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To make sense of the story of Israel,
we have to make sense of the God of that story of Israel.
At the heart of Christian theology,
at the heart of the Christian message, is belief in God.
And it's important to understand who God is
in order to understand the story of Israel,
to understand Jesus and what he was doing.
Unfortunately, many people have grown up
with lots of bad ideas about God.
Some people look at God as a resident cop.
And most of us don't ever see policemen
unless they have something bad to tell us.
I've never had a policeman knock on my door
and tell me that I'm a good citizen.
And I don't suppose you have either.
Other people look at God as just ancient,
you know, long white hair,
as we see in the images of European cathedrals.
Other people think God was here for a while
and is now gone.
He's disappeared to a far country.
Most people, however, have experienced God
as a parental hangover.
There is a correlation between our understanding of God
and our parents.
If you have perfect parents,
you are set up for a very good understanding of God.
But since most of our parents are not perfect
and we're not perfect,
we have some corrections and remediations to take place.
Many people have also experienced God as an angry judge.
They've heard nothing but sermons about God
threatening to throw people into hell.
All of these ideas
about God were outlined long ago by J.B. Phillips
in a wonderful little book called "Your God is Too Small."
So it is important for us to re-engage this topic
as we read the Bible, as we understand Jesus.
If there's anything I think that attracted people to Jesus,
it was his understanding of God.
A German theologian named Adolf Schlatter once said,
"Der erste und der erste,
der letzte Gedanken Jesu,
war der Gedanken Gottes."
And this could be translated the first and last
in the sense of the most important
and continuing important idea of Jesus was ideas about God.
And so it's important for us to understand
what Jesus says about God,
what he assumes about God,
what he teaches about God,
and how he embodies God and reveals God to us,
in the way that he lives.
Of course, as a Jew,
Jesus knew from his Bible that God was the creator
and that God was the covenant maker
through Abraham and Moses and David.
And Jesus, unlike the gods of the Greco-Roman world,
believed that there was only one God
and that all other gods were really phantoms.
But what does Jesus teach us about God?
I think we can divide this into two categories.
Jesus teaches that God is holy and that God is loving.
Jesus teaches that God is always holy and always loving.
He never acts just as a holy God
and never acts just as a loving God.
God is always loving in his holiness and holy in his love.
We can speak of God, in a sense, of his holiness
as theophanic and cultic.
He manifests himself.
And in that worship of God's revelation in the temple,
we experience the awe and grandeur and majesty of God.
That's why Mary begins the Magnificat:
"My soul praises the Lord," magnifies the Lord.
That's why Mary begins the Magnificat: "My soul praises the Lord," magnifies the Lord.
God is majestic, and in some sense, he is separate.
He is unlike anything else that we experience in this world.
And as a result of this, Jesus teaches his followers,
and he embodies in the way he lives
and in the way he talks about God
and in the way he tells them to pray
that God is to be revered.
This is a thing that we have to be aware of.
This is a theme that deserves far more emphasis
in our churches today
when we have become very casual and informal
in almost all our approaches to God.
Jesus teaches in the Lord's prayer, the first line,
"Our Father who is in the heaven,
may your name be hallowed."
This is the word, may it be made holy.
May it be treated separately.
In the world of Jesus,
people did not use the name of God lightly.
In fact, they substituted words for God.
This is why Jesus says in Matthew 23:9,
"You are to call no one on earth Father,
for there is one Father."
And he's talking about God.
Now, this really puts a crimp in the way we talk
because I'm a father,
and my son is a father.
So we use the word father,
and the early church used the word father for fathers.
But there is a warning being given by Jesus
that no one is to get close to the kind of fatherhood
that our God has.
And we are to revere that and honor it.
Jesus was so serious about reverencing God and revering God,
that he used language in the gospels that evinces this.
For instance, Jesus says over and over and over and over,
"Kingdom of the heavens."
We're not always sure exactly what this means
in English today because we're not first century Jews,
but this was probably an emphasis upon the distance of God
from humans, the rule of God over humans, and the need for us
to be reverent.
There's another side to this that we learn from language,
is that Jesus often spoke of God in the passive voice.
Four times in the Beatitudes, Jesus uses a passive voice.
"You will be mercy, you will be called sons of God."
This is the language that could be unpacked,
God will show you mercy, or God will call you his children.
Why does he speak in the past?
He speaks in the passive voice because he wants God's name
to be eclipsed from the sentence, and he is assumed,
and this comes off conveying a sense of reverence.
The holiness of God comes to fruition also
in a very common theme in the Bible, in the Old Testament,
in the prophets, in Moses, everywhere,
in Jesus, in Paul, in the book of Revelation.
And that is that there is a judgment.
Jesus warns Israel that if they don't respond
to the revelation that he is bringing to them,
that the city of Jerusalem will be sacked.
This is predicted in Mark chapter 13.
One of the most common passages that people love
to talk about today is the parable of the sheep and the goats.
And they like to talk about encountering Jesus in the poor.
And this is an important emphasis in Jesus,
and it's an important ethical manifestation
of the way Jesus wants us to live.
But do we remember in that joy over that parable
of the sheep and the goats, that this is actually
a powerful description of judgment,
that the goats will be assigned to one side
and the sheep to another side?
Why does Jesus talk about this?
He's fierce in his theme of judgment
because he believes that God is holy.
But Jesus, as I said, teaches about a God
who is both holy and loving.
And until we keep these two things together,
we don't understand the teachings of Jesus.
For Jesus, God loves us.
And he manifests this in one of his most common
forms of behavior.
We call this table fellowship with sinners.
Jesus calls tax collectors.
He ends up in their home, which is a little bit offensive.
And some of the people with higher religious scruples
were nervous about Jesus eating with tax collectors
and sinners.
And Jesus talks about this at times.
But he welcomes people to the table.
Why does he welcome people to the table?
He wants them to meet God.
He wants them to understand that the God that they are encounter
is a God who brings them to the table.
Jesus doesn't call people to the table just because he's inclusive.
He calls people to the table so that they will encounter God.
They will encounter Jesus and be transformed by it.
In his world, people didn't do this.
In fact, we could say that in his world, people said, "If you are clean, you can eat
with me."
Jesus said, "Eat with me, and I will make you clean."
And so he got this reputation of someone who ate with the wrong people.
He's a friend of tax collectors and sinners, a drunkard and a winebibber.
They talk about this.
Well, this is language for the rebellious son.
In the Old Testament.
But at the same time, describing the way Jesus behaved.
One of everybody's favorite parables is the parable of the prodigal son.
Do we know how this story was evoked?
Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners.
The Pharisees say, "Why are you eating with these people?"
And Jesus tells three stories, a story of a lost sheep, of a lost coin, and of a lost
child.
And his message is this: God rejoices when lost people find their way home and find their
way to the table.
This table was a table where Jesus transformed people from unclean to clean.
It became a contagion of purity.
And he welcomed people because in doing this, he made them one of his family and he embodied
the kingdom of God.
In the very way he lived with them.
Another illustration of Jesus' emphasis on the love of God is that Jesus emphatically
and distinctively, though not uniquely, Jesus emphatically says that God should be addressed
as Father.
The Aramaic word is Abba, and it occurs throughout the Gospels.
There is a concentration.
In the Gospels, about God as Abba that we don't find in any other Jewish text of the
first century.
When Jesus taught his famous Lord's Prayer, he said, "This is how you should pray.
Every time you pray, you start by saying, 'Our Father.'"
That Jesus, in Matthew chapter 11, says that these things have been "hidden from the
wise and the learned, and revealed to the babes that God is Father."
When Jesus is on the cross, he prays "Father" several times.
Father in the Jewish world always connoted two things.
It meant authority.
Fathers in a Jewish family were the leaders and the guides, and they had a certain sense
of authority.
Power, in fact.
And yet, at the same time, the word Father connotes and suggests and embodies family
intimacy.
A Jewish man continued to call his father Abba all the way through his life.
And this is the language of the family.
It is not that far from our sense of daddy, or what we would call intense, intimate family
language.
That Jesus calls us to call God Father is an invitation to the family and to the family
table.
Together, what Jesus teaches us about God is that our God is both holy and loving, both
loving and holy, that we worship this God, but that this God picks us up and embraces
us with his grace and love.
The story of Israel comes to fulfillment in the story of Jesus.
And the story of Jesus is shaped by the God of Jesus.
And this God is intent on forming a people in this world that are called the kingdom of God.
And in our next session, we're going to look at this theme of the kingdom of God.
The Kingdom of God