N.T. Wright's Aha Moments

One of the very first sermons that I was asked to preach when I was still a seminarian in 1972 at Whitliff Hall just up the road here was in St. Eb's church in Oxford on Trinity Sunday which was a great privilege and quite scary and the text was Isaiah 6.
Isaiah 6, very well-known reading for Trinity Sunday when Isaiah in the temple sees the angels serenating God and singing,

"Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory."

And then Isaiah is scared and says, "Woe is me. What's going to happen?" And the angel comes and touches his lips with a hot coal and says, "Actually, your iniquity is taken away." And then there's a voice saying, "Who shall I send and who will go for us?" And Isaiah says, ".. here am I. Send me."
Now, normally on Trinity Sunday, and I already knew this because of growing up going to church, that reading would stop at that point. Here am I, send me cue a nice sermon on vocation, on glimpsing God and then being called to his service.
But as I was studying that passage with the view to preaching that sermon, I was struck by the fact that the very next verses where God says to Isaiah,
"Go and say to this people, look and look, but never see and hear and hear but never understand." That very dark and troubling passage. That's the bit which is quoted in the New Testament and not just somewhere in the New Testament but by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and Acts and referred to in Romans as well.
So, I went back to Isaiah 6 and thought, "Oh my goodness, there's something more going on here." And we really need the whole story. Because Isaiah's vocation, which is um given to him with this vision of the angels and of God himself, it makes him feel totally inadequate and sinful. But then there is a word of forgiveness. But that's because Isaiah has to preach a word to the people which says, "You are in such bad shape that God's only word to you is judgment." And the judgment will be that you won't be able to see or hear anything. You'll just be blind to the prophetic word.
But that isn't the end of the story because Isaiah then describes how the people are going to be like a tree which is cut down. The last verses of Isaiah 6 uh give this image of a tree being hacked down and cut back and then finally the stump in the ground even is burnt. Uh but then the very last line of Isaiah 6 says, "The holy seed is its stump." And that looks forward to all the later prophecies of Isaiah in which we find that even after this devastating judgment, there is a holy seed. There will come forth a chute out of the stem of Jesse and the branch will grow out of his roots and so on.. and this image of judgment but then the promise of the seed. As I pondered that, I remember being struck and very excited because of course the passage where Jesus quotes those lines from Isaiah chapter 6 is in the explanation of his first great parable in Mark 4 and parallels which is about the seed. The seed which is the seed of hope, the seed which is about God planting the kingdom.
And so suddenly again, as with that aha moment of the transfiguration, it crept up on me. There's a larger story going on here. And it's not just a one-dimensional sermon about uh a vision of God and then a vocation. That's all there. You don't lose any of that. It's about something much darker and deeper which goes forward and includes the whole gospel message. The whole message of and the message about Jesus himself as he preached about the seed the seed which looked to be going to waste but then some seed fell on good soil and bore fruit 30fold and 60fold and 100fold so that that whole sense of vocation came right forward off the prophetic page into the gospels and then out into our lives as we were sitting there in a church in Oxford, 50 plus years ago now.
And so continuing with that chronological sequence, the next insight which I got which really has shaped a whole lot of what I've done again it crept up on me unawares. I was working on the Old Testament set texts for the theology degree I was doing and somebody had told me that there was a wonderful commentary on Genesis by one of the great Jewish scholars of the last generation Umberto Cassuto. And so I was intrigued by this. I'd never read a Jewish commentary on on the Bible before. And so I read Cassuto on Genesis and there are many many insights there because he was steeped in the rabbinic learning which made connections and saw how all sorts of things worked that the rest of us mightn't see.
And for me the key insight was this that when God calls Abraham and gives him his marching orders: "leave your country and your father's house and go to the land which I'll show you and I will bless you and make you a blessing and all the nations will bless themselves because of you."
And the way that God is calling Abraham echoes the commands that God had given to Adam in Genesis 1. In Genesis 1, God says to Adam, "Be fruitful and multiply and look after this garden." And in Genesis 12 and subsequently, God says to Abraham, "I will make you fruitful. I will multiply you exceedingly, and here is this land which is yours for possession." But as I came to see gradually bit by bit over the years, the land is itself an image for God's claim on the whole creation which indeed is already promised to Abraham. In you and your seed, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. And so that connection between Adam and Abraham, I started to ponder it and had this strange sense of the divine purpose calling Abraham and his family to undo and reverse the sin of Adam and its effects. So, not only was I now reading Genesis differently, here's chapters 3 to 11 with it all going wrong. And then God comes in and does the really unlikely thing in chapter 12 that when God is going to create a new family and a new world, he calls a childless nomad.
That sense of the almost laughable grace of God has stayed with me ever since. and and it produces of course enormous gratitude but also enormous excitement because the whole of the rest of the Bible is the story of how that plays out because of course it isn't a success story. It isn't Abraham saying: okay I've got that we'll go off and do that because chapter by chapter Abraham both gets it right and gets it wrong. He believes God and it's reckoned to him as righteousness and then he goes and takes his wife's maid instead of his wife and so has Ishmael and that causes all sorts of problems and so on and so on. Abraham is an up and down character. He's not just a great hero striding through the world as an example to follow. Indeed, anything but.
And so I came to see from that original heartwarming moment of realization that actually so much of the Old Testament is the story of what happens when the creator God says I'm not giving up on my purpose for creation. I'm not giving up on my purpose for humanity even though humanity have messed up and spoiled creation as a result. I'm going to choose a human family through whom I will rescue the creation. Recognizing that that human family are themselves part of the problem.
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The full testimony and insights can be watched here on the youtube