Jesus and the Spirit

Sermon Draft

Ben Nasmith - 29 Jul 18

Eph 2:11 So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision”—a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands—12 remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14 For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. 15 He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, 16 and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. 17 So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; 18 for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. 19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, 20 built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. 21 In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; 22 in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

Introduction

When I read this passage I ask myself, How did the cross of Christ and the Spirit that led Christ to that cross solve the problem of division between Jewish and non-Jewish Christians in the early church, and what does that mean for us today? The answer is found in verse 18:

“for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father.”

Thesis: I take this to mean—and this is my main point—that Christian unity, then and now, is something that requires the power of the Spirit of God, and not just any spirit, but the Spirit of God as the Spirit of Jesus—the Spirit that led Jesus to his cross and the Spirit by which Jesus confronts us today in our own experience.

I’ll start with a couple observations about unity and this passage.

First, unity between people isn’t automatic. This passage doesn’t take unity for granted. It speaks of a time when the reader was “without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” So the unity proclaimed here is not the type of unity that was there all along, but we were ignorant of it. There was once a “dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”

Second, unity always requires power. Sometimes this power is power to impose unity upon people who otherwise wouldn’t get along. But the power that unites in this passage is not that kind of power. We don’t have a forced unity here. Rather, we read of a power described in terms of “the blood of Christ,” a power at work “in his flesh” that “breaks down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” It is a power that reconciles “both groups to God in one body through the cross,” and somehow this puts “to death” this hostility between us, the dividing wall.

Third, the power that unifies is the power of the Spirit of Jesus. We read that Jesus “proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father.” This shared Spirit of Jesus unites us today, just as that Spirit once united Jewish and non-Jewish Christians in the early church.

Finally, the Spirit of God is the Spirit of Jesus. We are speaking about the Spirit of God. But in the New Testament, and in Christian experience, the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Jesus are one and the same. By this I mean that the Spirit that led and empowered the man Jesus of Nazareth, conveying to him the presence and power of his God and Father, is the very same Spirit that the exalted Jesus pours out upon us today, conveying to us his presence and power. This means that if we want to recognize the Spirit of God in our lives and world today, we should look for the same Spirit today that empowered and guided Jesus, the Spirit that ultimately led him to his death. Today, in our own experience, we must distinguish the Spirit that empowered Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospels from the numerous forces that nudge us toward this action or that attitude.

All that said, in order to understand how the Spirit of Jesus unifies, we must return to the story of Jesus and the Spirit of God. I’ll try to tell this story to you, a story that explains why the gospel of the New Testament tolerates no partiality or human-made divisions.

The Story of Jesus and the Spirit of God

The story begins in ancient Palestine, about 2000 years ago. A proud yet powerless people find themselves under foreign rule—a painful and embarrassing turn of events. The people of ancient Israel had a history, a national story that involved a special relationship with a God known to them as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They believed that this God had promised their forefather Abraham that through his descendants—this people—all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Abraham’s children were once slaves in Egypt, and they believed that their God had delivered them from slavery, and brought them into a land promised to Abraham. This God had once blessed them with a kingdom to be proud of, during the rules of David and Solomon. In fact, they believed that God had promised David a permanent royal line—a never-ending kingdom, and a permanent leading role on the world stage. The God who had redeemed them from slavery was not, in their eyes, a tribal deity confined to their land but rather the grand ruler over all nations, the cosmic creator and the unique being worthy of human worship. Their God was worthy of their worship because of God’s saving deeds and promises. The God of Israel had earned their loyalty.

The problem was that David’s kingdom had fractured rather than prospered, and within several generations the people of Israel found themselves diminished in power. As other kingdoms rose to prominence, Israel found itself in the cross-fire, located in a disputed patch of land between the great powers of Egypt and Assyria, and then Babylon. The national dream was shipwrecked as Jerusalem fell, the temple was destroyed, and the people deported into foreign exile.

After the exile, what could it possibly mean to be the people of God, a people promised an eternal kingdom ruled by an unending line of Kings descended from David? Everyone wondered. Perhaps it meant that God would restore their former fortunes, that the days of David and Solomon might return? In due course many of the people were able to return to Jerusalem and Palestine. They were able build a second temple. But things never quite returned to normal. In fact, this people still found themselves in the cross-fire of the rising and falling world powers, being first occupied by the Greeks as Alexander the Great swept through, then ruled by his unsavory successors, and then swept up into the Roman empire. So the question remained. What did it mean to be promised a kingdom? What of God’s promises to Israel? Why did Israel’s God, who is sovereign over the nations, permit Israel to languish in obscurity?

Amidst this new status quo, something remarkable happens. Albert Schweitzer described it beautifully. He writes,

There is silence all around. The Baptist appears, and cries: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him.

What does this mean? A man we know as John the Baptist begins preaching in Roman Palestine that God was about to fulfill God’s promises to Israel. And another man, who we know as Jesus of Nazareth, begins to echo that same message and preach it for himself. But unlike John, Jesus has a deep conviction that God has called him personally to “set in motion the machinery” that will usher in the long-awaited kingdom of God—to lay hold of the wheel of history and make it turn. Jesus does not spiritualize Israel’s expected kingdom (although he does make it inescapably ethical). Rather Jesus is convinced that through his own actions the God of Israel will inaugurate the promised kingdom at any moment.

What we now call his ministry, or career, began with a baptism. Like many others, Jesus went to John to be baptised as a sign of his commitment to the coming kingdom of God. This baptism is a crucial moment in his life: the moment when the Spirit of the God of Israel finally empowers Jesus to act. At his baptism Jesus relates to the God of Israel as his Father. Immediately the Spirit of his Father drives him out into the wilderness where his trust in God is tested. And the test is precisely this: Will the one to whom God has promised a kingdom take that kingdom by force from his enemies with his own two hands? Or will he, like King David before him, wait for God to deliver the promised kingdom to him?

Jesus begins teaching near his hometown, declaring,

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Many in Israel feel abandoned by God and long for a tangible salvation from what they think ails them. The downtrodden will be lifted up and God will finally set things right.

But sooner or later people take offense at Jesus. Jesus is not the type people expected to be the proclaimer, and certainly not the vehicle, of Israel’s salvation. His message has parts that they like—what’s not to like about healing the sick? Also, in a twisted sort of way, they enjoy seeing Jesus knock religious leaders down a peg. The people love to see Jesus embarrass their leaders in debate, especially in the final week of his life. But Jesus can also infuriate. He consistently exposes deep rooted prejudice and corrupted expectations about who God finds worthy, what God finds pleasing, and what God ought to do about it.

Remember, the question at hand was this: Why does God permit his special people to languish in obscurity on the world stage? When will God specially favour God’s special people? Of course, God favours his people by sending them Jesus, but in those days that is small comfort. Nevertheless, Jesus is entirely focused on his own nation, on Israel. His efforts are all directed toward influencing Israel, both its people and its leaders. He makes no real effort to sway the Roman authorities, or the neighbouring non-Jewish peoples. His life’s work is the work of one sent by Israel’s God to Israel. But Jesus also believes that when Israel inevitably resists God’s messengers, the nations are blessed all the same. When he makes this conviction clear to others it always strikes a nerve. In Roman Palestine, politics and theology and history are all one and the same. Israel’s political fortunes hinge on Israel receiving special treatment from her God, the God who rules the nations. And any threat to that divine privilege is anathema. Remember that in Nazareth, when Jesus reminds his neighbours at the synagogue of God’s favour to those outside of Israel in the days of Elijah and Elisha, the people of his hometown immediately try to kill him by throwing him off a cliff. Somehow he escapes.

As Soren Kierkegaard writes, “In order to believe, the person who believes must have passed through the possibility of offense.” However, “The possibility of offense lies in the contradiction that the remedy seems infinitely worse than the sickness.” Indeed, if the problem is Israel’s obscurity on the world stage, a salvation that blesses all the nations does seem like a cure that is worse than the disease. But it gets worse. Israel is chosen by God not for its own sake but for the sake of those other nations. Israel is chosen by God, but chosen to serve rather than receive preferential treatment. Israel is God’s vineyard, Jesus insists, its leaders the tenants chosen to care for the vineyard so that Israel will bear the fruit that will bless all the nations. Jesus interprets his own mission to Israel as the mission of the son of the owner of the vineyard, sent to collect this fruit of the vineyard from the tenants.

The teaching of Jesus alone has not produced the fruit of the vineyard. National repentance and preparation for a kingdom made not by human hands; embracing of a law that sets love of God and love of neighbour before all else; welcoming the son of the father to whom great men matter little and little children, women, and lepers matter much—these things did not happened through the ministry of Jesus. Instead, the miracles of Jesus provoke greed in some, slander in others. His blatant disregard for human standards of worth, whether they be sexual norms, human riches, political power, gender, age, health, ethnicity, or political affiliation (remember the tax collectors)—these all offend rather than inspire.

Only a decisive confrontation remains. This is why Kierkegaard writes, “Christ is not love, least of all in the human meaning; He is Truth, Absolute Truth; therefore He had to let men become guilty of his death: i.e. reveal Truth to the uttermost degree.” The truth is that all is not well between God and his people, between God and the world. To make this truth known—and known for all human history—Jesus will bring things to a head between God and Israel. Peter Forsyth writes, “As a great statesman, in full view of the situation and its crisis, might commit a people to war, so [Jesus] would force the whole nation into the valley of decision for Israel’s death or life.” If the exile had dashed Israel’s expectation of steadily increasing prosperity under divine privilege, the death of Israel’s anticipated Messiah and Son of Man—at the hands of Israel’s leaders, by the will of the people—would forever discredit human expectations of who God loves, and with whom God is well pleased. And so we read, that toward the end of his brief career, and after the so-called “mountain-top experience” described as the transfiguration, Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem. He begins a long walk from the margins to the center, from safety to danger, from popularity to near universal hatred, from success to failure. Jesus takes action. The Spirit of his Father drives Jesus toward Jerusalem, where he will force the wheel of Israel’s history to turn, and it will crush him.

Jesus does indeed perish, totally discredited, his teaching misunderstood, and his kingdom defeated.

Conclusion

But what does God think of Jesus? Jesus was crucified precisely in order to prove once and for all that God was not with him, that he did not speak for God, that God could be expected to conform to human standards of worth and value, that God would deliver unto us the type of kingdom we’d prefer, including in it only the types of people we find worthy. And in the silence of the three days after his death, the matter seems settled.

Yet the Christian faith insists that God has raised and exalted this crucified Jesus of Nazareth. God does not return Jesus to the condition he had before his death. God does not do for Jesus merely what Jesus did for Lazarus. The Christian faith insists that God exalted Jesus and makes him Lord over all. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the living and the living God—this God turns out to be precisely the God and Father of Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified one. The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. And through Abraham’s children, all the nations are blessed.

But how do we know that Jesus has been exalted? The truth is, we don’t know, at least not automatically. Its not the sort of thing that you can know by just being told about it. Knowledge that Jesus has been exalted comes by way of encountering the Spirit of God as the Spirit of Jesus. The same Spirit that drove Jesus into the wilderness; that reversed his cultural and even theological expectations about Israel’s God; that led him to scorn human standards of worth and value, success and failure—that same spirit challenges us today, in the present moment.

In my view, this is why the New Testament speaks of the Spirit of God as the Spirit of Jesus without any distinction. We know that Jesus is exalted—we know that whatever gods there may be are such that the same living divine imperative that provoked and empowered Jesus of Nazareth provokes and empowers us today in our own experience, on behalf of that same Jesus. We know this Spirit by its fruit. Just as we cannot see the wind, but we can see the evidence of the wind as it makes trees sway and waves form, we cannot see the Spirit of Jesus or the exalted Christ. But we can know the truth firsthand by welcoming the Spirit of Jesus at the painful and private level of our will.

The Spirit of Jesus is the same Spirit that set his face toward Jerusalem, by which Jesus provoked his people to a final crisis with their God, out of a love for his people and a zeal for God’s holy name. Not every influence in our lives bears the marks of this Spirit. Not every suggestion or piece of advice or demand made in Jesus’ name is worthy of his demonstrated obedience unto death. Not every thought or opinion that we attribute to Christian principles or Christian culture is worthy of the crucified one. We need to test the character of what we attribute to Jesus against his spirit-empowered life and his spirit-empowered death.

How does this bear on church unity? As our passage says, “through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father.” If I am led by the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit that set his face toward Jerusalem, I will rejoice to see that same Spirit at work in other people. It ultimately doesn’t matter whether we agree about theology, or church governance, or whether the moon landings were real or fake. The one thing needful for my unity with others is a shared experience of the Spirit of Jesus, however imperfect and limited that experience may be.

But what if other people don’t demonstrate the presence of this Spirit in their lives? Then that same Spirit leads me to love them, to regard as rubbish any human standards that differentiate and divide me from them, to see in them a person loved by the God who seeks to reconcile and redeem at any cost.

On the other hand, a form of Christianity guided by human distinctions stands at the foot of the cross hurling insults at the crucified one. To Christ it says, “If God is with you, why don’t you save yourself and us?” The moral apocalypse of the cross is that God is with the one we rejected. Those we are inclined to set aside as useless, perhaps as threatening—people such as these are in the good company of our crucified Lord. Who would our crucified Lord despise? Who would the one we despised and rejected, in turn despise and reject? This is how the cross destroys the ancient and universal hostility between those divided by human standards of worth. Those led by the Spirit of Jesus love who he loves, and despise none. And they rejoice to see that same Spirit at work in others, holding human distinctions and divisions in contempt. The Spirit of Jesus is manifest in us as the power to crucify human distinctions that divide those loved by God.