Several weeks ago I was given the opportunity to address the teenage children of a school hostel in Cradock. Every Sunday evening, Lawrence Coetzee, our friend and pastor of MWC-member Grace Community Church, organizes a service for the students. He usually invites pastors from the community to speak and, because we were visiting, he invited me to share the word.
I had been studying the book of Ephesians a lot in the previous months (I taught a course on it in June), and so it was in the forefront of my mind as I pondered what I might say. I chose to focus on the well-known armor of God passage (Eph 6:10-17), and found myself preaching on clothing as a motif for the proclamation of the gospel message.
Since armor is a type of clothing, and since Paul exhorts the Ephesians to "Put on the whole armor of God", it follows that the goal of the Christian life is to be dressed (6:11, 13). That might sound unremarkable, except that in the Genesis account of creation, human beings in their state of primal "goodness" are depicted as naked: "the man and the woman were naked together and unashamed" (Gen 2:25). If the original intention was nakedness, how can the final intention be a state of being clothed?
The tension between clothed and unclothed as both expressions of the will of God gives rise to the insight that our state of blessedness or goodness as human beings consists not in returning to a previous state of our existence but in going forward to the place where God's Spirit is leading us. We cannot return to Eden; we can only go forward to the New Jerusalem. We cannot recover the goodness of the first human being, unmarred before the sin of disobedience to the will of the Creator; we can only receive the goodness of the second human being, Jesus Christ, and allow his righteousness to overcome our sin. We cannot go back to our original nakedness; we can "put on the whole armor of God" and "be clothed with the Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom 13:14).
Such a view of salvation, of being not returned but being transformed, frees us from the weight of striving to retrieve that which we find impossible to retrieve, though we often struggle precisely to put back into place that which was. A friend once related a story to me of a "saved person", a born-again Christian, who reasoned on the basis of his faith that his old life of sin was of no consequence, and thus he has cut all ties with the child who was born to him out of wedlock. The implicit view of salvation in such a strategy would seem to be a going back to the life one had before the act of which one is ashamed, since the man's present "peace" consists in pretending that he is in some sense as he was before--not a father to the child he "fathered". In the biblical canon, such a strategy for dealing with regret was represented by Ezra and Nehemiah, who demanded after the return from exile in Babylon that the Jews "put away the foreign wives" whom they had married (Ez 10:3, 11, 44). Ezra and Nehemiah espoused salvation as return to an idealized past before a time of foreign contamination of the covenant community. In the Old Testament, books such as Ruth would seem to counter such a perspective; the blood of a Moabite woman, Ruth, mixes with Boaz to produce the line of Israel's greatest king.
The good news of Jesus Christ, likewise, accepts the consequences of behavior as a point of departure toward greater things, not abandoning the fallen or eliminating the foreign but incorporating them into the body of Christ. Within his body, things do not look as they were before nor are they left as they are; rather, "there is a new creation" (2 Cor 5:17). That new creation is very much a matter of clothing the naked. It covers the shame of sin, not by undoing what has been done (which no one can do!), but with a shirt of righteousness; a belt of truth; shoes of peace; a hat of salvation; a shield of faith; and a sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. Christ himself transforms us as we "put him on."
-Joe
No comments:
Post a Comment