God’s justice is a saving, healing, restorative justice, because the God to whom justice belongs is the Creator God who has yet to complete his original plan for creation and whose justice is designed not simply to restore balance to a world out of kilter but to bring to glorious completion and fruition the creation, teeming with life and possibility, that he made in the first place.
The gospels were all about God becoming king, but the creeds are focused on Jesus being God.
First, Paul is anxious that everyone who professes Christian faith should allow the gospel to transform the whole of their lives, so that the outward signs of the faith express a living reality that comes from the deepest parts of the personality. Second, he is also anxious that each Christian, and especially every teacher of the faith, should know how to build up the community in mutual love and support, rather than, by the wrong sort of teaching or behaviour, tearing it apart.
It is one thing to insist on walking south when the compass is pointing north. But to “fix” the compass so that it tells you that the wrong way is the right way is far, far worse. You can correct a mistake. But once you tell yourself it wasn’t a mistake there’s no way back.
Take away the stories of Jesus’s birth, and all you lose is four chapters of the Gospels. Take away the resurrection and you lose the entire New Testament, and most of the second-century fathers as well.
The Gospel is not meant to make people odd or less than fully human; it is mean to renew them in their genuine, image-bearing humanness.
When God does the big things, the little people get drawn in too. Human systems often forget that, but God doesn’t.
Following Christ in the power of the Spirit means bringing to our world the shape of the gospel: forgiveness, the best news that anyone can ever hear, for all who yearn for it, and judgment for all who insist on dehumanizing themselves and others by their continuing pride, injustice, and greed.
29“I’ll tell you the truth,” replied Jesus. “No one who has left a house, or brothers or sisters, or mother or father, or children, or lands because of me and the gospel 30will fail to receive back a hundred times more in the present age: houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and lands – with persecutions! – and finally the life of the age to come. 31But plenty of people at the front will end up at the back, and the back at the front.
The point of trying to understand the cross better is not so that we can congratulate ourselves for having solved an intellectual crossword puzzle, but so that God’s power and wisdom may work in us, through us, and out into the world that still regards Jesus’s crucifixion as weakness and folly.
In fact, like most things in life that really matter – love, beauty, justice – you can’t prove things in history the way you can prove Pythagoras’s theorem. But there are lots of things you can be certain of nonetheless.
If the Bible is not simply “revelation,” neither is it simply a devotional aid, even the primary devotional aid.
News is an announcement that something significant has happened. And good news is what Jesus and his first followers were all about.
When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God.
But the voice goes on, calling us, beckoning us, luring us to think that there might be such a thing as justice, as the world being put to rights, even though we find it so elusive.
Albert Schweitzer, a century or more ago, used another strong image. Jesus, he said, was like a man convinced the wheel of history was going to turn in the opposite direction. He waited for this to happen, but it didn’t. Then he threw himself upon the wheel, and it crushed him – but it did indeed start to turn in the other direction.
According to the book of Revelation, Jesus died in order to make us not rescued nonentities, but restored human beings with a vocation to play a vital part in God’s purposes for the world.
But in first-century Christianity, what mattered was not people going from earth into God’s kingdom in heaven. What mattered, and what Jesus taught his followers to pray, was that God’s kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.
God made humans to reflect his glory, his love, his wisdom into the world, and in the new creation God will not revoke this vocation. He will gloriously fulfill it. We will become more human, not less.
The aim, as in all theological and biblical exploration, is not to replace love with knowledge. Rather, it is to keep love focused upon its true object. We.