New light on familiar texts

I always get caught out by weeks with Bank Holidays in them - they're shorter than average weeks!

the trouble is I never seem to take that into account when diary planning. So my week thus far has been pretty full-on, but also surprisingly enjoyable.

I've been looking at the next section of the eschatological discourse in Matthew this afternoon. I'll be preaching on 24:36-51 on Sunday where Jesus shifts our focus away from the overthrow of the temple to his return.

As ever I have found Dick France's commentary to be absolutely first rate. He writes beautifully, his exegesis is easy to follow and his conclusions always soundly based. I was particularly struck by his take on the classic 'rapture' text in v40-41. Having grown up with Larry Norman singing a version of these words in I wish we'd all been ready, I thought I knew what they were about (and I didn't really like it!)

Dick invites us to ask what these people are being taken for? After all, just a verse earlier people were being taken unexpectedly by a flood. That clearly was not a good thing. So Dick argues here that these people are being taken to judgement; unexpectedly, out-of-the-blue, unprepared, they are swept away to face their maker and account for their lives.

The rapture doesn't sound so cool now, does it?

I love it when new light is cast on familiar and troubling texts by the cool head of a master scholar. What this does is to sort out the flow of the discourse for me. Jesus is talking about his unexpected return by using three pictures of sudden events - floods, burglaries and the return of a master from his travels. None of these events can be predicted with any accuracy; they come upon us when we're looking the other way.

So it will be with the return of Jesus. The question these verses ask of us is simple: will we be doing what we should be when he comes or will we have slipped round the back of the bike sheds for a sly fag?

Tomorrow I'm off to Didcot, home of the Baptist Union and BMS World Mission, hoping to get a number of papers tackling Clement's view of church leadership read and noted on the way there and back.

Fresh light on Philippians

I finished re-reading Peter Oakes' Philippians: From Letter to People (Cambridge 2001) last night. And what a wonderful book it is.

It's a revision of his Oxford DPhill completed under Tom Wright in the mid-90s, so in places it's very demanding. yet it has a lightness of touch and sure-footedness that lots of dissertations lack. I learned tons from it the first time I read it and a whole load more the second time.

I've always been drawn to Philippians - its passion, realism, portrait of Jesus and the life of faith have hooked me from early in my Christian life. But Peter's book took me to a whole new appreciation of the letter.

His thesis is centred on a fresh reading of 2:6-11 but before we get there, he treats us to a fascinating recreation of the Philippian churches within the city and environs of the Roman colony. He rejects the notion that Paul's original readers were Roman citizens, preferring to see them as Greeks rather than Romans, subject people from the lower strata of society.

It was reading this book for the first time that rekindled my interest in New testament social history and has led to me signing up to write an MA on an aspect of it - probably something to do with the social status of the early Christians and how that affects the way we read the NT.

One of the things Peter really helpfully all through his dissertation is to keep asking 'how did the first hearers hear this letter? what did it mean to them?'

This is why he sees 2:6-11 as a complex interaction between Isaiah 45 and Roman Imperial ideology and in particular sees the portrait of Jesus in those verses (which Peter thinks were composed by Paul for the occasion) as offering an example of how to view suffering. In short, he argues that Paul is urging his first hearers to embrace the loss of status that accompanies standing alongside brothers and sisters who are suffering in the interests of maintaining the unity of the church. It is as these believers stand together in mutual support of one another that they will stay strong and faithful in the teeth of opposition.

So thanks to Peter for his hard work and elegant prose. He is a model of faithful scholarship.