No, the only thing that will hold us together (with other Christians, and in our own life) is the risen, living Jesus who has claimed us—body and soul, in life and in death—as his own, and who has promised to be with us to the end of the age. The special privilege of a pastor is to point people again and again to this risen, living Christ, to remind them of his grace, and to ask them to attend to his claim on their lives, so that they might live with a new heart.
In the foyer of the library of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, where I teach, sits a very special gift that came to the seminary by way of Markus Barth, a professor of New Testament in the early 1970s. Markus Barth's father was Karl Barth, whose Church Dogmatics are the greatest work of 20th century Protestant theology. Its fourteen volumes take up a full shelf in my library, and there is so much rich, interesting material in their thousands of pages that even Karl Barth himself, it is said, never read the Church Dogmatics in their entirety!
When Karl Barth died in 1968, his son inherited the desk at which his father had labored for more than thirty years over the Church Dogmatics, and then gave the desk to the seminary. It is our little shrine, to which every Presbyterian pastor should someday make pilgrimage!
Above the desk, Karl Barth kept a reproduction of the 16th century Isenheim Altarpiece, painted by Matthias Grünewald (also on the wall above the desk at the library). In the center of the painting, we see the crucified Christ, his skin brutally pierced lacerated and his body weighted down. To the left, the beloved disciple John holds Mary, the mother of Jesus. They are filled with grief and horror. To the right stands John the Baptist, emaciated and unkempt and clothed in camel's hair. In one hand, John holds a book (the Scriptures). With the other, his arm upraised, he points with his long bony finger to the crucified Christ.
Barth said that the church is called by God to be like John the Baptist. It is called to do one thing above everything else: to point with its long bony finger to what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.
It is especially the church's pastors who lift the church's bony finger, especially as they attend to the ministry of Word and sacrament. There is nothing—absolutely nothing!—more important for a pastor than faithfully executing the ministry of Word and sacrament, so that Word and sacrament might point all of us to the crucified Jesus, whom God has now raised to everlasting life. We might extend Barth's metaphor to say: the pastor is the church's long bony finger!
