"God remains at work completing creation"

Below is a short section from the third chapter, which is the "architectontic"chapter of my dissertation, entitled "Kenosis is the essence of diakonia." The section title is the title of this post, except for the phrase that appears after "creation" "-even on the sabbath." This section utilizes an essay by James Alison.

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Commenting on the episode found in the fifth chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus’s Sabbath healing of a lame man, James Alison provides a glimpse of how God works through Christ to bring creation to completion.¹ One of the arguments made against Jesus’s healing being of divine origin is that it is performed on a Sabbath. The disputation begins with Jesus telling the man, after healing him, to pick up the mat on which he was laying and walk. It is the man’s walking with the mat in violation of the strict rules for Sabbath observance that first draws attention.

At the end of the first creation narrative, Genesis clearly states that after completing his work creating, God “rested on the seventh day from all the work he had undertaken.”² Further, we learn that “God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work he had done in creation.”³ As a result, keeping the Sabbath day holy is encoded in the Decalogue.⁴ Alison observes with no disputation whatsoever the commandment to rest on the Sabbath “is a strict injunction to imitate God.”⁵ This commandment is taken so seriously by the observant men who accuse Jesus that anyone who does not observe it disobeys God by failing to imitate him.⁶ Jesus’s retort to the accusation that it is sinful to heal on the Sabbath is mind-blowing: “My Father is at work until now, so I am at work.”⁷ According to Alison, Jesus’s reply contains two astonishing assertions: Jesus’s denial that God is resting on the Sabbath and, implied by this denial, stretching back to Genesis, the reason God is not resting on the Sabbath is because creation is not yet complete.⁸

Alison’s two assertions find further grounding in the fourth chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews, in which the earthly pilgrimage of God’s people ends with their entering into Sabbath rest. Citing Psalm 95, the author of Hebrews notes that entering into Sabbath rest was denied to the children of Israel because of their disobedience.⁹ In addition to resonating with this section of Hebrews, Alison’s insight also provides it with a hermeneutical key that lends the overarching point the inspired author is trying to make some theological coherence. “The cure on a Sabbath,” Alison continues, “has as its purpose to show God’s continued creative power mediated by Jesus.”¹⁰ Jesus’s point in this dispute, according to Alison, is that God is not done creating and so there is not yet a Sabbath rest into which anyone can enter.

Christ Healing the Sick at the Pool of Bethesda, by Carl Heinrich Bloch, 1883

What this dispute over Jesus’s healing of the lame man on a Sabbath amounts to is nothing less than who God is. If Sabbath observance in obedience to and imitation of God is what serves to separate the righteous from the sinners, then “God is defined,” and so circumscribed, by the Law. This view is what Jesus takes most exception to in his disputations with his fellow Jews, namely the Law as an end in itself as opposed to the means to the end of loving God and neighbor. Looked at through the lens of Jesus’s Sabbath healing, including his response to the accusation of being a transgressor, the Sabbath stands as a symbol of creation not yet finished, “and is an opportunity for God to reveal his lovingkindness [hesed] to humans,” thus “God is identified by his exuberant creativity.”¹¹

Being a rebirth, what can baptism be but God’s on-going work of bringing creation to its completion? In baptism as with Creation, God breathes his Spirit over the waters and brings forth life. There can be little doubt that something like this is what prompts Paul to proclaim: “whoever is in Christ is a new creation.”¹²

That Jesus’s work of creating is kenotic is hinted at in Luke’s account of his healing of the woman with hemorrhages.¹³ She is healed by touching a tassel on Jesus’s cloak. Even in the crowd, Jesus perceives that someone had touched him. When he asked his disciples who it was who touched him, beyond denying that it was one of them, they were flummoxed. Persisting, Jesus declared, “Someone has touched me; for I know that power has gone out from me.”¹⁴

It is the inspired author of Hebrews who states that “whoever enters into God’s rest, rests from his own works as God did from his.”¹⁵ As Jesus indicated in his dispute over healing on the Sabbath, God is not yet enjoying Sabbath rest because his work of creation is not yet complete. Diakonia is our participation in God’s on-going work of creation. “Therefore,” we are exhorted with reference to the generation of Israel that was delivered from Egypt, whose disobedience prevented them from entering the Promised Land, “let us strive to enter into that rest, so that no one may fall after the same example of disobedience.”¹⁶

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1 See John 5:1-18.^↩
2 See Genesis 2:3.^↩
3 See Genesis 2:4.^↩
4 See Exodus 20:8-11 and Deuteronomy 5:12-15.^↩
5 James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, 9.^↩
6 Faith Beyond Resentment, 9.^↩
7 John 5:17.^↩
8 Faith Beyond Resentment, 9.^↩
9 Hebrews 4:1-11.^↩
10 Faith Beyond Resentment, 10.^↩
11 Ibid.^↩
12 2 Corinthians 5:17.^↩
13 See Luke 8:40-48.^↩
14 Luke 8:46.^↩
15 Hebrews 4:10.^↩
16 Hebrews 4:11.^↩