Making God known

No one has ever seen God. It is God’s own Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. (St. John 1: 18)


One of the penalties of coming to the 9.30 service (apart from not having the morning in bed) is that you will probably miss Clive James’s weekly talk, A Point of View, at 8.45 on Radio 4. If you did catch him last week, you would have heard a quite remarkable celebration of the continuing importance of Jesus Christ in an age that on the whole has little time for him. James pointed to the revolution that Christ’s teaching brought about in the ethics of our world, and hoped that, whatever we made of Christmas, the influence of the man Jesus would not be lost.

This was all pretty surprising at a time when the cultivated view sees Christianity as hovering between an embarrassment and nonsense. For a highly literate man who is not a believer to stress the importance of Christ is rather encouraging for us, and, intellectually at least, we need all the encouragement we can get. So it may seem churlish to raise the point that James didn’t raise: what about the Church’s view of Christ? Because clearly Christianity has a lot more to say about Jesus than Clive James was prepared to say.

Christians, of course, have never been content to say that Jesus was simply an outstandingly, even revolutionarily, good man. St. John, summarising the experience of the first Christian century, is already making the extraordinary claim that it is only through Jesus that we have any knowledge of God. It is not that Jesus refines our idea of God, or extends it, or completes what Judaism had partially understood; John says quite bluntly that it is only through Jesus that we know God at all.

That sounds pretty preposterous now, and it must have sounded worse in the first century. Some of those for whom John was writing were Jews, with two thousand years of religious tradition behind them. Did they really know nothing about God? John is fairly emphatic. The tradition doesn’t seem to have helped. When God came into the world, the world did not know him; when he came to his own, they did not recognise him. So much for the tradition.

Is John simply being provocative? Is this just rhetorical exaggeration, or the imperialism of a new religion that aims to replace what has gone before?

John, of course, is starting from a position that is entirely orthodox and Jewish. When he says that ‘no one has ever seen God’, he is in line with the Jewish sense of God as other, as apart from us, unapproachable in his inconceivable holiness. Such a being could not be seen by human beings; even Moses only caught a glimpse.

But he is also saying something about human ideas of God and of gods generally. However sublime they are, they remain our ideas. Without Christ, God remains an idea; he exists for us as a philosophical concept, a projection, or as the eternal lawgiver, the necessary or unnecessary explanation for the existence of anything at all. It is such a God that writers like Richard Dawkins can demolish with great ease, because he exists mainly inside our heads. However much we may value and even worship this God, he remains an idea, vulnerable to question and argument in the way all ideas are.

But St. John knew that Jesus was not any kind of idea. Both in his gospel and in his first epistle, John’s emphasis is on what is visible and tangible: ‘we have seen his glory…’, ‘we have heard, we have seen with our own eyes, we have looked at and touched with our own hands that which concerns the word of life.’ Instead of the remoteness of the Old Testament God we have immediacy. Instead of otherness, we have kinship. Instead of invisibility, we have a being that can be seen, touched, and heard. Most important of all: what was unknowable is now known.

So the way to know God is to know Jesus. Fair enough for St. John, you might say, but what about us? We do not see Jesus or touch him. We have to go by the records and what we hear at eighty generations’ remove; and perhaps on that basis Clive James’s historical admiration is as close as we can get. For us, knowing Jesus is surely not very different from knowing St. Francis or the Duke of Wellington. We know only what the records allow us to know.
But St. John is not talking about memory or report or the historical record. Even though Jesus is sixty years dead, and even though most of those who knew him are also dead, John is still talking about immediacy, directness, tangibility, genuine knowing; knowing Jesus is still the key even for those who come after him.

So how do we know Jesus? There are two familiar answers: through the Eucharist, and through each other. Both are true and important. But I’d like, this morning, to stay with St John and see what he suggests.

First, for John, knowing Jesus is not a passive or an abstract kind of knowing. It is not like ‘knowing the Duke of Wellington’; it is not in any sense knowing about. French might make it clearer: knowing Jesus is never savoir, it is always connaitre. John says that he had touched Jesus; and you only touch someone by reaching out to them. You do not touch someone by keeping your arms folded. You have to move towards them, take a step, engage. In order to know Jesus we have to overcome our own distance from him, and we do that in some act of commitment, of trust. What that act is may be different for all of us.

Second, we need some way of recognising Jesus, of being sure that it is really Jesus whom we know. John offers a clue. He tells us that ‘the law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.’ So grace and truth are, if you like, the markers; wherever we meet them, we meet Jesus.

But that sounds as though we are going back to ideas and abstractions, the very things that John is fighting against; as though we are dissolving the person, Jesus, into two abstract qualities. We can finish up worshipping ideas again. We still miss the person of Jesus and therefore the person of God.

But John is always talking about this person whom he has known; never about abstractions or qualities. He is not saying that he has met someone who had, supremely, the attributes of truth and grace. He is saying that in this person truth and grace are not abstractions but the very essence of who Jesus is. What we know as ideas, as qualities that people may or may not have, in Jesus are life itself; they are the very being of the one who, because he makes them real in flesh, also makes known the being of God himself. Amen.