Listening to one or two people speak during last weekend’s Synod events, I was struck again by the tricky challenges of how we use both Scripture and history to illuminate our faith and lives. For both Scripture and history can be sources and mediums of Christian assurance and hope. Yet they can also be means of unhealthy myth-making and even misdirection. In secular politics, we frequently experience the same thing: when, for example, this or that dictator is ssid to be ‘just like Hitler’, or when events are said to be repeating themselves. There are sometimes varying degrees of truth in such statements. However, the reality is that noone is ever ‘just like’ someone else, never mind like Hitler. Events do not simply repeat themselves. Even Herod, in our Gospel reading, realised that: hence his perplexity about who Jesus was. Whether we use Scripture and/or historical allusions, we have to be discerning and judicious. There is much to be drawn for example from allusions, similarities, and questions, which arise from our knowledge of the early Church and the European Reformations. That is why we study them, and why, in teaching them, I actively encourage such reflection. For, in that sense, though different, like Scripture, history is not a mere record of what has been. It is an invitation to understanding ourselves, our world, and God, afresh. It is about dynamic encounter. As with some mentioned in our Gospel reading today, is inevitable that some will seek to re-run the past or think it is simply coming alive again. Yet drawing straight lines from one era to another is not only intellectually problematic but spiritually dangerous. Christians, for example, will never, ever, quite live again in the early Church or Reformation, or any other era. Our contexts and horizons will always be significantly different, not least because we are products of that history not mere participants in its re-running. All of which brings us to the challenges and wisdom of Haggai…
nWhat do you make of the prophet Haggai and his message? What does it mean for us today? I have to say that I quite like the book of Haggai, and some of the other post-Exilic literature of the Hebrew Scriptures and Apocrypha. I actually wish there was a little more of it. For whilst it would be low on my list of the top books of the Bible, it plays a vital role in enabling us to make a vital bridge between, on the one hand, the world of the patriarchs, the judges and kings, the law of Moses and the temple of Solomon, and the great prophets, and the world of Jesus. That earlier world gives us the great Scriptural themes which Jesus the Christ takes up, renews and fulfils: God as love and personal; God’s creation as good and purposeful; liberation from oppression; covenantal relationship and the search for justice; the call to true worship and holy living; the transformation of suffering and return from exile; inexhaustible promise and hope. Yet, without literature like the book of Haggai, it does not tell us how we travel from there to Jesus, or how we might puzzle out how to embody those core scriptural themes in our own lives and contexts.
The book of Haggai is conventionally known as ‘lesser prophecy’ with good reason. Like other post-exilic books, such as Ezra and Nehemiah, it can seem more pedestrian in language and import. What is this concern, for example, with rebuilding the temple? After the vibrancy and creativity of such prophets as Isaiah and Ezekiel, we can seem to be going backward. Instead of the great prophetic messages which draw us beyond tribalism into a Christ-shaping love and hope for all, we can appear to be being drawn into a reducing attention to walls. Does this point us therefore towards the world of Jesus, in which temple and pharisaism will become dominant? Or is there something else here: about how we are to live in different times, conscious of the golden core themes of our tradition but needing to work out our own salvation, in Christ, in a new world? What lessons are we to read from the scripture and history of Haggai?
Let me offer three suggestions of Haggai’s teaching with which we can all engage, irrespective of our particular outlooks and life situations. Firstly, and above all, Haggai calls us to put God at the centre of our lives. This is the heart of the matter, whatever the age or context in which we live. It does not matter whether we live under Roman tyranny, as in the early Church; or in the age of Christendom, when outward allegiance to Christ hides other dynamics at play; or in the age of the Reformations, when assertion of our own truth is all, irrespective of its impact on others; or in the age of Enlightenment, when we have to come to terms with science and reason; or in the age of postmodern diversity and its ambiguous promise and pitfalls. Post-exilic Israel could not be the supposed ’golden age’ of David, or those who had gone before. Indeed, politically, it had to deal with being under foreign influence if not control. Yet the centrality of placing God first remains.
Secondly, Haggai, as a prophet, does not I think encourage his hearers to rebuild the temple because he is seeking to restore a narrow tribal religion, although that is a danger which arguably then results. He is, I think, not interested in law and ritual per se, never mind mere bricks and mortar. He calls on the people to do so as a means of gathering and working together around their deepest identity as a people of the living God. Where each has been drawn towards their own interests, Haggai offers a means to a fuller common life and a stronger sense of the common good.
Place God first, at the centre of our lives, Haggai says to each of us and in every generation. Live and work together, he says, for it is your common life and purpose you will truly flourish. And, thirdly, he says, make this real. Incarnate it. Embody it in actual forms of life. Does this mean we must therefore literally build, or rebuild, our own temples, or architectural structures? Perhaps. New, or renewed, material expressions of faith and spirituality can be potent symbols and parthways for us, and others, into the love of God. That is the point I think: not that we replicate what we think others may have done fruitfully in the past, -in the way they did it – but that we too make real and visible our placing of God at the centre and our commitment to lives of mutual support and the common good. So what re-construction project, literal or metaphorical, will we therefore take up today and in the days to come?
by Jo Inkpin, for Thursday 28 September 2017 (St Francis College Brisbane eucharist), Haggai 1.1-8, Luke 9.7-9
The book of Haggai is conventionally known as ‘lesser prophecy’ with good reason. Like other post-exilic books, such as Ezra and Nehemiah, it can seem more pedestrian in language and import. What is this concern, for example, with rebuilding the temple? After the vibrancy and creativity of such prophets as Isaiah and Ezekiel, we can seem to be going backward. Instead of the great prophetic messages which draw us beyond tribalism into a Christ-shaping love and hope for all, we can appear to be being drawn into a reducing attention to walls. Does this point us therefore towards the world of Jesus, in which temple and pharisaism will become dominant? Or is there something else here: about how we are to live in different times, conscious of the golden core themes of our tradition but needing to work out our own salvation, in Christ, in a new world? What lessons are we to read from the scripture and history of Haggai?
Let me offer three suggestions of Haggai’s teaching with which we can all engage, irrespective of our particular outlooks and life situations. Firstly, and above all, Haggai calls us to put God at the centre of our lives. This is the heart of the matter, whatever the age or context in which we live. It does not matter whether we live under Roman tyranny, as in the early Church; or in the age of Christendom, when outward allegiance to Christ hides other dynamics at play; or in the age of the Reformations, when assertion of our own truth is all, irrespective of its impact on others; or in the age of Enlightenment, when we have to come to terms with science and reason; or in the age of postmodern diversity and its ambiguous promise and pitfalls. Post-exilic Israel could not be the supposed ’golden age’ of David, or those who had gone before. Indeed, politically, it had to deal with being under foreign influence if not control. Yet the centrality of placing God first remains.
Secondly, Haggai, as a prophet, does not I think encourage his hearers to rebuild the temple because he is seeking to restore a narrow tribal religion, although that is a danger which arguably then results. He is, I think, not interested in law and ritual per se, never mind mere bricks and mortar. He calls on the people to do so as a means of gathering and working together around their deepest identity as a people of the living God. Where each has been drawn towards their own interests, Haggai offers a means to a fuller common life and a stronger sense of the common good.
Place God first, at the centre of our lives, Haggai says to each of us and in every generation. Live and work together, he says, for it is your common life and purpose you will truly flourish. And, thirdly, he says, make this real. Incarnate it. Embody it in actual forms of life. Does this mean we must therefore literally build, or rebuild, our own temples, or architectural structures? Perhaps. New, or renewed, material expressions of faith and spirituality can be potent symbols and parthways for us, and others, into the love of God. That is the point I think: not that we replicate what we think others may have done fruitfully in the past, -in the way they did it – but that we too make real and visible our placing of God at the centre and our commitment to lives of mutual support and the common good. So what re-construction project, literal or metaphorical, will we therefore take up today and in the days to come?
by Jo Inkpin, for Thursday 28 September 2017 (St Francis College Brisbane eucharist), Haggai 1.1-8, Luke 9.7-9
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