God triumphs through the death of Christ, he wins by losing (Timothy Gombis)

Here is what Timothy G. Gombis says regarding Ephesians 3:1-14. I found this in an interview with him (in this blog) about his book The Drama of Ephesians. I think this sounds really good.

This was the most powerfully transformative passage for me personally. It is so utterly counter-cultural and counter-intuitive. We imagine that we will succeed personally and professionally through self-assertion and will advance in our careers (or in ministry!) through power-accumulation and the exercise of power over others.

But throughout Ephesians (and everywhere in Paul), the manner in which God triumphs in Christ sets the normative pattern for Christian discipleship. God triumphs through the death of Christ, he wins by losing. The victory of the powers was their defeat and the defeat of Christ was his victory. Paul draws the clear implication that if God triumphs through the cross, then cruciformity thoroughly shapes Christian communities and Christian lives.

I believe this is what Paul is getting at in Ephesians 3. His imprisonment is not a set-back, but the perfect place for God to magnify his triumph over the powers. God builds his church through the preaching of this shamed prisoner, this ‘least of all the saints’, rather than through someone with loads of social or political capital. For Paul, this makes perfect cruciform sense, and it is one of a number of passages that sets the normative ethical pattern for Christian existence.

How do we model that? By cultivating postures of servant-hood and humility in relationships, never exercising power over others nor relating manipulatively. For those who are well-practiced in (self-)destructive relational modes, our repentance is a bit more painful! But the way of life is the way of the cross.

Click here for the entire interview. It is worth reading.

Reflection: Reading the Bible as stories

I wrote this recently, "When we read the Bible as stories - God's stories - we stop treating it as a set of rules or prooftexts, or treating God as a genie for our benefits. As we enter the stories in the Bible, we feel the pain and suffering of the characters, feel the wonders of God's deliverance, identify with God's people as they struggle and falter, and experience the amazing grace of God in all our failures and shortcomings. And as we enter those stories and allow the Holy Spirit to touch us, we enter into worship just as the ancients did - and by the empowerment of the same Spirit, we enter into the world to make those stories known through our lives and deeds."

Then I received a note from a missionary friend, Sarah, in Cambodia, which said, "Enjoying the privilige of leading a family to know God simply by telling the stories of the Bible chronologically. I was so thrilled to find yesterday that they have figured out how to talk to God just from hearing the stories."

Sarah has been using story-telling as a way of proclaiming the gospel. This is her response to what I wrote, "It is stories that shape our worldview and worldview that shapes our beliefs and values, which lead to our behaviour. God knew what he was doing when he set so much of his Word in narrative form."

A divine drama that goes back to creation itself

I read the following from Daniel Kirk's blog recently. Worth reading. (I've read Hays' book below. Good reading for any New Testament student.)

Jesus as we meet him on the pages of the Gospels is not living out a self-contained story, but is acting out a final, climactic scene in the on-going drama of Israel that stretches back to creation itself.

In Paul’s letters as well, the story of the church is only intelligible as the continuation of the story of Israel. Paul is not merely making arguments, he is narrating the story of Israel with his gentile churches as full participants in the story. Paul is a narrative theologian, striving to help his Jesus-following churches understand a new past, present, and future that are all-determinative for their identity now that they are followers of Jesus. To understand who they are in Christ, Paul’s gentile churches no less than we ourselves required a comprehensive reframing of their story, what Richard Hays refers to as a “conversion of the imagination.”[i]

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[i] Richard B. Hays, “The Conversion of the Imagination: Scripture and Eschatology in 1 Corinthians,” in The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel’s Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 1-24.