On Book-Smarts and Knowing Jesus, a devotional thought

There's this almost throw-away line in John 7:49  that sometimes gives me pause. The scribes and Pharisees have sent some servants to arrest Jesus, but the servants don't do it because they are impressed with his teaching.  “No one ever spoke the way this man does,” is what they say (v.46). When the Pharisees hear this, and then learn that the crowd of onlookers was also impressed with Jesus, they are exasperated. But the reason the text gives for their exasperation is interesting: “None of the rulers or the Pharisees have believed in him,” they say, “but this mob, which knows nothing of the law, has.”

In other words, they chalk up the crowd’s belief in Jesus to a lack of learning, and credit their own ability “not to be taken in” to their superior education. The same thing happened earlier, when they criticized Jesus because he'd had no formal education (7:15). They take such pride in their Bible knowledge that it has actually blinded them from seeing Jesus for who he is.

Now don’t get me wrong: I place a high value on education. Life-long learning and deep study of the Scriptures are both a vital part of the Christian life, and this is certainly not meant to undermine those things. But still: it strikes me as curious that these Pharisees are missing out on the good thing that God is doing through Jesus, because they place so much stock in their biblical education that they can't recognize it; whereas the uneducated “mobs” are receiving it, for all their lack of book-smarts.

There’s an irony there. And also a warning, I think, for guys like me who love to climb high and go deep when it comes to hitting the books. It is possible for study—even study of the Scriptures—to move us away from God and not towards him. It's almost certain will do so, if it’s being pursued for selfish reasons, for personal aggrandizement, or any other reason than simply the glory of God and the edification of God’s people. And unless we hold it with an open hand and a humble heart, it’s just possible that a lot of book-smarts might make us, too, miss out on the good things God’s doing in Jesus Christ.

The Theology of Work (Part 2): Bruce Springsteen Meets Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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There’s a hidden gem on one of Bruce Springsteen’s early albums, a song called “Factory.” It’s a poignant tune about the heartache of the working life in blue collar America. For the beaten-down laborer in the song, the drudgery of a monotonous factory job sustains his body but steals his soul. “Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life,” sings the Boss, “It’s the work, just the work, just the working life.”

I’ve always found Springsteen’s handling of “the working life” intriguing. “Factory” isn’t the only Springsteen tune that explores this strange tension, between our profound need for work to do, on the one hand, and the soul-sucking drudgery work, on the other. The same tension is present for the poor souls in “Badlands,” and it’s there for the torn-asunder community in “My Hometown.” Work is one of our deepest needs and also one of our heaviest burdens, a bane and a blessing both.

I doubt Springsteen read much Bonhoeffer, but I see a parallel between the way Springsteen wrestled with the reality of work, and the theological reflection on work we find a in Dietrich Bonhoeffer book called Ethics. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor in 1940s Germany who was famously interned and eventually executed for his involvement in the Nazi Resistance efforts. An unfinished manuscript of Ethics was on his desk when he was arrested by the Nazis. Though incomplete, it was an effort to establish a theological framework for a system of ethics that might guide a Christian’s day-to-day living in a secular world.

The connection between Springsteen and Bonhoeffer may not seem immediately obvious, except that Bonhoeffer has an extended section in Ethics where he discusses something he calls “the four mandates.” He draws these from the Creation account as it is recorded in the first chapters of Genesis, the four mandates God gave Adam and Eve when he placed them in paradise on the day of their creation. These “mandates” were not commands, strictly speaking, divine rules that Adam and Eve might keep or contravene; rather they were directives, broad purposes that the human being was made to live into. They might be fulfilled in any number of ways, but generally speaking they were the aspects of life that, by pursuing them, humans could fulfill the divine command to live fully as human beings, Imaging God in the world.

The four mandates are: family, worship, government, and work. Bonhoeffer treats each of these mandates extensively in Ethics, but for our purposes here, it’s enough to notice that work sits squarely among the four mandates. On Bonhoeffer’s reading of Genesis, work was a divine mandate, given human beings in paradise before the Fall.

It’s how I read Genesis, too. In Genesis 2:15 it explains that after God had made the man, he took and placed him in the Garden of Eden, to cultivate it and tend it, that is to say, to work it. And before God does this, in Genesis 2:5, it explains that no plants of the field were yet growing because “there was no man [yet] to work the ground.”

There was work to do in Paradise, in other words, and except there were humans to do it, Paradise would not be paradisal. The divine mandate of work precedes the Fall.

This connects seamlessly with how Genesis 3 describes the effects of Adam and Eve’s sin. In Genesis 3:17, we learn that after discovering their sin, God cursed “the ground” because of them, so that it would now produce food for them “only by the sweat of their brow.”

It’s common to gloss this passage by talking about how “God cursed Adam and Eve when they sinned,” but strictly speaking, that’s not accurate. God only uses the word “curse” here to describe the effects of their sin on the earth. Adam and Eve will experience the consequences of their sin, to be sure. Eve will have pain in childbearing and Adam’s work will be miserable for him. But the actual “curse” is not pronounced on the human creatures; rather it is pronounced on the rest of creation, as a result of their sin.

This distinction is important to make, because it reminds us that God did not “curse Adam” by giving him hard work to do. That we would have work to do was part of God’s good intention for his human creatures right from the start. The creation became cursed because of human sin, and under this curse the divine mandate to work becomes distorted, burdensome, laborious, but the work itself is of God.

“Factory takes his hearing,” sings the Boss, and yet, at the same time “Factory gives him life.”

This is the paradox of the human condition, when it comes to work. We were made to do it and without it, paradise can’t be paradise, neither can we be fully human before our God; yet because of sin, the mandate is experienced as a curse. The earth produces our food only by the sweat of our brow. The work we have to do inevitably sucks away the life it sustains.

As unlikely as the combination may seem, both Springsteen and Bonhoeffer have a helpful word to speak when it comes to developing a theological understanding of our work, Springsteen in articulating this paradox that we labor under, and Bonhoeffer by framing it biblically for us.

When we come to see work as one of the four creation mandates God gave human beings when he made them in his image in the beginning, two interrelated things start to happen that have the power to transform how we do our work in the world. First, we start to realize that work itself was intended as a good gift from God, something that, so long as it is kept in its right place and performed for its proper purpose, allows us to live into our creation mandate. But second, we are forced to acknowledge that work can only be this through the redemptive grace of God.

Unredeemed, work wrings every drop of sweat from our souls and rewards our best efforts with thistles and thorns. Put a little less metaphorically: until the Lord redeems us from our own sin nature—the sin that compels us to idolize the work of our hands, and leaves us never satisfied with the outcome of our best efforts, and keeps us toiling under a constant fear of loss and failure and death—until these inevitable effects of sin are healed and transformed, our work will always have a shadow of the curse in it, however necessary, and even life-giving it may be.

For the redeemed, though, for whom the Spirit of God has begun to heal our addiction to idols and transform our sin-fed fears of death and loss—for the follower of Jesus who is having the Image of God increasingly renewed in them, that is—work, too, becomes healed and healing. It finds its rightful place among the four mandates, and becomes—yes, even work can become this—a faint echo of paradise.

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Entrusted of the Lord, a devotional thought

There's a spot in the Gospel of John, chapter 2, that I've always wondered about. In 2:24-25, we’re told that Jesus was in Jerusalem performing “miraculous signs” and many were believing because of what they’d seen. And then it says, “but Jesus did not ‘entrust’ himself to them, because he knew all people.” That's the part that keeps me wondering, in particular, because it’s not exactly clear what it means when it says that Jesus did not “entrust himself” to these people. The Greek verb it uses is pisteuo, which means “to believe.” It is, incidentally, the same verb in 23, when it says many "believed in him" because of his miraculous signs. They pisteuo-ed in him, but he did not, in turn pisteuo himself to them.

As strange as it may sound to say it like this, it seems there is a necessary “entrusting of himself to us” that Jesus does when we come into relationship with him, a reciprocal “faith” (for lack of a better word) that Jesus places in us, trusting us as his followers, and entrusting us with his own self-revelation and life. 

The immediate reason the text gives, for why Jesus did not do this for the people in this passage, is that their faith in him was superficial and self-interested. They believed simply because they'd seen the miraculous signs he’d performed and ostensibly were looking for more (v.23); and Jesus was intimately aware of their self-centred motives, inasmuch as he "knew all people" (v.24).  

To extrapolate a spiritual truth from the text, we might say that when our faith in him is like this—superficial and self-interested—Jesus does not reciprocate and entrust to us the deep things of God, the deep intimacy he wants to have with us. He certainly did not do so for the people in this passage. They trusted in him only superficially, so He did not entrust himself deeply to them.

Surely there is a caution here, and a challenge. We are being urged here, I think, to nurture that kind of faith in the Lord Jesus that is not based on the next flashy miracle and what’s in it for me, but is based instead on deeply knowing Jesus as he is, and receiving him for who he is. I’m reading between the lines, of course, but this kind of faith, it seems, is the kind that our Lord honours reciprocally by entrusting himself to us, in turn.

The first day of the rest of your life, a devotional thought

There's a fascinating sequence in the first chapter of the Gospel of John that often gets overlooked but is worth far more reflection than it usually gets. It’s right at the beginning of the gospel; we’ve just come through the Prologue (1:1-18) which talks about Jesus being “the word of God” that was there “in the beginning” and by which God created “all things that have been made.” Then it goes on to talk about Jesus as the life that was the “light of all mankind” that was “coming into the world.” As I often point out when I teach Bible studies on the Gospel of John, any 1st Century Christian reader worth their salt would recognize all of this as creation imagery lifted right out of Genesis. 

In other words, John’s telling a New Creation story, or rather: God has told one in the Person and Work of Jesus Christ. 

So far so good, but then in John 1:29 you have this nondescript reference to “the next day.” You have to count, here, but when you do, something wonderful comes into focus: if 1:29 is “the next day,” that would mean that 1:19-29, where John the Baptist predicts the coming of Jesus was “the first day.” So 1:29-34 is the “second day” you might say. Then in 1:35 you get a reference to “the next day again,” making 1:35-42, where Jesus calls his first disciples, “day 3.” Another day (the next day...) begins at 1:43, when Jesus calls two more disciples. Then, in 2:1, where we have his first miraculous sign, the water into wine, we’re told it occurs “three days later.” In other words: the turning of water into wine, by which he “reveals his glory” (2:11), occurs on the 7th day after the introductory prologue that marked this book out as a New Creation story.

If I’ve done the math here correctly, that would mean, in essence, that 1:19-2:1 symbolically marks off, the “first week” of this New Creation story, a sequence of seven days reminiscent of the creation week in Genesis 1. And if I’ve done the exegesis right here, that would mean that the calling of the disciples (1:35-50) is part of the creative work that God’s doing, to bring this New Creation to its fullness in Christ. 

Who knew, that when you were called to be a follower of Jesus, God was doing there and then a Creative Work, something like what he did when he made the sun and the moon and the sea and everything in it, way back in the beginning? Follower of Jesus, welcome to the first day of a whole new world!

The Theology of Work (Part 1): Working in a Post-Covid World

When the Covid-19 pandemic descended on the globe last March, it forced us, among other things, to reimagine what the work-world looks like. Stay-at-home orders required many of us to change dramatically the way we did our jobs, forcing us to work over the internet in ways we’d never done before. Business lock-downs put many of us on long-term layoffs with no viable alternatives for employment. Increased pressures on certain sectors of the work-world, especially in hospitals, medical clinics, nursing homes and schools, required many of us to work under a strain we'd never had to bear before. While all this was going on, the Government of Canada was providing wage-subsidies and financial assistance with such liberality that it made many wonder out loud if we were ready to test-run a universal basic income program for the country.

I have thought more than once during the last year that one of the long-range outcomes of the pandemic will be a dramatic restructuring of the role of work in our lives. This was already happening in nondescript and incremental ways. As automation pushes more and more human beings out of jobs, as A.I. begins to replace human brains in decision-making jobs, as the advent of self-driving cars threatens to put vast swaths of people who drive for a living out of work, as online-shopping and automated-home-delivery renders retail jobs obsolete—as our human ingenuity, that is, finds more and more ways to do the job without us, it’s already been forcing us to reimagine what work looks like in a robotic age. The pandemic has not caused all this, but it will accelerate it and intensify it. When we’ve finally come through Covid and we’ve started to rebuild all the things it toppled over, navigating the changes it has wrought to the nature of work will be one of primary social challenges we will have to face.

I call this a “social challenge” because having good work to do is essential to human flourishing and individual well-being, and the changes to our work that the pandemic is accelerating will inevitably cause corresponding changes to those things—our flourishing and well-being as people. Regardless all those times you woke up and went in wishing you didn’t have to, still, human beings need to have meaningful work to do, something that gives us a sense of purpose and allows us to make a positive contribution to the common weal of the community.

In saying this, I am using a very broad definition of work, one that includes those important activities that are not usually remunerated materially—like child-rearing or managing a household—but are just as crucial to the flourishing of society as the more obvious ones like doctor or construction worker. Whether it is done for money or not, work allows us to express our God-given creativity, to gain a degree of self-determination while remaining connected to the communities we are part of. Work matures us, broadens our horizons, and helps us attain a healthy self-actualization. At least it can do that, at its best; and it is not immediately clear how it will continue to do so in a post-Covid world, where we’ve not yet figured out what exactly we’ll do or how exactly we’ll do it.

I may have overstated the problem somewhat in the preceding paragraph. Certainly many of the jobs that existed in the pre-Covid world will continue to need doing post-Covid; and the pandemic itself has created all sorts of new jobs that need doing now and will still need to be done long after the last lockdown order has been lifted. It’s not as though a jobless dystopia is looming on the horizon (or a work-free utopia, depending on your perspective).

But there is a change in the wind.

It had me thinking about the various jobs I’ve had over the course of my working life. I will turn 47 this month, and inasmuch as I entered the workforce, roughly, at age 15, I have been working more-or-less steadily for 32 years. In those 32 years I’ve had a variety of jobs, including: hardwood flooring installer, summer camp youth leader, waiter, schoolteacher (then substitute teacher), stay-at-home dad, and now pastor. 

With the exception, possibly, of the second last item on that list, none of jobs I’ve worked at over the years would have continued unchanged had I been working at them when the pandemic hit. Some would have ended abruptly, others would have continued in a dramatically different form than they’d previously had. The job I actually was working at when Covid came along—the work of a pastor—has changed in all kinds of ways, some of which I’m only now beginning to understand, and some of which I may never fully grasp. The basic duties of the work are the same, of course, but how I discharge those duties in an age of live-streamed worship services and online prayer meetings looks very different than it did a year and a half ago.

I offer this all by way of introduction to a series I will be presenting here at terra incognita over the next number of weeks, looking at the theological meaning and spiritual dimensions of work. Given the profound role that our jobs play in our lives, and given also the way that this role is in an unprecedented state of flux for many of us, it may be a far richer topic for theological reflection than it appears at first blush. Does the daily grind really have any theological meaning beyond the brute fact of the grind itself? Does it really matter if we move into a world where the lines between work and home are irreversibly blurred? Does it matter if our work looks different than it ever has before? Does it matter if we even have any work to do at all?

You may be surprised to learn that the Christian message actually offers concrete answers to many of these questions, and even those it doesn’t answer directly it certainly provides the theological raw material necessary to infer an answer to them. In the coming weeks we will examine that raw material closely and see if we can’t determine what posture a Christian should take towards his or her work, even as it takes new and hitherto unimagined forms in a post-Covid world. I hope you will check back in for coming installments of the series, as we do our best to look at our work from God's perspective, and develop some theological handles for managing our work well, for his glory, whatever shape it takes in the days to come.

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The Architecture of Heaven, a devotional thought

In Revelation 21 we come to one of the most mysterious and beautiful passages in the whole book, John's vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem, descending from heaven and opening up in all its transcendent splendor. 

I find every detail of this celestial city fascinating.

We’re told, for instance, that it has 12 gates guarded by 12 angels, inscribed with the names of the 12 Tribes of Israel; and the wall of the city has 12 foundation stones, each one inscribed with the name of one of the 12 apostles. In other words: the New Jerusalem, the Heavenly City of God, is founded on the work/witness/ministry of the Apostles, and entered into through the Story of Israel. This Heavenly City is seamlessly consistent with the Old Testament story of God’s acts on behalf of Israel, and the New Testament story of his work in Jesus Christ.

And then, notice, that the foundation stones are each precious gems: jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, and so on. This, of course, recalls the 12 precious stones in the priest’s breastplate from the Book of Exodus (though they are not identically correlated). And what’s more, the city itself is a cube, as long and high as it is wide, which is the same shape as the Holy of Holies in the OT Temple/Tabernacle. 

On the one hand, all of this suggests that the description of the Tabernacle in Exodus, which many readers skip over because it seems so tedious—with its intricate priestly garments and careful temple measurements—are meant actually to give us a tiny little microcosm of Heaven. And on the other hand, it suggests that when we finally get there, these intricate, symbolic details, which seem so tedious, at times, to modern day readers, are going to be foremost among the mysteries we ponder (for eternity), as we press further in and higher up, for ever, into the beauty and glory and goodness and wonder of God.

A Journey through the Book of Job (Part 14): Job 42:1-17

Our Angelic Brothers in Arms, a devotional thought

In  Revelation19:10, there’s this brief but moving exchange between John, the author of Revelation, and an angel who has been telling him what to write. The angel tells him  he is to write, “Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb,” after which John, apparently overcome with awe in the presence of this heavenly emissary, falls down at his feet to worship him. 

In Greek, the word for worship doesn’t always have to mean “religious worship, offered to a deity.” It can also simple mean, “to give due honour” or “pay obeisance” to someone. In this case, though, it seems like it’s the former meaning, because the angel raises him to his feet and says, “Don’t worship me, I am a servant of God just like you. . . . Worship only God.” 

 Like I say, it’s brief, but also moving. Because biblically, angels are not the chubby little harmless cherubs that adorn St. Valentine’s Day cards. They are heavenly warriors (He makes his angles flames of fire (Heb 1:7)), ministering spirits from the heavenly realms that pretty consistently leave humans flat on their face in abject terror whenever they come into contact with us.

So let it sink in: this angel lifts John to his feet, shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye with him, and says, essentially, “You and I are comrades, colleagues, and co-servants in the Lord’s Kingdom.” Follower of Jesus , be inspired today: you are a comrade-at-arms with the angelic warriors of the Heavenly Host, who mark you as peers as together you serve the Lord Jesus with them.