In my devotional practice these days, I have been reading through the Gospels in J.B. Phillips’ classic paraphrase, The New Testament in Modern English. Translations often tell you as much about the translator as about the text they are translating, and Phillips’ work is no different. But fresh or unfamiliar translations can also be eye-opening.
One of the things that has stuck out to me this week, less because of any technical feature of NT in Modern English than because of the imagination sparked by reading familiar passages in unfamiliar words and phrases, is the invitational nature of Jesus and the role of the Gospels as metaphors for our own discipleship.
Jesus, in Phillips’ translation, is conversational. The stately, “verily verily, I say unto thee” of the Authorized Version (which Phillips’ readers would have been familiar with) has become phrases like, “Look here!” You can almost hear Jesus speaking in a British accent and calling the people around him, “old chap”. “Oh ye of little faith” is now, “You little-faiths.” And Gehenna, the word Jesus often uses in the Gospels to describe the destination of those who persist in sin, is not “hell” but “the trash heap” (which is what Gehenna literally was: the city dump).
Taken together, this all brings to life the Gospel picture of Jesus as personable yet challenging, as someone whose words show us how life really ought to be lived. Do we want to live a life whose destination is the city dump? Or do we want to give ourselves to the cause of God’s kingdom, living unafraid like the birds and the flowers, trusting God to care for us even as we deny our own agendas for the sake of God’s? There’s some romance in all of this, of course. J.B. Phillips’ translation is intended to give life to what had become, among his 20th century Church of England contemporaries, a dusty old book. And Phillips was working with what, by today’s standards, would be outdated scholarship. Some of his translation choices would be challenged today.
But we also see a constant mercy in Jesus, and this comes out in Phillips’ translation as well. Jesus challenges, but he also welcomes. Nothing Jesus says implies we aren’t genuinely invited to accept the life he is offering. We may have to put down a lot of things to be Jesus’ followers, but the offer is open. There is room at the table for us.
All this leads me to think about some of the theological works I have been reading these days–works by various Lutherans (especially Gerhard Forde) and early and late works by Reformed theologian Karl Barth. One of the radical notions of the Protestant Reformation, especially in Martin Luther, was the notion that God has spoken “two words,” the Law and the Gospel. The Law is God’s commandment, his demand. It is expressed most classically in the Ten Commandments, but also appears in the Garden of Eden as God’s prohibition against the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and in the New Testament every time Jesus tells us our salvation depends on our deeds. The Gospel, on the other hand, is God’s promise to us in Christ. Where the Law says, “Do this and you shall live,” the Gospel says, “Jesus has done this, and we shall live because of him.” The Law is the demand, the Gospel is the good news that the demand has been met. The Law shows us our need (we are sinners). The Gospel shows us the solution (trust in Christ).
In his own theological work, Karl Barth flipped this notion on its head. Instead of the Law being the bad news and the Gospel the good news, Barth said, they were two sides of the very same coin. God approaches us in Jesus and welcomes us. He says, “Here is what God is like. Follow me, and sit at my table.” But he also says, “This is how things work around here. There is a warp and a woof to being my disciple. Calling me Savior means calling me Lord.” But Barth didn’t take this in an earn-your-salvation kind of way. He more meant that to come up against Jesus was to come up against Reality itself. Jesus is, after all, the Word made flesh. He is the Logos, the governing principle of all things, incarnated in a human being. And this Reality, this Word, is both welcoming and demanding–it is both Law (demand) and Gospel (good news).
For Barth, only those who know they are redeemed can really come to terms with the sinfulness of their sin. Only in the face of God’s goodness and mercy toward us are we in any position to really appreciate the emptiness of doing our own thing. The mirror of the Law never takes away the truth of the Gospel, and vice versa. We are saved only because of Christ and what he has done. But this Christ who has saved us by what he has done now owns us. He gets to tell us how to live. And when his demands highlight our ongoing, and often subtle, disobedience (which they regularly do) that is when we recognize ourselves as condemned and guilty before the God who has loved us. The goodness and kindness of God is what reveals the badness in us. The Light shines on our dirt. In Barth’s words, we hear God’s No to our sin–but God’s No is the other side of God’s Yes. Our sin highlights our need, which highlights God’s mercy, which highlights our forgiveness and acceptance. And all this then highlights the rightness of getting back up, dusting ourselves back off, and making another go at obedience–because obedience to Jesus really is to live on the basis of Reality itself.
Barth and Phillips, though contemporaries, lived in different theological and ecclesiastical worlds. And in many ways the juxtaposition between Phillips’ New Testament in Modern English which I’ve read thus far (a.k.a the synoptic Gospels) and the theologizing of Barth is the juxtaposition between the presentation of Jesus in the Gospels (the discipleship metaphor) and the working out of the implications of Jesus’ death and resurrection in the letters of Paul (which tends to provide the plum line for much Reformed thought). But in both sets of work I see the interplay, the dynamic, of what it means to be a believer in Jesus. The refreshing “doneness” of our salvation in Christ, which is rightly (I believe) emphasized in Lutheran thinkers like Forde, takes on a feeling of movement in the Gospels and the writings of Barth. We are kept on our toes, but not by the fear we won’t be accepted. Rather, we are kept on our toes by the One who is both Law and Gospel himself, who wants us to keep moving forward in confident joy. The end is promised. The table is set. The journey, though difficult and even at times humiliating, is nevertheless lovely and well worth the pain.
Mikael Ivaska 