God’s life is light: purity, wholeness, righteousness, hope. But we have a world of darkness: sin, brokenness, injustice, despair. So when Jesus brings very inner character of God to Earth in the incarnation, he comes as light, the light of the world who ‘stepped down into darkness’[2].

Wherever we experience darkness, Jesus comes to shed his light. It may be the darkness when we know ourselves to be a moral failure, but the light of Jesus’ seventy-times-seven forgiving love draws us back to him again.

It may be the wounds we carry through life that leave us with low self-worth or even a sense of self-loathing, but the hope found in Jesus gives us strength to carry on.

It may be that a particular issue of injustice in the world affects us and we get involved with campaigning but nothing seems to change for the better. I listened to a talk recently by a Christian journalist whose life work it is to expose corruption in the church, but she has suffered attacks and false accusations from parts of the Christian community for her work. She has been tempted to give up, but the light of Jesus keeps her persevering for justice in the darkness.

Or maybe it’s bereavement. Six years ago when my father died, I said that a light had gone out of my life. He had modelled for me so much of what it meant to live with integrity as a Christian man in the world. Yes, he was just two months shy of his ninetieth birthday. Yes, Alzheimer’s Disease had taken his true personality before death took his body, and you could say it was a merciful release. But you know what grief is like. The logical answers don’t remove the pain.

Dad died on 1st August. It was not until Advent that year and reading John 1 that I felt a sense of hope. It was verse 5: ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’ that made sense of things for me. Jesus gave just enough light in the darkness to take me forward in hope.

Let us begin this Advent with a sense of hope. The relationship between Jesus and his Father may seem like hi-falutin’ brain-bending stuff, but at its heart are characteristics that stretch out from the inner life of God to us through the Incarnation of Jesus. Let that unity, love, and light give us strength and hope.

[1] Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) in Singing The Faith #210.

[2] Tim Hughes, op. cit., #175.

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The Lord’s Prayer: Who Is The God We Pray To? Luke 11:1-13 (Ordinary 17 Year C)

Luke 11:1-13

The late Rob Frost used to run a Christian conference after Easter every year, called Easter People. I don’t know whether any of you went to it. Some people described it as Spring Harvest for Methodists who were too scared to go to Spring Harvest. That’s a little harsh, but for some people there was some truth in that!

One year, I was asked to be a speaker at a set of seminars where a team of us was going to teach on the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer. Each of us had a section of the prayer to expound – one each morning for the week. It is so rich as a prayer that explaining and applying the entire prayer in one talk or one sermon fails to do it justice.

Indeed, when I have taught on it in churches before, I have taken a series of sermons to explore it.

But I don’t have that luxury today. So rather than go through the entire prayer at breakneck speed, I want to explore the teaching Jesus gives here immediately after the Lord’s Prayer. For it’s all very well knowing what to pray, but it helps to know who we are praying to, which is what that teaching is about. It’s no good using the right words or formula if we have a distorted picture of God.

Firstly, God is a friend. This is the theme of verses 5 to 8, where Jesus tells the story of the man who needs to disturb his friend at night for bread. And it’s no coincidence that Jesus mentions bread in this story after the petition in the prayer for ‘daily bread’ (verse 3). When we need our daily bread, God is our friend.

Jesus tells the story on the assumption that friends are bound together by honour or obligation. This wasn’t discussed much in Judaism, but the pagan philosophers of his world certainly explored this, and if we remember that Luke was a Gentile, then we see here some teaching that will make some immediate sense outside of Judaism among the new Gentile converts.

And in fact that is made all the clearer when we look at a difficult part of these verses. The latest version of the NIV translates verse 8 this way:

I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.

Did you expect those words ‘your shameless audacity’? Aren’t you used to hearing ‘your persistence’, with the preacher then calling you to persistence in prayer?

The trouble is, the old ‘persistence’ translation is almost certainly wrong. An American scholar, the late Kenneth Bailey, who lived most of his life in the Middle East and who studied the ancient texts, the early translations into other Middle Eastern languages, and the local culture concluded that ‘persistence’ was wrong. It was wrong as a translation and it was wrong in the culture of hospitality in Palestine.

In fact, Bailey linked it to this concept of honour that I mentioned. The friend would not want his honour to be questioned, however grumpy he was for being woken up at midnight. That desire to maintain his honour would motivate him to answer the request for bread.

And so I go with the alternative translation that is a footnote in the NIV: not ‘because of your shameless audacity’ but ‘to preserve his good name’. God is an honourable friend, so much more honourable than the grumpy friend in Jesus’ story. He does not want the honour of his name to be called into question, because it is so important to him that his position as our friend is maintained.

So I wonder what ‘daily bread’ needs you bring to God? It may literally be daily bread, especially with the problems our world is having with supply and inflation. We now know that Jesus’ expression ‘daily bread’ was one that was in everyday use in his day, because some years ago archaeologists found an ancient shopping list which specifically mentioned daily bread.

If you are bringing your basic needs to God, know that you are bringing them to an honourable friend. And that is not just a formal expression in the way that Members of Parliament refer to MPs of the same party as ‘my Honourable Friend’, this is real and deep with our God. For the honour of his name as our friend, he will make sure our needs are met. He will not do so miserably or reluctantly, because he cares for us.

I urge you to put aside any thought that it’s unworthy to bring your basic needs to God in prayer. As your friend, he cares about the food you eat, the income you have, the energy you need for your home, the clothes you wear, and many other things, too. As Jesus reminded us in the Sermon on the Mount, he does not want us to worry about these things. Why? Because as an honourable friend, he will see to it that we have enough.

Do not view God as an ogre, says Jesus, view him as your caring friend. He is so much better than that. He is not cruel. He is caring. He is not indifferent and asleep but ready to be asked. Bring him your needs without shame.

Secondly, God is our Father.

Now in recognising God as Father, I am of course aware that there are people who have had bad experiences of a human father. That’s not something I can say. When my father died five years ago, I wrote on Facebook that a light had gone out of my life.

But what I experienced was growing up in a family where money was tight. Often I tell the story of being a small boy and overhearing my parents talking one evening about how they were going to manage all the bills, so I went into the front room where they were and offered to give up my pocket money. So I didn’t have an abusive father like some, but I had an experience of finding it hard to believe that a father could provide everything I asked for.

Things improved as I got older, but the key for me was slowly absorbing the biblical picture of God as a caring, concerned, compassionate Father, who had all the resources of creation at his disposal:

for every animal of the forest is mine,
    and the cattle on a thousand hills (Psalm 50:10).

So for those who do not have a good image of the word ‘father’ I do not take the route of dispensing with it and just using feminine language for God, I prefer over time to rehabilitate the notion of fatherhood, because its use for God is a good and nourishing one.

This is what Jesus basically says to his listeners. Paraphrasing, he says, you know that human fathers want to give what is good to their children, so how much better is your heavenly Father? Scorpions for eggs? No! In the Holy Land, scorpions are common and I read the other day of someone who camped on a beach there and found a small scorpion had crawled into his sleeping bag.[1]

But no loving father would do that to their children. And neither will our heavenly Father with us. He will only give us what is best for us.

Now ‘what is best’ is naturally not necessarily what the world considers ‘best’. It is not necessarily the best of material possessions, the highest of incomes, and the most desirable of homes.

Rather, you may have noticed that Luke’s account of these words differs in one important way from Matthew’s. Here, Jesus does not say, ‘how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him,’ he says, ‘how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him’ (verse 13).

The very best is God’s own presence with us for ever, the Holy Spirit. Can anyone beat such a gift? No!

As parents, Debbie and I will give to our children so that they may make the best of their lives, and we keep savings in order to do that. We do not give to them in order to indulge them, but so that they can have the best we can provide for them to make something worthwhile with their lives.

Well, it’s all that and much, much more with God. We can confidently ask him for the good things we need, and because not only is he an honourable friend, he is also a loving Father, he will provide for us. But he will set us up for the life of serving and loving him in his kingdom – the best life of all, even if it is costly – by the gift of his Spirit.

Would it not be the most natural thing of all, therefore, for Christians regularly to be praying for more of the Holy Spirit in their lives? It seems logical to me if we have such a loving and caring Father in heaven.

I know that we still go through hardships. I know that we still face trials. I know that we still face life situations where we do not know why certain things are happening to us. But through all that I am still convinced of God’s fatherly goodness to us. Let me tell you one final story about that goodness as I have experienced it.

Much earlier in my ministry, and a little while before I met Debbie, I was considering whether to buy a new computer for my work. I really liked the look of one particular model, and I wanted to buy it.

But I was hesitant. As you know, I like computers! And I didn’t want just to kid myself that this was God’s will to spend this large amount of money. So I prayed and left it with God.

In my main church was a woman called Mandy. One night at the church prayer meeting she had had such a powerful experience of the Holy Spirit and afterwards she discovered that she had received the spiritual gift of prophecy. Not prophecy in the sense of foretelling the future, but prophecy in the sense of being able to bring direct and relevant messages from God to people.

One Saturday morning she had gone to the church premises to pray on her own. Walking around, she came to the front of the sanctuary, near the communion table and the lectern, and in that area she felt prompted to pray for me.

While she was praying there, she heard God say to her, ‘Tell Dave he can have what he wants.’

She relayed that to me sometime in the succeeding days and I knew instantly this referred to my dilemma about the computer. My prayer was answered by a loving Father.

In conclusion, I don’t want to harangue you about the need for prayer, it’s too easy to do that. Instead, I want you to hear just how good and loving our God is. He is the friend who will maintain his honour by providing what we need. He is the Father in heaven who provides the good and the very best for his children.

Let us be confident in this God of love when we pray.

[1] https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/how-can-we-pray-like-jesus-in-luke-11/

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