FRIDAY, MARCH 30
The emerging message
RECAP
Isaiah 25:6-9
Isaiah’s prophecy of death being swallowed up for ever. People of the Lord of a future generation will say, “We trusted in Him and He saved us”.
Mark 16:1-8
Mark recounts how the sudden realisation that the resurrection of Jesus was a reality was a shock, not least to the three women disciples who discovered of the miracle of the open, empty tomb.
Acts 10:34-43
A turning point as Peter enters Cornelius’ house and tells the Gentile audience that God does not show favouritism to His own nation of history but receives those of any race or culture who turn to Him: the Good News is for Gentile equally with Jew.
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Paul’s mission has reached the Greek city of Corinth and he reminds the church he founded there that Jesus, crucified and buried as dead, is very much alive as hundreds could testify.
“He has gone ahead”
Between seven and eight centuries before Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit at his baptism, Isaiah prophesied of a Messiah to come – a light in the gloom, a shoot from the stump of Jesse, a wonderful counsellor and prince of peace, born of a virgin, a healer, and light to the nations of the world. He would be One who would restore sight to the blind and set captives free – and on Mount Zion death would be swallowed up for ever, its power broken. Who could believe such an immense vision?
When the Messiah, Jesus, did start His ministry, Jews who had studied these and three dozen others which point to the Messiah to come were unable to recognise Him, even though he fulfilled the genealogy and all the criteria that had been prophesied. God had gone ahead while people who professed to know his ways struggled to catch up.
When Jesus had been nailed to the Cross to die amid earth tremors and eclipse of the sun and mocking onlookers, His men followers fled and the women watched from a distance. He had died; they were in the shock of bereavement. Visiting the tomb cut in the rock given by Joseph of Arimathea with aloes and spices, as we would put flowers on the grave, the three women found the massive stone closure rolled back, an empty tomb – and an angelic messenger who said, “He has risen, and gone ahead… to Galilee.” The shock of bereavement became a stunned incredulity, a joy they would feel once numbed emotions began to recover.
Peter, with fighting his natural reserve as a Jew, accepted an invitation to visit a Roman officer’s house and talk to them about Jesus. Something had fallen into place for him, a revelation which shocked him to the core – God’s favour through Jesus was for Jews and Gentiles equally. God had gone ahead and once again done a new thing (Isaiah 43:19)
In more recent church history we can see how God has often ‘gone ahead” and done a new thing, to the consternation of those rooted in how it had been before.
Our ‘Jews’ and ‘Greeks’ look different. There are various ‘people groups’ or tribes within the Christian church. We call them denominations, or sub-groups within denominations. Take evangelicals, for example, who have so faithfully defended the priority of Scripture and the centrality of a personal relationship with Jesus against modernist liberalism. Yet some have been uncomfortable (or worse) alongside those who found in that same personal relationship and same Bible a spiritual empowering and spiritual gifts for service and mission that God seems to be re-emphasising today. Pentecostals formed churches (for distinction they called them ‘assemblies’) in the early years of the last century found a freedom to worship and evangelise with great freedom and expressive joy. One of the very first was started by a Hereford outfitter during the First World War years. Fifty years later, believers in the C of E and other more formal churches began to be impacted by the same new awareness of the Person of the Holy Spirit and His empowering – and some old-time Pentecostals reacted by separating even more, suspicious of this new ‘departure’.
The problem is that human nature does show partiality and likes to protect its own – and God confronts this. We may have opportunity to pray with someone who professes no faith at all – and God is inclined to do something completely unexpected (and, we think, underserved), to shock them with His love and grace.
The house of Cornelius, for us, is discerning the kingdom of God over and above our little prejudices. It is also leaving our comfort zones and favourite seats in church or chapel, to willingly enter the territory of people who are absolutely NOT like us – and show them Jesus.
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