This is the Gospel of the King who Saves

This morning at church we started a new sermon series on the Gospel of Mark, looking at chapter 1, verses 1-15. The extracts below highlight what it is all about: forgiveness of sins and God establishing a new kingdom, as he promised.

1 The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God....


⁴ John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins...


"After me comes he who is mightier than I, ..."

¹⁴ Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God,¹⁵and saying,  "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel."

John the Baptist was the "Elijah" [one dressed in camel hair] who had been predicted to come. He points towards Jesus [he saves] Christ [King].

The painting below is from the Isenheim Alterpiece by Gruenwald. A copy hung in Karl Barth's office for much his career.

The myth of human autonomy

In modern life children think that milk comes from grocery stores and not from cows. Most of us are rarely at the mercy of "mother nature", the way that farmers are. We are autonomous, successful, and independent. And, if we aren't then we are working hard to make it so! But the doctrine of Creation speaks to this issue of dependence. Karl Barth has an interesting discussion of Genesis 1:29.

²⁹And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. 

That man is directed absolutely to set his hope on God alone has its solid and undeniable counterpart in the fact that he is completely dependent on the cosmos surrounding him. And it is an incontestable and unshakeable sign of the real grace of God addressed to him that the cosmos is a home prepared to satisfy his own and his fellow-creatures' needs, to nourish him and them, 

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 3.1 The Doctrine of Creation, p. 207.

The painting is Paradise by Jan Brueghel, the younger (1601-1678).

A father's private world

The New York Times has an interesting review of "My father at 100" by Ronald Reagan Jr. It sounds like a fascinating and somewhat tragic story of a son desperately wanting to engage with his father, a man who constructed his own reality in order to come to terms with the demons of his own childhood.
I thank my dear wife for bringing the review to my attention.

A sympathetic reading of the Tiger mother

To balance my previous post Slavery to the idolatry of children I refer readers to a more sympathetic reading of Amy Chua's book by Kathy Tuan-Maclean. 

A day is coming...

This morning I was reading through the account in 2 Kings of the life of the prophet Elijah. I then listened to some of Mendelssohn's Elijah. In the libretto below I intersperse some relevant Biblical references/allusions:

Soprano
Behold, God hath sent Elijah the prophet, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children unto their fathers; lest the Lord shall come and smite the earth with a curse.
[Malachi 4:5,6; These are the last verses in the Old Testament]

Chorus
But the Lord from the North hath raised one, who from the rising of the sun shall call upon His Name and come on princes. Behold, my servant and mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth! On him the spirit of God shall rest: the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of might and of counsel, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord: ‘I have raised one from the North, who from the rising, on My Name shall call.’
[Isaiah 9]

Quartet
O come everyone that thirsteth, O come to the waters: O come unto Him. O hear, and your souls shall live for ever.
[Isaiah 55:1, John 7:37]

Chorus
And then shall your light break forth as the light of morning breaketh: and your health shall speedily spring forth then: and the glory of the Lord ever shall reward you.
Lord, our Creator. how excellent Thy Name is in all the nations! Thou fillest heaven with Thy glory. Amen.
[Psalm 37:6, Isaiah 58:8]

Slavery to the idolatry of children

Parenting has got to one of the greatest challenges in life. There seem to be no simple answers and knowing what the right thing to do and actually doing it are not the same thing. One of the thorniest issues is finding a balance between discipline, compassion, and flexibility. God is the perfect father and brings together loving discipline, compassion, and grace in his dealing with his children.

My wife brought to my attention the hot issue of Chinese tiger mothers and so I found fascinating reading an article in the Australian, Tough love for the tigers of tomorrow. Here are a few extracts I found particularly interesting:

Amy Chua, a mother of two girls, and a law professor at Yale University, as is her husband Jed Rubenfeld, has provoked incendiary responses in the US and increasingly in Asia too, from her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and from an essay published in The Wall Street Journal this month. 

[n.b. the article including the title are strung together by the WSJ and book publishers to be as controversial as possible to generate interest and sell books]. Here are some of the chosen extracts:

"A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too.  

"Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa [now 18 and 15], were never allowed to do: attend a sleepover, have a playdate, be in a school play, complain about not being in a school play, watch TV or play computer games, choose their own extracurricular activities, get any grade less than an A, not be the No 1 student in every subject except gym and drama, play any instrument other than the piano or violin, not play the piano or violin."

"Even when Western parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being Chinese mothers."

"The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable -- even legally actionable -- to Westerners." Chua lists three big differences: Westerners are anxious about their children's self-esteem, whereas Chinese parents demand top grades because they believe their child can get them; they believe their children owe them everything and they know what is best for their children.

She follows the tradition of The Book of Filial Piety, attributed to Confucius and long part of what has become Confucianism. This says "filial piety is the root of virtue and the source of civilisation . . . It begins with serving one's parents, our rulers, and is completed by establishing one's character."

"One of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't."

Her two previous books were on how hyperpowers' rise to global dominance and how exporting free market democracy breeds ethnic hatred and global instability.

She has defended herself since, as being somewhat ironic. "These coaching suggestions seem a bit extreme," she concedes in the book after describing threatening to burn her daughter's soft toys if she failed to perfect a piano piece. "On the other hand, they were highly effective . ." She admits she is "not good at enjoying life." And says she wasn't a curious student: "I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorise it."

At an American Chamber of Commerce conference on Hong Kong's competitiveness that I attended 12 years ago, the discussion ended up focusing on education. A young ethnically Chinese businessman made the most memorable contribution to the debate, confiding that he had trailed in the bottom 10 per cent at his traditionalist Hong Kong high school until his parents sent him to the US. There, with his creative intelligence unleashed, he graduated in the top 10 per cent from high school, went on to score an excellent degree and had become a senior Time Warner executive.

Here are a few of my random thoughts. 

This is very sad. It shows slavery to religion, slavery to performance, slavery to fear, and reflects an idolatry of children. 

It shows how strong cultural influences are. Even for someone who has lived their whole life in the "melting pot" of the USA, they still see their identity and values in terms of their ethnic and cultural origins.

Someone can be very well "educated" but not particularly "enlightened." This applies not just to "tiger mothers" but also well-educated liberals who are so "wimpy" about disciplining their kids that they end up as drop outs or drug addicts.

Amazing Grace. How sweet the sound! It liberates and frees and motivates.

In the name of God

I have been reading through 1 Kings which describes Solomon's reign and the construction of the Temple. It is striking to me how much it mentions and focuses on "the name of the LORD [YHWH]".  The temple was built "for the name", and "the name" dwelt there,..

It is interesting to read Karl Barth's discussion of the central role of the name of God, not just in the Old Testament, but in the New Testament as well:

This is the concept of the name of God. Knowledge, love, fear, trust, hope, praise, preaching, invocation are all related continually to this ... and yet even so they are unmistakably connected to Yahweh Himself. The righteous man thinks, speaks and acts in this name when he stands before Yahweh, under His protection and blessing. To this name of Yahweh, not to the One who dwells in Sinai or according to the later view in heaven, a house or temple is built in Jerusalem. Conversely this name ... for whose sake Yahweh forgives and is gracious and guides and does not forsake Israel; His name dwells indeed, as Yahweh chose, in Jerusalem. ...  

In His name is concentrated everything He is in His relation to His people, to the righteous, and from His name proceeds in some way everything that the people or the righteous can expect from Him as they stand in this relation. What does all this mean? Not for the old Testament alone but for ancient thought generally, and perhaps for what is called primitive thought (though it is not really primitive), a man's name is not something that comes to him from without, something accidental and non-essential,...  

the picture which the New Testament itself sets before us is that of the self-disclosure of this Father in which He is not the Father but the Son, the historical figure of this Man on His way from Bethlehem to Golgotha, the "name" of Jesus. Again, the concreteness and actuality of the self-unveiling of God for man, and the enigma of the self-distinction in God Himself which makes this self-unveiling possible, has not just increased quantitatively here in comparison with the Old Testament....

In thinking that it has to defend against Jesus as against a blasphemer the name of God dwelling in the house of stone in Jerusalem, it [Israel] denies this very name, and thus separates itself from it and from its own Holy Scripture, which is one long witness to this name as God's real presence and action in the human sphere. This presence and action of God Israel declines. Why is it that the Lord's Prayer in the New Testament begins in the style of the Old Testament: "Hallowed by thy name!"? How else could it begin? one might almost reply. This is the whole point with Jesus. His concern is not with something new but with that which is first and primal, with the God who wills to be God and to be known as God a second time in a different way, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who wills to be revealed in His name and hallowed in His name. 

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 1.1, pages 316-9.

The painting is Solomon before the ark of the covenant, by Blaise Nicholas Le Sueur