Monthly Archives: January 2009

The work of the people is the work of the Holy Spirit

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Simon Chan, “A Theological Understanding of the Liturgy as the Work of the Spirit”


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The most interesting part of my second day at the Worship Symposium at Calvin was Simon Chan’s workshop on the liturgy as the work of the Holy Spirit.  Dr. Chan is a Pentecostal who teaches at Trinity Theological College, an ecumenical Christian seminary in Singapore; from the title and the interview he gave Christianity Today last year, I knew him to be rather more liturgically-minded than most Pentecostals, but I didn’t expect him to ground his argument in the work of Eastern Orthodox theologians like John Zizioulas and Nikos Nissiotis—which is exactly what he did.  It was a fascinating argument and discussion about the way in which the Holy Spirit works on and in the church, and effectively takes on the shape of the church—the church, we might say, becomes the body of Christ by embodying the Holy Spirit.I’ll be a while processing what Dr. Chan had to say, I suspect; but I greatly appreciate his emphasis on the fact that the Spirit of God is always present with and at work in the church, and that it’s the Spirit’s ongoing work that constitutes the church.  That really drives home the point that we are entirely dependent on grace.

The importance of friendship in ministry

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The Worship Symposium began today at Calvin; this year, I started off by taking a seminar on “Developing Pastoral Excellence,” which turned out to be interesting in an unexpected way.  The presenter, the Rev. David Wood, is the director of Transition into Ministry, a program funded by the Lilly Foundation which seeks to aid and support pastors in the transition from the education process into the early years of their first call.  As such, he’s been thinking a lot about what it means to be a good pastor and what is necessary for pastors to minister well; in so doing, in looking at all the list that various authors have generated of what makes an excellent pastor, he noticed “the sound of something missing”:  he argued that an essential and unconsidered component of pastoral excellence is friendship.In brief, his argument runs like this.  To be a good pastor, one must be a person of character and integrity and moral habit; as Aristotle (whom he quoted repeatedly) says, “We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”  To live in this way requires sustained moral effort; and to sustain moral effort, the Rev. Wood contends (following Aristotle), we need friends of character—deep, strong friendships with godly people whom we can trust implicitly.This is true for a number of reasons.  For one, central to our work as pastors is our ability to maintain a proper balance of intimacy and distance with the people in our congregations, something we can’t do if we’re starved for intimacy ourselves.  For another, this requires a degre of self-knowledge which we can’t manage on our own—we need people who know us well to reflect us back to ourselves, so that we can see them through their eyes.  For a third, we need support, reinforcement, encouragement, and sometimes a good swift kick or two from others if we’re to live lives of excellence of character—none of us have the resources in ourselves to do that alone.And fourth, we need friends to protect us from boredom.  The Rev. Wood argues that when you see a pastor in moral collapse, you’re probably seeing someone who was bored with their life.  It’s easy to grow bored with the things that matter most to us if we have no one with whom to share them; it’s easy to forget why they matter.  We need others to help us remember, and to help us stay excited about and invested in them.  As long as we stay interested in what we’re called to be doing, we stay energized about doing it, and invested in it.  When we get bored, we go looking for trouble—and usually find it.

Lessons from the mistakes of the Bush administration

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courtesy of the Baseball Crank, who has put together an excellent and thoughtful list.NB:  this is a list of mistakes—to wit, things that hampered President Bush and his administration in achieving their goals and purposes—not a list of policy disagreements.  To take the biggest one, the invasion of Iraq was not a “mistake.”  You may think we never should have invaded Iraq, and history may prove you right or it may prove you wrong, but either way, that’s not a “mistake”—it’s a policy judgment with which you disagree.  That’s a whole other list and a whole different set of questions and issues.As such, almost all of the points on this list are apolitical; certainly the first eight are, and even the last two probably apply to Democrats as well as Republicans, though differently.  Most of these points have to do with matters of practical judgment such as personnel appointments and communication.

Laughing at Uncle Joe; or, is Joe Biden the new Dan Quayle?

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I like what Ed Walsh has to say about this:

In an earlier post, I mentioned the trouble comedians were having coming up with a funny trope to use to poke fun at President Obama. The experts’ conclusion seems to be that Vice President Biden is the fattest target for humor in the Administration.Now we see the story developing further. It’s not just Biden, see, but Obama’s reaction to Biden that is becoming a reliable comic routine. In this scenario, Barack Obama is Joe Biden’s straight man.It’s promising. As this Politico clip of segments from “The Daily Show” and “The Tonight Show” makes clear, watching the habitually on-message president react to Biden’s howitzer-in-a-hurricane rhetorical style is pretty funny. And it offers the hint of a crack in Obama’s cool public face.

John Updike, RIP

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If you’d asked me yesterday who was America’s greatest living writer, I probably would ultimately have come down for John Updike; as the Wikipedia article on him puts it, “Updike was widely recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his highly stylistic writing, and his prolific output, having published more than twenty-five novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children’s books.”  He seemed to do everything, as a writer, and if not always brilliantly, he consistently managed to do it with insight and wit.  I particularly appreciate his willingness to be unfashionable in his opinions (as seen for instance in his piece “On Not Being a Dove”).  Like the rest of his contemporaries, he was no longer at his best as a writer, but his death today of lung cancer is a great loss to the republic of American letters—with his independence of mind, I think, being the greatest loss of all.

An unexamined faith is . . . what?

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In my previous post, commenting on James Hitchcock’s Touchstone editorial “Subject to Change,” I discussed the main body of his argument, but I didn’t address his closing comment, which might be the most interesting thing he has to say:

One of the oldest and deepest assumptions of Western civilization is that the unexamined life is not worth living, and it is a perplexing theological conundrum to what extent real faith exists if the possibility of rejecting it does not exist also.

This is in one way a logical conclusion to his piece, since it does connect directly to the burden of his argument; this is really the core question underlying the issue he raises.  Put like this, however, this closing paragraph is also an opening paragraph to an article (or a book) not yet written, as it opens out onto a whole new field of discussion.  For my part, I tend to think this is a question without a definitive answer—that it really depends on the person; it does seem clear, though, that an unexamined or unchallenged faith, if not necessarily less real, is at least far less robust than a faith that has had to confront and address the possibility of unbelief.  As well, those whose faith is never questioned are not likely to learn to question and evaluate themselves, and thus their faith will probably tend to be shallower, and to engage life in a more superficial fashion.  I don’t think we can look down on those whose faith is sheltered, but we can say that it’s an open question whether they’ve put their roots deep enough to survive the storms if and when they come.My brothers and sisters, consider it entirely as joy when you face trials of many kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfast endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.—James 1:2-4

Modernity as universal cultural acid

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James Hitchcock has a truly remarkable editorial in the latest Touchstone which asks a penetrating question:  can traditional societies survive the power of modernity?  He writes,

A closed traditional society finds it almost impossible to effect an orderly and controlled transition to modernity. Religion dominates all aspects of life to the extent that no distinction is made between matters of faith and mere custom. . . .Thus, it proves psychologically impossible to discard those things in traditional society that have outlived their legitimacy without thereby setting off global change. The changing culture fosters a half-conscious conviction that truth lies roughly in asserting the opposite of what one previously believed. Changes cannot be evaluated rationally, because people are carried along by a euphoric sense of having liberated themselves from long-standing, narrow oppressiveness.Modern society offers an opportunity to exercise freedom in the fullest sense, an exercise that exposes the facts that what passes for deep conviction may be for many people merely a brittle social conformity, and what passes for morality may be the mere absence of opportunities for sin.Muslims who see the United States as the Great Satan reject the good of political liberty along with the poisonous moral licentiousness that such liberty permits. They perceive the ambiguity of modernity itself, most of which either originated in the United States or has been propagated through American influence.But for that very reason the antibodies to modern cultural viruses also exist most robustly in the United States, which is practically the only society in the Western world where moral traditionalists have an effective voice in public affairs.Religious belief is stronger in America than anywhere else in the West partly because believers have had to find ways of living their faith without the kind of social supports that, historically, were provided in countries with established churches.

This is an interesting explanation for America’s unusual religious culture, and one that makes a great deal of sense; but if he’s right to suggest that “the forces of modernity—political, economic, and cultural—really are irresistible and that sooner or later almost every society in the world will have to face them,” then the implications of his argument must be faced as well, because they are of great significance.  As he says,

If that assumption is correct, it is better to experience modernity sooner rather than later, in order to make use of what is good in it and to learn to cope with what is bad. Simple quarantine is no longer possible. . . .Both for societies and for individuals, our cultural situation is tragic in the classical sense, because it requires decisions none of which are free of possible bad consequences. Maintaining a rigorously closed society may protect generations of people from the worst evils of modernity, even as it virtually guarantees that later generations will be infected all the more virulently. But alternatively, allowing people a good measure of freedom inevitably leads to abuse.

While, from a Christian perspective, one may well call the consequences of this situation for the church tragic, there is a silver lining as well:  if Hitchcock’s overall thesis is correct, then that applies not only to Christian societies but also to Muslim societies as well.  This suggests that while traditionalist Islamic societies will no doubt succeed in resisting modernity for some time—which is, I believe, the driving concern behind the rise of Islamism in its various forms, including its most virulent strain, jihadism—they cannot resist forever; eventually, the Islamic world will see its own version of Quebec’s “Silent Revolution,” and the collapse of radical Islam, leaving much of the Islamic world looking much like the once-Christian nations of western Europe.  This offers hope that, in our conflict with militant Islam as with the Cold War against global communism, if we will stand strong and not surrender, we will see a Berlin Wall moment.

The state of the media and the sphere of legitimate debate

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I read an interesting article yesterday on why the Internet weakens the authority of the press (thanks to a link from JMHawkins in the comments on this post on the probable closure of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and why that matters; the post deals specifically with sports coverage, but the points it makes are broader in application).  The article, posted by Jay Rosen on PressThink (which looks like it might be a blog for the blogroll), deals with the following diagram from the 1986 book The “Uncensored War”:  The Media and Vietnam by Daniel C. Hallin:Rosen describes these three spheres in this way:

1.) The sphere of legitimate debate is the one journalists recognize as real, normal, everyday terrain. They think of their work as taking place almost exclusively within this space. (It doesn’t, but they think so.) Hallin: “This is the region of electoral contests and legislative debates, of issues recognized as such by the major established actors of the American political process.” . . .2. ) The sphere of consensus is the “motherhood and apple pie” of politics, the things on which everyone is thought to agree. Propositions that are seen as uncontroversial to the point of boring, true to the point of self-evident, or so widely-held that they’re almost universal lie within this sphere. Here, Hallin writes, “journalists do not feel compelled either to present opposing views or to remain disinterested observers.” (Which means that anyone whose basic views lie outside the sphere of consensus will experience the press not just as biased but savagely so.)
Consensus in American politics begins, of course, with the United States Constitution, but it includes other propositions too, like “Lincoln was a great president,” and “it doesn’t matter where you come from, you can succeed in America.” Whereas journalists equate ideology with the clash of programs and parties in the debate sphere, academics know that the consensus or background sphere is almost pure ideology: the American creed.3.) In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible. The press “plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant view, says Hallin. It “marks out and defends the limits of acceptable political conduct.”Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition.

Rosen analyzes the work of the press in terms of these categories, and makes some interesting points:

That journalists affirm and enforce the sphere of consensus, consign ideas and actors to the sphere of deviance, and decide when the shift is made from one to another— none of this is in their official job description. You won’t find it taught in J-school, either. It’s an intrinsic part of what they do, but not a natural part of how they think or talk about their job. Which means they often do it badly. Their “sphere placement” decisions can be arbitrary, automatic, inflected with fear, or excessively narrow-minded. Worse than that, these decisions are often invisible to the people making them, and so we cannot argue with those people. It’s like trying to complain to your kid’s teacher about the values the child is learning in school when the teacher insists that the school does not teach values. . . .Deciding what does and does not legitimately belong within the national debate is—no way around it—a political act. And yet a pervasive belief within the press is that journalists do not engage in such action, for to do so would be against their principles. As Len Downie, former editor of the Washington Post once said about why things make the front page, “We think it’s important informationally. We are not allowing ourselves to think politically.” I think he’s right. The press does not permit itself to think politically. But it does engage in political acts. Ergo, it is an unthinking actor, which is not good. When it is criticized for this it will reject the criticism out of hand, which is also not good.

This is, I think, essentially correct, and is a more helpful way of understanding media bias than simply using categories of left and right; among other things, it’s a more nuanced model, allowing room for what he refers to as “complications,” such as the point that these spheres cannot be understood monochromatically:

Within the sphere of legitimate debate there is some variance. Journalists behave differently if the issue is closer to the doughnut hole than they do when it is nearer the edge.

That said, to make use of this model it is necessary to map it to the political spectrum in this country; and that, of course, is where disputes arise.  Rosen is clearly a man of the left, and those who engage with him would seem to be even more so; for him, and for them, it seems to be axiomatic that the media’s understanding of the sphere of consensus is wrongly shifted in a conservative direction—and thus, to put the matter in standard terminology, that the media is biased against liberals.  From where I stand, that seems nonsensical.  But then, as Rosen might say, this isn’t really a dispute about the media at all:  it’s a political dispute based on the differing understandings of conservatives and liberals about what properly belongs in each sphere.  As such, it is in fact an inevitable political dispute over the most basic part of any political discussion:  the definition of the terms of that discussion.  This is why Markos Moulitsas (the Kos of Daily Kos, for anyone who might not know) said in his response to Rosen’s post,

The person who controls the [conventional wisdom] controls the terms of the debate. Modern activism is in large part a battle to capture that CW.

Of course, the ultimate purpose of Rosen’s article is to apply this analysis to the rise of the blogosphere, about which he makes an interesting point:

In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized—meaning they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the “sphere of legitimate debate” as defined by journalists doesn’t match up with their own definition.

I think he’s right about that; but in truth, I think he doesn’t go far enough.  It’s not just that journalists’ definition of the sphere of legitimate debate doesn’t match up with “their” definition—it’s that there is no one “they,” and thus that we may wind up with the national conversation being atomized instead as different groups insist on their differing definitions of the various spheres.  We have people, for instance, working very hard to define “Sarah Palin is an idiot” into the sphere of consensus for purposes of political expedience, and others working very hard to move that statement into the sphere of deviance on the grounds that it’s objectively untrue.  The danger of this sort of conflict is that it may tend to replace legitimate debate over issues with arguments over whether issues are legitimate—a sort of meta-debate which is not likely to prove productive.  Disputes over definitions are, as I said, inevitable in any political conversation; but when they’re used as a proxy to avoid actually having the conversation, that’s unhealthy for democracy.  The great advantage of the political blogosphere is that bloggers, unlike journalists, are open about their partisanship, thus putting the inevitable biases in the foreground and allowing readers to take them into account.  The great disadvantage is that one can always use one’s partisanship as an excuse to treat one’s opponents solely on one’s own terms, rather than putting in the hard work to consider them on their own terms, and thus to give them credit for their good intentions.  Doing so may not be the best thing we can do for our own political agenda—but it is the best thing we can do for the health of our country.

Thought on worship and idolatry

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Human beings have an instinctive tendency to idolatry.  That might seem a strange thing to say in the West, where we don’t have big statues standing around for people to bow down to, but it’s true.  For one thing, we were made to worship, and have a bent that way; if we don’t consciously worship God (or some other god), we will usually find ourselves coming unconsciously to worship something else.This might sound like a strange thing to say, but take a look around. Take a look, not at people’s formal religious affiliations, but at where they put their money, their time, and their trust, and what do you see? You see entertainment; you see possessions; you see, perhaps, investments; with some people, you see their ambitions, whether social, political, or economic; you see relationships, certainly; and you see a lot of people who put most if not all of their money, time, and trust, quite frankly, in themselves. Now, some of these are purely good things—for example, if I didn’t spend money and time on my wife and kids, I’d get a lot of questions, not least from them—and none of them are evil; but the pattern is another matter. As Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there is your heart,” and it’s even truer that where your trust is, there is your heart; we might say, going further, that where your trust and treasure are together, there is your true worship, and the true focus of your attention.Worship isn’t just about going and participating in a formal service somewhere, although that’s what we associate with the word; worship is about giving honor, and according someone (or something) a place of particular importance in our lives.  The word “worship,” in its older English form, was “worthship”; it meant to ascribe worth to something, to see that thing as having worth, as being important, and to treat it accordingly. Now, the word “worship” has come to have a more specific meaning, a formally religious one, but that old meaning is still at the core of it—it means to treat something or someone as of greatest worth, and to behave accordingly.This is perfectly natural; indeed, we might say it’s necessary, or even inevitable.  The problem is, in our pride, we resist according that place to God, because doing so means giving up control—or, at least, the illusion of control—and so we have the tendency to turn instead to things, or to the self, to find security and peace and meaning in life instead of turning to God.  That way, by giving pride of place to nothing greater than the self, we remain free from being told what to do (as long as circumstances permit, anyway).  The problem is, in so doing, we put our trust and our hope in things which simply cannot bear the weight, and so—sooner or later—they fail us.(Partially excerpted from “Can You Do This?”)

“Can You Do This?”

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(Isaiah 41:21-42:9, Matthew 12:15-21)

I said last week that Isaiah liked court scenes, and here we have another one—but this one has a different tone, and a different purpose. God called the nations before him in the beginning of chapter 41 for them to hear his case, offering them the blessings of his kingdom, but they ran from him, fleeing to their idols; and so now, after a word of encouragement to his people Israel, God returns to the courtroom to put the idols on trial. You can just imagine the scene, as the bailiff rises in the court:

Hear ye, hear ye! This court is now in session. The God of Israel is accusing the defendants, the gods of the nations, of deceptive advertising practices and numerous anti-trust violations, on the grounds that they claim to be gods but in fact are not, and thus are claiming rights and privileges which they do not in fact deserve. Will the prosecutor, the prophet Isaiah, please call his first witness?

Your Honor, I would like to call all the defendants to the stand as a group. Let the people of all nations carry their gods into this honorable court, for the LORD, the King of Israel, challenges these gods to prove themselves. Yes, if you claim to be gods, prove it! Tell us what will happen in the future! If you are truly gods, then you must have some sort of control over what will happen next; tell us your plans, and how you are going to bring them about! Marduk—you’re a big one on military power, and certainly your Babylonians have built up quite the empire; but it’s starting to fall apart now, the army isn’t doing so well, and what are you going to do about it? How about you, Ishtar? Your Assyrians played that game pretty well, too, until Babylon ground them into hamburger. What’s left of you? Do you know what will happen in the future?

. . . Your Honor, I don’t think the defendants can answer the question. It doesn’t matter, though—I have another one for them. Tell me, can you explain the past? Can you tell us why everything happened the way it did, and help us to understand the world we live in now? In particular, can you tell us how the world came to be, and why? My God has done all these things for his people; if you are truly gods, you should be able to do the same, because you should remember the making of the world, and you should understand why everything has happened and what it means. If you are truly worthy of the worship you claim, you should be able to help your followers make sense of the world.

. . . Still no answer? How about this: if you can’t tell us where we’ve been, can you tell us where we’re going? How will the world end? What will come after it? If you can’t explain the past or make sense of the present, can you at least tell us what to expect in the days to come? Will the struggles and pains of the past be redeemed at all in the future? Will the injustices of the present ever be made right? Will any good ever come of the bad things that have happened to us? Do our lives mean anything? Or is all of life just one great big joke with a really bad punch line?

. . . Your Honor, the defendants just sit there. Whether they cannot answer, or simply will not, I don’t know, but I don’t think instructing them that they must answer will accomplish anything. Come now, you great blocks of wood, at least do something! No, don’t tell me that you made the sun come up this morning or the rain fall yesterday—the sun’s been coming up every morning since the beginning of time, and the rain falls every year; how do we know you did that? You could just be taking credit for someone else’s work. No, do something new and different—good or evil, it doesn’t matter, just something surprising, something that will amaze and terrify us—something to prove you’re a god, not merely a fraud.

. . . No? If you can’t answer so simple a challenge, how can you claim to be able to do anything at all? Your Honor, I submit that we have proven our case against the defendants: they are nothing and less than nothing, their work is nothing, they are frauds. Whatever they may be, if they exist at all, they’re only part of the system. They weren’t around when the world was created, they’re as much a part of it as any other rock or stick, and they can’t make anything themselves. They don’t understand anything that has happened and they have no clue what’s going to happen tomorrow, except to guess that it will be the same thing that happened yesterday; they have no understanding of the beginning of things, because they weren’t there, and they can’t conceive of the world ending because they can’t imagine what the alternative might be. All they can do is take credit for the work that the God of Israel does, and draw people away from worshiping him to worship them instead. They are detestable, and they defile those who worship them.

. . . Yes, Your Honor, I realize that isn’t enough. But unlike these pathetic pieces of wood and stone, I have a case. Hear what the LORD says: I stirred up a conqueror in the east, one who will strike from the north; he will trample other rulers underfoot as easily as the potter steps into the vat to mix the water and clay with his feet. I called him, and I predicted his coming far in advance, well before anyone else had ever heard of him. Which of these so-called gods can make such a claim? For all the messages they give their followers, did any of them give any warning at all that my conqueror was coming? No! There was no one who declared it; there was no one who proclaimed it; in fact, no one heard them say anything about the subject at all. Only I, says the LORD, only I announced his coming. I prepared him to deliver my people, and I promised them that he was coming, while none of these other so-called gods said or did anything about him at all. None of them can answer my questions, none of them can explain what I am doing or why, declares the LORD. They are nothing, mere delusion and wind.

. . . Well, as trials go, that one’s pretty much a slam dunk. Of course, it’s easy to say that, since no one has worshiped Bel, Nebo, Marduk, or most of the other gods Isaiah was addressing in a very long time. (Oddly enough, though Babylonian religion is long gone, the religion of their Persian conquerors, Zoroastrianism, is still around; in fact, I went to college with a practicing Zoroastrian.) That doesn’t really make any difference, though; the same questions aimed at our own culture would produce the same results. 

Take a look, not at people’s formal religious affiliations, but at where they put their money, their time, and their trust, and what do you see? You see entertainment; you see possessions; you see, perhaps, investments; with some people, you see their ambitions, whether social, political, or economic; you see relationships, certainly; and you see a lot of people who put most if not all of their money, time, and trust, quite frankly, in themselves. Now, some of these are purely good things—for example, if I didn’t spend money and time on my wife and kids, I’d get a lot of questions, not least from them—and none of them are evil; but the pattern is another matter. As Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there is your heart,” and it’s even truer that where your trust is, there is your heart; we might say, going further, that where your trust and treasure are together, there is your true worship, and the true focus of your attention.

The problem, in other words, is that so many people turn to things, or to themselves, rather than God to find security and peace and to fill the holes in their lives. Most of these things, to be sure, are good in and of themselves, if we keep them in their proper place—and God deeply loves and values every person he has made, whether they return his love or not—but they cannot meet the challenge God offers; they aren’t as important as we often try to make them, and they can’t bear the significance we try to put on them. Just as with the old gods of Assyria and Babylon, when God turns to them and says, “I can do this. Can you do this?” they are silent.

This trial sequence leaves a problem, however: the nations beyond Israel are worshiping things which are no gods, which are in fact nothing at all. They are empty; they have no guidance from God, no source of wisdom and no one to lead them according to his justice. Israel was given that job, but they’ve largely refused to do it. To address that problem, God raises up his Servant—and you’ll note that here, the first time he is mentioned, the focus is on his work as a light to the nations. In Isaiah 49, the second Servant Song, which we’ll consider in a few weeks, the Servant begins by talking about his mission to the Jews before moving to consider his mission to the Gentile world, but here the main concern is for Gentile need. God says of this one “in whom [his] soul delights,” “I have put my Spirit upon him”—which was a major statement in those days; back then, only those whom God had specially chosen for a particular work, like prophets, or the artists who decorated the tabernacle, received his Spirit. But he says of the Servant, “I have put my Spirit upon him, and he will bring forth justice to the nations.”

Now, this word “justice” is that word mishpat again, that we talked about last week; it’s worth repeating here, I think, that this is a concept of justice which isn’t merely punitive, but is restorative. As we said last Sunday, mishpat is all about the restoration of the original created order of the universe, when “everything was right, just, whole, in accordance with God’s perfect will.” As such, justice as we know it is obviously a key part of this idea, but so is peace, because they’re both facets of that same fundamental divine order. The false gods of the nations lead people away from that order and toward chaos—moral and social chaos, yes, but the chaos doesn’t stop there; it always spreads into the physical world. Thus, for instance, treating the world God made with disrespect is morally disordered, but it also disrupts the proper physical order of the world. The work of God’s Servant is to take God’s mishpat, his justice, which he has already revealed to his people through the giving of the law, and bring it to the world.

Note how he’s going to do it. This is not a conqueror, someone who will establish justice through military might or political power; nor is it someone who will call attention to himself and shout down those who oppose him. No, the Servant will come quietly, unthreateningly, with no aggression and no self-promotion. Unlike the demagogue, he will not seek to whip people into an emotional frenzy; unlike the dictator, he will not crush his opponents, nor will he seek to tear down in order that he may rebuild things his own way. Indeed, he won’t even crush the weak, the dying, and the seemingly useless, something powerful people tend to do without even trying; instead, a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not put out. As Old Testament scholar John Oswalt put it, “God’s answer to the oppressors . . . is not more oppression, nor is his answer to arrogance more arrogance; rather, in quietness, humility, and simplicity, he will take all of the evil into himself and return only grace. That is power.”

Now, some will look at him and see that he doesn’t crush the weak, and they will conclude that he is weak himself; but far from it. Verse 4 begins with a bit of wordplay that doesn’t come through in the NIV: the words translated here as “falter” and “be discouraged” are forms of the same words used to describe the wick and the reed. The point, I think, is that the Servant himself will not be a smoldering wick or a bruised reed, but rather a man of great strength of character and will; the attacks and the pressures which weaken and defeat others won’t deter him or slow him down until he has accomplished his purpose of establishing justice in the earth. This is a good thing, for his ministry, both his teaching and his actions, is the only hope for justice the world has.

In verses 5-9 we have, you might say, God’s initial marching orders to his Servant; and notice how he begins: “Thus says God, the LORD, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk in it.” This might seem an odd digression, but in fact it’s nothing of the sort. The Servant’s rule will not be some new imposition on the nations of the world; rather, it will be the continuation and renewal of the plan of the one who created them. It is God who created everything and who keeps it going every minute by his will; it is God who created us and gave us life and identity and awareness; and it is God who sends the Servant to carry on and intensify his sustaining work.

In verse 6 God sets out the overall mission statement for the Servant: “I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations.” His mission begins with his own people, with the nation of Israel. Though God’s people had broken his covenant with them beyond repair, he refused to give up on it or them, and so he would send his Servant to fulfill and restore it; though the Jews had every reason to believe that their relationship with God was hopelessly broken, he came to proclaim to them that God’s covenant love had never and would never let them go. It is also in this that he is the light to the nations; for the darkness of the dungeon and the blindness to which verse 7 refers are the darkness and blindness into which idolatry plunges us, because idolatry exiles us from the source of all light and all good things. But into this darkness shines the light of the relentless love of God, which will not let us go.

It is only God who can do this, for it is only he who is not bound to and by the cycles of the world; for all others, what goes up must come down, but not for him. Thus he says, “See, the former things [which I predicted] have taken place, and new things I now declare.” Idols can’t declare new things, because they can’t do new things; but God can, and does, in the world and in our lives. We aren’t trapped by what has gone before; we aren’t limited by what we can imagine. We are limited by who God is, because he isn’t going to do a new thing that contradicts his character and his will—but anything that God desires to do, he can do. No one expected Jesus, no one of his time ever saw him coming; even to his own people, he was unimaginable, inconceivable—but not to God. God isn’t restricted to doing only what he’s done before, the same way he’s always done it—and therefore, neither are we. 

As we work to develop a new vision for ministry, a new plan and a new approach, it’s easy to doubt that there’s any point—and certainly, we need to learn the cautionary lessons of the past, not just the encouraging ones. We do need to take counsel of what has been tried that hasn’t worked, even if only to remind us that just because we do a new thing, it doesn’t mean we’ll find success. That’s why the important thing is not to come up with our good ideas—even our best ideas—and draw from the best of the conventional wisdom to produce the best plan we can, and then ask God in on it; rather, we need to seek his will, to find out what new thing he’s preparing to do, so that we can get in on that. In Christ, we aren’t locked in by the past, because in him, God has done a new thing, and we have been set free for his future.