Christ Our Salvation E-Book

John Webster

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 314

Beschreibung

The church's vocation is to treasure the gospel and live it out. The late theologian John Webster believed Christian preachers and theologians should be principally concerned with the proclamation of this news. At the center of that proclamation is our salvation in Christ.In this compilation of homilies, John Webster explores the various contours of the salvation accomplished for us in Christ and displays for preachers a model of theological exegesis that understands that the gospel is the heart of holy Scripture. Readers of Christ Our Salvation will be presented with a feast of "theological" theology for Christian proclamation.

Leseprobe

CHRIST OUR SALVATION

Expositions and Proclamations

JOHN WEBSTER

EDITED BY DANIEL BUSH

Christ Our Salvation: Expositions and Proclamations

Copyright 2020 John Webster

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV ®), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version® (NIV®), copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. TM. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are from the King James Version. Public domain.

Print ISBN 9781683594208

Digital ISBN 9781683594215

Library of Congress Control Number 2020941749

Edited by Daniel J. Bush

Lexham Editorial: Abigail Stocker, Kelsey Matthews, Danielle Thevenaz

Cover Design: Micah Ellis

published posthumously

in honor & memory of

John Webster

CONTENTS

Preface

Part I

SOUNDING SALVATION

IThe Unfathomably Miraculous Reality

John 3:16–17

IIA Reawakened Affection

Psalm 119:97–104

IIIHe Has Set Us Free

Mark 7:6–8

IVTruth Known and Loved

Psalm 119:1–16

VRemembering Our Peace

Isaiah 2:4

Part II

SALVATION’S GOD

VIWho Is God?

Isaiah 6:3

VIIGod for Us

Titus 2:11–14

VIIIGod with Us

John 15:12–17

IXGod among Us

John 1:19–28

XGod above Us

Ephesians 4:9–10

Part III

SALVATION’S HEART

XIThe Faithful Witness

Revelation 1:4b–5a

XIIThe Great Reversal

Colossians 1:13

XIIIShaped by Love

John 1:35–51

XIVOpen to Judgment

Revelation 3:1–6

XVThe Great Revolutionary Act

Psalm 105:1–6

Part IV

SALVATION’S VIRTUES

XVIWisdom

1 Kings 3:3–9

XVIICourage

Joshua 1:9; Ephesians 6:10

XVIIIThankfulness

1 Thessalonians 1:2–3

XIXGenerosity

2 Corinthians 8:9

XXGentleness

Galatians 6:1–3

XXIJudgment

Matthew 7:1–5

Part V

PROCLAIMING SALVATION

XXIIProphetic Speech

Ezekiel 12:23–13:9

XXIIIAbandoned to God’s Cause

Jeremiah 20:7–12

XXIVCreatures of Grace

Romans 15:14–21

XXVCalled, Sent, and Authorized

Mark 6:11–12

XXVIPreach the Word

2 Timothy 4:1–4

XXVIIWitness to the Resurrection

Acts 2:32

Message Delivery Index

PREFACE

Those familiar with contemporary preaching are accustomed to the use of narrative and illustrative stories to capture the imagination and keep the big guy in the choir from falling asleep. I admit, I’ve been under a considerable amount of stress in my own preaching to find the “right” illustration after completing exegesis. John Webster is concerned with story, too, yet it isn’t captivating illustrations to provide color commentary that concerns him. In message after message, he maintains laser focus on the gospel story, unfolding in extended paraphrase the narrative of salvation found in holy Scripture.

This, for Webster, is the central task of preaching. The task of preaching isn’t to entertain; far less is it to draw attention to the preacher. Rather, the preacher’s task is to get out of the way, to let God’s own self-revelation through the written and proclaimed word do the work. And if this is to happen, then the word alone must be primary. Guided by conviction concerning the sufficiency and reliability of holy Scripture, Webster takes no liberties but simply preaches. He doesn’t speak what is his but speaks only the story of salvation as presented in Scripture. The result is captivating: the hearer (or in this case, the reader) begins to hear the God of Scripture speak, addressing the church with the gospel of salvation.1

It was a gray sky afternoon, not uncommon in Aberdeen, when I sat with John in his study at King’s College and he entrusted to me the messages that make up this volume. We also discussed at length his preaching. By this I’m not referring to the dogmatics of homiletics but the very human issue of mechanics. When he was called upon to preach, he would read the Scripture passage for the service a few times and prayerfully mull it over. He would check one or two commentaries and perhaps look at what John Owen had said, then he would just write so as to submit himself personally to the rule of holy Scripture, saying again in contemporary speech what had already been said and nothing more. His aim, as he emphatically put it to me, was for listeners to hear what the Spirit—rather than John Webster—says to the church.

The reader should be aware that John’s primary audience was within a university environment. The majority of the messages were delivered at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford where he served as a canon during his tenure as the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford’s Christ Church college from 1996–2003. A few messages were delivered at King’s College, University of Aberdeen, and elsewhere (see index). The point is that his audience were intellectual and more or less homogeneous, like-minded listeners.

Through the messages assembled in this volume, one thing stands out clearly: Webster was constrained by the Spirit and the rule of Scripture to bear witness before this audience to the “one needful thing” (Luke 10:42). However well he might have felt that he succeeded as a witness is beside the point—honest preachers are notoriously self-deprecating and John was no different—for he was faithful and true to the one who called him. The attentive reader will hear Christ and forget the preacher.

With great honor and heartfelt remembrance, I share these meditations entrusted to me so long ago. Job well done, John!

DANIEL BUSH

CHRIST OUR SALVATION

PART I

SOUNDING SALVATION

I

THE UNFATHOMABLY MIRACULOUS REALITY

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

JOHN 3:16–17

Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus is one of the great resonant passages of the Gospel of John, nowhere more so than in the deep words of John 3:16–17. Of course, they’re familiar to many of us, but each time we hear them what strikes us is their capacity to find us out and address us in the vanity and wretchedness of sin.

Whether they’re Jesus’ words or the words of John the evangelist, we don’t know. It doesn’t matter too much; what’s clear is that in them we have set before us something of the limitless scope and infinite depth of the reality that we call salvation. Here, in this little comment on the gospel story of the Son’s saving work, we’re told with utter simplicity what we’ve to do with the gospel—what we’ve to do with the fact that in Jesus, so well-known and yet so completely different, we face God working the world’s salvation. The theme of the gospel is this, simply this and nothing other than this: that the world might be saved through him.

In the man Jesus, something has taken place which constitutes an entire renewal of the world, a remaking of reality, a setting aside of a reality ruined beyond repair and the making of something bewilderingly new. That new reality is what we mean by salvation. What may we learn here of this simple and yet unfathomably miraculous reality? Four things we may care to ponder.

First, the cause of salvation is the love of God. What lies at the root of the saving ministry of Jesus Christ is God’s love. The deep ground of our salvation is this: “God so loved the world” (John 3:16). We must not assume that we know what God’s love is, for it is God’s love—not just a magnified or improved version of the love that we try to practice, but something with its own very particular dignity and glory.

The dignity and glory of God’s love is that it’s a love which creates and preserves fellowship. God’s love is known in his willing and creating of a reality which will be under him and alongside him as the object of his love and mercy. God’s love means that he’s not only God for himself but God with us and God for us. And in being in this way our God, God with us and for us, God binds himself in love to what he has made. His love creates fellowship, creates us to be his. And it also preserves fellowship; it protects what God loves from all the threats to fellowship. God’s love is God’s resolve, the unshakeable purpose with which God determines that the fellowship that he creates will not be spoiled or overthrown. God’s love has a direction, a goal: that the creature whom God loves will flourish, that nothing will finally overcome fellowship—in short, that God will be with us, and we will be with God. God’s love creates and preserves us to keep company with him. What we call salvation is caused by nothing other than God’s act of love which ensures that this will be so. God loves as Savior; salvation is the love of God in action.

Second, the real quality of the love of God can be seen as we consider the object of the love of God. What is it that God loves so much?

The world. And “the world” doesn’t just mean the totality of the things which God has made. It means the creation which has rejected God, and, most especially, it means the human creature in rebellion against God—in other words, us. God loves and creates us as objects for his love, human partners for fellowship. We repudiate God: rather than living out of God’s love and living for fellowship with God, we seek to be creatures on our own—to be free of what we stupidly think to be the hindrances and obstructions to our freedom that God’s love puts in our way.

We do not want fellowship with God; we will not have it, and we struggle against it with all our might. We would rather destroy ourselves, and do destroy ourselves, rather than live out of God’s love. All this means, therefore, is that God’s love isn’t set on some worthy object, something which could expect or invite the love of God. God loves the world; God loves us in our contradiction and hatred and renunciation of his love, loves us in all our unloveliness. And so the love of God which is the root of salvation is always and only mercy, pure and simple pity for ruined creatures who have broken fellowship with God.

This loving mercy of God is manifest, third, in the means of salvation, which is the coming of the Son of God. How does God save us, his ruined creatures, and restore us to fellowship with him? Not simply by looking upon us with a loving attitude; not simply by a declaration; not simply by offering an example of love. No! God’s love is God’s act. It’s the act of God himself in the persons of the Father and the Son. For, we read, “he gave his only Son”; and again, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world” (John 3:16, 17). Salvation means that God the Father gives and sends his only Son, and it means that God the Son is given and sent. Salvation isn’t a mere word or attitude but a sending and a being sent, a giving and a being given. It’s a sending into a giving to the world. God enters the realm of our hostility and estrangement. He comes into the very midst of our broken fellowship. That which is utterly unthinkable—that God should still seek to keep faith with his faithless creatures—is what happens in Jesus Christ. In the coming of the Son of God, we’re reconciled to God.

We’re not reconciled by anything that we ourselves do or could ever do, for the simple reason that there’s nothing we can do. The world cannot restore its fellowship with God. We’re reconciled to God because God turns to us, and sends his Son, and in sending him gives him to us, and in giving him brings about our salvation.

Which leads, fourth, to the end or purpose of God’s saving work, which is that we should live. Salvation is God’s act that ensures that his purpose of fellowship will be undefeated. This means that God excludes, indeed abolishes, what we fear above all things—perishing, condemnation. “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn”; God sent his Son so that we “should not perish” (John 3:17, 16). Perishing and condemnation, our final fall into death and damnation, have been once and for all excluded by the love of God in Jesus Christ.

There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, literally: death and damnation have ceased to be (Rom 8:1). They’ve been replaced by a new kind of aliveness, by reconciliation with God, by restored fellowship, by acquittal—in short, by salvation, summed up here in John’s Gospel by the words “eternal life.”

Eternal life is life in God’s company, life under God’s mercy, life rooted in God’s love. Its origin is in God’s mercy; its security is in the love of Christ; its end is the life everlasting. What takes place in Jesus Christ isn’t the mere possibility of this life with God, not a mere offer or hope or aspiration, but the very reality of eternal life. In Jesus Christ, God saves not just potentially or in prospect but actually, with all the authority and certainty of God himself.

When we gather week by week, a company of people who get together to hear some words from a book and to eat and drink at a table, the place where we gather is the place of salvation. We’re in the domain of salvation. We’re in the world which God has loved and reconciled, and we’re people whom God has loved and reconciled. What are we to do in response to the miracle of God’s saving love? In a very real sense, we’re to do nothing. We’re to do nothing because there is in one sense nothing to do; God has done it all for us. We don’t need to try to make salvation happen by moral effort or liturgical performance or having wretched thoughts about our sins. That God loves us and has saved us is as sure as the fact that the sky is blue.

What that reality requires of us is the strange act of faith. The God who loves us and saves us in his Son requires simply that we believe in him (John 3:16). To believe in him is not to add our bit to the work of salvation, clinching the deal by signing on the dotted line. If we think that, we’re saying that we’re saved by our faith, not by God. Faith lets God do God’s work. Faith rests in the fact that from all eternity God is our God and he has pledged himself to us finally in sending his Son, giving him to us that we may not perish but have life with God. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17). Whoever believes in him is not condemned.

May God give us joy and trust in these things. Amen.

II

A REAWAKENED AFFECTION

Oh how I love your law!

It is my meditation all the day.

Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies,

for it is ever with me.

I have more understanding than all my teachers,

for your testimonies are my meditation.

I understand more than the aged,

for I keep your precepts.

I hold back my feet from every evil way,

in order to keep your word.

I do not turn aside from your rules,

for you have taught me.

How sweet are your words to my taste,

sweeter than honey to my mouth!

Through your precepts I get understanding;

therefore I hate every false way.

PSALM 119:97–104

One of the most weighty claims that the Christian gospel makes on human life is the reordering of our affections. That is, faith in Jesus Christ and life lived under his governance requires not only a change in our practices, ideas, and attitudes but a deeper alteration, one which underlies those things. That deeper change is a change in what we love. If the gospel is indeed to take up residence in us, it can only do so as our affections are transformed and our hearts are set on new things. Until that happens—until our affections are made new by being set on new objects—the work of regeneration will remain incomplete.

Why the affections? What makes them of such cardinal importance in the life of Christian discipleship? Often in common speech we use the word “affection” to mean a not-very-passionate liking for something: we talk of an affection for cats and dogs, or antiques—something nice and possibly absorbing yet hardly earth-shattering. But affection can also be used in a deeper sense to indicate the fundamental loves which govern us and determine the shape of our lives. In particular, the affections are that part of us through which we attach ourselves to things outside of ourselves. Sometimes the object of our affections may be a person, or a form of activity, or a set of ideas; whatever it is, we cleave to it through the affections. When we set our affections on something, we come to regard it as supremely significant, valuable, and praiseworthy. It offers us a satisfaction and fulfillment which we cannot derive from other things, and we arrange our lives in such a way that we take every opportunity to enjoy that satisfaction and experience that fulfillment. In this way, our affections—our loves, which are fixed on certain realities, and our desires, which long for what we love—are one of the driving forces of our lives. The affections are in a real sense the engines of our attitudes and actions. What we are and what we do cannot be separated from what we love.

Because the affections are so important, the consequences of human sin upon the affections are particularly catastrophic. Sin means alienation from God, and alienation from God means the detachment of the affections from their proper objects. Our desiring and loving become disordered. We attach ourselves to the wrong things; we come to take satisfaction and fulfillment not from what God has ordained as the means of our flourishing but from wicked things. No longer a means of adhering to our good, no longer a way of cleaving to God’s ways for us, our affections are detached from God. Our affections no longer follow the truth; they become chaotic; they are a sign of the breakdown of our lives as creatures.

This disintegration of the affections as they lose their grip on the truth is no slight business; it is one of the greatest signs of our human degeneracy, and no amount of human effort can heal us. If the affections are to be renewed and the disorder overcome, it can only be by a work of God that makes human life new. That is, the affections can only be renewed by baptism. They must submit to that twofold work of God in which we are put to death and raised from the dead. Like everything else about us, the affections must be judged and condemned, exposed in all their falsehood and malice and vanity, and they must be recreated by the power of God’s Spirit.

If we are to be disciples of Jesus Christ, our affections must be put to death. Attachments have to be broken; our love must be separated from its false objects; we must learn to abhor and turn from the things to which our disorderly affections cling. That process, the putting to death of false affections, is no slight work of a moment; it is a long, hard effort, one in which we have to fight ourselves and our circumstances. We hang on like limpets to the objects of our affections. We fear losing the things to which we cling, even when we know they are destructive, because we cannot believe that there is any good for us without them, and so dying to such false affections is the work of a lifetime as we try to deny ourselves and inch forward toward holiness. But the putting to death of the affections is only the reverse side of their being remade. As we grow in holiness, our affections are not destroyed; rather, they are attached to fitting objects as we learn to love and desire the right things. Moving ahead in the Christian life depends a great deal upon this reordering of our affections. Experiences, moral effort, religious exercises will not get us very far unless the affections are engaged and we are drawn away from unworthy loves to our true end.

Now, all that is a prologue to coming to terms with something Psalm 119 works to hammer into our souls—namely, that one of the hallmarks of the spiritual life is a reawakened affection for God and the ways of God. One of the chief fruits of our remaking by the Holy Spirit is a delight in God’s law. “Oh, how I love your law!” Or again: “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (Ps 119:97, 103). What does the psalmist mean here by God’s “law”?

We’re schooled by our culture to think that nothing could be less delightful than law. Law instinctively seems to be something arbitrary and inhibiting. For the psalmist, however, law is an altogether wholesome and delightful matter.

God’s law is not an arbitrary set of statutes managed by some divine magistrate; still less is it a mechanism for relating to God through a system of rewards for good conduct and punishments for misbehavior. God’s law is best thought of as God’s personal presence. It is God’s gift of himself, in which he comes to his people in fellowship and sets before them his will for human life. God’s law is the claim that God makes upon us as our Maker and Redeemer. And because it is his claim—the claim of the one who made us and has redeemed us—God’s law calls us to be what we have been made and redeemed to be: God’s people, those who are to live with him and for him and so find fulfillment and peace.

The law which is celebrated all through Psalm 119 is our vocation to be human; it is the form of life with God, the path of real human flourishing. And that is why it engages our affections and fills us with delight. “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (Ps 119:103). When the affections are converted back to God, then God’s law ceases to be a threat; it’s no longer something we merely respect or fear. We’re not terrified of it like slaves, and our keeping of it is not craven, sullen, inhibited adherence to rules. It is delightful: we enjoy its sweetness because we know God’s law isn’t a prison but a space in which we can grow and thrive.

We can learn a good deal about ourselves if we inquire into our lives from this angle. If we’re alert and conscientious Christian people and not lazy or couldn’t-care-less about our faith, then we’ll want to examine ourselves now and again—to try to be aware of what we’re up to, how things stand with us in this great matter of our fellowship with God. Self-examination shouldn’t, of course, be overscrupulous or anxious; it shouldn’t drive us inside ourselves or make us feel defeated by our muddles. It should always be rooted in the assurance that God is much better at forgiving us than we are at forgiving ourselves. But, with those things in mind, the wise Christian will, from time to time, want to ask: Where do my affections lie? If I am as truthful as I can be about myself, what draws my desires? What are the objects of my loving? When I look dispassionately and without illusion at who I am, what is the substance of my delights? As we engage in that kind of reflection and try, as it were, to take the temperature of our spiritual lives, the psalm offers us two tests, two lines of inquiry to help us see our lives in the light of the truth. Both of them are ways of asking how deeply our affections are engaged by the law of God and how firm our attachment is to his ways for humankind.

The first test is this: affection for God’s law will be demonstrated in spiritual meditation. “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (Ps 119:97). Those whose affections delight in God’s law will spend a great deal of time pondering it. Why? Because sin confuses our thinking. It makes us unsteady and unstable; it distracts us by filling our minds with a great clutter of falsehoods, and those falsehoods prevent us from seeing the truth and setting our affections on the truth.

Sin makes sure that we can’t see the truth and so can’t love it. But as the Spirit takes hold of us and makes us new, one of the things brought about is a new focusing of our lives. We become more centered; our lives and our affections are directed to the simple and utterly attractive reality of God. And when our affections are set on God, then our minds follow: we begin to meditate on God and God’s law, and God’s ways with us become the substance of our thoughts.

Of course, the meditation which the psalmist is talking about here isn’t unfocused reverie, the free play of our religious feelings. It’s something very specific, very distinctive. It’s attention to God’s law in which God manifests himself and his will for human life. It’s what happens when the law of God so fills our hearts, minds, and wills that it becomes the lens through which we see everything, the norm which we consult in order to figure out what we are to be and do. For the person whose affections are set on God, that kind of meditation is the default setting of our minds; it’s what we keep returning to because, as the psalmist puts it, “Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is ever with me” (Ps 119:98).

This isn’t a matter for pride. Quite the reverse: it means that we do not think of ourselves as the masters of wisdom for living but that we simply ponder God’s instruction, knowing that what we know is what we’re taught by God. Nor is it a matter of theory alone. Meditation isn’t abstract, merely entertaining right notions; it’s searching God’s law in order to be instructed in the way we should live. “Through your precepts I get understanding,” the psalmist says—that is, practical wisdom for framing my life (Ps 119:104). God’s law tells us that God is this God, that his ways with us are these ways, and that we are called to act in their light. So to meditate on God is to find guidance, direction, a shape for our living.

The second test is this: affection for God’s law will be demonstrated in avoidance of wickedness. “I hold back my feet from every evil way, in order to keep your word.… Through your precepts I get understanding; therefore I hate every false way” (Ps 119:101, 104). Corresponding to our turning toward God in practical meditation on the law of God is a turning away from what stands opposed to God’s ways.

As our lives are made new by God’s Spirit, our affections are set on God’s law; that law gives us understanding, and that understanding in turn enables discrimination. That is, we begin to see what is good and what is evil and to embrace the will of God. That embracing of the will of God involves us in making a very clear refusal. It means keeping our feet from evil paths, not departing from God’s laws. It means we have to say no to ourselves. It means we have to stop thinking of our lives as a sort of empty space to fill as we wish and instead see that we’re directed to walk in a very specific direction, and only in that direction.

But we can only do that if our desire for wickedness is supplanted by a desire for God, because desire for God will inevitably generate an aversion to what’s excluded by God’s law. That aversion is to be real and strong: “I hate every false way,” the psalmist says (Ps 119:104). A kind of singleness in our affections is commanded of us; vacillation, commitment to both sides, is simply not possible. Purity of heart means to will one thing and one thing only, which is the will of God that is set before us in his law and to which, by God’s Spirit, our affections are attached.

We’ve only just scratched the surface of this magnificent bit of Holy Scripture; there is enough here to give us the matter for much thought and prayer. To help us on our way, here’s a prayer of Miles Coverdale, the sixteenth-century bishop of Exeter:

O Lord Jesus Christ, draw thou our hearts unto thee; join them together in inseparable love, that we may ever abide in thee and thou in us, and that the everlasting covenant between us may stand sure for ever. Let the fiery darts of thy love pierce through all our slothful members and inward powers, that we, being happily wounded, may so become whole and sound. Let us have no lover but thyself alone; let us seek no joy and comfort except in thee; for thy name’s sake. Amen.

III

HE HAS SET US FREE

And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,

‘This people honors me with their lips,

but their heart is far from me;

in vain do they worship me,

teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’

You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”

MARK 7:6–8

Conflict is a common discourse in the holy Scriptures, especially in the Gospel narratives. In his Gospel, Mark zooms in on a localized conflict, catching in his lens a bitter dispute about tradition. The laws of ritual cleansing that were such a given in the religious world of early Christianity are the issue of the hour: “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” ask the Pharisees and the scribes (Mark 7:5). There is outrage in the question.

This isn’t merely the kind of outrage with which we naturally treat our competitors as we try to expose them as the frauds they are, but something deeper. It’s outrage about the fact that Jesus threatens something absolutely basic to the posture of the people of God in the world. What he seems to be threatening is holiness, separation. He seems to be just striding over all the boundaries that had been so carefully erected and which were so carefully patrolled because they marked the distinction between the people of God and the pagan occupier. The rites of cleansing which surrounded eating and drinking were not just bits of religious ornamentation; they were ways of giving tangible expression to the fact that God’s people wouldn’t compromise their elect status, wouldn’t pollute themselves and become like the gentiles. What’s at stake, therefore, is the very identity of God’s people, their distinctiveness, the visibility of their difference, and, in the end, the obedience due to the Lord of the covenant. Jesus’ very casualness about ritual matters isn’t just disrespectful to the elders; it strikes at the heart of how the people of God ought to be the people of God.

Or at least, that’s the theory. For Jesus, there’s just as much at stake as for his opponents. His opposition to them isn’t merely a matter of recommending a more relaxed, unfussy attitude, less scrupulous and therefore less likely to get things out of proportion. No, for Jesus—as for his opponents—what’s at stake is the radical demand that the law of God makes on the people of God. Far from seeking to loosen up the law and soften its force, Jesus is urging that his opponents have missed the point. In establishing a set of regulations to embody commitment to God’s law, he claims that his opponents have set the whole law aside. Their problem, therefore, isn’t over-obedience; it’s faithlessness. It’s a faithlessness that manifests itself as scruple, but faithlessness it is, and Jesus is unsparing in exposing it to judgment.

What’s gone wrong? At its heart, this: tradition has inserted itself between the people of God and the Lord of their lives. “You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men” (Mark 7:8). It’s important to realize the problem isn’t tradition itself. In and of itself, tradition is both innocent and, indeed, positively helpful. Traditions are orderly ways of living human life, ways of living that work with given, inherited values and try to negotiate all sorts of human situations with the resources that those inherited values offer. The great strength of tradition is that it refuses to believe that in every situation we have to start afresh—that we never have anything to learn from the accumulated wisdom of the past. To live in tradition is to live a life with a shape that I don’t just make up as I go along but which comes from before me, which gives me a shape, which helps me make sense of the world, and which puts me in touch with resources that I can’t just pull out of my own stores.

People often lament the lack of traditions in a good deal of modern life, and there’s a truth in the lament. The need for roots is something very deep in us; the lack of roots is very destructive. It’s destructive above all when we’re faced with challenges from new situations. Wise communities take stock of their situations by looking to their past and trying to figure out from that vantage point what they’re called to do. One thing we might pray for is that our own bit of Christianity may be given grace to think about its traditions before it catapults itself into the future like some kind of unguided missile.

But for all the good things that tradition brings, it can also turn against us. It can become not the shape of our lives but a straitjacket; not a role to play but a shell to hide in. Tradition can become God’s enemy and our own. How does this happen?

Tradition works well when it’s a response to a call. A healthy and effective tradition is one that offers a way of living our lives in responsibility, in answer to a summons from outside ourselves to be a particular kind of people. What a tradition does is help us find ways of building our lives around that summons and of making sure that the summons is always laid before us. In the Christian tradition, for example, creeds and set forms of prayer serve just this need: They help us focus; they help us fix mind and heart and will and imagination on the particular reality of the gospel; they prevent us from drifting into formlessness; they shape our lives into an answer to the call of God in Christ. But religious traditions in particular go wrong when, instead of giving access to the call of God, they become a substitute for it. The tradition somehow freezes; it interposes itself between God and the people of God; obedience to God becomes submission to the tradition. Then, we might say, tradition is no longer an open window but a closed room. And it’s just this corruption of tradition which Jesus uncovers in the little conflict story in Mark 7.

The Pharisees challenge the laxity of Jesus’ disciples and thereby challenge Jesus himself. He responds by turning the accusation around and claiming the true fulfillment of the law for himself. His opponents, he says, honor God with their lips but not their hearts. It’s a familiar theme in the great prophetic writings of the Old Testament: that ritual is no real substitute for moral obedience; that mercy, not sacrifice, is the fulfillment of the will of God; that cleanliness is of the heart, not the hands. All this lies behind the latter part of the story, where Jesus points to what’s already within us as what really poisons the soul.