A Nazareth Manifesto E-Book

Samuel Wells

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 678

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

A Nazareth Manifesto is an eloquent and impassioned ecumenical proposal for re-envisioning Christianity's approach to social engagement away from working "for" the people to being "with" them.

• Questions the effectiveness of the current trend of intervention as a means of fixing the problems of people in distressed and disadvantaged circumstances
• Argues that Jesus spent 90% of his life simply being among the people of Nazareth, sharing their hopes and struggles, therefore Christians should place a similar emphasis on being alongside people in need rather than hastening to impose solutions
• Written by a respected priest and broadcaster and renowned Christian ethicist and preacher
• Supported by historical, contemporary, exegetical and anecdotal illustrations

Leseprobe

A Nazareth Manifesto

Being With God

Samuel Wells

This edition first published 2015 © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Cover image: Fraser Ayres and Will Adamsdale in Stuart: A Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters, Edinburgh 2013. Photo © Robbie Jack

For Stanley

CONTENTS

Prologue:

The Most Important Word

Introduction:

God Is With Us

Chapter 1: Being With

Argument

Style

Some Assumptions

Forebears

Notes

Chapter 2: A Nazareth Manifesto

Being With and its Alternatives

Nazareth as a Theological Claim

A Nazareth Manifesto

Notes

Part I: Realignment

Chapter 3: Reassessing the Human Predicament

Introduction

Mortality

Poverty

Isolation

Why Alleviating Mortality Heightens Isolation

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 4: Reconceiving the Divine Purpose

A Congregation in Conflict

Exasperation

Impatience

Difference

Gospel

Conclusion

Notes

Part II: God is With Us

Chapter 5: The Story of Jesus

Sabbath

Egypt and Babylon

The Jordan

The Cross

Resurrection

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 6: The Stories of Jesus

To whom was Jesus Talking?

Who is Jesus?

Who is the Samaritan?

Who are We?

Notes

Chapter 7: Embodying the Story of Jesus

The Pathos of Working For

The Dynamics of Working With

The Limitations of Being For

Notes

Part III: Being With

Chapter 8: God Being With God

Presence

Attention

Mystery

Delight

Participation

Partnership

Enjoyment

Glory

Notes

Chapter 9: God Being With Us

Taking With for Granted

Being With Us in Nazareth

Whom Jesus is With

How Jesus is With

Notes

Chapter 10: Being With One Another in Nazareth

Being With One Another

A Life Backwards

Presence

Attention

Mystery

Delight

Participation

Partnership

Enjoyment

Glory

Looking Back to Nazareth

Note

Chapter 11: Being With One Another in Galilee

Galilee

God’s Hotel

Slow Medicine

Presence

Attention

Mystery

Delight

Participation

Partnership

Enjoyment

Glory

Note

Chapter 12: Being With One Another in Jerusalem

George Bell

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Being With One Another in Jerusalem

Notes

Part IV: Explorations

Chapter 13: Theological Ramifications

Creation

The Power and the Glory

Atonement

Eschatology

Notes

Chapter 14: Social Embodiments

Seeking Nazareth

The Plight of the Contemporary Nazareth

The Capacities and Properties of Nazareth

The Abundant Community as Nazareth

Notes

Part V: Implications

Chapter 15: The Transcendence of Justice

The Problem with Justice

Conventional Justice

Going Beyond Justice

Notes

Chapter 16: The Transfiguration of Suffering

Sources of Suffering

Responses to Suffering

Three Ways to Pray

Beyond Being With

Notes

Epilogue: Magnificat

Acknowledgments

Afterword

Scriptural Index

Subject Index

EULA

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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PrologueThe Most Important Word

This sermon, on the text John 1:1–14, was preached in Duke University Chapel, Durham, North Carolina, on December 24, 2010.

I want to describe to you three scenes that I’m guessing will be familiar to everyone here. And then I want to think with you about what these three scenes have in common.

The first is your relationship with the most difficult member of your family. Let’s say it’s your father. You spend some time in the stores after Thanksgiving and you find presents for most of your friends and colleagues and family. But somehow you have no idea what to give your father. It bothers you because deep down it feels like your inability to know what present will make your father happy is symbolic of your lifelong confusion about what might truly make your father happy – especially where you’re concerned. So in the end you spend more than you meant to on something you don’t really believe he wants, pathetically trying to throw money at the problem but inwardly cursing yourself because you know that what you’re buying isn’t the answer. When Christmas Day comes and your father opens the present, you see in his forced smile and his half-hearted hug of thanks that you’ve failed yet again to do something for him that might overcome the chasm between you.

Here’s a second scene. You have family or friends from out of town coming for Christmas. You want everything to be perfect for them and you exchange a flurry of emails about who’s going to sleep where, and whether it’s all right for them to bring the dog. You get into a frenzy of shopping and baking, and you’re actually a little anxious that you’ll forget something or burn something, so the kitchen becomes your empire, and you can’t bear for someone to interrupt you, and even at Christmas dinner you’re mostly checking the gravy or reheating the carrots, and as you say goodbye to them you hug and say, “It’s such a shame we never really talked while you were here,” and, when they’ve finally left, you collapse in a heap, maybe in tears of exhaustion.

Here’s a third scene. You feel there’s something empty or lacking in the cosy Christmas with family and friends, and your heart is breaking for people having a tough time in the cold, in isolation, in poverty, or in grief. So you gather together presents for children of prisoners or turn all your Christmas gifts into vouchers representing your support of a house or a cow or two buffaloes for people who need the resources more than you and your friends do.

What do all these scenes have in common? I want to suggest to you that they’re all based on one tiny word: it’s the word for. When we care about those for whom Christmas is a tough time, we want to do something for them. When we want our houseguests to enjoy their Christmas visit, our impulse is to spend our whole time doing things for them, whether cooking dinner or constantly clearing the house or arranging activities to keep them busy. When we feel our relationship with our father is faltering, our instinct is to do something for him that somehow melts his heart and makes everything all right.

And those gestures of for matter because they sum up a whole life in which we try to make relationships better, try to make the world better, try to be better people ourselves by doing things for people. We praise the selflessness of those who spend their lives doing things for people. People still sign letters “Your obedient servant,” because they want to tell each other “I’m eager to do things for you.” When we feel noble we hum Art Garfunkel singing, “Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down …” – presumably for you to walk over me without getting your dainty feet wet. When we feel romantic we put on the husky voice and turn into Bryan Adams singing “Everything I do – I do it for you.”

It seems that the word that epitomizes being an admirable person, the word that sums up the spirit of Christmas, is for. We cook for, we buy presents for, we offer charity for, all to say we lay ourselves down for. But there’s a problem here. All these gestures are generous, and kind, and in some cases sacrificial and noble. They’re good gestures, warm-hearted, admirable gestures. But somehow they don’t go to the heart of the problem. You give your father the gift, and the chasm still lies between you. You wear yourself out in showing hospitality, but you’ve never actually had the conversation with your loved ones. You make fine gestures of charity, but the poor are still strangers to you. For is a fine word, but it doesn’t dismantle resentment, it doesn’t overcome misunderstanding, it doesn’t deal with alienation, it doesn’t overcome isolation.

Most of all, for isn’t the way God celebrates Christmas. God doesn’t set the world right at Christmas. God doesn’t shower us with good things at Christmas. God doesn’t mount up blessings upon us and then get miserable and stroppy when we open them all up and fail to be sufficiently excited or surprised or grateful. For isn’t what God shows us at Christmas.

In some ways we wish it was. We’d love God to make everything happy and surround us with perfect things. When we get cross with God, it’s easy to feel God isn’t keeping the divine side of the bargain – to do things for us now and forever.

But God shows us something else at Christmas. God speaks a rather different word. The angel says to Joseph, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, ‘God is with us.’ ” (Matt. 1:23) And then in John’s gospel, we get the summary statement of what Christmas means: “The Word became flesh and lived among [with] us” (John 1:14). It’s an unprepossessing little word, but this is the word that lies at the heart of Christmas and at the heart of the Christian faith. The word is with.

Think back to the very beginning of all things. John’s gospel says, “The Word was with God. He was in the beginning with God … Without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:1–3). In other words, before anything else, there was a with. The with between God and the Word, or as Christians came to call it, between the Father and the Son. With is the most fundamental thing about God. And then think about how Jesus concludes his ministry. His very last words in Matthew’s gospel are, “Behold, I am with you always” (28:20). In other words, “There will never be a time when I am not with.” And at the very end of the Bible, when the book of Revelation describes the final disclosure of God’s everlasting destiny, this is what the voice from heaven says: “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them” (Rev. 21:3).

We’ve stumbled upon the most important word in the Bible – the word that describes the heart of God and the nature of God’s purpose and destiny for us. And that word is with. That’s what God was in the very beginning, that’s what God sought to instil in the creation of all things, that’s what God was looking for in making the covenant with Israel, that’s what God coming among us in Jesus was all about, that’s what the sending of the Holy Spirit meant, that’s what our destiny in the company of God will look like. It’s all in that little word with. God’s whole life and action and purpose are shaped to be with us.

In a lot of ways, with is harder than for. You can do for without a conversation, without a real relationship, without a genuine shaping of your life to accommodate and incorporate the other. The reason your Christmas present for your father is doomed is not because for is wrong, not because there’s anything bad about generosity; it’s because the only solution is for you and your father to be with each other long enough to hear each other’s stories and tease out the countless misunderstandings and hurts that have led your relationship beyond the point of being rescued by the right Christmas present. The reason why you collapse in tears when your guests have gone home is because the hard work is finding out how you can share the different responsibilities and genuinely be with one another in the kitchen and elsewhere that make a stay of several nights a joy of with rather than a burden of for. What makes attempts at Christmas charity seem a little hollow is not that they’re not genuine and helpful and kind but that what isolated and grieving and impoverished people usually need is not gifts or money but the faithful presence with them of someone who really cares about them as a person. It’s the “with” they desperately want, and the “for” on its own (whether it’s food, presents, or money) can’t make up for the lack of that “with.”

But we all fear the with, because the with seems to ask more of us than we can give. We’d all prefer to keep charity on the level of for, where it can’t hurt us. We all know that more families struggle over Christmas than any other time. Maybe that’s because you can spend the whole year being busy and doing things for your family, but when there’s nothing else to do but be with one another you realize that being with is harder than doing for – and sometimes it’s just too hard. Sometimes New Year comes as a relief as we can go back to doing for and leave aside being with for another year.

And that’s why it’s glorious, almost incredible, good news that God didn’t settle on for. At Christmas God said unambiguously, “I am with. Behold, my dwelling is among you. I’ve moved into the neighborhood. I will be with you always. My name is Emmanuel, God with us.” Sure, there was an element of for in Jesus’ life. He was for us when he healed and taught, he was for us when he died on the cross, he was for us when he rose from the grave and ascended to heaven. These are things that only God can do and we can’t do. But the power of these things God did for us lies in that they were based on his being with us. God has not abolished for. But God, this night, in becoming flesh in Jesus, has said there will never again be a for that’s not based on a fundamental, unalterable, everlasting, and utterly unswerving with. That’s the good news of Christmas.

And how do we celebrate this good news? By being with people in poverty and distress even when there’s nothing we can do for them. By being with people in grief and sadness and loss even when there’s nothing to say. By being with and listening to and walking with those we find most difficult rather than trying to fob them off with a gift or a face-saving gesture. By being still with God in silent prayer rather than rushing in our anxiety to do yet more things for God. By taking an appraisal of all our relationships and asking ourselves, “Does my doing for arise out of a fundamental commitment to be with, or is my doing for driven by my profound desire to avoid the discomfort, the challenge, the patience, the loss of control involved in being with?”

No one could be more tempted to retreat into doing for than God. God, above all, knows how exasperating, ungrateful, thoughtless and self-destructive company we can be. Most of the time we just want God to fix it, and spare us the relationship. But that’s not God’s way. God could have done it all alone. But God chose not to. God chose to do it with us. Even though it cost the cross. That’s the wonder of Christmas. That’s the amazing good news of the word with.

IntroductionGod Is With Us

God is with us. These four words express the character of God, the identity of Jesus, the work of the Spirit. They are the Christian testimony about the past, witness in the present, and hope for the future. Each word offers itself as the heart of the gospel.

Thus the gospel is first and last about “God.” God’s nature and purpose are expressed by the three words that follow (“is with us”). No words can define God, if definition means to limit, to circumscribe, or to prescribe. God is the root, the rhyme, and the reason for all things. God is goodness, truth, and beauty. God is before all things and after all things. Without God, is not anything that is. Yet without the three words that follow, this central statement of Christian heritage, conviction, and destiny has no context, no theatre in which to reverberate, no relationship in which to matter. God does not need context; indeed the interrelationship of the persons of the Trinity indicates that the Godhead has an inner context of its own: all other context is secondary and dependent on God. Context is a fruit of grace.

The second word declares that the gospel is about now. God “is.” In that brief statement lies faith that God is always present. For sure, God has acted and will fulfill: but most of all, God is – is here, is present, is now. “Is” means the incarnation, the passion, and the coming of the Spirit have abiding, not just fleeting, significance: they are past events but have permanent dynamics. Meanwhile Jesus’ resurrection constitutes the “is” event par excellence: it guarantees that not even death can dismantle God’s “is.” Without the resurrection, the incarnation might be simply a past event – a “was” (“God was in Christ”). Without Pentecost, the Ascension might mark the conclusion of the human encounter with the living Lord. But resurrection and Pentecost ensure the definitive action of God in Christ remains a present event – an “is.” God exists, and perhaps alone truly exists: all other existence is by analogy with, and by the gift of, the true being, which is God. This is the simplicity of truth: there is no frenzy of activity – there is simply abiding existence. God is. This is the faith of Israel, the name of the God of Moses, the unflinching underpinning of reality.

These are claims long held, from the beginning, to be central to Christianity. But the third word has not always been held in such high regard as the first two – or dwelt upon quite so acutely. This book seeks imagine what theology and ethics would be like if it were. My argument abides in the “with” of God. God is with. God’s whole being is shaped to be with. Being with is about presence, about participation, about partnership. It is not about eliding difference, or denying separation, or neglecting otherness. On the contrary, it is about being present in such a way that such contrasts and tensions are made visible, recognized, named, and embraced, rather than ignored, suppressed, or exploited. Being present is above all a Trinitarian condition. God is three persons in one substance. In other words, God isn’t a thing, an achievement, an edifice, a piece of technology, an impressive vision, even a dazzling light, or a blazing fire. God is a relationship. God is a relationship of three persons, so wonderfully shaped toward one another, so wondrously with one another, that they are one, but so exquisitely diverse and distinct within that unity that they are three. With is the key to the identity of the God who is.

These three words together become focused on the fourth word: “us.” This is the wonder of grace. Us – humanity, set amidst the good creation – is the object of God’s attention, made subject in the miraculous word “with.” This is not an exclusive choice, with losers and outsiders; it is an inclusive covenant, held with fierce intensity, as if each one were the only one. And this relationship, at the same time personal and corporate, is made permanent in the abiding affirmation of “is.” This, then, is the axis of Christian faith: that God, whose being is “with” – the inner interrelationship of the three persons of the Trinity – is not just “with” within, but determines to be with externally: to be with us. God’s whole life is shaped by the permanent resolve never to be except to be with us. Here is the direction, the fixed purpose, the orienting goal of the ordering of God’s life: being with us. This, indeed, is henceforth the name of God: if we are asked who God is, what God is called, what is God’s nature, what we most fundamentally answer is that God is “with us.”

Each moment of salvation history bears the character of God being with us. Creation is God making a context in which to be with us, and a theater in which we may discover how to be with one another and with God. Humanity’s fall distorts that creation. It interrupts God’s being with us, and ours with God and with one another, such that our lives become grievous to God, to one another and to ourselves, and God’s life becomes grievous to us. The covenant – liberation, law, and land – crystallizes God’s resolve to be with Israel, and thus to be with all peoples and the whole creation, through sustained and personal encounter. The exile is the season par excellence when Israel discovers that even sin, even estrangement, even loss of tangible signs of land, king, and temple, cannot break, but only refine God’s resolve to be with. The incarnation is the disclosure of God’s utter commitment to be with us, and of the grace that such an orientation is at the heart of God’s identity. Salvation is God isolating the process by which being with became a constraint, a curse, and a threat, God finding ways to dismantle such distortions, and God restoring our being with ourselves, with one another, and with God so that it becomes an abiding blessing and an abundant joy. Church is being with God, one another, and ourselves, and celebrating and embodying the ways such restoration takes place. Kingdom names the ways God brings about this restoration sometimes regardless of, sometimes in spite of, sometimes alongside, and sometimes through the church. And eschaton names the final existence of God and the whole creation being with one another with all curses and threats having passed away. Thus every dimension of theology finds its telos in God being with us.

These, then, are the two dynamics that lie at the center of all things: God’s perfect inner relationship, which we have just considered; and God’s very life shaped to be in relationship with us through Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit. Both are characterized by the preposition “with.” The task of theology, I suggest, is to describe that “with.” The task of theological ethics is to inhabit and imitate it. Such is the purpose of this book.

1Being With

Argument

My argument is as follows. I maintain that the word with is the most important word in theology. Hence the Prologue, which articulates that conviction as best and as succinctly as I am able. This is not an Anglican theology that sacralizes the created order by claiming divine participation in it through Christ. It is an enquiry into whether with is the pervading theme that runs through Trinity, creation, incarnation, atonement, the sending of the Spirit, ecclesiology, and eschatology.

In Part I, I come from two angles to the same arrival point. In Chapter 3 I argue that the human project in the West has been to secure life against limitation in general and mortality in particular, but that such efforts have only deepened the true predicament, which is isolation. In Chapter 4 I suggest that efforts at reconciliation fail because Christians invariably approach the situation with exasperation and impatience, whereas it turns out that there is no gospel that is not reconciliation – and restored relationship is the epicenter of God’s mission.

In Part II, I continue this introductory survey of the significance of with by first exploring, in Chapter 5, how with is the central theme, not just of Jesus’ ministry, but of the whole scriptural narrative. I then in Chapter 6 narrow down on what I judge to be the single most important story in the Bible for grasping my argument – the parable of the Good Samaritan – and show how the way the story is read reveals people’s commitments and assumptions about social engagement and their status before God. Then in Chapter 7 I offer a critique of the other three modes of engagement – working for, working with, and being for – to explain why I make the bold claims for being with that are to be found in Chapter 2.