¶1Hello and welcome to the Ask NT Right Anything podcast, a program where we try to answer your questions about Jesus, the Bible, and the life of faith. I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia, joined by >> Tom Wright from Wycliffe Hall in Oxford. >> And Tom, this long hot summer just keeps going on and on. Is there any any respite for you on the horizon? >> Well, the forecast is saying that according this on a Friday, the forecast is saying that the weekend it will cool down, maybe even get a splash of rain at the weekend.
¶2The there's one problem about that. We're supposed to be having some guests in on Sunday early evening, and that's just when they say there's going to be rain, and the only way we can get these guests in is in the garden. And so we're hoping that the rain would ease off when we're in cuz there's just no room in the house for for the guests who are supposed to be coming. Anyway, so respite, I think it will cool down, which it will be a blessed relief. >> Okay.
¶3Well, we want to give some relief to our listeners as well who have some very urgent questions, often very personal as well, and they want to hear your wisdom, Tom. Our first question is from Yolanda Petronelli in London of the UK, and this is about self-forgiveness. And Yolanda asks, "Is there anything like self-forgiveness in the Bible? Can we say, I forgive myself for, you know, X? Can we lead someone else into praying that?
¶4Doesn't this teaching supersede the truth that we need to ask God to forgive us and receive his forgiveness? We are not our own savior, Jesus is." Yeah, so Yolanda is touching on something. How important is self-forgiveness to your mental health, you know, to your own self-understanding and identity, but if you do forgive yourself, are you usurping divine prerogatives? Because, you know, to fit to forgive that's that's God's business. That's in that's in God's, you know, position description.
¶5Who are we to go around forgiving people? I suspect that the answer's probably a little bit more complex than that. Tom, would you would you care to share your thoughts with Yolanda? >> Yes, I mean, pastorally speaking, I understand very well where this question is coming from. When you put the pastoral into the theological framework, as you just hinted, Mike, then I think we can see ways through.
¶6Let Let's start with the pastoral thing that somebody can maybe even go to confession, certainly confess their sins to to God whether through another person or not. And officially, as it were, receive God's forgiveness. And somebody can look up verses in the Bible which says, "If anyone confesses their sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." That's a phrase which comes from 1 John and which we use in the traditional Anglican service. Now, it's perfectly possible to hear those words, to pray them in, and then almost immediately to feel in the back of one's mind, heart, wherever it is, "Ah, yes, but you shouldn't have done that and you know you shouldn't have done that and and oh dear, you're a wicked person." And and then that is a matter for pastoral counseling, pastoral guidance, perhaps for praying over a period of time on and through a course of pastoral counseling with somebody who is wise and experienced and knows what they're doing in helping people because um because then it it it isn't it isn't a matter of simply me as an independent individual saying, "Okay, I'm going to forgive myself for that." Um it's a matter of saying, "I am receiving God's forgiveness. I'm finding it hard at the moment for that reality to land in my heart, my innermost mind.
¶7Therefore, I need to learn how to look myself in the mirror and say, "Hey mate, God has forgiven you, so it's time you forgave yourself." Um that as I say, that can sometimes be a one moment of sudden release and few, I can let go of that bit of the past and it doesn't need to trouble me anymore. But it more likely in my pastoral experience will take some while. It might be days or weeks, but it's something to work towards. So, I wouldn't see it as an either/or, either it's God forgiving or it's me forgiving myself. There There may be some things where we do perhaps some rather trivial things where we wish we hadn't done it and then we say, "Well, I forgive myself for doing that." Um but ultimately, I think if we were wise, what we should mean by that is I accept God's forgiveness for that as for everything else and I will learn to forgive myself in the sense that I am not going to be constantly looking in the mirror and saying, "Tom Wright, you're a wicked sinner.
¶8You know perfectly well you shouldn't have done that last week" or whatever it was. So, coming to that position is difficult and I think may need repetition. We may need to go back again and again and that's where the the wise help and counsel of a pastoral counselor or therapist, sometimes even a psycho- therapist may be needed before we can get to that position of healing and wholeness. That God wants us to get there, I have no doubt. That God provides a variety of means by which we get there, I think that is the job of the church, the body of Christ so to supply those healing ministries.
¶9>> Yeah, I I think it's important to do that. I mean, the language I tend to use, Tom, is faithing your forgiveness. I don't think it's just a matter of well, I forgive myself for all sorts of things. It's I put my faith in God's forgiveness of me and I need to trust in that and believe that and move forward. And I've got a military background as well, Tom, and there is a thing that they're appointing called moral injury where students are realizing not students, sorry, soldiers are realizing that they may have inadvertently led to some human tragedy.
¶10Like they called in an airstrike that, you know, hit some bad guys, but it also maybe blew up like half a village or some poor family's house. And the soldiers then go through this process of guilt of of moral injury, you know, and and not knowing what to do cuz in many cases they simply, you know, if they've got a secular upbringing, they don't have the resources to use the language of forgiveness, you know, of themselves or of God or or or trying to how to figure out how to make sense of this real tragic situation. And I think forgiveness is the one of the things of the Christian tradition that we're potentially losing as we become more secular, you know, whether we think of everything in terms of oppressor and oppressed or how you've wronged me or you've got too much privilege and, you know, all those sorts of things that we have debate about. I think the language of forgiveness either of relationships between people or of ourselves is one of the best tools to have a a healthy psychology and a healthy social dynamics wherever we live. >> Yeah.
¶11And and I know that there have been some theologians who have written about forgiveness very movingly. I think of Greg Jones in the States, um, a former colleague of mine, Anthony Bash in Durham, who's writing about that. Um, and and the whole question of forgiveness it is a specifically Christian contribution to present debates about well, human well-being in general. And I remember reading Desmond Tutu's book No Future Without Forgiveness where writing out of the South African situation, it wasn't enough to say we want justice, we want to find all the wicked people and we want to put them in jail or whatever. There had to be forgiveness for the society to be able to move forward.
¶12Now, sadly of course South Africa hasn't moved as far forward as Desmond Tutu would have wanted. It's still a very difficult and in some ways dangerous place, but that was a way of resolving the huge apartheid legacy. The idea of bringing people together being able to say I forgive you. And and let's be clear, forgiveness is not tolerance. It's not saying oh well, it didn't matter.
¶13Forgiveness is saying it really did matter, you really did do it, and I am forgiving you. And when you forgive somebody else, part of the odd dynamic of that is that you release yourself from the burden of their wickedness. If you don't forgive them, you are still being emotionally hamstrung, crippled by what they did. So, to forgive is actually the kindest thing you can do to yourself as well as the kindest thing you can do to them. >> Yeah.
¶14That's wise advice. So, forgiveness very important topic for yourself, in relationships, learn to put faith in your forgiveness. We're going to change tack now with a completely different question. We have a question from Edward Curran from London in the UK. And this is about the Samaritans.
¶15This is what Edward asks. You recently discussed the lost 10 tribes of Israel. Aren't at least some of the Samaritan descendants of the Israelite tribes? Wikipedia thinks so anyway. What do you think?
¶16Thanks for all your work. Now Tom, I don't know whether you know, but Wikipedia, ChatGPT, and Reddit are part of the the trinity of internet knowledge. And it would be a wise man who would dare speak against this holy digital trinity. Uh but do you have any thoughts on the Samaritans, Tom? How How do the Samaritans relate to Israelites?
¶17Are they just foreigners who were brought in? Or do you think maybe the picture might be a little bit more mixed as to their origin story and ethnic identity? >> Yeah, I'm not an expert on the Samaritans, but my understanding is that after the northern tribes were taken away by Assyria, which is, you know, nearly a thousand years before the time of Jesus, certainly uh seventh or eighth centuries before the time of Jesus, then knowing what one knows about migrations in the Middle East, it's highly likely A that not everyone was in fact taken away. There'll have been some, probably poor people, who were left behind and just decided to carry on doing as best they could. But also that other people will have come in, some of whom may have been ancient Israelites, um who decided to see if they could make their way back to their promised land.
¶18Um others of whom will be people from other tribes of which we now know very little. I suspect even the DNA evidence from present Samaritans mightn't tell you that much about where they came from. Um but so that the Samaritans were a kind of mixed bunch, if I can put it very crudely. And we're talking about the area between Judea, that's the area focused on Jerusalem and and Bethlehem, which is where the the last two tribes uh had been, uh Judah and Benjamin, plus such Levites as were with them. The area between there and the area around Nazareth and the northern border of the Sea of Galilee, which is the area to which many Judeans came back after the Babylonian exile.
¶19And so that geographically, the Samaritans are sandwiched between Judean populations in the first century in the north, where Jesus grew up, and in the south around Jerusalem. And to this day, there is still that division between a very Jewish north and a very Jewish Jerusalem area, with then what is now the Palestinians in between. And I remember hearing a sermon here in Oxford several years ago from one of the leading Palestinian theologians, a man called Naim Ateek, and he read us the passage from John chapter 4, in which Jesus meets the Samaritan woman, and she goes and tells her friends, her neighbors, that she's found the Messiah, and they all come out to be with Jesus. And Naim Ateek began his sermon by saying, "These were my ancestors. They were people in what we now call the West Bank who came to faith in Jesus during the course of Jesus' ministry, and the Samaritan church, the the Palestinian church, has continued to this day." And that though something not everyone knows about.
¶20But of course, in Jesus' day, there was great resentment because the Judeans who had come back from Babylon found that then there were people living in the middle bit of the land who didn't want them to come back because they were frightened that if the Judeans came back, they would want to take over the whole area, and then what was going to happen to them. And we today know perfectly well what that dynamic looks like in the Middle East and we could think of it in theory but it's going on sadly of course still very much in practice. So that then in Jesus' day there are all these basic slogans about Jews don't have any dealings with Samaritans etc. Because there was resentment. There was we're not sure who these people are.
¶21We're not sure if they ought to be allowed access to to to the temple um and then so the Samaritans then had their own temple in the middle of their territory and then you get the controversy that the woman of Samaria reports on that your people, you Jews, um say that you ought to worship in Jerusalem whereas we say we ought to worship in Samaria and Jesus says, "No, that's not the point. Um geography is no longer relevant. The point is to worship the Father in spirit and in truth." But we can feel that tension still crackling along through the New Testament and it comes out of course in the so-called parable of the good Samaritan where it's the the man from Samaria who actually does the will of God, who actually loves his neighbor as himself. So Jesus is breaking down that division but it was a typical bit of Middle Eastern ethnic anxiety, resentment, not sure who these people are, we're commanded by God to keep to ourselves so we can't have any dealings with them and all of that is going on at the time and as I say tragically it echoes down through different uh different pathways to the present day and um it may be that in the mercy of God we in our day might see some forms of reconciliation, of new ways forward. At the moment it doesn't look like that but I do think we should be praying for that as I'm sure Jesus himself was when he went on his journey uh through Samaria in in uh John chapter 4.
¶22So, Mike, that's the briefest and most general outline, but you got anything to add on that? >> Uh the only thing I would add is that Samaritan studies is its own thing. You know, there's still the Samaritan people who are there to this very day with their temple, you know, in the Holy Land. The Samaritan >> they celebrate their own Passover. Yeah.
¶23>> Yeah. The Samaritan Pentateuch is its own literary core that gets studied and how it relates to the Hebrew and the Septuagint Old Testament. So, yeah, so Samaritan studies are a very interesting part of the ancient biblical world that, you know, are still around today. Well, we're going to take a break and when we come back, we're going to have a bit of a deep dive into the ascension of Jesus. Is it a an embarrassing piece of ancient cosmology with Jesus launched into heaven or is there something more important going on?
¶24[music] All that in a moment. >> I I recently saw Richard Dawkins. [music] Sort of embarrassingly, I sort of said I I was actually at evensong last night and he said, "Me, too." It's not as if I ever looked at a supermarket shelf of religions and said, "I think I'll have that one." I found this continued [music] to unfold and make the best sense I could imagine. >> The person of Jesus compels me. Is life all suffering?
¶25Is it all loss? Oh, it's both. It's both. And this in this story they are held in this I find it beautiful. >> The way I think of Christianity is that in the person of Jesus, God and us and the universe came together [music] in a unique and unparalleled way.
¶26>> You're supposed to be atheists. >> [laughter] >> We're Christians. >> This is This is all happened since you invited me. Sorry. >> [laughter] >> Sorry.
¶27Don't worry. I haven't become an atheist. >> Is that one atheist >> [laughter] >> on the panel? I've got some bad news. >> Welcome back.
¶28Our third question is from David Waterhouse, and David is in [music] Orpington. He's got a question about the Ascension. Why does Jesus ascend to heaven by going up through the clouds when heaven is not in the sky or upwards? Also, other parts of scripture refer to looking up to heaven. However, heaven obviously cannot be up as the earth is round.
¶29So, up is different for everyone, and heaven is presumably not in outer space. Now, Tom, this goes to show that a lot of Christians, a lot of critics of Christianity, have had fun with the Ascension. And they they use it to mock the Christian worldview as if we live in a three-story universe. There's earth, and there's heaven, and heaven is somewhere just above the clouds or just beyond the stars. And I I've heard atheists and critics mock Christianity.
¶30They call the Ascension the launching of the Lord, you know, sending Jesus from earth into outer space where they think heaven is. So, in the Ascension, do we have a like a literal cosmology? Is it Is it ancient myth? Is it metaphor? How do we understand the reality, the truth of the Ascension?
¶31>> It It's a great question, and I think the key thing is, and our questioner has said this, that heaven is not a geographical location within our cosmos, within our space-time world. It's a different sort of thing. It's a different sort of place. Heaven is uh God's sphere, which intersects with ours. It was always intended to be so.
¶32In Genesis 1, God made heaven and earth. And at various points in the Old Testament, it talks about the heavens are God's heavens, but the earth is given to the children of humans. Um as though yes, it is a bipartite reality, but it's meant to be a reality in which the two parts fuse with one another. And of course, particularly when you built a temple in the ancient world, built a pagan temple, the same would be true. You want the temple to be the place where the sphere of the divine and the sphere of the human intersect.
¶33So that when you go there, you are in heaven. And certainly, that's how the Judeans thought of their temple. Of course, it was radically different cuz there wasn't an image in [clears throat] it, but it was the place where you meant went to meet with God because he'd covenanted to put his name there. And that can be followed up in a number of different ways. So that then when we talk about Jesus ascending into heaven, what we're talking about is the joining of heaven and earth in the person of Jesus.
¶34Now, they use the language of up and down, which does seem to be quite a natural way of talking about it, but it only I think it seems perhaps more natural than it should to us because we are so heavily influenced by Platonism, in which you might actually be forgiven for thinking that the realm of the forms or something was up there somewhere away from this messy world down here. Um but as your as the questioner says, the earth is round, so going up from one point would make no sense for another. I mean, Mike, you're talking from Australia. If you go up from Melbourne, you're going further away from England and and you know, well, goodbye to that and and vice versa. So obviously to us, it can't mean that, and I suspect, and this is the point, obviously to them as well.
¶35I think when we look at the Bible as a whole, what we see is a mis- mystery of the divine presence and the divine activities and the divine sphere of operations as something which is not far away, which people can enter into and occasionally glimpse, like Micaiah when in that glimpsing the heavenly council at the end of 1 Kings, or in 2 Kings, Elisha saying to his servant, "Lord, open his eyes." And the Lord opens the servant's eyes, and the mountain is full of horses and chariots of fire round about the prophet. This is the heavenly reality, but the idea of vertical upward journeying to to get into that heavenly reality seems to me a natural metaphor which people in the 1 century would have taken perfectly happily as a metaphor, rather than as "Oh, they believed in a three-decker universe, so they were going upstairs instead of going downstairs to the other place, whatever that might be." Um and I think we often assume that people in the ancient world were were just a bit simple and didn't understand things the way that we do. And so, um we know it's not actually upward movement, but bless them, they probably didn't understand that. I think the answer is they understood it a lot better than people within a modern restricted secular supposedly scientific worldview would understand it. Having said that, it would be a shame to get stuck on the how and the why and the where, and miss the what's going on, because the whole what's going on thing is all about Jesus now being exalted as the world's true sovereign.
¶36And this is one of the biggest mistakes we can make to imagine that heaven is a long way away. So, when Jesus goes to heaven, he's leaving us to our own devices. I have heard sermons saying that. He's gone away and the great glory of that is that he's now told us to get on with things in our own way. Um, I think absolutely not.
¶37Heaven, as I've often said, is the CEO's office. Heaven is where everything gets run from. Um, and the trouble is that we don't understand that because for us, running things means sending administrative orders, and if people disobey, sending in the troops. Jesus' whole way of running things is set out in the Sermon on the Mount, and it doesn't mean sending in the troops, and it doesn't mean barking orders at people. It means, "Blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the hungry and thirsty for righteousness, etc." That's how Jesus is running things, and the story of Acts is the way in which it is the story of the way in which the Jesus who is now exalted is now ruling his world in a whole new way, the like of which Caesar and Herod had never imagined.
¶38Um, so, the other thing I would say is that Acts [clears throat] chapter 1, you have heaven and earth joined together. There is a bit of earth which is now in heaven, namely Jesus' body. Acts chapter 2, the breath of heaven comes to infiltrate the earth. The earth. So, you've got Acts 1, heaven and earth.
¶39Acts 2, heaven and earth. In other words, the whole story now is about a temple, which is the new community indwelt by God's Holy Spirit, which is why most of the controversies in Acts are about temples. And this is what Paul is talking about, of course, in Ephesians and elsewhere. You are the temple of the living God. God's Spirit dwells within you.
¶40>> Yeah, when I think about the Ascension time, I tend to think of it as a mixture of marvel, mystery, and metaphor. But the takeaway point is not that Jesus is in absentia, it's that he has all the authority on heaven and earth. And students are always astounded when I tell them that in the book of Acts in the preaching of the apostles the heavenly exaltation of Jesus gets more attention than the death of Jesus. Luke just mentions that, you know, Christ was put to death, you know, by wicked men amongst us, but this Jesus whom they did that to has been exalted and and put up in the highest places in heaven. And in the book of Hebrews, the author there calls the Ascension an anchor for the soul.
¶41And and everything's connected to the atonement, you know, I'm sorry, to the Ascension. The atonement, the authority of Jesus, the identity of the church, the assurance of faith. So, Tom, this is this is my big motto. I think we need to MAGA. We need to make the Ascension great again.
¶42Now, I wouldn't recommend we walk around with MAGA hats, but I've got a I've a very bad suspicion this could be misinterpreted, but I say make the Ascension great again. At least let's bring back Ascension Sunday. We have Easter, we have Pentecost. Let's bring back Ascension Day cuz it's important in the New Testament. >> Absolutely, but of course Ascension technically isn't a Sunday, it's a Thursday because it's timed after Easter.
¶43So, that and the true many churches because they think we can't get a crowd out on a Thursday, >> [clears throat] >> they'll do it on a Sunday to be near that. But the the other thing that and I've written about this once or twice, um the Western churches ever since the 1920s have been developing this thing called the Feast of Christ the King, which the Pope invented in the 1920s as a way of poking Hitler and Stalin in the eye, but then it got moved to be the last Sunday before Advent, which has always given people the false impression that Jesus only becomes King of the world at the very end of the process before his return. Whereas, we already have a Feast of Christ the King, and it's called Ascension Day. And I'm absolutely with you. We should be celebrating that and explaining about the lordship of Jesus.
¶44Yeah, according to 1 Corinthians 15, he must reign until he's put all his enemies under his feet. He is already reigning, and Paul, like other New Testament writers, is channeling Psalm 110. The Lord said to my Lord, "Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool." We are living in that until moment, and the lordship of Jesus, as in the Ascension, is at the heart of it. >> Yeah. That's fantastic, Tom.
¶45I think we're going to have to do a bonus episode on Christ the King. >> That'll be good, I think. >> The theme, the motif, the day, I think we've got to do a bonus episode on that. And if all of our listeners want to get hold of those bonus episodes, I think they're at like $3.99 a month, you get four extra episodes from Tom and I. Otherwise, to everyone else, look, keep sending us your questions on the Ascension, on Jesus and the Bible, ethical dilemmas you think Christians need to wrestle with today.
¶46Send them to askntwright.com, and Tom and I will do our very best to answer them. That's all we have time for today. It's goodbye from me, Mike Bird. >> And it's goodbye from me, Tom Wright. >> And we'll see you on the next episode of Ask NT Wright Anything.
¶47Until then, God bless you all and take care. >> [music]