Seminary Journal 2008 (August) - Virginia Theological Seminary

would explain why it was that Dodd
and Bultmann had never been able to
agree about the meaning of this passage.
That would remind him of a conversation
at Cambridge where they
were serving sherry and cucumber
sandwiches one afternoon and the Hanson
brothers had been there and somebody
had asked one of them about the
meaning of one of the Greek words in
our passage and whether it necessarily
implied a realized eschatology or not.
It was wonderful: sometimes it seemed
as though he never forgot anything
he’d ever learned.
I mean, if you had been educated at
Collyer’s School, Horsham, where they
read Greek comedies in Greek, so that
when you were a student at Peterhouse
and they put on Aristophanes’ The
Frogs and as a young man you had been
part of the chorus of frogs and memorized
brekekeke.x koa.x koa,x, brekekeke.x koa.
x koa,x (brekekekex ko-ax ko-ax, * is apparently
what Greek frogs used to say in
the time of Aristophanes), would you
still remember that 70 or 80 years later,
and be able to quote it at exactly the
appropriate place in a contemporary
conversation?
Reginald Fuller had a keen sense of
the importance of detail, which is why
he himself chose the lessons we heard
today. Perhaps he was following in the
tradition of Rudolph Bultmann who
insisted that John and Paul were the
two great giants of New Testament
theology. Or perhaps he chose them
because they are just great lessons to
hear at the time of our grieving.
Paul in Romans 8 assures us that all
who are led by the Spirit of God are
children of God. We did not receive a
spirit of slavery but a spirit of adoption
as God’s children, and so heirs, joint-
VIRGINIA SEMINARY JOURNAL AUGUST 2007
He’d open his Greek
New Testament
to the passage we
were reading and
take out a few pieces
of paper on which
he had some notes.
That’s all he’d ever
need, just the Greek
New Testament,
and we’d watch him
translate the passage
from sight before
our eyes, and he’d
mention something
interesting from the
most recent
commentary
published.
heirs with Christ. If we suffer with him
at the present time, we will also be glorifi
ed with him at the end of time.
So our present sufferings—our own
loss as we think this morning about
Reg—and I’m very sure that he would
also be thinking about all the lives lost
at Virginia Tech this week—all these
present sufferings are not worth comparing
to the glory of God that will
be revealed in God’s good time. The
whole creation waits to see it. Even
the Spirit is groaning in labor pains
in anticipation of it. We hope for that
which we do not see, and we wait for
it with patience.
Since it is God who justifi es, who puts
things right and makes us righteous,
then who on earth—or indeed who in
the heavens—can condemn us? Paul
lists a whole group of possible candidates:
Everything he can think of
that might possibly be able to counter
God’s gracious word of justifi cation.
We listen as all the potential adversaries
of our victory in Christ Jesus fall
aside one by one. Not peril nor sword,
not death itself, nothing. Not one thing
in all creation will be able to separate
us from the love of God in Christ Jesus
our Lord.
From Paul’s confi dent argument about
God’s powerful faithfulness, we move
to John’s tender narrative about Jesus at
the time of the death of his good friend
Lazarus. The narrator begins the story
by telling us that Jesus loved Lazarus,
and also loved the two sisters of Lazarus,
Mary and Martha. The little bit of
the story we hear comes from the dialogue
between Martha and Jesus about
death and resurrection.
Martha says, “Lord, if you had been
here, my brother would not have died,
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