Good news beyond the singing of it

THE RIGHTEOUS ONE

The Greek for Righteous One [‘ton dikaiou’] in Stephen’s sermon before his stoning 

Acts 3:11-16 While he clung to Peter and John, all the people ran together to them in the portico called Solomon’s Portico, utterly astonished (at the healing of a lame man). When Peter saw it, he addressed the people, ‘You Israelites, why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we had made him walk? The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our ancestors has glorified his servant Jesus, whom you handed over and rejected in the presence of Pilate, though he had decided to release him. But you rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked to have a murderer given to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses. And by faith in his name, his name itself has made this man strong, whom you see and know; and the faith that is through Jesus has given him this perfect health in the presence of all of you.

Acts 7.51.53 And Stephen said: ‘You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are for ever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, and now you have become his betrayers and murderers. You are the ones that received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it.’

Acts 22: 12-16 And Paul said: ‘A certain Ananias, who was a devout man according to the law and well spoken of by all the Jews living there, came to me; and standing beside me, he said, “Brother Saul, regain your sight!” In that very hour, I regained my sight and saw him. Then he said, “The God of our ancestors has chosen you to know his will, to see the Righteous One and to hear his own voice; for you will be his witness to all the world of what you have seen and heard. And now why do you delay? Get up, be baptized, and have your sins washed away, calling on his name.”

Today, we come up against a really BIG theological term: righteousness. I don’t mind saying I have wrestled longer with this one entry more than any other so far. Here goes…

Jesus is described very specifically as The Righteous One in three testimonies about Christ recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. Chronologically, we hear Peter, Stephen and Paul describe Jesus as The Righteous One. It is significant that it is Jesus’ righteousness that they all choose to highlight. It is both a character and a gift. Jesus is both righteous and the giver of righteousness. Jesus has both power to make us right and the desire to give us that righteousness.

This Name of Jesus reaches deep into the character of God and the nature of Jesus’ death on the cross. It also is rooted deeply in the traditions of Judaism. God is described constantly in the Hebrew Scriptures as Righteous. Jesus (lest we forget) was a Jew. Peter was a Jew. Stephen was a Jew. Paul (Saul) was a Jew. Peter, Stephen and Paul, in each of these three sermons, were exclusively addressing fellow Jews.

But what does this word mean?  I found a fascinating thought about this word in a Wikipaedia entry. The English word ‘rightousness’ was a creation of William Tyndale, the hugely influential bible translator whose breakthrough English version of the bible was published in 1526. It was Tydale’s work which laid the groundwork for the King James Version nearly a century later. Tyndale remodelled the word after an earlier word rihtwis, which would have yielded modern English rightwise or rightways. He used it to translate the Hebrew root צדקים (TzDYQ), tzedek, which appears more than five hundred times in the Hebrew Bible, and the Greek word δίκαιος (dikaios), which appears more than two hundred times in the New Testament.

(As an aside: It is impossible for us to quite understand in the 21^st century the incredible impact English translations of the bible had in the 16^th century, when most people were ignorant of the bible because they could not read Latin or Greek. Tyndale described the gospel, in his pamphlet ‘A Pathway to Holy Scripture’ in 1530, as: ‘Good, merry, glad and joyful tidings, that maketh a man’s heart glad, and maketh him sing, dance and leap for joy.’)

It is interesting to go back to that earlier English translation of the word righteous; that God’s character is about ‘right wisdom’ or directing ‘right ways’ to live. We might call righteousness the foundation of right relationship. God as Trinity is in utter and complete harmony in the mystery of the relationship that exists between Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. And God desires and longs for both creation and humanity to be in right relationship too. The conviction of Peter, Stephen and Paul is this: that Jesus showed through his character and his actions and ultimately through the sacrifice of his life how he was both The Rightous One and had the power to give righteousness to all who seek it. Jesus' mission is about setting people in right relationship and wholeness with God and each other through loving servanthood.

Peter is addressing the crowds who have gathered after the healing of a man crippled from birth who had sat for years at the temple’s Beautiful Gate. He is quick to point to Jesus, the Righteous One, as the source of the healing and grabs the opportunity to bear witness to Christ. This outpouring of grace upon this one man through his healing is about making whole that which was broken – this might be another description of what righteousness looks like. And it was the cause of singing, dancing and great joy and astonishment!

Stephen is addressing a different kind of crowd, one that is baying for his life. These are the last words he utters before he is stoned to death by a mob whipped up with the same kind of hatred that had delivered Jesus to the cross. It is apparent that Stephen is so full of a great sense of the righteousness of God and of what he has received himself in the gift of Christ, that he almost seems to bate his accusers even as they pick up stones. Filled with the Holy Spirit, he looks up and sees the glory of God and Jesus at God’s right hand – at which point he is killed. And one of those present, holding the coats of those who strip off to stone him, is Saul.

Saul the persecutor becomes Paul the proclaimer. He, too, has a mystical experience of Jesus The Righteous One which is perhaps the bible’s greatest example of conversion. Yet, we must remember, he was a Jew rooted in a theology of righteousness. What revolutionized his mind was the understanding that righteousness was a gift to all through the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross rather than something conferred through following the commandments.

Billions of words have been written by hundreds of bible scholars and theologians on Paul’s understanding of righteousness. But our focus is on Jesus as The Righteous One. And for Paul the key event in his life was the discovery that Jesus not only set him in right ways and gave him right-wisdom, but, above all, that Jesus loved him and wanted a right-relationship.

The Righteous One comes to us with the joyful gift of relationship. One that sets hearts a singing and feet a dancing and leaping for joy!