Rev. Dr. Jared Michelson—Year C Proper 20

Anthony: Our next text for the month is 1 Timothy 2:1-7. It is a Revised Common Lectionary passage for Proper 20 in Ordinary Time, which is September 21.

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, ² for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. ³ This is right and acceptable before God our Savior, ⁴ who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. ⁵ For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, ⁶ who gave himself a ransom for all—this was attested at the right time. ⁷ For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth; I am not lying), a teacher of the gentiles in faith and truth.

This is a brief but powerfully rich theological text. God desires everyone to be saved, verse 4. Jared, what does this declaration tell us about God, the church, and anthropology, human worth?

Jared: Yeah. I really like that last bit of the question. What does it tell us about anthropology and human worth? Because I think it tells us quite a lot. Verse 5 has this proclamation of monotheism: “for there is one God, and there is only one mediator between God and humankind, Jesus Christ.” This is actually profoundly significant for developing ideas of human dignity, human rights.

When you look at the ancient world, Christian monotheism was not just about how many gods there are. In fact, it wasn’t really about how many Gods there are or not, because at times Paul seems to say there’s lots of false gods. There might actually be some malevolent powers that are kind of God-like in a bad way.

It was more about the character of the one God and the one God that is revealed in Jesus Christ. Paganism had this way of relating to God, and you see the prophets particularly in what’s called the post-exilic text, particularly in the bits of the Old Testament that are when Israel is trying to reckon with the exile, they are constantly critiquing the pagan deities.

And the critique is less about how many gods there are. The critique is that your gods are needy — paganism in this way. And they had a vision of God that was based on exchange. If you want your crops to grow, if you want your nation to be protected, if you want to have a large nation, then the key is treating the god rightly. If you give the god the proper sacrifice, then he will make your crops grow. If you sacrifice just a little bit of something that is valuable to you, then he will give you something even more valuable. If you sacrifice a few of your crops, he’ll make your crops grow. If you sacrifice an animal, he’ll protect your nation. And on and on it goes.

And the kind of terrible dialectic of idolatry is that out of desire, out of seeking something that you think will make you happy, whether it is flourishing or protection or a large family, you end up giving more and more to the god. The gods are needy, they’re demanding, and eventually you end up giving the thing that is most precious to you for the sake of your own happiness, because of course, the horrible conclusion of idolatry. This idolatrous dynamic that the prophets critique is child sacrifice. You give literally the most precious thing in the world to you for the sake of your own desire.

And the prophets constantly have this exalted, transformed, monotheistic vision of God, which just cuts off that logic of exchange right from the beginning. In the Psalms, God will say, “I have the cattle on a thousand hills. If I needed anything, I wouldn’t have asked you. In other words, there’s no exchange needed here. My goodness doesn’t need to be bought. It doesn’t need to be bargained with. And the reason is actually because I am so full of life, I’m the Creator of all things. I’m not one small pagan tribal deity that you can bargain with that’s just for your nation and not others. I’m the God who made all things, and therefore I’m so endlessly rich that the needs of bargaining couldn’t even enter into the equation to begin with.”

But the other implication of this is that when you have a pagan god, when you say, we’re the Babylonians and we have Marduk and he’s our god, and we’re some Canaanite tribe and we have Baal and he is our god, your gods are for you and not for anyone else. They work for you if you pay them off, and they’re opposed to the other. And so, when you look at the ancient world, they don’t have our modern idea that all humans have shared dignity and value just because they are human.

When you read Aristotle, he has a very different view. He says, some people were born to be slaves and other people were born to rule. He said, some people were born Greeks or Romans, and some people were born barbarians. And they’re almost as if these are different sorts of species, as if to be a Roman and to have our gods makes us of a fundamentally different kind than these other sorts of beings.

And so, part of the revolution of monotheism and particularly Christian monotheism is saying, if there’s one God overall, then he operates with us out of his goodness, not by bargaining, but two, he is the God for all people, not just for us. As I said before, there’s no slave nor free. There’s no Greek nor barbarian.

And that’s why Paul on Act 17, when he comes to speak to the Greek thinkers, he says, this God is not far from any one of us. In him, you live and move and have our being. He’s the Father of all and he’s basically been reaching out to all of humanity from the beginning.

So, this vision of one God is actually profoundly significant. It is, I would argue — and there’s a lot of intellectual histories that have made this point — it is the roots of our modern idea that every single human person, no matter where they’re from, no matter what race they are, no matter even what religion they are, every one of them is worthy of dignity and value. And this is actually rooted in the idea that there was one Creator and Lover and good God over all. So yeah, that last question, I think this is absolutely essential to recovering a vision of the human worth and dignity of every person.

Anthony: And for me, this is why it’s so important to point to this one God as triune Father, Son, and Spirit. Because if you have a unitarian God in isolation, he would have created out of need. And so, everything does become about neediness.

But within the triune nature of God, there was joy, overflowing harmony. There was no need. But out of the overflow of love, creation came to be. And therefore, all created beings, all of our human beings made in his image and likeness, not out of need, but because of desire of relationship, of wholeness. And as you said earlier, for the flourishing of all mankind. It’s so important to see the triune-ness of God, the Trinity.

Jared: I think that is absolutely right. And sometimes I say things like this, and people will think that this is some sort of revisionary version of God. This is not true at all. You can find arguments like this all throughout the medieval, the idea that if goodness, if generosity is a divine perfection, if it’s part of what made God perfect, then if God was just a monad, then who could God have been generous to without creating?

So, what that would mean then is in order to be generous — and remember we said generous was, generosity is part of what makes God perfect — so, in other words, in order to be perfect, in order to be God, he would’ve needed to create, and in that case, God wasn’t creating the world in order to give. He was paradoxically creating the world for himself so he can become perfect, so he can become generous, so he can become the generous God that characterizes perfection. Instead, as you said, if God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, if he is perfectly giving within his one essence from all eternity, then this world is, and I love this word, even though it’s a big word, is gratuitous. God didn’t need it for the sake of God.

Anthony: Yes.

Jared: God literally loved it into being out of that fullness and joy within God’s perfect triune perfection. He spilled out into the world. And again, sorry, I know I’m rambling here, but this does transform the way we think about quote unquote conditions, to go back to our earlier view. Because we oftentimes have actually that kind of an implicit pagan view of God that I was talking about before. We think God has saved us or God has promised us salvation. God has done all of these good things for us. And, therefore, he just asks a bit from us in return.

He wants us to do some good things, either to pay him back for what he has done or because this is owed in some way because of all of the good things he promises to give to us. But if God is this infinite triune God, that can’t be the case because God doesn’t need anything we have to give. So, anything he asks us to do can ultimately in some deep sense only be for us, not for him. It can only be to give grace upon grace, gift upon gift, to lead us into more humanity and more flourishing and more wholeness, not to take something from us that he was lacking.

Anthony: Yeah, that’s so insightful because, and not to get into another subject, but that really does inform missiology. Like when we participate in mission with God, it’s out of the overflow. It’s the spilling out of his love, not just another box to check, but this is who God is and this is what he does by his Spirit. And, oh, there’s just so much to get into there.

Let’s continue on with this thought. When we look at verses 5 and 6, we see that there’s one mediator between God and humanity, and you’re in St. Andrews. So, I think of TF Torrance in his work, the Mediation of Christ. What are the implications of Christ Jesus, the man being the mediator between God and humanity? Is that just high theology or is there something very practical about this?

Jared: Yeah, I think there’s a huge amount that is practical here and there’s so many ways you could get into it.

It is high theology. One of my favorite modern theologians is George Hunsinger, and he talks about how the view of the atonement that you have, the view of what you think Jesus needs to do to redeem us is almost inseparably and inevitably connected with who you think Jesus is. So, in theological terms, the atonement and Christology, what you think Jesus does and who you think he is are inseparable. And the bigger job you think Jesus has to do to restore us and to redeem us, the more exalted you need to think about him.

And I think that’s exactly what we’re getting here, that Jesus is the one mediator because he alone, as verse 6 says, gives himself as the ransom. And I think that’s a really powerful word. Look, I’m not a biblical scholar. They could get into all the details, but at a basic level it just means a means of release.

And that to me gets to the heart of salvation. The reason that we — salvation is a big job and it needs God himself, the one mediator Jesus Christ — is because the most difficult parts of sin are things that we feel powerless before. Again, we can be very judgmental and legalistic and think that if people just wanted to stop sinning, then they could.

And I don’t think that’s a very helpful way of thinking. I think we need to be released from something that stands over against us. I don’t know about you, but when I think of my most kind of intractable character flaws, for me to be completely honest, one of them is just people pleasing. I care so much about what people are thinking about me, I think they’re thinking about me much more than they are. And I usually think that they’re thinking much worse thoughts about me than they actually are. And I can just be consumed in thinking about what people think. And can I tell you if I could stop that, I would. I have wanted to be released from that kind of obsession with being worried about what people are thinking about so many times.

I think that might sound like a mundane, safe thing to share, but I think most of our biggest struggles in life are things that we feel helpless before. I think of my friends that have gone through AA and one of the foundational tenets is that you need a higher power because you cannot solve this yourself.

And that’s what that idea of ransom is about, that we need someone to release us from a power that threatens to hold us captive, and that to some degree makes us helpless, or at least makes us feel helpless. But if I could say one other thing about that idea, then, of the one mediator — what this does mean then is that in, in some profound fundamental sense, our relationship with God is direct. It is in a sense individualistic. It is straight through. There’s no one that needs to stand in the way, that God himself, in the person of Jesus has done what is required to release us from sin. And therefore, by relating to him we have union with God.

And yet what that one mediator doesn’t do is it doesn’t eliminate the fact that God still uses means. Paul talks about how Jesus is the one reconciler, and yet he’s given to us the ministry of reconciliation, that other people can be the means, the vehicle, the space at which we encounter the one mediator that is Jesus Christ. And if we had time, I could tell loads of stories about that. But that is what you talked before about mission.

Mission is not us going off on our own and through our own ingenuity or smarts or argumentative rigor or whatever it may be, winning people to Christ. It’s maybe being in the right place at the right time, where the one mediator, Jesus uses us as an instrument to show people Jesus. And oftentimes that’s not through our strength, it’s through our weakness. Oftentimes it’s not through our capacity. It’s through our own need for Christ ourselves, which allows us to be that vehicle through which other people meet the one mediator that is Jesus.

Anthony: So much could be said there, and I’m grateful for what you did say, because it’s a lot — that we have direct relationship with the Father. Jesus is not so much a middleman as it were.

Sometimes I think people can get that idea that he’s protecting us from the Father. That’s not what’s at play here at all, because guess what? The Father’s like Jesus and has always been like Jesus. We didn’t always know it, but now we do because he is the one mediator. Hallelujah. Praise the Lord.