Scotch College

Two Letters in AssemblyChaplain’s Column

Astonishingly quickly, Jesus of Nazareth became known as Christ the Lord. Luke describes how his disciples gave him the Name above all names. They used the four Hebrew consonants YHWH. In the highly stratified Roman world there could only be one name above all others, and it was reserved for Caesar. This meant that Jesus was to become clear challenger to the Emperor.

Imperial mail travelled regularly along the Roman roads. Amazingly Pliny’s correspondence has been preserved for modern readers. In Letter 96 of the correspondence, written around 112 AD, Pliny the Younger, Imperial Governor in Northern Turkey, explains a problem on which he sought the advice of his master and friend, Trajan the Emperor.

Pliny explains that public devotion to the Emperor is in serious recession. The crowds no longer throng the temples to offer their tokens of devotion, and prayers for his wellbeing are in steep decline. Someone else is the rising star of the Empire, capturing the hearts and minds of the people. The rapid spread is alarming, like swine flu; ‘infection’ is the word Pliny uses. He says a ‘degenerate cult’ is spreading across the county. To find out about this subversive activity he arranged the torture of two captured women ‘deaconesses’.

In Pliny’s report of the interrogation he sounds disappointed. He discovered from the women that Jesus devotees met before dawn on a set day of the week and they take oath not to commit fraud, commit adultery or break trust. They sing a hymn, he wrote to Trajan, ‘to Christ as to a god’.

These things threaten the Empire because they expose a power greater than the power of the sword. After all, Jesus said, ‘Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.’ Insightfully Tim Rice, working with the text of the Gospels, could see this threat. As he puts it on the lips of Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar:

“Neither you, Simon, nor the fifty thousand/Nor the Romans, nor the Jews/Nor Judas, nor the twelve/Nor the priests, nor the scribes/Nor doomed Jerusalem itself/Understand what power is/Understand what glory is/Understand at all” Until the Year 12 students finished, in assembly this term we were reading another ancient letter; one of the loveliest in the New Testament, St Paul’s to the Philippians. The apostle urges the disciples in Philippi, ‘Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus’. Such a transformation is the aim of every Christian, to conform to Christ thinking. We are not hearing here of the creation of clones, but of a community where each person is transformed by an encounter with the love of God; love revealed in the life and death of Jesus.

Paul backs up this Christian challenge to a transformative experience with a reference to what scholars generally regard to be an ancient hymn whose theme is Christ’s humility, his self ‘emptying’. God honoured Christ who humbled himself. As it was read in assembly I wondered if the deaconesses Pliny had tortured in the interests of state security knew the beautiful hymn Paul quotes in verses 6-12 of chapter 2?

It is not enough to merely give Jesus the tick of approval and list him with the Superstars of humanity. The Name above every name belongs to Jesus. Christians still hold that he is God become a human being. This mystery we call the Incarnation. The change we need is in the mind of Christ.

Graham Bradbeer