Trinitarian Surrender
Notes
Transcript
One summer Saturday morning, a father decided to take his son fishing for the first time. The boy had been fishing with his father a number of times before and had watched him closely, but he had never been allowed to fish himself. You should also know that this young man was not unlike many children: he was precocious and independent, always wanting to do things on his own. As soon as they arrived at the lake shore, the boy took out the Snoopy fishing poll his father had bought him, seized a worm out of the container, and proceeded in an attempt to bait the hook. His father saw what was transpiring and said to the boy, “Son, wait. Let me show you how to bait the hook.” Showing his independent personality, the boy said, “No daddy, I do it myself.” The father watched as the boy struggled to get the wriggling worm on the hook. In frustration, he pinched the worm hard and forced the hook right through the worm and into his thumb. The boy whelped in pain and grabbed his thumb. It wasn’t a major wound, just a small puncture wound, but it was bleeding and hurt like the dickens. Injured, looking up at his father, he said, “Daddy, I can’t do it. Will you help me?”
In my mind, this story presents a helpful picture of spiritual surrender. An aspect of surrender is coming to a place where we stop resisting and insisting that we can live the Christian life on our own without our Father’s help and without the support of other Christians. Like the boy, we want to do it on our own, so we press and we try and we summon all the energy we can to live the life of discipleship, and these efforts always lead to discouragement. I think we try to be Christ-like on our own because we see the life of discipleship as more of a command than an invitation. Imagine if the father in our story had told the boy, “Son, go fishing and bring something back,” and expected the boy to find his own way to the lake, catch something, and find his own way home. It’s an absurd expectation.
Yet, this is exactly how we often approach discipleship: it’s as though God has commanded us to go live the life of discipleship instead of inviting us to journey with him. Notice that when Jesus called the disciples he said, “Come, follow me.” It was an invitation to journey with him, to become his apprentices and learn from him. So, I want to suggest that discipleship is more invitation than command, and it is not something we can do without the Father’s help.
To come to that realization that we are powerless to overcome the brokenness in our lives without God’s help. To realize that we are incapable of faithfully living the Christian life by our will and determination is a form of surrender.
I wanted to begin the sermon this way because the Beatitudes are tough. We have no hope of living a life reflective of the Beatitudes without God’s help in spite of our repeated attempts to do so. So, we might as well declare defeat and surrender right up front. We simply will never be able to muster enough willpower to conform our lives to these sayings. Before we shove the hook into our thumb and hurt ourselves by trying to muster up hunger and thirst for righteousness, we might as well just say, “Father, I can’t do this. Will you help me?”
The Beatitudes, then, begin with surrender.
Surrender does not appeal to us because it suggests weakness and defeat. However, I want to suggest that surrender to God leads not to defeat but overwhelming victory. I also believe that surrender is not weakness but power because it reflects the nature of God’s Trinitarian Personhood. If I’m correct, then, when we surrender we bear the image of God because surrender is reflective of God’s nature.
If I were in your seat, I’d be thinking, “Is this guy crazy? What’s he talking about? God surrenders to no one! This is heresy.” If that’s what you’re thinking, you’re correct in that God surrenders to no one outside himself, bu there is a sense in which the Persons of the Trinity self-surrender to one another. E. Stanley Jones, the great Methodist missionary to India, put it this way:
“Self-surrender is at the very heart of God and is at the very heart of all his attitudes and actions. When He asks us to surrender ourselves, He is asking us to fulfill the deepest thing in Himself and the deepest thing in us.”
Jones is claiming that self-surrender is one of the deepest aspects of God’s very being. In order to see how this is so, we must look to the doctrine of the Trinity and the way in which the Persons of the Trinity relate to one another.
The theologian, Karl Rahner, famously said,
“The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa.”
This pithy statement became known as Rahner’s Rule. While powerful, it contains some technical language used among Trinitarian theologians that requires explanation. Theologians have long made a distinction between what they call the immanent Trinity and the Economic Trinity. Just so you know, it took me a long time to get my head around this important distinction, so I’m going to do my very best to explain it simply and clearly.
The immanent Trinity refers to the internal relations among the three Persons of the Trinity that remain largely hidden from us.
The economic Trinity refers to God’s revealed actions in human history.
To illustrate, think of a married couple. There are aspects of their relationship that no one else sees. There are ways the couple expresses their love, concern, and affection for each other when no one else is around. The nature of that connection remains largely hidden to those outside their marriage. However, when we see a husband take of his warm jacket and give it to is shivering wife in the cold, that tells us something about how they relate to one another. When a woman tells her friends what a great husband and father he is, that tells us something about how they connect when no one is around. Whey they hold hands in public, that communicates something about how they interact when it’s just them.
The Immanent Trinity reflects the way the members of the Trinity relate to each other internally. It remains largely hidden from us and a mystery, but we know something about how they relate to one another internally because of their actions in human history. Thus, what God does publicly, in history for us to see tells us something about the internal relationships of the Trinity. The incarnation of the second Person of the Trinity is a great example that reveals how self-surrender is at the heart of God’s internal relations.
Hebrews 1:1-3 says,
1 Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets,
2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.
3 He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,
According to this text, God has spoken to us in a new and profound way through his Son, Jesus Christ. God spoke to us not through the words of a prophet but through his very own presence among us in Jesus who is the “exact imprint of God’s very being.” So, when we look at the Incarnation of Jesus (one of God’s acts in history - the economic Trinity), that act tells us something important about the internal relations within the very being of God: how the Persons of the Trinity internally relate in their very being (the immanent Trinity).
In Jesus of Nazareth, we behold the eternal Son of God entering the human condition within history and surrendering to the will of the Father.
In John 5:30, Jesus confesses
30 “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I seek to do not my own will but the will of him who sent me.
Jesus, being fully human, confesses his need for the Father’s help. Thus, self-surrender as revealed to us in Jesus Christ is part of God’s very nature and Being. To surrender, then, is a way in which we bear the very image of God. Surrender is not weakness, it is the fulfillment of our vocation as divine image bearers.
If we approach the Beatitudes with an attitude of self-reliance and determination, the outcome will almost certainly be discouragement and despondency.
However, if we start from a place of surrender, from a place of saying, “Father, I can’t do this. Please help me,” well then we have chance.
So let’s unpack the next three Beatitudes today: hungering and thirsting for righteousness, being merciful, and purity of heart. We’ll begin with hungering and thirsting for righteousness.
Matthew 5:6 reads,
6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Most of us when we think of righteousness we think of personal moral uprightness and personal moral action. So, to hunger and thirst for righteousness is to hunger and thirst for moral uprightness in our personal lives. Such a definition captures part of the meaning of the Greek word used here in Matthew 5:6, but not all of it. In English we have two separate words to capture the full meaning of this one Greek word. In Greek, the word, δικαιοσύνη, captures both the concept of righteousness and the concept of justice in our language.
δικαιοσύνη
In English, righteousness tends to denote a quality of the individual person while justice tends to apply to apply to a pattern of fair treatment for a group of people. Thus, to be righteous might mean (if you’re male) treating the women you work with with the same amount of respect you would give to your male colleagues and affording your female coworkers the same opportunities you would offer to your male colleagues. Seeking justice, on the other hand, might mean using your influence to urge HR to evaluate employee compensation to see if there is an unfair pay gap between men and women, and if there is, asking the company to rectify the situation. Thus, to seek justice is to seek the right functioning of a community. Hopefully, you’ll see that while there is a difference between righteousness and justice in our language, you cannot have one with out the other. One who is not righteous is not likely to seek justice. And unjust communities are not likely to produce righteous people.
With both meanings in mind, I would suggest that a great translation for this verse would be: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for all things (individuals, cultures, and systems) to be set right, to be set in accordance with God’s plan and design for people and creation.”
Today, I want to argue that this robust notion of justice/righteousness is cross-shaped.
That is, there are two inseparable components of the Greek word used in Matthew 5:6: a vertical beam and a horizontal beam. The vertical beam represents God’s transformative work in our individual lives to cultivate Christ-likeness. The horizontal component refers to God’s work in our communities to cultivate Christ-likeness in them.
Accordingly, to hunger and thirst after righteousness/justice is not only to long for moral uprightness within ourselves but to long for our entire world to be set right such that everyone is treated well. God’s promise is that those who hunger for all things to be put right in this way will certainly not go unsatisfied.
In our second Beatitude for today, Jesus declares, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” The Greek word employed here in Matthew 5:7 refers to those who are concerned about the needs of others, and, contextually, the Sermon on the Mount beckons us to be merciful toward those we’d rather not receive mercy.
Later on in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is going to instruct his hearers to love their enemies. This is no small charge. That particular passage concludes in Matthew 5:48 with
48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
In the context of this passage, then, God’s perfection is demonstrated in God’s kindness toward the righteous and the unrighteous. To be like God, then, is to care both for those who are kind to us and those who mistreat us, to care fore those who deserve it and those who don’t. Interestingly though, Luke 6:36 renders Jesus’ statement this way.
36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
Accordingly, when we read this verse canonically with both Matthew and Luke in view, the kind
of mercy God has in mind is the kind that is extended even to those whom we deem unworthy of mercy. Otherwise, if we only offer mercy to those we think deserve it, how are we different than anyone else?
As I was preparing for this sermon this week, I drove past a young, homeless man holding a sign asking for help as he smoked a cigarette. To me, he looked healthy and able like he should be able to find work, and I thought maybe if he didn’t waste his money on things like cigarettes, he wouldn’t need to beg. Now, I’m not here to get in a debate whether we should give money to homeless people or not. That’s complicated, and I get it. The problem in the scenario I just described is that I judged him unworthy of receiving any mercy from me. I hope God will not judge me in the same way because Lord knows I need mercy.
Our final Beatitude in Matthew 5:8 reads,
8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
When we hear this Beatitude, it sounds very similar to how we traditionally understand hungering and thirsting for righteousness. To be pure in heart is to be pious and innocent, to be righteous. However, purity of heart has a slightly different meaning in this context. In the LXX, the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, this same expression is deployed in Psalm 24:3-4, which reads,
3 Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place?
4 Those who have clean hands and pure hearts, who do not lift up their souls to what is false, and do not swear deceitfully.
To be pure in heart, then, is not so much about innocence as it is about having an undivided loyalty to God. We see this idea fleshed out later on in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:19-24 where Jesus talks about not storing up for ourselves treasures in heaven. Notice that this passage ends with Jesus saying (Matthew 6:24),
24 “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
Here, Jesus speaks of the split devotion that manifests itself in the accumulation of material possessions. However, it’s not just money and possessions that desire our loyalty but many other things: our work, our culture, political party’s, our cell phones...?
I am increasingly beginning to suspect that we have deified our mobile devices and turned them into an idol. Think about the pseudo-divine attributes we functionally assign to them.
Omnipresence - Our mobile devices are always with us and always available to us. Many of us panic when we can’t find them.
Omniscience - We tend to treat them as all knowing. How do we often settle disagreements with others over disputed facts? We look it up on the phone to see who’s right. Got a health concern? Dr. Google is ready and waiting to diagnose you with three or more rare, terminal illnesses.
Finally, there is omnipotence. Through your phone, tablet, or computer you can move massive amounts of money at a moment’s notice. Amazon provides you with virtually anything you could want. Want to exact revenge on someone? That option is just a Facebook post, online review, text, email, or Tweet away. And of course there is the way our mobile devices demand our attention. It rings. Yes, Lord, your servant is listening. W receive a text or social media notification. Yes, Lord, your servant is listening. Your smartwatch tells you it’s time to stand up. May your word to me be fulfilled.
The ability communicate, gather information, make convenient purchases, or get reminders are not bad in themselves. However, when I go to a restaurant, and I see a whole family sitting together not talking because each person is on their phone, it makes me wonder to what we are really devoted. I kid you not I saw a person in a contemporary worship service raising one hand in an act of worship as he sang the song while in the other he was reading something on his smartphone, and it wasn’t the lyrics because those were on the screen. It’s worth our time and thought to consider how much time we devote to our mobile devices if we desire to be pure in heart. I know this is an area of consideration for me. And again, if you realize this is an issue for you, don’t jump on the shame train. Simply say, “Father, I cannot do this. Will you help me?”
To hunger and thirst for righteous and justice, to be merciful even to those we deem unworthy of mercy, and to have an undivided loyalty to God are tall orders and there are six other Beatitudes that demand our attention! The only path I can discern where we have a shot at embodying these sayings begins with surrender. As Jesus modeled surrender for us in his relationship with the Father, may we say as he did in John 5:30, “We can do nothing on our own.” May we bear the image of God through the act of surrender, which is revealed as a disposition in the very being of the Triune God. It will be through this type of Trinitarian surrender that these Beatitudes will not just be aspirations but descriptions of our lives.
Reflection Questions
Reflection Questions
What are you going through in your life right now that you need to say, “Father, I can’t do this. I need your help?
Of the Beatitudes we discussed today, which one do you need the most help with: hungering and thirsting for righteousness, being merciful, or having a pure, undivided heart?