A Sort of Homecoming

Essays Honoring the Academic and Community Work of Brian Walsh

Marcia Boniferro, Amanda Jagt, Andrew Stephens-Rennie, Marcia Boniferro, Amanda Jagt

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781532683558
  9781532683565
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532683572
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

We live in a culture of collective fear over climate change and mass migration, and we experience increasing intense personal anxiety and despair. How might the Bible's themes of homecoming and homemaking address our physical, emotional, and spiritual displacement? This collection of essays honors the academic and community work of Brian J. Walsh upon his retirement as Campus Minister at the University of Toronto Christian Reformed Campus Ministry. The collection is a stunning mosaic at once academic and personal--representing the many elements of Brian's life as pastor, theologian, professor, farmer, mentor, and friend. In an age when "home" feels physically and spiritually elusive for so many, this volume reawakens our imaginations to the foundational biblical themes of homecoming and homemaking. Academic, pastoral, personal, and timely, this volume honors Brian's career and equips readers to engage the fear and anxiety of our age with the hope of the gospel.

1

Jesus as the Face of God

Hendrik Hart

Readings of rich texts with long histories of interpretation almost naturally yield a large number of different results. Offering readings of Scripture’s rich texts has been a significant dimension of Brian Walsh’s ministry, and he and I first engaged in such explorations nearly half a century ago in a class at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, offered as an orientation for the work done there. Fittingly, this is a reading in the Gospel of John, for which Brian and I ever since that class have maintained a profound love. And it is a reading focused on the prologue to the Gospel, read as key to all that follows, offering the good news that in Jesus, God has come home. Home is a theme that features prominently in Brian’s ministry.

1. First Reading: The Prologue

I propose to read the end of the prologue to John’s Gospel as its climax: “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has made him known” (John 1:18).1 Traditionally that ending has often been read as being about Jesus as God. It is then taken, together with other texts in John, to proclaim Jesus’ divinity. A slightly different reading, however, could offer a somewhat different meaning, in which this text may not intend to be about Jesus as God, but more about God as (in) Jesus. As I read it the text tells me, besides the many other things it may also be saying, that the God who was never seen (known) becomes visible (known) in Jesus who was God’s intimate. God is God in Jesus. “Seeing” is a many layered word in John. Here it can be read as a way of knowing: Moses in Exodus didn’t see/know God in all fullness; that glorious fullness first became visible/known in Jesus. Or, more broadly: God was not fully known until Jesus became God’s incarnate presence.

This reading of who God is connects the end of the prologue with its opening. “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1) and “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1) are here related to tell a fuller story. The Maker of heaven and earth is now specifically made known as the Word who became flesh in Jesus. It is no surprise that John starts the prologue of the Gospel of Jesus with the creation as its setting. He thereby provides a familiar orientation for his Jewish readers, who knew God the Creator as their help in danger. The Maker of heaven and earth was Israel’s Redeemer and the Redeemer was the Maker of heaven and earth. When pilgrims went up to Jerusalem to celebrate their arch deliverance from Egypt, they sang songs of ascent as they went. Three of these songs praise their Creator as their help in all danger (Pss 121; 124; 134). Creator and helper are one as sides of a coin.

Israel’s confession and experience of God as the Maker of heaven and earth and therefore as helper has profound significance and is not confined to the psalms. The Creator God as helper appears throughout the Old and New Testaments, as well as in how the Apostles and Nicene Creeds name God. John Calvin was so powerfully gripped by this confession that he ordered worship in the churches to open with: “Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth” (Ps 124:8). This opening of worship services was still used when I was younger.

John’s story of creation at the opening of the prologue tells us that from the very beginning the Maker of heaven and earth was our helper in the Word that became flesh. So startling was this proclamation that when Israel’s helper came to his own in that Word made flesh, he was no longer recognizable. The incarnation, intended to fully reveal God as helper, began in alienation as John tells it. The God who came home found nobody home, a far cry from the vision of God finding a home among people in the beginning of Revelation 21, and far removed also from Jesus alluding to his father’s home, in John 14, as God dwelling in us. How can we understand this non-recognition?

In this reading, John unveils the disconnection between the reception of the Word of origin and of the Word incarnate as a clash between different understandings of Exod 34:6–7: “And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, ‘The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.’”

This brief but highly significant passage is sometimes referred to as Israel’s grounding creed. References to it appear throughout the Bible, e.g., in the Torah, the Psalms, and several minor prophets. The context is God’s self-revelation to Moses after the shocking event of Israel’s worship of the golden calf. This glorious self-revelation was a response to Moses’ request to see God’s glory. God grants this request in part: Moses will see God’s goodness in full, but not God’s face (Exod 33:17–23). The self-revelation, however, besides proclaiming all God’s goodness in full glory, emphatically also includes God’s intent to punish the guilty for as long as four generations.

The Christian church best knows the message of that last sentence from the ten commandments. Wherever the law was read in church, people heard that God is a jealous God who punishes iniquity (Deut 5:9). However, that is followed by: “but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments” (Deut 5:10). From the time that I was able to understand this, it engaged me: do the compassionate God and the jealous God go together? Some of Israel’s minor prophets addressed this question as well: they struggled with Israel’s confession of an all-forgiving God who was also a punishing God in God’s revelation to Moses. Among the Old Testament’s minor prophets we find differences in their interpretation of Exod 34:6–7 on precisely this point. Generally speaking, when these prophets quote or refer to vv. 6 and 7, some focus on 6–7a and intentionally ignore 7b, while others do the very opposite.2 So, usually they refer either to God’s boundless goodness or to God’s punishment, but not both. John, as a Jew, would have been familiar with this, and I read the prologue as his addressing of this difference. John joins the prophets who stress God’s boundless love. God as known in Jesus (v. 18) is God the Creator-helper (vv. 1–4) who is fully revealed in Jesus as fullness of grace. John, perhaps unique in this respect among New Testament authors, knows no boundaries to God’s grace.

In the prologue vv. 14–18, in my reading, John tells us that what Moses asked for but didn’t get became fully real in Jesus:

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”) Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.

So, I read John’s good news of the incarnation as intertwined with Exod 34:6–7a and intentionally leaving out 7b. He proclaims the incarnation as God’s coming home to creation in Jesus as the all-forgiving God made flesh. God in Jesus, as John tells it, fulfills the boundless love of Exod 34:6–7a and passes over 7b. The prologue’s end in vs 18, so read, specifically intends to identify God not as the jealous God of the ten commandments, but as the forgiving God made known in Jesus. But this identification would be a stumbling block to all who continue to worship and serve a God who forgives and also punishes. They, then as now, do not welcome God to come home in Jesus in this manner. In short, John’s prologue to his Gospel proclaims that God, the Maker of heaven and earth, fully becomes manifest as Israel’s and the world’s helper in Jesus the son. With revealing allusions to Exod 34:6–7a in the context of Exod 33:12—34:9, John preaches a gospel of full forgiveness: God is the faithfully loving and reliable one: hesed and emeth, usually translated as grace and truth, though grace and faithful love come closer to the original meanings. So, the close of the prologue announces that Jesus has made God known as the God full of grace and truth, the God of Exod 34:6–7a, the Maker of heaven and earth visible as helper in full glory. Jesus is the face of God; we, unlike Moses, can now come close enough to see God’s glory. The face of God is now visible in Jesus. So far no one had seen God, not even Moses. But at the end of the prologue we get to know that in Jesus God’s glory has become visible as the glory of the son.

In the ministry of Moses, God gave us the law. The law demands punishment when transgressed. In the ministry of Jesus, God gives us the fullness of glory in what Exod 34:6–7a ca...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• About the Editors
• Chapter 1: Jesus as the Face of God
• Chapter 2: Places That Shape Us
• Chapter 3: Heaven as Home in Christian Hope
• Chapter 4: Searching For Home, Discovering Peace
• Chapter 5: Reflections on Interfaith Work and City-Building
• Chapter 6: Jewelry in the Apocalypse
• Chapter 7: Welcome Homeless
• Chapter 8: Voices from the Ragged Edge
• Chapter 9: Iris and Nereus Here and Now
• Chapter 10: Hospitality as Hermeneutic and Way of Life
• Chapter 11: Springtime in Cape Town
• Chapter 12: The Wit(h)ness of Suffering Love
• Chapter 13: The Reconciling Power of Public Art In a Broken Home221
• Chapter 14: Of Tents and Temples
• Chapter 15: Revillaging the City
• Chapter 16: Setting Another Place at the Table
• Chapter 17: Reconciling the World?
• Chapter 18: Holiness and Homemaking
• Chapter 19: Animism Reconsidered
• Chapter 20: Home Is Where the Wild Rice Is387
• Afterword