Genesis 2.15–17; 3.1–7
Romans 5.12–19
Matthew 4.1–11
Students set to translate Romans 5 often despair: some of its ‘sentences’ have neither subjects nor verbs nor objects, but are just collocations of indirect phrases. Paul at his most oblique: ‘So then – through the trespass of the one – unto all people – unto condemnation, so also – through the righteous act of the one – unto all people – unto the verdict of life!’ Perhaps this too is quite deliberate, the linguistic form that reverence takes when alluding to the deep and strange work of God.
It is also something to do with the fact that this paragraph sums up the previous four and a half chapters and looks on to the next three – and the next three, and the final five. This is the craggy ridge from which, unless you suffer from vertigo, you can look out in both directions – and, indeed, at Genesis 3 and Matthew 4. With a view like that, you don’t expect the path to be gentle.
The point of the Adam/Christ comparison is to emphasize that the human project begun in Genesis, the key part of the creator’s project for the whole creation, has been put back on track. Paul doesn’t offer a full ‘doctrine of sin’ here, but merely summarizes what he had said in 1.18–32 (which doesn’t usually make it into the lectionaries). Enough for the moment to know that sin involves disobedience, failure of loyalty, a fracturing of the creator’s intention, which, because it is a turning away from the source of life, cannot but bring death.
The parallel is unbalanced (that is the point of vv. 15–17) because Jesus did not start where Adam started; he began where Adam ended up. The ‘obedience’ of the Messiah is his obedience to the whole saving plan of God, the Israel-shaped plan to which Israel had herself been disobedient; hence the double task, not just to lift the weight that Adam failed to lift but first to catch it as it fell. And the result of that abounding grace (v. 15) is the firm platform on which Christ’s people now stand. ‘By his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make the many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities’; Isaiah is never far from Paul’s mind, and the echoes here are plain.
Dense doctrinal statements are, of course, shorthand ways of drawing together a larger world of narrative. Romans was written, so far as we know, before the Gospels, but it presupposes the sort of story we find in Matthew 4. Jesus offers God not merely the obedience which Adam refused, but that redeeming obedience which Israel refused in the wilderness. Jesus faced the ‘if …’ of the tempter with courage, with Scripture, with loyalty to the one who had called him. Interestingly, he thereby chose the way Eve had thought to avoid, the way of death, the naked death of the cross. But the tree he chose was the tree of wisdom, the tree of life.
The Second Sunday of Lent
Genesis 12.1–4a
Romans 4.1–5, 13–17
John 3.1–17
‘Leave country, kin and home, and go.’ And Abram went. The call was like that other word, to leave and cleave, spoken before the Fall: a marriage vow, a challenge and a pledge of loyalty. Like, too, the older word to image-bearing Adam, and to Eve: be fruitful, multiply, and tend the garden. Now: I’ll make you fruitful – bless, through you, the world of thorns and thistles. Abraham, father of us all.
Paul’s question, then, is not ‘what Abraham gained’, or ‘found’. Repunctuate (there were, of course, no marks, or even spaces, in the early texts): ‘What shall we say? Have we found Abraham to be our forefather in terms of flesh?’ Paul’s question comes, of course, from his insistence that God’s faithfulness is now unveiled, fulfilled, in Jesus Christ. Does this mean, then, that those who come to faith in Christ must join the fleshly, ethnic family founded by Abraham?
No. This family is not marked out by works of Jewish law. The law, as Paul made clear, discloses only sin, leading to wrath. The promise stands outside that scheme, opening the wider world before the patriarch long before the giving of the law. Paul’s mind leaps over the intervening scheme of Torah, holy land, ethnic restriction, seeing instead the glittering promise in the early dawn of Israel’s ancestry. ‘He would inherit the world’: a line drawn from this point reaches right into Romans 8.
And how would Abraham’s family attain their promised land? Through Exodus, marking them out as liberated slaves, God’s freedom-people (Genesis 15).
The good news, then: Abraham is father not of one nation merely, but of all, all who now share his faith in God the life-giver. ‘The father of us all’: 4.16 (which doesn’t need a bracket, as some versions think) gives the climactic answer to the question of verse 1. With this, Paul’s argument is nearly done: this is how the one true God has been, in Christ, faithful to what he’d promised. From here, he too will journey on, through water (chapter 6) and Spirit (8) to the larger promised land. When, finally, he opens up the sight of cosmic liberty, creation free at last from death, part of the point is ‘This, then, was what God promised Abraham’.
What then of Jesus, and his night encounter with the puzzled teacher? ‘New birth’, in Jewish ears, meant a new family: leaving the old, cleaving to something new. Abraham’s family redefined, out-nomading the old nomad. Water and Spirit, baptism and faith. Israel took its shape from Exodus and Sinai, sea and fire, its healing from the strange bronze serpent. Now, a new covenant: the love of God, not Israel’s private boast, but for the world. All is revealed in one who left his father’s home and went where he was told. ‘So must the Son of Man be lifted up.’ God is now newly working: everyone, all who believe, will share the glory of the age to come.
The Third Sunday of Lent
Exodus 17.1–7
Romans 5.1–11
John 4.5–42
John’s great sprawling story (what an excellent move to have some of Jesus’ Johannine encounters in full during Lent) offers food for thought at every level. The antipathy between Jews and Samaritans was not just a cold standoff: then as now, if you travelled through Samaria from the Dead Sea region to Galilee, you could expect trouble. Josephus tells of violent riots, a few years after Jesus’ time, when Jewish pilgrims tried to make the journey. Try telling someone in the Middle East today that, while ‘salvation is from the Jews’, in God’s design there will be no such thing as a holy mountain. That’s fighting talk.
The dialogue is a long string of double meanings and misunderstandings (did John actually intend it, perhaps, to sound funny, a semi-comic scene with a serious point hidden among the to-and-fro of the repartee, like some of Shakespeare’s clown scenes?). Jesus offers living water (the regular phrase for ‘running water’, as opposed to still or stagnant), and the woman reminds him he hasn’t got a bucket. Is Jesus greater than Jacob, the original giver of the well (notice the ‘our father Jacob’, and the long memory of water rights – again, today, a sore point in the same region)? She can’t, of course, cite Exodus, since the Jews claim that as their text – but there, too, water is all-important, and a cause of strife between the wilderness people, their leader, and their God. When Jesus responds with the promise of a water that slakes thirst for ever, she is suddenly submissive. She probably doesn’t
