Читать книгу Luminescence, Volume 2 - C. K. Barrett - Страница 23

[Preached five times from 4/15/92 at Sherburn Hill to 2/10/08 at Sacriston]

Can you use your imagination? Imagine this church does not exist; there is no church in Darlington. There is no Christian in Darlington, not a soul who has heard the name of Jesus. You take out an old chair, or a soapbox, in the High Row; you climb up on it, and the crowds thread their way passed you, and some of them look up and wonder what this idiot is about. And you begin to speak, “I’m going to tell you about someone called Jesus.” A voice in the crowd says, “Who on earth was he?” “A Jew, he lived in Palestine, and they thought he was a terrorist, or a traitor, or something and they killed him, executed him.” “So he’s dead then?” “Yes he is, and no he isn’t. He was but he isn’t now.” “Sounds like a lot of nonsense.” “No it isn’t. Because of him, because he died, we can all be children of God and members of his people.”

Can you imagine it? It was a lot easier fifty years ago when I used to take a chair out on the High Row on Saturday nights and talk to whoever would listen. In those days most of them had been to Sunday School and remembered that they had heard something about Jesus, something of the story of the Cross. And it was wartime and everyone knew there was something wrong with the world, and ministers were supposed to believe that Christianity could put things and people right. Not that even that was something that you would look on as a picnic, and I still remember with gratitude a man, half-drunk into benevolence who pressed a 3-D piece into my hand and said “There, you spoke very well laddie.” I wonder if that ever happened to Paul.

For of course I am only introducing Paul, who brought Christ crucified into the great, wealthy, noisy, unknowing city of Corinth. How do you introduce Christ where Christ has not been named or known? I made up my mind, he says, that I would make no attempt to dazzle you with rhetoric; I wouldn’t impress you with imposing abstract philosophical arguments. I would simply tell you about Christ crucified.

Some people say that Paul, when he had left Athens, felt he had made a mistake there in trying to beat the philosophers at their own game, and determined to try something different in Corinth. I don’t believe that for reasons which this is not the time to talk about. But in any case, the contrast remains “Christ, and him crucified” and philosophy or any other theme you might like to think about. Only Christ; let me tell you about him.

It is one of the greatest of privileges to be back in this pulpit, and on this day; and I wondered for a long time which I should take of the two lines I oscillate between for many years on Good Friday; something taken from the story of the crucifixion, or one of the great theological pronouncements in the New Testament about the death of Jesus. As it is, I think I am making the best of both worlds, just as well perhaps this time. For there is no doubt that we are just on the edge of one of Paul’s great theological pronouncements, and he tells, he must have told or he would have had no sermon, the story of the Cross.

So what does it amount to? What is there in it for us? Paul in Corinth a long time ago, us in Darlington today. What can we learn from him and his more thematic communication on Christ and him crucified, the Jesus of Good Friday? I think we begin with the negative, the “not to know anything.” What is this denial, this rejection?

NOTHING

There is a side of it we can understand very easily, and very well. He is rejecting the skilled methods, the techniques of oratory which played so large a part in the education theory and practice of those days; the art of making a good case, of persuading people, of convincing them to your point of view. All this he rejects, and perhaps the cynical observation that this was part of the technique is not entirely wrong. “I am no actor as Brutus is,” says Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “I only speak right up.” And of course Antony was a far better orator than Brutus and was practicing the old trick of representing himself as just a plain, honest fellow, no tricks, no guile. I dare say Paul knew something about that too, but there was more than that. He did not aim at getting people to agree with him just long enough to vote in the election. He was inviting them to change the foundation on which they built their lives, and he wanted a foundation that would last, not one that would fade, and disintegrate as soon as the flow of eloquence ceased. His aim was that this faith should stand not on the wisdom of human beings but on the power of God.

Well enough so far; but “nothing” and “not knowing” will go farther. Wisdom is not only the fancy wrapping, it is the content of the parcel too. How was Paul going to get his hearers to turn (as he would say to the Thessalonians) from idols to the living and true God? There was, and there is, a place for philosophical argument. The idolatry, the polytheism, that confronted Paul susceptible themselves to philosophical criticism, and so does the materialism and determinism of our own day. But negation goes further than that. It takes in the conventional ways that human beings have sought to establish belief in God. You have not, some of you, the conventional and very imposing labels that have been given them. But behind the labels there are defensive works behind which in turn we want to hide and protect ourselves from the scares of life.

There is the cosmological argument; we live in a cosmos, an ordered universe so complete and connected that we cannot but believe that it was put together by an infinite mind, which planned and still controls its beautifully integrated parts. Really? Yes, the solar system works pretty well; it has worked with mathematical regularity throughout my lifetime, and will, no doubt, manage to work a few years yet for the benefit of you younger people. But what do I care about the solar system? Like Sherlock Holmes, I don’t much care whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun around the earth; it comes to much the same thing either way. I want a different order than that, and of all the contradictions of order that I see is not the Cross the greatest?

The same thing goes for the teleological argument. Everything contributes to the great goal and has a purpose; and there must be one who forms the goal and works towards the purpose. The higher you move through the forces of life, the harder it is to see the purpose. Suffering of any kind is contradiction enough, but the suffering, the crucifixion of the innocent will knock the stuffings out of any kind of purpose.

And the moral argument—the poor relation because the adjective was only two syllables instead of five or six? This suffers most of all. For the moral argument means there is a voice, a voice of conscience, that cries within me “I ought”; and the Cross means for me and my fellows that the voice cries, “I ought, but I jolly well won’t”; I won’t deny myself, won’t give up my pleasures and ambitions for the likes of him. But we are coming to the positive side of what Paul says. He determines, as he brings the Gospel, to strange, heathen, idolatrous, immoral Corinth to know nothing except Christ crucified.

CHRIST CRUCIFIED

A theme in two words; but each of them must be worked out. They are our own themes today. Christ—Paul does not say Jesus, and this I think is no accident. No one can understand the message of Christ, Messiah crucified, unless someone tells him something about the Old Testament, about a God who has been ceaselessly at work in history. He called one man, Abraham, made him promises, offered him an inheritance, and Abraham took him at his word, trusted him, believed him, and God said “That’s what I want, I want a person who will trust me. That’s what’s right.” Abraham isn’t perfect, he is going to do some odd things, passing his wife off as his sister, and so on; but this is the kind of man I can work with. And the story went on.

God active in history, God when humans often destroyed and defiled, often misunderstood, often forgotten but just occasionally really trusted, really looked to for pardon and for guidance. And he made his plan of putting together all his purposes for his people through this people, to the whole of humanity, in a unique person who would make him known to all the world—his Christ. God, not content with the obscurities of nature, not working in history with men and women who grasped little pieces of the truth, and with some successes and many failures lived them out.

And, says Paul, this is the man I am talking about. He has come. “Fine,” says the crowd, “and has he won his victories? Are you telling me that he is on his way from the beach at Corinth with his troops?” “No, as a matter of fact he is dead.” “What, the whole thing a failure?” “No, as a matter of fact he is alive.” The whole story is there, and you will not expect us to tell it in all its details. The suffering and death of the innocent is no new problem; human beings have wrestled with it as long as there has been a moral conscience in the world. How can God allow such things, we ask if we are religious people and we are right to ask it if we are to take seriously our belief in the love of God. But there is a harder question here. For this is a suffering, a death, that God did not merely allow, he caused it, he willed it.

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