TRISTAN SHERWIN

Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre, Bury & Whitefield service (dated 27th February 2022), continuing our current series on the Apostles’ Creed. You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel.

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We’re continuing our series on the Apostle’s Creed, exploring this story that has been passed on to us, from generation to generation.

This week, we’ve arrived at the words, ‘and was buried. He descended into hell. On the third day he rose again from the dead.’

We could spend time looking at why these words are in the Apostle’s Creed. I could talk about some of the gnostic ideas that were floating around in the ancient church that were attempting to alter this story—ideas that were uncomfortable with the Incarnation (that the Word became flesh), and uncomfortable with the idea of Jesus actually dying (see CREED // INTRO). Buried and descended exist in the creed to protect the memory that Jesus actually died—he didn’t faint, he didn’t swoon on the cross. The Word made flesh, suffered, was crucified, died, was buried and descended… and rose again from the dead.[i]

But I don’t want to talk about that why. I want to talk about the bigger WHY behind these words and the words which precede them about Jesus’ birth and crucifixion.

Why are these words important to us? Why do Christians insist the Jesus event is the focal point of the salvation story we tell? Why are we fixated on it as the story we pass on?

I mentioned the other week, when we looked at the incarnation, that this was the turning point in human history, a new beginning had come, a great rescue, the definitive exodus was taking place.

Theologian, Fleming Rutledge, in her wonderful book, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ[ii], writes, ‘Unless we are to abandon the New Testament witness altogether, we must acknowledge that the overcoming of sin lies at the very heart of the meaning of the crucifixion.’[iii]

I’m going to expand her definition, and say that the overcoming of sin lies at the very heart of the incarnation; the whole of Jesus’ life, from birth to death to descent to resurrection.[iv]

READ: COLOSSIANS 1:13-24a (NRSV)

‘He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.’ Colossians 1:14

LIVING SYMBOLS

I find that music contains memory. Songs have a way of transporting me to the memory of someone or somewhere.

For example, when I hear Bon Jovi’s You Give Love a Bad Name, in my mind I’m taken back to being six or seven, and I’m playing on the field near my childhood home, revelling in the freedom of just being a kid. I hear that wonderful classical piece, Cavatina, and in an instant I’m once again at my father’s funeral—with all the emotions that came with it. And when I hear Patsy Cline singing Crazy, I don’t hear Patsy Cline. I hear and feel the memory of my late mother once again.

I know I am not the only person who does this; many of us have memories stored into particular songs. And it’s not just with songs: memories seem to leak out of odours and tastes, colours and textures.

Everyday things stop being just everyday things, and they speak about things that they are not.

They become Symbols, in that, through them, we experience something else.

Our world is swamped with symbols. So much so, that we probably take them for granted. They surround us in varying camouflaged blends of shapes, colours and sounds. Road signs; tattoos; logos; ringtones; a tone of voice; a pre-schooler’s crayoned picture of his home. Even the angle of Steph’s eyebrows when I’ve said something I shouldn’t have.

All these symbols point away from themselves and towards something else. If that makes sense?

The Bible is full of symbolism too; from rainbows and vineyards, to arranged piles of stone, and bread and wine. These symbols speak of God’s interactions within the Cosmos, or people’s understandings of those interactions. But none of them are actually an image of God.

What I mean by that is this: that when God talked with Noah, for example, about the rainbow, God didn’t say ‘When you look at that rainbow, Noah, that’s Me, in glorious “Technicolor”’ – the symbol of the rainbow simply evokes memory. The rainbow is not an image of God.

Actually, the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20) strictly forbid making an image of God. Which can seem a bit OTT. What is God saying when he forbids making images? Is God forbidding artistic licence? Does God have a problem with marketing and logos?

Or could it actually be that God is saying that he doesn’t need an image; God had already called and crafted a symbol to bear His image?

As Genesis 1:27 (NLT), says, ‘So God created people in his own image; God patterned them after himself; male and female he created them.’

Humanity is a symbol, or at least should be functioning as one: a symbol that should be speaking of something larger than itself. It is not about how we physically look; it is about how we are supposed to function. We were meant to be the taste, sound and odour of God. Humanity, through its care of each other, and through its care of the world it lives in, was made to display, point towards, what God is like.[v]

Or, to use the Apostle Pauls image, in 2 Corinthians 3:18, we were made to be mirrors that reflect God.

We were to enjoy God, know God, and participate with God in building a flourishing world, a world full of shalom. It was all relational.

In essence, this is what worship is all about. We’ve often wrongly reduced worship to singing, but worship is about the whole of life. Worship is about our willingness to relate to God and function as a symbol, an angled mirror, reflecting creation’s praise upward to God and reflecting God’s wise and loving rule into creation.

THE DOMINION OF SIN & DEATH

But, to cut an ancient story short, we didn’t mirror God. Humanity didn’t function as the symbol.

We mirrored—we worshipped—other things, instead. As a consequence, at our invitation, this intruder called Sin enters the human story and with it, another intruder, Death.

Now, there is a huge amount to be said about the terms sin and death, what they mean and what they don’t mean. I’m not doing a study on them, here. So please, don’t play ‘buzzword bingo’ this morning: please don’t sit there waiting for me to quote definitions that you’re maybe used to hearing, and please, don’t hear what I haven’t said.

If you are looking for some definition, though, then I’d recommend a book called, Not the Way it’s Supposed to be: A Breviary of Sin, by Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

Within that book, Plantinga states that ‘Sin is the smearing of relationship’ (p. 12).

What he means by that, is that we should not reduce sin to being a moral thing, or to it being about breaking certain rules—although, its symptoms may manifest that way. It’s a relational thing, first and foremost, a vocational thing.

Like using a Ming Dynasty vase as a potty, or a Fender Telecaster guitar as a tennis racquet, or, worst of all (for booklover, like myself), like using a book to prop up a faulty table leg, we gave our humanity to other uses. Our relationships, the very way we were to display God, are all smeared.

You only need to take but a glance at the world, and our inhumanity stands out: War; Sexual Abuse; Exploitation; Oppression; Greed…

But don’t let the pendulum in your thinking swing too far, by thinking that everything is ugly, or horrible, or totally depraved.

Our world is also full of beauty and goodness. That’s because, despite how often Christians may talk about ‘original sin’, we believe in something more than that: we believe in original blessing, inherent goodness. God (the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth) made this world, blessed it and called it good (and very good).

As I said in the first week of this series, it is an ancient gnostic view that looks at the material world, material existence and calls it all evil. This isn’t the biblical picture at all. The Scriptures recognise the inherent goodness of our world, the potential for good and the good that humans do, but it also recognises our failures, our propensity to violence, our apathy… our inability to reflect our love of God through our love of our neighbour.

In short, our human mirrors are smeared; they are in need of realignment and repair.

In a sense, then, sin is verb—it can speak of something that we have done (or not done), something we are responsible for. The problem is, our definition often stops here, truncating the story and missing the bigger theme.

As Fleming Rutledge points out, when she explores the Apostle Paul’s use of the word sin (in Romans), sin isn’t only a verb—it’s not just describing, in the New Testament, something that we do. There is also this predominate understanding of Sin as a dominion—it is something that has duped us, ensnared us, enthralled us, and because we are thralls/slaves to it, we find ourselves collaborating with it.

Sin and its cohort, Death, have us in their grip.[vi]

As theologian, William Stringfellow, puts it, ‘Sin… does not mean that men are bad, or that men have a proclivity for wickedness, or that they are proud and selfish, but, instead, sin is the possession of men by the power of death, the bondage and servitude of men to death…’[vii]

I’m reminded of what God says to Cain, in Genesis 4:7b, ‘Sin is crouching at the door. It desires to dominate you….’

It is vital that we do not neglect this. If we do, we end up preaching a message that says repentance and better morals will fix everything, and Christianity warps into a religion of moralism and sin management. As if, somehow, the sin problem can be overcome by us through better morality and repentance. But if that was the case, then Jesus would not have needed to come.

Don’t get me wrong, repentance is not wrong, but it does not initiate God’s salvation. Repentance is receptiveness to the salvation God has already performed.

Morality isn’t bad, either. But Human determination doesn’t cut it and it misdiagnoses the problem. Actually, it deepens the problem because it cuts God out of the solution, it makes us our own saviour—the very problem in the first place.

The Symbol of humanity was in need of repair and its bondage, under the dominion of Sin and Death, needed to be broken.

Like the Hebrew nation, enslaved to Egypt, an economy of death and futility, humanity as a whole needs rescue.[viii]

ENTER JESUS, STAGE LEFT

This is what Jesus does. As Jesus declares in Luke 4:7, quoting from Isaiah, ‘He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives.’

The Word becomes flesh. God is incarnate. Jesus, the visible image of the invisible God, takes on our human flesh, and through it lives a life that perfectly reflects God. Divinity unites itself with our humanity and achieves what Adam, Israel, and humanity as whole did not and could not do in its state of bondage.

Jesus perfectly reflects who God is. Not just because Jesus is God, but, as the New Testament authors tell us (see Philippians 2 and the writer of Hebrews), because he was obedient to God. It would be wrong to reduce obedient to the sense of ‘he did what he was told’—it’s deeper than that. He followed the pattern, he enfleshed the heart of God.

Jesus, in his body, takes the misdirected, tarnished and smeared mirror of humanity and, throughout his life, aligns our human nature towards God. He re-consecrates humanity, I suppose; he offers it in worship to God, he blesses it (remember that).

Even to the point of death, death on a cross (Phil. 2:8). In the midst of being afflicted by agony, disgrace, shame, and inhumane suffering, Jesus keeps faithfully displaying God’s very nature. Not once does he swerve from embodying God’s nature—he keeps the mirror firmly angled at the Father.

As the Orthodox Bishop, Kallistos Ware points out in his book, The Orthodox Way: ‘At his Agony in the garden and at his Crucifixion the forces of darkness assail him with all their violence, but they cannot change his compassion into hatred; they cannot prevent his love continuing to be itself. His love is tested to the furthest point, but it is not overwhelmed […].’[ix]

I’m also reminded of the following lyrics to a Godfrey Birtell song, called, When I Look at the Blood:

When I look at the blood

all I see is love, love, love.

When I stop at the cross

I can see the love of God.

But I can’t see competition.

I can’t see hierarchy.

I can’t see pride or prejudice

or the abuse of authority.

I can’t see lust for power.

I can’t see manipulation.

I can’t see rage or anger

or selfish ambition.

I can’t see unforgiveness.

I can’t see hate or envy.

I can’t see stupid fighting

or bitterness, or jealousy.

I can’t see empire building.

I can’t see self-importance.

I can’t see back-stabbing

or vanity or arrogance.

I see surrender, sacrifice, salvation,

humility, righteousness, faithfulness, grace, forgiveness,

love! Love … love…

This, by the way, is why the Apostle Paul, in Romans 8:31-39, is so convinced that nothing could separate us from the love of God!

Even in death, Jesus reflects the wise, loving and good rule of God, the self-emptying benevolence of God, into the world. Because of this perfectly aligned mirror, life and light burst into a world ‘that sits in darkness and in the shadow of death.’ (Luke 1:78, also see John 1)

For those who have seen Ridley Scott’s 1985 film, Legend, there’s a really good analogy of this contained within it. As Tom Cruise’s character, Jack O’ The Green, overcomes the villainous Darkness by flooding his realm with light via the use of a series of mirrors.

Jesus’ human mirror floods creation with the life and light of God.

Death can’t dominate that. Sin can’t dominate that. The darkness could not extinguish that. Jesus life, his death and his resurrection breaks the dominion of Sin and death, and Satan, too.

This is one of the great themes of the New Testament.

As we’ve just read in Colossians 1:13-14 (NRSV), ‘He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.’

Or, as John writes in Revelation 1:17-18 (NRSV),‘When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.”’

Or, as the writer of Hebrews 2:14-15 (NLT): ‘Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death. Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of death.’

Or as Paul puts it, quoting Isaiah, in 1 Corinthians 15:55, ‘O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?’

Or, as Paul writes in Romans 8:3, ‘…[Jesus] condemned sin in the flesh.’

Or, as Paul puts it in Ephesians 4:8, quoting Psalm 68:18, ‘Having ascending to the height [Jesus] led captivity captive…’

That last verse contains a wonderful image. As Martyn Lloyd-Jones describes, ‘It is a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ leading in His triumphal train the devil and hell and sin and death–the great enemies that were against man and which has held mankind in captivity for so long a time. The princes which had controlled that captivity are now being led captive themselves.’[x]

When we say these words of the creed, when we say ‘[Jesus] was buried. He descended into hell. On the third day he rose again from the dead’, we’re not repeating dry historical facts. We are proclaiming that the empire of Sin, Death and Satan has been shattered through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.[xi]

We are proclaiming good news!

To quote St. Athanasius of Alexandria (4th century Bishop of Alexandria), ‘By man, death gained power over men; [but] by the Word made Man, death has been destroyed and life raised up anew.’[xii][xiii]

TOOK, BLESSED, BROKE, OFFERS BACK

There’s so much more we can say, of course. But, I want us to grasp that the, ‘The story is not: God made humans and gave them rules; They broke the rules; Jesus came and followed the rules; Now we don’t have to. The story is: God made humans to reflect His image. Our idolatry [our worship of other things] undermined this call [and placed us in bondage to those things we worshipped]; Jesus faithfully fulfilled this call [and defeated the powers that held us in bondage]; Now [we are free to live out that call] and we can [do so] by His Spirit living in us.’[xiv]

This may be hard thing to remember. But, to jump back to symbols, Jesus gave us a very powerful, symbolic way of remembering that story; something we do every we time we gather to break bread.

At the last supper, we are told that Jesus does four things: He takes the bread; He gives thanks for it and blesses it; He Breaks it; and then he offers/gives it back, inviting his disciples to take and eat it.[xv]

These four stages correspond exactly to what Jesus has done:

Jesus takes the bread: He takes on our humanity.

Jesus blesses it: Through his humanity, Jesus upholds our humanity before God and re-consecrates it.

Jesus breaks the bread: Not only is his own body broken at the cross, but the dominion of these powers is also broken.

And then Jesus offers this bread back: Jesus invites us to receive from him and ‘ingest’ this resurrection life, so that we can be realigned and renewed, on a daily basis, learning from Jesus what it means to be living symbols of the living God.

Salvation is all God’s work. All we do, as voiced in the Apostle Creeds use of the word I, is believe (trust) in this work of God’s. All we can do is take and eat what Jesus offers us, and allow it to change us from the inside out.

Therefore, to quote from Colossians 3:1, 5 & 10 (NLT), and to set up what Helen has to say next week on the next part of the creed:

‘Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven, where Christ sits in the place of honor at God’s right hand… Put to death the sinful things lurking within you… Put on your new nature, and be renewed as you learn to know your Creator and become like him.’

The header image for this series comes from the The Saint John’s Bible (saintjohnsbible.org), illustration taken from the book of Genesis.

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[i] Of course, the line ‘descended into hell’ has stimulated much debate throughout the years, not only with regards to its meaning and wording, but also its historical accuracy and its late addition to the Creed. To quote John Calvin, however, ‘there is no one of the [church] fathers who does not mention in his writings Christ’s descent into hell, though their interpretations vary.’ Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.16.8-12.

[ii] Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, p.185 [italics original]. Seriously, this book is incredibly good. If you have the money and the luxury of time to read, then I would encourage you to stop wasting time reading my notes; purchase Rutledge’s book instead.

[iii] As Rutledge notes, ‘The New Testament states unequivocally in various places and in various ways that Jesus Christ came and died for the overcoming of sin(s) … A partial list of references: Matt. 1:21; 26:28; Mark 2:10; Luke 1:77; 7:47-49; John 1:29; 8:24; Acts 2:38; 3:19; 5:31; 10:43; 13:38; 26:18; Rom. 4:25; 5:16; 6:1-10; 8:2-4; 1 Cor. 15:3; 2 Cor. 5:21; Gal. 1:4; Col. 1:14; 2:13-15; Heb. 1:3; 2:17; 9:26-28; 10:12; 13:11-12; 1 Pet. 2:24; 3:18; 1 John 1:7; 2:1-2; 3:5; 4:10; Rev.1:5.’ Ibid, p.185 and footnote 45.

[iv] This expansion would certainly be in line with what Rutledge espouses in her own words in the book referenced above.

[v] This text is an edited extract from my chapter on worship in my book Love: Expressed.

[vi] Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, chapter entitled The Gravity of Sin, p.190.

[vii] William Stringfellow, Count It All Joy: Reflections of Faith, Doubt and Temptation, 1967, pp. 90-91. As quoted in footnote 55. of Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.

[viii] The exodus story is actually a microcosm of the story of the whole of humanity—a story foreshadowing the ultimate exodus to come. This is why the framework of the exodus is echoed and in the foreground of each of the gospel writer’s accounts of Jesus.

[ix] Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, rev. ed., “Chapter 4, God as Man” (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), p. 81

[x] Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Christian Unity: An Exposition of Ephesians 4:1-16 (Grand Rapids:Baker, 1982), p. 153.

[xi] As Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444), ‘When He shed His blood for us, Jesus Christ destroyed death and corruptibility…. for if He had not died for us, we should not have been saved, and if He had not gone down among the dead, death’s cruel empire would never have been shattered.’ (As quoted in Fleming Rutledge, Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, p.410)

[xii] Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation, chapter entitled The Divine Dilemma and its Solution in the Incarnation, (10)

John of Damascus also repeats this theme in the 8th century, within his Exposition of the Faith, stating, ‘For the purpose of God the Word becoming man was that the very same nature, which had sinned and fallen and become corrupted, should triumph over the deceiving tyrant and so be freed from corruption, just as the divine apostle puts it, “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead . [ 1 Corinthians 15:21 ]”’ (3.12). Prior to this he also states, ‘We hold, moreover, that our nature has been raised from the dead and has ascended to the heavens and taken its seat at the right hand of the Father: not that all the persons of men have risen from the dead and taken their seat at the right hand of the Father, but that this has happened to the whole of our nature in the subsistence of Christ. Verily the divine Apostle says, “God has raised us up together and made us sit together in Christ [ Ephesians 2:6 ]”’ (3.6).

[xiii] I also like how Pastor Derek Vreeland sums it all, in his book Primo Credo (p. 56), ‘Jesus tasted death, real human death, so he could swallow it whole, rendering it powerless in a final defeat of our ultimate enemy.’

[xiv] Rev. Dr. Glenn Packiam, via Instagram (@gpackiam), July 20^th, 2021 (brackets mine)

[xv] This pattern, or shape (as someone called it), can be seen in 1 Cor. 11:23-26, Luke 22:19, Mark 14:22, and Matthew 26:26. It is also seen in the Emmaus encounter, in Luke 24:29-30.