What’s
New? – The One New Person in Place of the Two
Ecclesiastes
1:9 Revelation 21:5
Ephesians
2:15
Psalm 33:3
“There is nothing new under the sun”, said the writer of the
book of Ecclesiastes.
“Nothing new?” said
the writer of the book of Revelation; “Everything
is new, for hasn’t God said, ‘Behold, I make all
things new’?”
Then which is it: nothing new or everything new?
I:
-- Let’s
begin with a brief word study. There
are two Greek words for “new”: neos
and kainos.
Neos
means ‘new’ in the sense of chronologically recent.
If I have six identical wineglasses and I break one, I replace it
with a new wineglass of the same kind.
The new one is the same as the odl ones.
It’s new only in the sense that I’ve owned it for ten minutes
instead of ten years. It’s
new in the sense of chronologically recent, even though it’s identical
in all respects with the ‘old’ glasses.
Kainos, on the other
hand, means “qualitatively different.”
For years the Volkswagen Company produced only the “Beetle.”
A new VW Beetle wasn’t a new development; it was simply a
chronologically recent version of the same old car.
Then one day the VW Company brought out the Jetta and the Golf.
These were new developments.
The new VW car was now kainos-new
rather than merely neos-new.
In scripture, wherever human newness is concerned kainos
is used. We humans need ever
so much that’s qualitatively new, ever so much that we can’t produce
ourselves. The newness we
need God alone can produce. For
this reason scripture uses kainos,
qualitatively new, only in connection with what God can produce.
God alone can fashion a new (kainos)
human reality.
God alone can; God just as surely does.
The prophet Ezekiel speaks of God giving people a new heart; God
removes the heart of stone (calcified, cold, inert) and gives us a heart
of flesh (warm, throbbing, life-sustaining.)
Ezekiel tells us that God puts a new spirit within his people.
The apostle Paul, a spiritual descendant of Ezekiel, exclaims,
“If any person is ‘in Christ’ – that person lives in a whole new
world where everything’s new.”
God alone can fashion the humanly new.
He does. The newness
he presses upon us is gift; sheer gift.
At the same time it’s a gift we must exercise.
Not only does Ezekiel tell us that God gives a new heart and new
spirit; he also tells his people “Get
yourselves a new heart and spirit.”
The newness that is God’s gift is also a newness we must
exercise.
Too many people, upon hearing scripture’s characteristic speech
about new heart, new spirit, new creation become dreamy-eyed mystics.
They passively wait for something they-know-not-what, some sort
of intra-psychic vividness. They’ve
heard someone else describe experience of some sort in living colour,
and now they’re waiting for the phosphorescent flash.
We shouldn’t do this. Instead
we should affirm, in faith, that the gift which God alone can bestow
upon us he has bestowed; and then we should set about exercising this gift,
doing the truth. We take God
at his word, and then we act on the truth of that word.
II:
-- God
tells us that he makes all things new.
Lacking time to probe everything he makes new we shall
concentrate on one issue only: the two opposed persons whom he makes
into the one new person. Listen
to Paul: “For he [Christ] himself is our peace, who has made us both
one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of
hostility…that he might create in himself one new man in place of the
two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body
through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.” (Eph. 2:14-16. ESV)
When the apostle says that Jesus Christ has broken down the wall
of hostility and has made one new person in place of the two, he’s
speaking of Jew and Gentile. In
the first century world there was no higher wall than the wall dividing
Jew and Gentile. The Jew
regarded the Gentile as godless and lawless.
The Gentile regarded the Jew as religiously obsessed, and
obsessed with the pointless as well as the grotesque; after all, the
food restrictions were pointless, said Gentiles, while circumcision was
barbaric. Over the centuries
mutual suspicion had hardened into mutual hostility.
The wall between them had had brick after brick added to it until
it was insurmountably high. Not
only could no one bring it down; no one seemed to want to.
And then – this takes the apostle’s breath away – and then
in Jesus Christ, specifically in his cross, the wall had been crumbled.
This one Jew, the Son of God who was also the Son of man; this
one Jew both mediated God to all humankind and mediated all humankind to
God; this one fellow absorbed in himself the lethal hostility that boils
and boils over whenever people who are different in any respect face
each other. In absorbing in
himself such lethal hostility he undercut the standoff; he collapsed the
wall of hostility, thereby making one person in place of two.
Who knows this? Who
knows that the wall is down? Who
knows that Christ alone brought it down?
We do. Christ’s
people do. To be sure, the
two have been fused into one only “in Christ.”
By faith we live “in Christ.”
Therefore by faith we participate in “the one new person.”
Non-Christians don’t live “in Christ.”
Therefore they haven’t discerned that there’s only “the one
new person.” Nevertheless,
since the arms of the crucified embrace the whole world, the whole world
has been appointed to this truth, even if there are some who haven’t
yet perceived it, some who haven’t yet acknowledged it, and some,
quite frankly, who simply don’t believe it and never will.
Still, no one’s disregard of truth undoes the nature of truth.
For this reason Jesus Christ has conscripted his people on behalf
of that truth which he has already established and which can never be
undone.
III:
-- We
can’t deny that the wall of hostility appears to be standing yet.
Think of racial hostility. For
years I’ve heard Canadians say that because the history of
Canada
isn’t as racially torn as the history of the
USA
, therefore Canadians don’t have in their bloodstream the lethal
racism that Americans seem to have.
The premise is correct; the conclusion is false.
Racism is a mark of the Fall, and everyone, everywhere, lives in
the wake of the Fall.
William Stringfellow, the New York City lawyer and Anglican
theologian I’ve spoken of many times here; Stringfellow maintained
that racism in Canada was much more subtle, much more covert, much more
polite than that in the USA, and for that reason harder to identify –
yet no less virulent.
Toronto
, Stringfellow said, was much more racist than
New York City
.
It’s customary for sports teams to accommodate players two to a
hotel room when the team is on the road.
For decades the Ottawa Roughrider football team always roomed
black player with black and white player with white.
What happened when a black player and a white player were left
over? The leftover players,
white and black, were each given a separate hotel room at the team’s
expense lest they have to share a room.
Black Ottawa football players who dated white women were taken
aside and told they shouldn’t be doing such a thing.
Few Canadians appear to be aware that there were slaves in New
France (now
Canada
) during the seventeenth century. Slavery
didn’t end here because of humanitarian enlightenment.
It ended because the climate here didn’t support a plantation
economy. Slavery ended
inasmuch as it didn’t pay white people to enslave black people.
During World War II Canadian citizens (citizens,
be it noted) of Japanese origin were herded into concentration camps
euphemistically called “internment camps.”
(Yes, I’m aware that a few years ago the Canadian government
compensated these people, even as everyone knew that the distress into
which they had been plunged couldn’t be assigned a dollar value at
all, never mind the matter of payment rendered decades later.)
The treatment of Canadian citizens of Japanese origin was deemed
necessary for reasons of national security.
Why, then, were German-Canadians not treated in the same manner?
Because German-Canadians were Caucasian.
The prime minister of
Canada
wrote in his diary, which document came to light years later, that
Canada
had to be protected from “the yellow peril.”
But the highest-ranking RCMP officers declared repeatedly that
there was no peril.
Rabbi Lawrence Englander remains one of my dearest friends in
Mississauga
. Larry’s mother used to
tell me of her teenage years in
Brampton
, when signs were posted reminding Jewish people that they were
forbidden to enter public parks. More
recently two people from Larry’s synagogue in Mississauga have come to
me with heartbreaking stories about public vilification of Jewish people
at the hands of Christian clergy in Mississauga, one event being a
church funeral, another event being a pastor’s conversation with a
thirteen year-old Jewish girl who had been sent to interview him on a
grade eight school project. Solel
Synagogue and Streestville United Church collaborated in masterminding
two affordable housing projects, Jews and Christians alike thinking it
important that financially disadvantaged people have adequate
accommodation. (One project,
by the way, was worth $19 million, the other $15 million.)
At the conclusion of the projects a celebratory party was held on
a Saturday night in the synagogue. While
we were all dancing up a storm in one part of the building, hoodlums
sneaked into another part where the food we were to eat later was
waiting for us. They trashed
the tables laden with food. In
the years I’ve lived in
Mississauga
, Solel Synagogue has been vandalized five times.
Ever since “9/11”,
September 11th 2001
, when the
World
Trade
Towers
were attacked in
New York City
, I have feared an outbreak of Islamophobia.
I have feared that every last Islamic person in
North America
would be looked upon as treacherous.
Some people tell me that there are dark, dark currents in Islam.
Some of the people who tell me this have lived in Islamic
countries for many years. I
have not. Plainly their
identification of dark currents is something I can’t contradict.
Neither do I want to. I
don’t doubt that there are horrifically dark currents in Islam.
But tell me: is
Northern Ireland
Islamic territory? Of course there are dark currents in Islam.
Are there no dark currents in church history?
Ask your Jewish neighbour. You
won’t have to ask her twice. The
truth is, until 1948, the founding of the state of
Israel
, Jewish people received far, far better treatment at the hands of
Muslims than they received at the hands of Christians.
We should ponder all of this carefully.
After all, right now, both in the city of
Toronto
and in
Canada
as whole, there are more Muslims than there are Presbyterians.
When I was a pastor in
New Brunswick
there were enormous tensions between English-speaking and
French-speaking people. High
school students went to two different schools, depending on the language
of instruction. For part of
the bus trip to school, however, both Anglophone and Francophone
students had to ride on the same bus.
The French-speaking students were threatened, with the result
that guardians had to be on the bus in order to get the Francophone
students to school intact. On
one occasion I was speaking with an older woman in the congregation who
wanted to sever and sell part of her ample lot. She
had advertised the piece of land. On
this particular evening a young woman, accompanied by her fiancé,
approached her. They talked
about the land, the purchase price, the date of transferring the deed,
and so on. Somewhat
suspicious now, the older woman said to the younger, “By the way,
what’s your name?” “Poirier.”
“Poirier? The land
isn’t for sale.”
III:
-- I
want you to imagine someone standing in the middle of the street going
through the motions of sawing, hammering, and mixing concrete.
As soon as you see him you tap him on the shoulder and say,
“Excuse me, but there’s nothing here.”
Imagine him replying, “Oh, but there is; there’s a wall here,
and I deem it my responsibility to keep it in good repair.”
Whereupon he returns to the motions of sawing and hammering and
mixing. What would you
conclude about the fellow? You
wouldn’t say, “I think he’s mistaken.”
You would say, “He’s psychotic; he’s no longer in touch
with reality.”
Humanists who act from a humanitarian concern tell us that we
ought to bring down the walls that divide hostile groups.
Humanists insist that not to bring down these walls is to
perpetuate bigotry. Christians,
however, don’t speak like this. We
don’t talk about “bringing down” any wall.
We know that the wall is down now.
To live as if it weren’t down isn’t to display bigotry;
it’s to display insanity.
For twenty or thirty years after the Allied defeat of the
Japanese in World War II a Japanese man would stumble out of a cave on a
Pacific Island where he’d been hiding for the last several decades.
He had been a Japanese soldier stationed on the island when
American forces overran it. Having
fled inland in order to spare himself, he had remained hidden on the
assumption that American forces were still occupying the island.
On the day he was unearthed he learned that he had spent half of
his life orienting himself to something that had long since disappeared.
People throughout the world do as much all the time.
They spend their entire lives orienting themselves to something
that has long since disappeared. The
wall is down. Christ has crumbled it.
Not to acknowledge this isn’t bigotry or blindness or
ignorance; it’s psychosis, madness.
One new person has been fashioned in place of the two.
The wall is down.
IV:
-- One
important matter yet to be discussed is the mood in which we announce
and embody the truth about the crumbled wall.
In this regard scripture says much about the “new song.”
Neos-new would mean a recent repetition of the same old song; kainos-new
means that God has given us a brand new song to sing, a song we could
never invent for ourselves. Because
we’ve been given a new song, the prophet Isaiah isn’t silly in
urging his people, “Sing unto the Lord a new song.”
For the same reason the psalmist cries, “Sing unto the Lord a
new song….Tell of his salvation, his shalom, what he has
done, from day to day.” Four
hundred years later another Hebrew prophet announces, “Behold, my
servants shall sing for gladness of heart….For behold, I create new
heavens and a new earth.”
The point is regardless of what is happening in the world;
regardless of what turbulence or distress there might be, the people of
God have grounds for singing a new song and therefore must be found
singing it.
It’s crucial that we be found singing the new song, for
otherwise we’re going to be forever mumbling the old dirge.
If we aren’t found singing the new song, then when we come upon
the person commonly described as “bigoted” or “intolerant” or
“prejudiced”, our own
spirit will acidify and our own heart will shrink and we shall become as
bitter and as negative as the people we are currently faulting.
Only as we are found singing the new song can we continue to
announce and attest the crumbled wall and not become petulant or cynical
or sour when we are opposed by so many people who delight in telling us
that the wall is still standing and standing for good reason.
“There
is nothing new under the sun”.
“Behold
I make all things new.”
“For
he [Christ] himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has
broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility…that he might
create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and
might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby
killing the hostility.”
“Sing
to the Lord a new song.”
Everything
is new for those who are kingdom-sighted.
Victor
Shepherd February 2007
