preaching as brooding

For the topic of Preaching last weekend at Bethany Bible School, I selected three texts: Genesis 1:1-5; Jeremiah 1:1-10; John 1:1-9.

These three texts have in common a focus on the Word of God or, in other words, that which human preachers dare to proclaim when they preach. That preaching is a big job is underscored by the call of Jeremiah, in which the prophet reacts to the coming of the “word of the LORD” to him with self-degradation—“Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy” (1:4-5). Yet proclaiming that word to others is something he must do, though something he can only do because the word is not his but God’s own put within his mouth (1:6, 9).

If it is thus true that the call of Jeremiah establishes for us the preaching imperative, the preacher still needs to know what and how he/she should preach. Genesis 1:1-5, the first words of the Bible, sheds light on the how of preaching. It is interesting to note, for example, that the spoken word is not the first thing in the story; before God speaks (1:3), “God”, “the Spirit of God”, and “formless” material of some kind (along with darkness and water) are in the story (1:1-2). In other words, before the word which is “light” (1:3) is spoken, the Spirit of God has been “hovering over the waters” (1:2). Though the waters are dark, though the earth is “formless and void”, though the creation is not yet really creation, though it is chaos, yet something is there—something over which God is pleased to hover.

The Xhosa translation uses -fukama for what the Spirit was doing over the waters; –fukama, what a mother hen does to her eggs and chicks, is what God was doing to formless matter: lovingly, jealously guarding-protecting-keeping it, considering what it will be until the day it is born. God the Mother was brooding over the waters.

It is from such brooding that the word finally speaks—and orders-creates a world. It is from the hovering of the Spirit of God (1:2), from perhaps the Mind of God (1:1), that the Word of God creates.

This is all to say that the preacher—the one called to speak the Word of God—must hover over the things of creation that will be before his word can begin to order them. Herein lies a “how” of preaching, a method for preaching. Before the proclaimer can speak, he must brood over material as a hen over unborn offspring. She must consider all things—people’s lives and stories, culture, news, proverbs, wisdom and—of course, especially—the text itself. Somehow, out of that consideration, by the Spirit of God, the creative Word speaks (or the spoken Word creates). This is a call for preparation—not of a rigid, inflexible kind but of a prayerful “brooding” over stories and the Story until the preacher has virtually taken them into herself. In short, a preparation of the Spirit.

The hovering of the Spirit of God has a second, equally important, implication for preachers and their preaching. Just as the Spirit hovered before the Word was spoken (not before the Word was), so the Spirit of God hovers over the things of creation before the preacher speaks or fashions them into a world. For the preacher this means that, no matter how chaotic the world to which he comes might be, how much unlike an ordered world it seems, that world—its inhabitants, its stories, its wisdom—is lovingly kept by its loving God. The Mother Hen is guarding her children and watching the preacher, keen to see whether his words will conform to the spirit of care with which God broods over them. Though, as God attested to Jeremiah, the Word can have a rough edge—“to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow” (1:10)—its ultimate purpose is “to build and to plant” (1:10). Tough love must be God’s and not the preacher’s own—it must come from the Word or not at all. God will judge the preacher if his words do not convey God’s love for the people.

Third, on this point, the brooding of the Spirit before the spoken Word contains an obvious connection to the missio Dei, or that common concept in mission theology that Christian mission is God’s and not our own. The implication of the missio Dei, of course, is that—in spite of certain historical mission rhetoric—the missionary does not “bring God” to people who do not know God; rather, the missionary, like Paul, proclaims “the unknown God” from within known cultural categories (Acts 17:22ff.) and toward the revelation of God through God’s Word. The presence of God before/ahead of us with others is essential for missionary patience and trust—virtues through which love is expressed to others.

Finally, a God-focused rather than a preacher-focused approach to preaching resonates with John 1:1-9, the third text here considered. For just as the “man sent from God, whose name was John” was “not himself the light” but only a “witness” to the light, so is any preacher in relation to the Word (1:6-8). For Christian preaching, that “Word” which “was in the beginning with God and was God” is Jesus himself (1:1-2); “for we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor 4:5). He is, in the end, both “what”—who—we proclaim and “how” we must proclaim what we proclaim. For it was his Spirit that lovingly hovered over the waters at creation as “a hen gathers her brood under her wings” (Lk 13:34).

-Joe

fear, deception, mercy: the burial and resurrection of Jesus from Matthew’s Gospel

In my last post, I argued that Matthew’s story of the passion exposes the violence from all sectors of a human society united against Jesus. In the follow-up to the passion, the burial and resurrection, Matthew continues with that theme. If, however, no one group assumes greater responsibility for the death of Jesus than another in the passion, the burial-resurrection narrative implicates especially the “chief priests” along with the “Pharisees” (27:62) and the “elders” (28:12) in another plot against Jesus—a cover-up of his resurrection.

From 27:62, the story begins with the “chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate” asking for “the tomb to be made secure” in order that Jesus’ disciples may not “go and steal him away and tell the people, ‘He has been raised from the dead’”—a “last deception”, they say, which “would be worse than the first” deception, presumably Jesus’ own prediction that he would “rise again” (27:62-64).

For someone who was so plainly destroyed and humiliated before their very eyes, the chief priests and company show a most peculiar fear. Rather than delighting in the elimination of one who was such a threat to their power, they are consumed by the fearful prospect of his enduring influence. That fear is tied to Jesus’ disciples who—if the chief priests had been watching from the events of Thursday-Friday—were nothing to fear. Indeed, long ago they “all” had “deserted him and fled” (26:56). The disciples, not courageous enough to stay with Jesus in his darkness hour, were scarcely a threat to steal his body from the tomb and willingly proclaim a lie, a resurrection that was not. Yet the chief priests fear precisely that. They fear it so much to go to Pilate and ask for “the tomb to be made secure”, a request that Pilate grants with a “guard of soldiers” (27:65).

A “guard of soldiers” and “sealing the stone”, however, is not enough to prevent what they fear. In fact, their first fear gives way to a worse one—evidence that what Jesus promised of himself has actually taken place, his resurrection from the dead. In one sense, of course, their fear was not fulfilled; the disciples did not steal away the body. In the other sense, their fear increased. They who had feared a “last deception worse than the first” find themselves ensnared in a “last fear worse than the first”: Jesus, their enemy, is alive.

Ironically, that which they feared would happen—the disciples stealing the body of Jesus and proclaiming a lie—is, following the report of Jesus’ resurrection by the guard, all to which the chief priests have to cling; their first fear remains their last security—and a flimsy one at that. The very lie that the chief priests feared is the lie they now actively spread, paying the soldiers a “large sum of money” to say that “ ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away’” (28:13).

Of course, the chief priests find themselves clinging to a “last deception worse than the first” because they could not submit—neither in Jesus’ life nor now in his resurrection—to the truth. No amount of plotting, scheming, or force can thwart the Life that Jesus embodies. He is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (Jn 14:6); they—we—the “imposter” we made him out to be (27:63).

Surely the story has something to say about the trap of fear. Just as the chief priests submitted to their worst fear rather than to the truth in Jesus, so we, doing the same, find our “last” condition “worse than the first” (see also Mt 12:45). Yet in the grace and mercy of his resurrection he says to us, as he did to two Marys, “Do not be afraid” (28:1, 10). Or to “the eleven”, those who had deserted him: “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (28:16, 20).

-Joe