Canter Bridge

The incomparable Colombian novelist Gabriel García-Márquez is a master of the evocative book title. From Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) to El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (The Coronel Has No One Who Writes to Him) to Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold) to El amor en tiempos de cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera) García-Márquez tells stories whose titles dare you to read them.

The last of these is clearly my inspiration this evening: Love in the Time of Cholera. As its literary signature, that genre of fiction writing that has become known as ‘magical realism’ juxtaposes an ordinary concept to the fantastical, odd, magical, or extraordinary. So for García-Márquez does love—that most ordinary, common, everyday virtue of human coexistence—jostle awkwardly and suggestively against the time of cholera. The once-in-a-century affliction of cholera, in all its epidemic phantagasmoria, reframes love almost entirely. It renders it poignant, out-of-time, compelling. It makes it something different that it is ordinarily understood to be.

Yet love does not thereby lose its powerful identity as the thing that inspires the bloom of romance or the fidelity of an aged man to his Alzheimers-afflicted wife. It does not take the edge off the young woman’s passion or the old soldier’s devotion to his nation. It inspires both Ludwig van Beethoven and Reba Macintyre. It is no less love for finding itself momentarily reframed in the life-defying circumstances of a Colombian cholera epidemic.

Now I realize that a knot of missiologists is not generally considered a thing to be compared with the devastation of a wave of cholera. And, to be truthful, I do not consider missiologists to be altogether a bad thing. Most of them are rather nice people. You may play on a softball team with one or two of them. Most of them pay their taxes and do not litter. Indeed, it would only be a short stretch if I were nervously to assure you that some of my best friends are missiologists.

I name them here not in order to to do harm to any particular one of them. Rather I use a particular class of human beings— ‘missiologists’—as a cipher in what is admittely a low blow to their profession. On the one hand, I caricature missiologists as people who fuss over the analysis of large trends in a way that leads us to believe that we actually know more or less what God is doing in his world, that we have some reliable sense of where his Spirit is blowing right now and—even more—that with the correct management of statistics and data we can properly allocate resources in a way that will help our Lord to accomplish his redemptive tasks in this world.

I run into such people regularly, usually in the context of the research office of this or that foundation. They believe they know the mind of Christ, not in the deep sense of having imbibed the waters of salvation that he causes to flow gently and deeply but rather in the tactical sense of knowing his game plan, of detailing what he is up to, of being cognitively on his side amid the dazzling minutiae of human to-ing and fro-ing. Such people remind me just a little of the illuminati, whom I met in my youth in works inspired by Hal Lindsay.

I have a second, less serious, arguably more mischievous purpose in mistreating the missiologists in this way: I have observed that—like linguists, New Testament scholars, and ballroom dance instructors, missiologists perform at their best when provoked. And so, rather unfairly, I poke at them to see what we might get out of them this evening.

Now a word about the part of my title that follows the colon: why you can’t not hope. The double negative is intentionally clumsy. It ought not to be used, therefore, as an argument for including a short course in remedial English grammar in the seminary’s curriculum.

I want to suggest by its unbalanced weight that hope in our world does not drop into the laps of worldly-wise Christians, does not spring full-grown from the earth, does not course through our veins like our very own blood. Rather, hope is a kind of spiritual discipline. Very much like wisdom, hope develops and grows into something potent and good only when nourished and cultivated by very specific and hard-won kinds of biblically-shaped understanding.

I mean to suggest that you simply cannot allow yourself the luxury of not hoping any more than you can relax your standards enough to pinch a nickle from your daughter’s milk money or steal your neighbor’s Prius because your old Jeep gulps rather than sips its gasoline or bail on the harsh contours of a proper Nicene christology. You can’t let the rest of us down by taking such an easy out, by falling asleep before the fourth movement or the ninth inning, by taking yourself out of the game on third and nine. To do so would be cheap, tawdry, unbecoming of your high calling and mine. It would be defeatist, soul-crushing, and God-dishonoring.

So, I suggest to you this evening, hard as it might seem, you really can’t not hope.

Now let me see whether I can work my way forward from the enigmatic title I’ve chosen, moving carefully in the direction of four biblical convictions that lie behind it.

Love is Yahweh’s chesed

I begin by clarifying that the love to which my title refers is nothing less than Yahweh’s own chesed. In my judgment and with apologies to Gerhard von Rad, the closest the Old Testament comes to a creed is its oft-stated refrain that Yahweh is good; his love (chesed) endures forever.

It is no easy thing to define this chesed, but there can be no arguing that it is not near to the very core of the divine temperament. It was in Gordon-Conwell’s own halls that I learned many years back a concept that has placed me in good stead ever since. It came to us that morning in Kerr Hall in a faintly Rhodesian accent: God’s very nature is that of holy love. I learned many things as a pupil in this great hall of learning, but I never learned anything more true than this.

Years later, as my GCTS-forged finger-hold on Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek blossomed into a daily immersion in the Scriptures in those languages, I inspected more closely the Bible’s own grammar of love. I was thunderstruck as I traced the notion of chesed through the Hebrew Scriptures and followed its nourishing watercourse into the New Testament. I found no locks blocking that water’s natural flow, no barriers, no intrinsic interference on this point between the two Testaments.

I learned—at least I believe I have begun to learn this—that Yahweh’s chesed is not eternal in the static, quasi-Platonic sense towards which our creeds are often accused of having turned dynamic biblically-illuminated reality. The psalms of lament, the narratives of Israel’s declension and restoration, the Pauline language of groaning in redemption’s direction—to name just a few examples—alert us that in human experience chesed is anything but a comfortably flat-line thing.

No, Israel and we experience chesed in a different way that I liken to a stream that—though it nourishes those who live along its banks—intermittently goes subterranean on us, leaving us to wonder if it exists, if its waters will ever again gladden our parched lips, and even whether we every actually knew its life-giving moisture or only imagined we had, like some terrible, taunting mirage before the eyes of dry, doomed, caravaneers.

Then, just when we have almost concluded that Sheol’s dust trumps whatever watercourse Providence might have promised, chesed‘s stream breaks the surface and bursts again with life-giving resilience into the land of the living. Or, better, into our land, which now becomes once again the land of the living.

When it does so, Israel frequently celebrates the moment by bursting into a new song. The old songs that entertained our hearts and shaped our minds back when the river was broad and the desert just a rumor no longer work when chesed‘s redemptive violence suddenly deconstructs our gloom, drenching us in holy water and reminding us how wrong we were to take the demise of our hopes and dreams with such utter seriousness.

Then, we sing with Israel that Yahweh is good. He is beautiful, he is noble, he is dignified, he is dance-worthy, he is glorious, he merits daring and self-sacrificial praise. And, because the mind longs for understanding as well as vigor, Israel appends an epexegetical clause, perhaps the epexegetical clause by which Creation sings its Maker’s praise. Exactly how is Yahweh good?: le’olam chasdo. His persevering love is indomitable, endlessly creative, immune to all of Sheol’s poison gases, undaunted with respect to Yahweh’s determination to listen in as every knee bows and every tongue confesses his praise.

But the missiologists—at least the kind I have chosen to caricature this evening—speak with astonishing self-assurance about those corners of creation (Western Europe, post-Christian Britain, the east and west banks of this country of ours, Latin America, fill in the blanks … ) that the divine Lover has now abandoned, urging us to invest our hot kingdom funds in the new, emerging, spiritual markets where the Spirit is really moving today.

Isaianic faith —to name just one of the reservoirs of biblical hope—looks at a desert and insists that streams will flow and pools will accumulate here, that a desert will bloom. The missiologists look at the same desert and say, ‘Yahweh has finished his work here. Move on, no rubber-necking, people, everything’s over. We know where the new songs are being written and it’s over there, not here.’

I find no reason to hope in such rhetoric. I find every reason to hope in Yahweh’s forever chesed.

Glory’s resounding persistence

I can think of a second reason why refusing not to hope is the appropriate state of mind even in the time of missiologists. I refer now to that Isaianic and psalmic insistence that the whole earth is full of his glory. This counter-intuitive affirmation, which comprises half of the Seraphim’s eternal song, blends with the similar confidence that the earth will be full of Yaweh’s glory and of those who know him as the waters cover the sea.

I am familiar with all or most of the historicizing interpretation that reads ‘eretz as ‘land’ rather than ‘earth’ and finds in this or that golden moment in Israel’s history some adequate reference point by which to exhaust this affirmation of its content. Such interpreters then relegate such noisy enthusiasm about the divine glory to an historical footnote, the stuff in which religious paleologists delight but really nothing to excite us on a missions emphasis week. Respectfully, such a lowering of the bar does not do justice to the resilience of such statements across the canon.
Just as Christians pray, ‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’, so the psalmist tranposes the Seraphim’s indicative into a prayer:

Praise be to his glorious name forever;
may the whole earth be filled with his glory.
Amen and Amen. (Psalm 72.19)

In addition, a large number of passages give us the picture of the temple being filled with the Lord’s glory. Erstwhile Gordon-Conwellian Greg Beale would be quick to remind us of the temple’s function as a microcosm of the whole created order or of what Isaiah and the psalmists loved to call the tebel, the inhabited earth.

Then John the seer, a writer whose breathtaking audacity arguably eclipses even that of the aforementioned Brother Beale, sees fit to deconstruct even the temple image in order to assure besieged believers that a day is coming when such instrumental, partial images must give way to a fulsome reality that casts them to the margins. John has this—intensely Isaianic—vision to offer of a redeeemed Jerusalem that encompasses all of restored humanity, whether or not they started off knowing how to call Abraham their daddy:

I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it. (Revelation 21:22-26)

With apologies to my splendid Cambridge teacher Graham Davies, this does not sound like Israelite conquest of unwilling heathen. Perhaps John the Seer has creatively transmuted the language of conquest and enslavement into the dialect of redemptive celebration, reading out of his Hebrew Bible a destiny for the nations that is the exact opposite of what it wanted to affirm.

But I think not.

It seems rather that a deep, biblical current of heroic insistence that Yahweh’s glory will conquer the hearts and territory of the world’s nations has found a new locus and impetus in the saving work of Jesus Christ and realized its latent vocation in the language that now has the nations themselves filling the Lord’s city with their own glory. His own splendor is polished by the offering of theirs. He is both pleased and praised by the welcome offering of each culture’s highest achievement, their noblest sentiment, their deepest pockets.

Partial, pinched, marginal redemption is nowhere to be found. All the nations both serve and praise him. His mercy turns out to have been wider than we imagined, not because of some sentimental lowering of redemptive requirements but rather because his love turns out to have been more potent and effective than we ever knew. There are defeated enemies in such scenarios—whether found at the end of Isaiah or Revelation or in any other place. Indeed, some of the imagery that portrays them is downright gruesome. But they fade to the status of a marginal detail as the sheer immensity of human and creational response to irrepressible, victorious chesed is chronicled.

I am continually amazed by the complete and total unfamiliarity of most non-Anglo-Saxon Christians with the music of Georg Frideric Handel, for I myself am almost incapable of hearing certain biblical phraseology without reference to this composer’s magisterial renderings. Having taught for so many years in Latin America and seen only blank stares when I asked whether my students knew this or that line from Messiah, I have become reticent to quote that great majesty for fear of speaking only to one sector of my audience. But I must.

I think at this moment of that passage in his Hallelujah where we learn that:

The kingdom of this world is become
The kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ
And He shall reign forever and ever
King of kings and Lord of Lords
Hallelujah!

Mr. Handel has not wandered far, in that moment, from his source. A deep, abiding confidence that the Lord will have his nations—willingly for the most part, it seems to me—and will find all that they are and much of what they have done to be glorious.

Yahweh’s penchant for turning the tables suddenly

A recent work by the brilliant Old Testament scholar turns its attention to the way Israel recorded its griefs and its joys. In Biblical Mourning,(Oxford University Press, 2004) Saul Olyan argues that ritual enactment of grief and rejoicing were hermetically sealed off from each other. It was entirely inappropriate for an individual to participate simultaneously in rites of grief and those of celebration. Great care, Olyan explains, was taken to maintain the proper distance between the two, To do otherwise would, seemingly, offend Yahweh and lead to uncomfortable consequences.

Near the end of his study, Olyan takes up the matter of more permanent mourning practices such as the trimming of a man’s beard of the scarring or tattooing of one’s body. Olyan seems to turn to the matter dutifully rather than curiously, almost as though he couldn’t conclude his fine work without saying something about each mourning practice in the Hebrew Bible and so had to spend a moment or two on this not very interesting one.

Olyan notices that Leviticus prohibits these two long-lasting mourning practices to priests and that Deuteronomy does the same with respect to all Israel. Olyan’s explanation for this oddly specific prohibition is fascinating and, I believe correct.

Yahweh’s response to the suffering and grief-stricken is often sudden. The Hebrew word hafak comes into play in such contexts to describe the turning or upheaval of one’s circumstances in favor of a new and far better situation. So, for example, do we come to love the Bible’s gorgeous affirmations that:

You have turned (hafakta) my mourning into dancing;
you have taken off my sackcloth
and clothed me with joy,
so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.
O LORD my God, I will give thanks to you forever. (Psalm 30.11-12)

Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance,
and the young men and the old shall be merry.
I will turn (wehafaktiy) their mourning into joy,
I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow. (Jer 31.13)

Following his thesis, Olyan simply describes the reality that a man or woman who had marked himself or herself semi-permanently as a griever could hardly enter into the context of celebration with the marks of mourning still visible on the body. To do so would violate the hermetic seal between the two classes of rites.

Olyan is uninterested in the theological implications of his acute observation. I, on the other hand, find them staggering and pertinent even to the matter of tracing Yahweh’s way with his world.

I wonder whether an analogy can be made without doing further injustice to those missiologists who until a moment ago were my friends. In fact, let me now stop naming as missiologists the people whose understanding of the church’s mission I am criticizing. The convenient fiction of blaming such a deficiency on missiologists is a piece of magical realism has served its purpose. I am not critiquing a group of people but rather an understanding of our mission in the light of Yahweh’s mission that may be less than adequately robust and theocentric. I have been a bit rough on those who locate this mission’s center of gravity in human activity and its implementation in human concept, but with the hope of nudging us fruitfully in an alternative direction.

Whowever we are, when we behave as though we know where God is moving and—more importantly—when and where he has moved on, do we not mark ourselves with the botched beard and the ugly tatoo of the hopeless mourner? Do we cut ourselves off from the possiblity that God might change our mourning into dancing and give us a garment of praise in place of our bitter tears? Do we mark ourselves as incapable of entering a worshipping congregation that can do no other than sing a new song when Yahweh once again shows up where we least expected him and pulls off—yet again—one of his twalpn?

Do we imagine that cholera epidemics never end, that life never returns, that love is powerless in the face of unbelief?

Would it not be better for us to leave our missiological tattoos and hope in surpassing, surprising chesed? It is the love of a God who can do all things and who habitually does those things which we would not in our wildest dreaming have predicted.

Compassion for the enemy

Let me offer one final reason why in the environment of divine chesed you cannot not hope: I refer here to the twin biblical—and admittedly Isaianic themes—of compassion for the enemy and the hope of nations.

Early on in his paradigmatic textbook The Middle East, the great Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis introduces ‘the two most articulate peoples of Mediterranean antiquity’: the Greeks and the Jews. These nations ‘bequeathed two classical definitions of the Other—the barbarian who is no Greek and the gentile who is not Jewish’. Lewis also credits these two peoples—so like and so unlike each other—with an otherwise unknown quality: compassion for the enemy.

I am intrigued by his attribution of such feeling to the Greeks, even if I find Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey not entirely as high-minded on this point as Lewis appears to read them. But I am sure is right about the Jews.

May I employ some final minutes to direct your attention to this theme as it appears in a very unlikely venue. You might already guess that I will once more indulge my habit for finding the root of all good things in the book of Isaiah and their flowering in the Johannine and Pauline theologies.
For much of the sixty-six long chapters of Isaiah, Israel/Jacob/Judah stands with feet firmly planted on one side of what Paul will eventually call ‘the dividing wall’, while the nations froth and foam in their unwashed banality on the other.

Yet this is far from being the whole picture. Two things happen that undermine a bifurcation of humanity in this way.

First, the book makes the audacious claim that the nations hope in Yahweh’s justice. Simultaneously, it confronts us at its beginning and at its end with a picture of pilgrimage to Zion in which the nations are active and enthusiastic participants who want nothing more than to huddle up around the opened windows of Yahweh’s temple and revel in his light and law in the hope that they might to walk in his ways.

The book’s programmatic vision of visions in chapter two is the densest expression of this attribution to rank pagans of such high-minded, God-planted, redemption-realizing sentiment:

The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the LORD. (Isaiah 2.1-5)

At the same time, in the book’s ferocious oracles against the nations, Yahweh time and again turns to heal, bless, and redeem the nation that has come under the prophet’s denunciation. We see Yahweh portrayed not merely as the destroyer of rebellious peoples but as their wounding healer (nakah and rafa’). He is this very same afflicting lover of Israel, by the way. That chosen nation’s only hope is to be redeemed through justice, by which the book means—I am sure of it—the purifying furnace of Yahweh’s chesed-soaked intentions with both Israel and the nations.

The Bible is fiercely reluctant to see the fate of any nation summarized and abbreviated as the rebellion of the damned. Rather, Yahweh is prepared to use means fast and slow, violent and gradual, conventional and idiosyncratic in order to woo the nations to his temple where he teaches them of his ways and makes their swords into pruning hooks.

In a world that is so governed, how can we at any particular moment fail to hope?

Conclusion

I have offered here no radical alternative to the fine work of missiologists, missionaries, and those who love and learn from them. I want merely to expess some gentle suspicions that in their field, as in any other, the siren song of idolatry and control is more subtle and seductive than we are able to anticipate.

If these thoughts have moved your hearts and minds at all, I hope it is in the following directions:

• towards a focus on Yahweh’s mission in his world rather than our missions in it.

• towards resilient hope and away from paralyzing despair and demoralizing muttering.

• towards a view of our world that flows more easily in the direction of doxology than grumbling.

• towards the suspicion that our Lord is at any moment likely to bare his redeeming arm over the most unpromising landscape, even over ours, and to pray that it might be so.

• towards missiological and eschatological habits of mind that nourish hope rather than pessimism.

• towards an appreciative, winsome love for the longsuffering missiologists among you.