/ Wright
The Rt. Rev’d Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham (England), on a theology of the Eucharist.
The Rt. Rev’d Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham (England), on infant baptism.
“I have a cousin in Vancouver. He and his wife sat me down for dinner one evening just before their child was born, and they said, ‘We’ve got a question for you?’ They were a bit shy about it because they weren’t explicit, deeply confessing Christians, but they wanted to kind of find their way in. They said ‘We want to know how old does a child have to be before the child can actually know anything about God?’ And I think they were expecting me to say ‘About six or eight or ten’ or something like that. I said ‘O, about three minutes.’ And they stared at me.
I said, ‘Well you’ll find if the child is born even reasonably healthy, that you will be able to establish a very intimate relationship with that child from those very, very early moments. The natural focal point of a newborn child’s eyes is the distance between the breast and the mother’s eyes, so that the natural thing that the child does is to establish eye contact with mom while feeding at the breast. And I remember establishing eye contact with my children very very early on in their first minutes. And there’s this extraordinary sense of knowing which passes between parent and child.’
And I say to myself, and I said to my cousin, ‘If that is so between the human parent and the child, are you really going to tell me that the living God who created heaven and earth and made whales and waterfalls and little penguins and all the rest of it, cannot establish contact with a lovely little creature who bears his image, but has to wait until that lovely little creature becomes five or six or seven or ten? Forget it! God has ways of making himself known intimately to children from their earliest days. And perhaps one of the dare I say sacramental ways by which God does that is precisely by the loving welcome of the Christian community.
Now of course children can’t articulate it. The five-minute old baby can’t put her hand up and say, ‘Okay, I believe in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.’ But I actually suspect—and I’m being very serious here—I suspect that some of those little children, to the God who knows the hearts of all, have a deeper and fuller faith than a lot of people who say those words every Sunday but have long since allowed them to drift off into the distance somewhere.”
This is a wonderful talk, every bit of it.
The Rt. Rev’d Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham (England), on the sacrament of baptism, continued. Referring to St. Paul (in Romans 6) appealing for faith on the basis of baptism, he speaks of doing the logical sums of baptism and λογιζεσθε, the need for the baptized to reckon themselves, to figure it out—it being baptism. He says, “Of course God welcomes us as we are, but God’s welcome never leaves us as we are. God’s inclusiveness is always a transforming inclusiveness…. Baptism is about dying, and then rising again, not somehow evading the challenge and getting in without any dying and rising to be done. As C. S. Lewis was always fond of emphasizing, there is nothing in this world which cannot die and be raised into God’s new world; but there is nothing in this world which will make it into the new world if it does not die and be raised.”
Tomorrow, Wright on infant baptism.
The Rt. Rev’d Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham (England), on the sacrament of baptism.
Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, on Virgil, Novus Ordo Seclorum, the Enlightenment, and where the British are relative to Continental and American philosophies
Tom Wright, Lux et Veritas, and why the key doesn't fit the lock
My proposal to you is that we should not be frightened of the postmodern critique. It had to come. It is, I believe, a necessary judgment on the arrogance of modernity, and it is essentially a judgment from within. Our task is to reflect on this moment of despair within our culture and, reflecting biblically and Christianly, to see our way through the moment of despair and out the other side. That is why I want to talk to you about the resurrection and about the Emmaus Road story; that is why I want to do so through the lens of the poem that we call Psalms 42 and 43, which (despite its customary division in the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin Bibles) is actually a single poem, with its refrain:
Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my help and my God. (42:11)
This psalm contains a magnificent prayer, which we do well to echo as we consider our own calling:
O send out your light and your truth;
let them lead me;
let them bring me to your holy hill.
and to your dwelling.
Then I will go to the altar of God,
to God my exceeding joy;
and I will praise you with the harp,
O God, my God. (43:3-4)
Let me take you quickly through this poem, so that we see its shape and its thrust. The whole is about being in the presence of God. At its most obvious level, it is about someone who has experienced the presence of God in the Temple in Jerusalem. The poet remembers the excitement of being close to God and feels a deep ache and a sense of loss because he is not there any more.
So, in verses 1 to 5, he is in a state of what we might call depression. He is thirsty for God, like a deer in the desert longing for cool water. He finds himself in tears twenty-four hours a day. His memories of happier times only make him feel worse. All he can do is engage in an inner dialogue: Why are you so heavy? Hope in God—I shall again worship him.
Then, in 42:6-11, he remembers what it was actually like, being in the presence of God. He is a long way away from Jerusalem, in the land of Jordan or up on Mount Herman. He knows that in theory YHWH is there with him, even in exile, and he can pray to YHWH, but still the poet feels as if he is a very long way off, that his enemies oppress him and people taunt him, “‘Where is your God?” There is no evidence of the presence of YHWH. So the poet longs to be back in Jerusalem, where one could sense God’s presence and grace where everyone was caught up with worship and adorations again the poet reminds himself that he must hope. (Telling yourself to hope is not, incidentally, the same as hoping; but if it is all you can manage, it is a good deal better than nothing.)
Then, in what we call Psalm 43, but which is actually the third and last stanza of the same poem, the problem comes more into focus. The psalmist is not just geographically distant from the home of God, he is surrounded by people whose whole way of life is radically opposed to God. They are ungodly, deceitful, and unjust. He is powerless before them, and God seems to have abandoned him. It is at this point, the low point in the whole poem, that he prays:
O send out your light and your truth;
let them lead me;
let them bring me to your holy hill
and to your dwelling.
Then I will go to the altar of God,
to God my exceeding joy;
and I will praise you with the harp,
O God, my God. (43:3-4)
He is far away from Jerusalem and needs to be led back with joy, like Israel in the wilderness being led by the pillar of cloud and fire, the strange symbolic presence the living God. “Light and truth” are what you need, not just when your intellect is curious and needs stimulating, but when your whole being is lost, downcast, depressed, and thirsty for God. Then he returns once again to the refrain:
Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my help and my God. (43: 5)
I want you now to hold this poem in your minds as we turn to the New Testament. We will use the language and imagery the poem supplies as the visual backdrop, or perhaps the musical accompaniment, to the story we are now going to examine, the story of the two disciples, on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:13-35.
I should like first to consider the background to the events that Luke describes here. It is the afternoon of the first Easter Day. All sorts of strange things have happened in the morning—rumors of visions and of an empty tomb-and the disciples still have not a clue as to what is really going on. As the day wears on, two of them set off to go home to Emmaus. They are joined by a mysterious stranger, who engages them in conversation about the new events. If we are to understand this section historically, it is vital that we grasp the central point stated in verse 21. “We had hoped,” they say, “that he was the one to redeem Israel.”
Where were they coming from? What was their problem?
They had been living out of a story, a controlling narrative, a “metanarrative,” as we might say. This story was built up from historical precedents, prophetic promises and of course from the songs of the Psalter. The Exodus was the backdrop. God’s subsequent liberations of his people from various foreign power, formed successive native layers all pointing in the same direction. When pagan oppression was at its height, Israel’s God would step in and deliver her once more.
Why are you cast down, O my soul
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him.
In particular—and this is perhaps the most important point to grasp—most first-century Jews believed that the Exile was not yet really over. Yes, they had come back from Babylon, geographically. But the pagans were still on top: first Persia, then Greece, then Syria, and now Rome. No sensitive or intelligent Jew would have dreamed of asserting that the promises of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the rest had been fulfilled in the various paltry “returns” that had taken place. Israel still needed “redeeming”—which, in their language, was an obvious code for the Exodus. The Exodus was the great covenant moment; what they now needed was covenant renewal. So we may imagine that when they prayed Psalm 43, they had this situation in view and some very clear notions as to what they were hoping for: Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people; from those who are deceitful and unjust deliver me? … O send out your light and your truth; let them lead me; … Why are you cast down, O my soul … Hope in God!
The Hebrew Scriptures thus offered to Jesus and his contemporaries a story in search of an ending. Jesus’ followers had thought that the ending was going to happen with Jesus. And clearly, it had not.
How had they thought it would happen? The pattern of messianic and prophetic movements in the centuries either side or Jesus gives a fairly clear and consistent picture. The method and the means would be quite simple: holiness, zeal for God and the Law, and military revolt. The holy remnant, with God on its side would defeat the pagan hordes. Thus it had always been in scripture, and thus, they believed, it would be when the great climax came, when Israel’s God would become King of all the world. “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” The two on the road to Emmaus had been doing what the psalm told them to do: Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.
The crucifixion of Jesus was therefore the complete and final devastation of their hope. Crucifixion is what happens to people who think they are going to liberate Israel and find out, too late, that they are mistaken. It is not simply that Jesus’ followers knew from Deuteronomy that a crucified person was under God’s curse. Nor was it simply that they had not yet worked out a theology of Jesus’ atoning death. The crucifixion already had, for them, a perfectly clear theological as well as political meaning: It meant that the exile was still continuing, that God had not forgiven Israel’s sins, and that pagans were still ruling the world. Their thirst for redemption for God’s light and truth to come and lead them had still not been satisfied. All of this we must, as historians, hold in our minds if we wish to understand the story of the road to Emmaus at its most basic level.
Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham and New Testament scholar, herewith
