[Preached seven times from 5/25/03 at Bishop Auckland to 1/20/08 at Witton Gilbert]2
There is no greater text in the Bible, and I had the cheek to make on it the first sermon I ever preached. I have it still; it is tucked away at the back of a drawer in my study. But you need not worry, I am not resurrecting it today. In the last sixty odd years I have, I think, learned a thing or two about the world, and life, and myself, and other people, and about goodness and badness, about mercy and truth. But you may well think I have not lost all my cheek.
If you and I did not belong to a godless, profane, secular society the text might well lead us into the same hell that it gave the young Martin Luther, five hundred years ago. “The Gospel in which God’s righteousness is revealed.” But that is no Gospel, no good news. Luther knew the meaning of the words. He had been brought up on Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, one of whose virtues was that he never said anything without carefully defining the words he used. He could tell you what righteousness, justice meant. Cutting a long story short, and simplifying a good deal, it is plain common sense that we all accept. Justice means giving every person their due. If he does well, he gets a reward, if he has done ill, he gets a punishment. We still expect to see this kind of justice done, and complain if it is not done. But now the court is not the Old Bailey, the court is God’s court. And here Luther knew that while he was as good as most folk, he was not good enough. Had he, and had I, loved God with all his heart, and soul and mind and strength? Had he, and had I, loved his neighbor as himself? Always? No. So righteousness could only say guilty, and pack us off to where the guilty go.
It was the Psalms that cracked the Pauline nut. First, by making it worse. “Free me by thy righteousness, Nazarene!” But the Psalms were the source of the words Jesus quoted on the Cross, “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” If Luther knew God forsakenness, so did Jesus. “He had taken it for me.” So Aristotle was wrong, at least as far as God was concerned. God’s righteousness is not a matter of handing out the punishments we all deserve. For God, it means putting things right, especially putting right the wrong relation that exists between us and God. That is where we can move on and take the next step. In the Gospel God reveals his power to put wrong things right, in particular wrong people into the right relationship with himself. Because of this, the Gospel is the power of God leading to salvation.
SALVATION
Nothing can work properly if it is out of the proper relationship with its Maker. Years ago now, so long ago I had almost forgotten it, I was talking to Conrad Eden, the great organist of Durham Cathedral. He told me that stacked away somewhere in the Cathedral archives was a quality of fine music written by earlier generations of cathedral organists. He would have loved to have played it, and to get the choir to sing it. But he couldn’t do it. The music was written on scraps of paper and no one could put them together. Here was a line for the tenors to sing; here was one for the altos, but they didn’t fit. They didn’t belong together. And (though I suppose someone may have succeeded since) up to that time, no one had been able to bring them together in harmony. One man could have done it, the composer. He knew what it should all sound like. The harmony was singing in his head. But he was not available, his creation was out of touch.
Creation is wonderful, however you think it happened, whether in seven days or with a Big Bang. Nothing is more wonderful than the creation of the human race. And somehow the human race has got it all wrong. Wasn’t the Garden of Eden somewhere in Iraq? What a story for the history books, or tabloids. The story of Eden is right at least in this: what went wrong was sin, and sin meant the rupture of the relations between the Maker and the thing made. “I hid myself because I was naked.” The point is not, “Because I found out that my wife and I are sexual beings.” It means because I sinned, because I disobeyed, because I ate of the tree which you forbade me to touch. Breakdown of relations, hence suffering and sweat for the man, suffering and subordination for the woman, and death for both.
How this chaotic state of human affairs reveals itself in practice I shall not attempt to describe, partly because we lack the time and partly because you know it already. You read the papers, you watch the news on television, you hear it on the radio. I expect the Garden of Eden has been well and truly blown up by now. And I have said it so often, and so many other people have said it so much better than I have. It is the story of Jesus. If we are, not to sum it up, but at least to stretch out a pointing finger in the right direction, I begin and end with the death cry I have already quoted from Luther. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken Me?” The one person God could not justly forsake, felt bitterly the forsakenness that we in our insensitivity will sometimes shrug off. And he bore it for us, entering our hell so that we might recover heaven.
All the images human beings have used to describe this event are faulty for it is unique. There is nothing like it. I think sometimes of a medicinal tablet that you throw into a glass of water. It sinks to the bottom and in effervescing it disintegrates, but the health-giving, life-giving properties of the medicine permeate the whole glass full of water. You drink it and it heals. Christ too sank to the bottom of life, touched the very bass string of humanity. And so the human creation is cleansed. Sounds like a conjuring trick, does it? But wait. The rich text has another word for us faith.
FAITH
The power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes (that is, has faith). Therein is revealed a righteousness of God by faith unto faith (that is faith all along the line, from beginning to end). Only believe? It sounds easy, easy enough to mock. So for example Bernard Shaw. I haven’t read it for decades and I am not sure in which of the prefaces you will find it, and I am bound to quote from memory. But he says ‘the Reformation, with its doctrine of by faith alone, was a triumph of cheapness. Saved at the cost of a credo and a penny in the plate.’
Remarkable, isn’t it, how an intelligent person can read a plain text and get it wrong? But perhaps he wanted to get it wrong. Henry Drummond had a better picture of the matter. He was asked once to speak to the members of an expensive and exclusive London club. He began his address: “The entrance fee to the Kingdom of God is—nothing. The annual subscription is all you have.”
Faith means freedom all the way through, and in more ways than one. It begins, as the New Testament tells us, as a gift from God. There is no other way it can begin. The trouble with God’s human creation is that we have cut ourselves adrift from God. We want to go our own way, not his. We want to go under our own steam, responsible to no one but ourselves, unwilling to place ourselves under an obligation by discovering all the strength that God supplies. And if we sense something is wrong and want to put it right, we draw on our own strength to do so and make our own existence more self-centered than ever.
The only way forward is to accept God’s gift, knowing that it can never be anything but a gift, that we can never deserve it nor find the resources to buy it. We must accept God’s gift of faith and go on accepting it. Faith is always a gift, always free; we never have it by right. I said that faith is freedom all the way through. It is. It starts and continues as a gift and it sets us free, free from fear, from anxiety, from habit; free from ourselves. That means it sets us free for creative service.
I started with Luther. Let us have him again in the greatest Christian epigram that ever he uttered: “A Christian is a free lord over everything, and subject to no one. A Christian is a menial servant of everything and subject to everyone.” He is free through faith, a servant through love. The same faith that sets him free manifests itself only in universal love. There is far more to say in this greatest of texts, but time allows for only this—the Gospel is for all.
THE GOSPEL IS FOR ALL
Paul has his own way of putting it here, and we shall have to find ours. Paul’s world was made up (so most people would have said) of ordinary normal people, and of Jews. Of course they, in truth, were normal too. But everyone knew they were odd. They had their own religion which was different, their own laws and customs, their own fierce nationalism which prevented them from sharing fully in the almost universal civilization of the Greco-Roman world. The Gospel began amongst them, for Jesus was a Jew. So, to the Jew first. But Paul adds at once, “but also to the Greek” meaning by that