From centripetal to centrifugal
Commentary
Object:
In God's initial encounter with Abram, recorded in Genesis 12, it is clear that the relationship between God and Abram was missional in character. The Creator wished to "bless" all nations of the earth but would enact that blessing through Abram and his descendants. This became the source of Israel's unique identity: bound to Yahweh through the Sinai covenant and positioned on the great highway between the nations in the territory known as Canaan. For the mission to work, people would have to flow to and through this piece of property, and Israel would have to be the visible face of God and God's intentions.
But the world is expanding, and "Canaan" is no longer the center of civilizations. Also, the witness of Israel to the nations had become muted through historical circumstances and internal challenges. So the Creator became a creature (John 1:1-14), taught and showed and expressed the divine mission, and then initiated the Christian church from among the people of Israel to become an international community of witness within every culture.
What began as a centripetal force, pulling all nations into Israel's witnessing orbit, was now flung out as a centrifugal spray, invading and influencing every territory on earth. This idea is central to each of today's lectionary passages. Through Isaiah, God takes and re-launches the redemptive mission of Israel in a very personal manner (the "Suffering Servant" personifying all of the divine being) to the nations of the earth. In the book of Acts, the "kingdom of God" as known to Israel now becomes globalized as Peter declares to Cornelius that Jesus alone is King of kings and Lord of lords. And even in the simple act of Jesus' baptism by John, the history of Israel as God's redemptive agent to the nations of the world is now filtered through the one who is baptized in the Jordan just where Israel was generations earlier on its road to fulfillment of the promises made to Abraham. God blesses Abraham. And through Abraham's descendants, all nations of the earth will be blessed.
Isaiah 42:1-9
Regardless of whether one person, or several from a community that was shaped by a larger-than-life teacher, wrote the various and combined oracles of Isaiah, the message is consistent throughout. Isaiah was overwhelmed by a divine commissioning (6) that took place in the temple during the year that King Uzziah died. He was guided by the theology of the Sinai covenant (2-5), which mandated that Israel was supposed to have a unique lifestyle among the nations, a set of behaviors that would serve as a missional call for others to join this holy community in a global return to the ways of their Creator. He was confident that Yahweh could resolve all political problems (7-11), no matter how daunting they might seem. He believed Israel/Judah needed to repent (12), and recover their original identity and purpose as Yahweh's covenant partners and witnesses. He was certain that Yahweh was sovereign over all nations (13-35), even if Yahweh's primary focus was attached to Israel/Judah. He heard the heartbeat of divine love and compassion, wrestling for the soul and destiny of Israel/Judah as a loved companion and partner (36-41). He saw Yahweh transforming Israel's/Judah's identity and fortunes through a "Suffering Servant" leader (42-53). He envisioned a future age in which all the world and every society and even the universe itself would be restored to harmony with its Creator and would resonate with magnificent glory (56-66).
The powerful "Servant Songs" in Isaiah 42-53 were first identified in a commentary on the prophecy by Bernhard Duhm in 1892. They personify both Israel and Yahweh in the tense drama unfolding among the nations of the ancient near east:
Isaiah 42:1-9 -- Yahweh identifies and commissions his special envoy who will bring justice among the nations through quiet ministry to the marginalized and the disenfranchised. His work will be successful because the great Creator has chosen this one to be the agent of divine renewal.
Isaiah 49:1-13 -- The Suffering Servant testifies of his unique call and commissioning. His voice and message are then confirmed by successive oracles in which Yahweh speaks, announcing that his servant was ordained for this ministry from before his birth, and that kings and outcasts will experience divine favor through the work of this one. The outcome will be a restoration of joy to the entire world, which has too long suffered under the consequences of evil.
Isaiah 50:4-9 -- Now the voice of the chosen one is heard even more clearly. The entire poem is in the first person, and is a reflection on both divine anointing for the tasks at hand and also the early backlash of those who do not want Yahweh to disturb their evil machinations. The confrontation thickens between good and evil, and the Suffering Servant stands at its vortex.
Isaiah 52:13--53:12 -- The last and longest of the poems personifies the Suffering Servant most clearly. Here the focus is less on the grand justice that will result from his ministry and more on the agony that he will endure to accomplish his assigned task. What began as a shout of confidence and joy in the first song has now turned dark and almost defeatist here. Only the final lines of this song serve to remind us that Yahweh is still in control and that these things do matter for eternal purposes.
Jews believe that it is the people of God themselves who function in the role as the arbiter of God's justice among the nations, a task which ultimately crushes its vocalizer in the evil machines of human depravity. This is why the Jews remain the prophetic voice of God to the nations, and why they also mark their history with the awful pogroms and bloody reprisals that have been unleashed against them.
Christians, on the other hand, quickly found in these passages a kind of messianic blueprint describing the coming, anointing, teaching, ministry, suffering, and death of Jesus. There is no question but that the hints at divine initiative and personal character and contextual backlash all fit hand-in-glove with the events of Jesus' career.
Both interpretations are likely intertwined. Certainly the theme of today's combined lectionary readings brings the two strands together. If the God of creation and the God of redemption are fully met and expressed in Jesus, those who are saved by the messianic Suffering Servant and those who express the mission of the Suffering Servant are one and the same. "By his stripes we are healed" to become, ourselves, the Wounded Healer of others.
Acts 10:34-43
There is something wonderfully paradoxical about the Christian church. Its origin as a unique social phenomenon clearly dates from the Pentecost events described in Acts 2. Yet at the same time, Jesus' disciples, who were at the center of the church from its very beginning, would say that this "new" community of faith was simply part of a centuries-old, already-existing people of God, stretching back all the way to Abraham and his family. The connection between the old and the new is rooted in several theological axioms.
First, it is built upon the confession that there is a God who created this world and uniquely fashioned the human race with attributes that reflected its maker. Second, through human willfulness the world lost its pristine vitality and is now caught up in a civil war against its Creator. Third, intruding directly into human affairs for the sake of reclaiming and restoring the world, the Creator began a mission of redemption and renewal through the nation of Israel. Fourth, Israel's identity as a missional community was shaped by the Suzerain-Vassal covenant formed at Mount Sinai. Fifth, in order to be most effective in its witness to other nations, Israel was positioned at the crossroads of global societies and thus received, as its "promised land," the territory known as Canaan. Sixth, the effectiveness of this divine missional strategy through Israel was most evident in the eleventh century BC, during the reigns of David and Solomon, when the kingdom grew in size and influence among the peoples of the ancient near east and beyond. Seventh, this missional witness eroded away, almost to oblivion, through a combination of internal failures and external political threats, until most of the nation of Israel was wiped out by the Assyrians and only a remnant of the tribe of Judah (along with religious leaders from among the Levites, and a portion of the small tribe of Benjamin) retained its unique identity as the people of Yahweh. Eighth, because of the seeming inadequacy of this method of witness as the human race expanded rapidly, the Creator revised the divine missional strategy and interrupted human history in a very visible manner again in the person of Jesus. Ninth, Jesus embodied the divine essence, taught the divine will, and went through death and resurrection to establish a new understanding of eschatological hope, which he passed along to his followers as the message to be communicated to the nations. Tenth, Jesus' teachings about this arriving messianic age were rooted in what the prophets of Israel called the "Day of the Lord," a time when divine judgment for sins would fall on all nations (including Israel), a remnant from Israel would be spared to become the restored seed community of a new global divine initiative, and the world would be transformed as God had intended for it to be so that people could again live out their intended purposes and destinies. Eleventh, instead of applying all aspects of this "Day of the Lord" in a single cataclysmic event, Jesus split it in two, bringing the beginnings of eternal blessings while withholding the full impact of divine judgment for a time. Twelfth, the Christian church is God's new agent for global missional recovery and restoration for the human race, superseding the territorially bound witness through Israel with a portable and expanding testimony influencing all nations and cultures. Thirteenth, since the "Day of the Lord" is begun but not finished, Jesus will return again to bring its culmination. Fourteenth, the church of Jesus exists in this time between Jesus' comings as the great divine missional witness.
Each of these themes is implied or explicit in the book of Acts and all are assumed in today's passage. God and sin and the divine mission are all part of the fabric of the narrative, while Israel's role in the divine mission, along with the changing strategies, is declared openly. Jesus is at the center of all these things, but the unique divine intrusion he brought into the human race is now being withdrawn as he ascends back to heaven. Now the church must become the ongoing embodiment of Jesus' life and teachings, so that it may live out the divine mission until the remainder of the "Day of the Lord" arrives when Jesus returns.
Peter's experiences with Cornelius in Acts 10-11 (or, perhaps even better, Cornelius' experiences with Jesus through Peter) are one of the most critical and world-changing events in human history. Peter was a good Jew. He was a pious believer in God. He was a leader among Jesus' disciples. But he remained convinced that God's work was primarily for and certainly always directed through the biological family of Abraham as channeled through Isaac and Jacob. Suddenly, however, first with the vision on the rooftop in Joppa, and then powerfully and personally through the Spirit-initiated connections with this Roman centurion, everything has changed. The God of Israel has become the God of humanity. The redemption of God's people has been transformed into the reconciliation of all nations. The salvation of Jews has broadened to encompass the renewal of all creation.
Matthew 3:13-17
Matthew opens his gospel with a quick-step through a variety of incidents in Jesus' early life, revealing a number of things about the essential character of this unique lad. Jesus, Matthew makes clear, is actually destined to replay or relive the life of Israel in a host of dimensions:
Jesus copies Israel's miraculous existence and purpose, born through divine intervention as savior of nations (1:18–25).
He is spared from the murderous intents of a scheming king (2:3-8) who goes on to slaughter the innocents (2:16-18), just as Moses was delivered in Exodus 2 while many Israelite boys were slaughtered.
Like the nation as a whole, Jesus is gathered out of Egypt (2:15).
From his earliest days, he is dedicated to a divine mission (so the play on the words "Nazirite" and "Nazarene" in 2:23).
His ministry is set in motion by passing through waters (3), right at the same spot where Israel crossed the Jordan River in order to begin its witness to the nations from the Promised Land.
Jesus also wanders in the wilderness for forty days (4:1-11) before he can fully assume his adult responsibilities, mirroring Israel's traumatic forty years described in the book of Numbers.
It is in this context that Matthew wants us to understand Jesus' baptism by John. There are certainly more layers of theology that can be read into these events, but we need, at minimum, to keep Matthew's primary focus in mind.
Application
The idea of "kingdom" implies citizenship, or at least allegiance to a governing authority. It possesses us. It is the kind of thing that J.R.R. Tolkien tried to picture in his powerful trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Writing in the recovery years after World War II, Tolkien imagined what powers there are in this world that can possess peoples and nations, for good or for ill. His tale of the struggles of Middle Earth allegorically reflected the biblical idea of kingdoms in conflict.
Our youngest daughter was born in Nigeria while I was teaching at the Reformed Theological College in Mkar. Because the Nigerian government does not automatically grant citizenship to all who are born on its soil, Kaitlyn was truly a person without a country in her earliest days. Until I could process her existence with the United States consulate in Kaduna she had no official identity, no traveling permissions, and no rights in society outside of our home. We took a picture of her at five days old, sleeping in my hands, and this became the photograph used on her passport for the first ten years of her life. The snapshot may have become outdated quickly as she grew through the stages of childhood, but the passport to which it was affixed declared that she belonged to the United States of America. She had rights. She had privileges. She had protection under the law. When the time came for us to leave Nigeria and travel through three continents to get back to North America, that little passport opened doors and prepared the way for her. She had never lived in the U.S., but the U.S. knew her by name and kept watch over her.
So it is and more with the kingdom of heaven, according to Jesus. It becomes the badge of identification for us, as well as the symbol of our protection and care. It is not enough to own a piece of fading substance; we need to be owned by something which transcends our time. We need God to lay hold on us.
This is why, in many of the earliest liturgical forms for baptism, those who were newly coming into the fellowship of believers were asked if they renounced the devil and all his works. Early on it was recognized that entering the kingdom of God was more than just adding another spiritual talisman to the mix of superstitious hex warders; it was a fundamental commitment of identity that could not be shared. No dual passports in this kingdom!
For God's "Suffering Servant," this complete allegiance was absolute. So, too, was Jesus' commitment through the act of baptism under John. And when Cornelius experienced God's grace through the preaching of Peter and the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the first response was for him to be baptized.
An Alternative Application
Acts 10:34-43. It is appropriately ironic that the first Gentile convert to Christianity was a Roman centurion. C.S. Lewis knew the battlefield connection underlying Christianity. He came about that insight in a very personal way. When he was nine years old his warm and loving mother contracted cancer. Within a very short time she was confined to bed, enduring harsh treatments, in terrible pain, and stinking because of the sores and horrible wasting of her body. At night she would cry out in anguish, and young Jack (as he was known) hid in terror under his covers. He had heard the minister say that God answers prayer, so he begged God for his mother's deliverance. But to no avail. She died gasping and screaming, and his belief in God went with her.
Years later, when as an Oxford professor he began to rationally think through the possibility of Christian belief, Lewis finally understood what was going on in his mother's painful illness. He came to see that this world is a battlefield between the kingdom of God and the powers of evil, and that Christianity was true precisely because it took this conflict seriously. The religion of the Bible was not a streamlined Santa Claus story of a jolly old grandfather figure who always brings gifts whether you are naughty or nice. Rather, it is an acknowledgement of the struggles present in this world and the necessary reality of God's intervention. Lewis' mother died not because God didn't grant a child's wish but because the evil one had twisted God's good world in such a way that even the very cells of her body no longer worked as they should. But though healing did not come in that instant of boyish spiritual lisping, the prayers did not go unheard, and his mother was not lost forever or forgotten.
Cornelius would share these marching orders in his new discovery of the kingdom of heaven. We are not saved so that we may politely pat ourselves on the back and smile at one another in the tiny corners we occupy. No, we are part of a movement that seeks and engages the nations of this world who might be campaigning for small victories to their own destruction.
But the world is expanding, and "Canaan" is no longer the center of civilizations. Also, the witness of Israel to the nations had become muted through historical circumstances and internal challenges. So the Creator became a creature (John 1:1-14), taught and showed and expressed the divine mission, and then initiated the Christian church from among the people of Israel to become an international community of witness within every culture.
What began as a centripetal force, pulling all nations into Israel's witnessing orbit, was now flung out as a centrifugal spray, invading and influencing every territory on earth. This idea is central to each of today's lectionary passages. Through Isaiah, God takes and re-launches the redemptive mission of Israel in a very personal manner (the "Suffering Servant" personifying all of the divine being) to the nations of the earth. In the book of Acts, the "kingdom of God" as known to Israel now becomes globalized as Peter declares to Cornelius that Jesus alone is King of kings and Lord of lords. And even in the simple act of Jesus' baptism by John, the history of Israel as God's redemptive agent to the nations of the world is now filtered through the one who is baptized in the Jordan just where Israel was generations earlier on its road to fulfillment of the promises made to Abraham. God blesses Abraham. And through Abraham's descendants, all nations of the earth will be blessed.
Isaiah 42:1-9
Regardless of whether one person, or several from a community that was shaped by a larger-than-life teacher, wrote the various and combined oracles of Isaiah, the message is consistent throughout. Isaiah was overwhelmed by a divine commissioning (6) that took place in the temple during the year that King Uzziah died. He was guided by the theology of the Sinai covenant (2-5), which mandated that Israel was supposed to have a unique lifestyle among the nations, a set of behaviors that would serve as a missional call for others to join this holy community in a global return to the ways of their Creator. He was confident that Yahweh could resolve all political problems (7-11), no matter how daunting they might seem. He believed Israel/Judah needed to repent (12), and recover their original identity and purpose as Yahweh's covenant partners and witnesses. He was certain that Yahweh was sovereign over all nations (13-35), even if Yahweh's primary focus was attached to Israel/Judah. He heard the heartbeat of divine love and compassion, wrestling for the soul and destiny of Israel/Judah as a loved companion and partner (36-41). He saw Yahweh transforming Israel's/Judah's identity and fortunes through a "Suffering Servant" leader (42-53). He envisioned a future age in which all the world and every society and even the universe itself would be restored to harmony with its Creator and would resonate with magnificent glory (56-66).
The powerful "Servant Songs" in Isaiah 42-53 were first identified in a commentary on the prophecy by Bernhard Duhm in 1892. They personify both Israel and Yahweh in the tense drama unfolding among the nations of the ancient near east:
Isaiah 42:1-9 -- Yahweh identifies and commissions his special envoy who will bring justice among the nations through quiet ministry to the marginalized and the disenfranchised. His work will be successful because the great Creator has chosen this one to be the agent of divine renewal.
Isaiah 49:1-13 -- The Suffering Servant testifies of his unique call and commissioning. His voice and message are then confirmed by successive oracles in which Yahweh speaks, announcing that his servant was ordained for this ministry from before his birth, and that kings and outcasts will experience divine favor through the work of this one. The outcome will be a restoration of joy to the entire world, which has too long suffered under the consequences of evil.
Isaiah 50:4-9 -- Now the voice of the chosen one is heard even more clearly. The entire poem is in the first person, and is a reflection on both divine anointing for the tasks at hand and also the early backlash of those who do not want Yahweh to disturb their evil machinations. The confrontation thickens between good and evil, and the Suffering Servant stands at its vortex.
Isaiah 52:13--53:12 -- The last and longest of the poems personifies the Suffering Servant most clearly. Here the focus is less on the grand justice that will result from his ministry and more on the agony that he will endure to accomplish his assigned task. What began as a shout of confidence and joy in the first song has now turned dark and almost defeatist here. Only the final lines of this song serve to remind us that Yahweh is still in control and that these things do matter for eternal purposes.
Jews believe that it is the people of God themselves who function in the role as the arbiter of God's justice among the nations, a task which ultimately crushes its vocalizer in the evil machines of human depravity. This is why the Jews remain the prophetic voice of God to the nations, and why they also mark their history with the awful pogroms and bloody reprisals that have been unleashed against them.
Christians, on the other hand, quickly found in these passages a kind of messianic blueprint describing the coming, anointing, teaching, ministry, suffering, and death of Jesus. There is no question but that the hints at divine initiative and personal character and contextual backlash all fit hand-in-glove with the events of Jesus' career.
Both interpretations are likely intertwined. Certainly the theme of today's combined lectionary readings brings the two strands together. If the God of creation and the God of redemption are fully met and expressed in Jesus, those who are saved by the messianic Suffering Servant and those who express the mission of the Suffering Servant are one and the same. "By his stripes we are healed" to become, ourselves, the Wounded Healer of others.
Acts 10:34-43
There is something wonderfully paradoxical about the Christian church. Its origin as a unique social phenomenon clearly dates from the Pentecost events described in Acts 2. Yet at the same time, Jesus' disciples, who were at the center of the church from its very beginning, would say that this "new" community of faith was simply part of a centuries-old, already-existing people of God, stretching back all the way to Abraham and his family. The connection between the old and the new is rooted in several theological axioms.
First, it is built upon the confession that there is a God who created this world and uniquely fashioned the human race with attributes that reflected its maker. Second, through human willfulness the world lost its pristine vitality and is now caught up in a civil war against its Creator. Third, intruding directly into human affairs for the sake of reclaiming and restoring the world, the Creator began a mission of redemption and renewal through the nation of Israel. Fourth, Israel's identity as a missional community was shaped by the Suzerain-Vassal covenant formed at Mount Sinai. Fifth, in order to be most effective in its witness to other nations, Israel was positioned at the crossroads of global societies and thus received, as its "promised land," the territory known as Canaan. Sixth, the effectiveness of this divine missional strategy through Israel was most evident in the eleventh century BC, during the reigns of David and Solomon, when the kingdom grew in size and influence among the peoples of the ancient near east and beyond. Seventh, this missional witness eroded away, almost to oblivion, through a combination of internal failures and external political threats, until most of the nation of Israel was wiped out by the Assyrians and only a remnant of the tribe of Judah (along with religious leaders from among the Levites, and a portion of the small tribe of Benjamin) retained its unique identity as the people of Yahweh. Eighth, because of the seeming inadequacy of this method of witness as the human race expanded rapidly, the Creator revised the divine missional strategy and interrupted human history in a very visible manner again in the person of Jesus. Ninth, Jesus embodied the divine essence, taught the divine will, and went through death and resurrection to establish a new understanding of eschatological hope, which he passed along to his followers as the message to be communicated to the nations. Tenth, Jesus' teachings about this arriving messianic age were rooted in what the prophets of Israel called the "Day of the Lord," a time when divine judgment for sins would fall on all nations (including Israel), a remnant from Israel would be spared to become the restored seed community of a new global divine initiative, and the world would be transformed as God had intended for it to be so that people could again live out their intended purposes and destinies. Eleventh, instead of applying all aspects of this "Day of the Lord" in a single cataclysmic event, Jesus split it in two, bringing the beginnings of eternal blessings while withholding the full impact of divine judgment for a time. Twelfth, the Christian church is God's new agent for global missional recovery and restoration for the human race, superseding the territorially bound witness through Israel with a portable and expanding testimony influencing all nations and cultures. Thirteenth, since the "Day of the Lord" is begun but not finished, Jesus will return again to bring its culmination. Fourteenth, the church of Jesus exists in this time between Jesus' comings as the great divine missional witness.
Each of these themes is implied or explicit in the book of Acts and all are assumed in today's passage. God and sin and the divine mission are all part of the fabric of the narrative, while Israel's role in the divine mission, along with the changing strategies, is declared openly. Jesus is at the center of all these things, but the unique divine intrusion he brought into the human race is now being withdrawn as he ascends back to heaven. Now the church must become the ongoing embodiment of Jesus' life and teachings, so that it may live out the divine mission until the remainder of the "Day of the Lord" arrives when Jesus returns.
Peter's experiences with Cornelius in Acts 10-11 (or, perhaps even better, Cornelius' experiences with Jesus through Peter) are one of the most critical and world-changing events in human history. Peter was a good Jew. He was a pious believer in God. He was a leader among Jesus' disciples. But he remained convinced that God's work was primarily for and certainly always directed through the biological family of Abraham as channeled through Isaac and Jacob. Suddenly, however, first with the vision on the rooftop in Joppa, and then powerfully and personally through the Spirit-initiated connections with this Roman centurion, everything has changed. The God of Israel has become the God of humanity. The redemption of God's people has been transformed into the reconciliation of all nations. The salvation of Jews has broadened to encompass the renewal of all creation.
Matthew 3:13-17
Matthew opens his gospel with a quick-step through a variety of incidents in Jesus' early life, revealing a number of things about the essential character of this unique lad. Jesus, Matthew makes clear, is actually destined to replay or relive the life of Israel in a host of dimensions:
Jesus copies Israel's miraculous existence and purpose, born through divine intervention as savior of nations (1:18–25).
He is spared from the murderous intents of a scheming king (2:3-8) who goes on to slaughter the innocents (2:16-18), just as Moses was delivered in Exodus 2 while many Israelite boys were slaughtered.
Like the nation as a whole, Jesus is gathered out of Egypt (2:15).
From his earliest days, he is dedicated to a divine mission (so the play on the words "Nazirite" and "Nazarene" in 2:23).
His ministry is set in motion by passing through waters (3), right at the same spot where Israel crossed the Jordan River in order to begin its witness to the nations from the Promised Land.
Jesus also wanders in the wilderness for forty days (4:1-11) before he can fully assume his adult responsibilities, mirroring Israel's traumatic forty years described in the book of Numbers.
It is in this context that Matthew wants us to understand Jesus' baptism by John. There are certainly more layers of theology that can be read into these events, but we need, at minimum, to keep Matthew's primary focus in mind.
Application
The idea of "kingdom" implies citizenship, or at least allegiance to a governing authority. It possesses us. It is the kind of thing that J.R.R. Tolkien tried to picture in his powerful trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Writing in the recovery years after World War II, Tolkien imagined what powers there are in this world that can possess peoples and nations, for good or for ill. His tale of the struggles of Middle Earth allegorically reflected the biblical idea of kingdoms in conflict.
Our youngest daughter was born in Nigeria while I was teaching at the Reformed Theological College in Mkar. Because the Nigerian government does not automatically grant citizenship to all who are born on its soil, Kaitlyn was truly a person without a country in her earliest days. Until I could process her existence with the United States consulate in Kaduna she had no official identity, no traveling permissions, and no rights in society outside of our home. We took a picture of her at five days old, sleeping in my hands, and this became the photograph used on her passport for the first ten years of her life. The snapshot may have become outdated quickly as she grew through the stages of childhood, but the passport to which it was affixed declared that she belonged to the United States of America. She had rights. She had privileges. She had protection under the law. When the time came for us to leave Nigeria and travel through three continents to get back to North America, that little passport opened doors and prepared the way for her. She had never lived in the U.S., but the U.S. knew her by name and kept watch over her.
So it is and more with the kingdom of heaven, according to Jesus. It becomes the badge of identification for us, as well as the symbol of our protection and care. It is not enough to own a piece of fading substance; we need to be owned by something which transcends our time. We need God to lay hold on us.
This is why, in many of the earliest liturgical forms for baptism, those who were newly coming into the fellowship of believers were asked if they renounced the devil and all his works. Early on it was recognized that entering the kingdom of God was more than just adding another spiritual talisman to the mix of superstitious hex warders; it was a fundamental commitment of identity that could not be shared. No dual passports in this kingdom!
For God's "Suffering Servant," this complete allegiance was absolute. So, too, was Jesus' commitment through the act of baptism under John. And when Cornelius experienced God's grace through the preaching of Peter and the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the first response was for him to be baptized.
An Alternative Application
Acts 10:34-43. It is appropriately ironic that the first Gentile convert to Christianity was a Roman centurion. C.S. Lewis knew the battlefield connection underlying Christianity. He came about that insight in a very personal way. When he was nine years old his warm and loving mother contracted cancer. Within a very short time she was confined to bed, enduring harsh treatments, in terrible pain, and stinking because of the sores and horrible wasting of her body. At night she would cry out in anguish, and young Jack (as he was known) hid in terror under his covers. He had heard the minister say that God answers prayer, so he begged God for his mother's deliverance. But to no avail. She died gasping and screaming, and his belief in God went with her.
Years later, when as an Oxford professor he began to rationally think through the possibility of Christian belief, Lewis finally understood what was going on in his mother's painful illness. He came to see that this world is a battlefield between the kingdom of God and the powers of evil, and that Christianity was true precisely because it took this conflict seriously. The religion of the Bible was not a streamlined Santa Claus story of a jolly old grandfather figure who always brings gifts whether you are naughty or nice. Rather, it is an acknowledgement of the struggles present in this world and the necessary reality of God's intervention. Lewis' mother died not because God didn't grant a child's wish but because the evil one had twisted God's good world in such a way that even the very cells of her body no longer worked as they should. But though healing did not come in that instant of boyish spiritual lisping, the prayers did not go unheard, and his mother was not lost forever or forgotten.
Cornelius would share these marching orders in his new discovery of the kingdom of heaven. We are not saved so that we may politely pat ourselves on the back and smile at one another in the tiny corners we occupy. No, we are part of a movement that seeks and engages the nations of this world who might be campaigning for small victories to their own destruction.
