Rationalities

“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” (Rev 22, 12)

Some years ago I spent a while working in the United States, and I found myself in a house where there was no Bible. So I went out to buy one. The only edition I could find was an Authorised Version with (as it said on the cover, its unique selling point) “the sayings of Jesus in red.” As you turned the pages the red print of the sayings stood out from the black, right through the gospels and into the Acts of the Apostles. But what surprised me was the amount of red in the book of Revelation.

Now we know that the earliest traditions about Jesus were passed down by word of mouth, and that different groups of Christians remembered different things; so that it is not impossible that in the late first century the Christians of Ephesus, the community that produced the Book of Revelation, might have preserved some sayings that were lost elsewhere. Certainly Revelation contains some very familiar sayings, such as that in chapter three: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him and he with me” (Rev 3, 20). In sayings like that, Jesus’s tone of voice does seem to sound clear and recognisable for us to hear.

But some of the sayings in Revelation are rather strange and not what might have been expected.  This evening’s text is one such: “I am the Alpha and the Omega ... the beginning and the end.” Not inappropriately, these words appear twice, at the beginning and the end of the book, in chapter 1 and chapter 22. They bracket everything else, as though this insight, that Christ’s being embraces and includes all other being, were John’s main point. It is certainly a powerful and memorable statement and one that has often been imaged in Christian art. But the words remain strange, in more than one way.

First, they show Jesus using an image based on the Greek alphabet. Alpha is the first letter and Omega the last. Does that mean that Jesus knew the Greek alphabet? Scholars have suggested that, in first century Palestine, Jesus would have had contact with Greek. Did he speak some Greek? Was he literate in Greek? Or was John simply devising an image that would work with his Greek-speaking readers?

A deeper strangeness is that in these words Jesus makes an atypically philosophical point. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end”: that rises above the immediacy of Jesus’s gospel sayings—all those earthy stories that we call parables—to the level of metaphysical statement, an assertion of his relation to being as a whole.

A fair conclusion might be that this probably isn’t a remembered saying, but an expression of what the early Church had come to understand about Jesus. There is some agreement that the Book of Revelation, though not written by the John who wrote the fourth gospel, nevertheless stands in the tradition of that gospel, that there is an intellectual line of descent from John the Evangelist. In that tradition, there is a sequence of cosmic images of Christ: from the first words of the gospel itself, where Jesus is identified with the logos, the word of God from which all being emerges, to the opening of John’s first letter, where Jesus is the light that was from the beginning, to these words in Revelation, where Jesus declares himself to be the beginning and the end.

This sequence of imagery, all of which relates Christ to the primary logic of creation, suggests that part of what the early Christians experienced in Christ was the rationality of being as a whole. Christ somehow made sense, not just of individual lives, but of everything that there was. He revealed, alongside the personal love of God, the rationality of God that suffuses all being; so that they saw the universe not as chaotic or irrational, not the product of unknowable forces or whimsical spirits, but as a profound and rational order in which the reason of humanity, our power to make sense of things, has a place.

To see how Christ might have prompted this recognition, we might look at the way reason is understood in our own day. Very often rationality is set in opposition to religion; it is associated with science, and religion is seen as a force of unreason which misdescribes the universe and corrupts the rationality of human affairs, whether personal, social or political. To be rational is to reject the unreason of belief in God and all that goes with it.

There are things to be said. First, it needs to be recognised that it was Christianity’s vision of the deep rationality of the universe that made modern science possible. No one would launch on the scientific quest unless they had some belief that things were orderly and open to rational analysis. That belief, for our culture at least, Christianity provided.

Second, the rationality of science is not the whole of human rationality; it does not extend to everything that human beings want to reason about. Scientific reason is very good at telling us how things are and how they came to be that way. From that it can often tell us how things are going to be. So it can tell us that ice is water in a particular form; that this form appears when the temperature of water drops below zero; and that since the temperature will be five degrees below zero tomorrow morning, we can expect ice on the roads.

But can scientific reason say whether it is reasonable for me to love my enemies? It can say that there may be some evolutionary usefulness in coming to terms with enemies and cooperating with them for the common good; but is that really the question I’m asking? If I’m worried about how I should treat an enemy, I’m only partly asking about what is useful: I’m also asking about what is right, about the action that would make sense of my life and the lives of others. I’m asking a question (trying to reason) about the meaning of my existence. Scientific analysis of causes and consequences probably isn’t going to help me very far.
 
It is in this area that Christ introduces his followers to a deep and inclusive rationality, a frame of reasonableness that does indeed embrace all being. Suppose I have the impulse to love my enemy, to return good for evil. It feels somehow right, but I don’t know why I’m doing it. I may even suspect that I’m acting irrationally, because most people would see such an act, good given in return for evil, as unreasonable or even foolish. Jesus places that act within a new frame, so that it is no longer just an impulse but something that makes sense. He tells us that the ground of such an action is the being of God, a being in which love and goodness flow forth endlessly in the face of whatever evil is thrown against them. He shows us that behind the rationality of human calculation—can I be expected to do this, will it help me?—there is a deeper rationality, and within the logic of that rationality my action makes complete sense.

Against the partial reason of science, a reason that often seems to reduce or exclude aspects of our humanity, the Christian faith sets a fuller rationality; not in order to deny the first, but to complete it. The writer of the Book of Revelation had seen in Christ how the reason of God opens itself to the reason of man, embraces it, and gives it an eternal validity. As Christmas approaches, we should remember that, just as the Incarnation reveals the love of God, so it also, through that same love, reveals the rationality of God, the orderliness of being, and the possibility for our reason to enter into that greater reason which comes before and after all that is. As John has Jesus say, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”

Advent

Luke 21, 36: “Stay awake, praying at all times for the strength to survive all that is going to happen, and to stand with confidence before the Son of Man.”

We stand at the beginning of a new Church year, at the beginning of Advent; and we should perhaps pause for a moment to ask ourselves what we are doing on this day. Are we looking backwards or forwards? Are we preparing to remember a great even in the past—the coming of Jesus Christ—or are we, as the word Advent itself suggests, looking forward to something that has yet to happen, our celebration of the feast of the Nativity? This is a question not just for this moment in the Church’s year, but for every moment in the life of the Church. Is our concern the past or the future? Are we a remembering institution, focused on events two thousand years ago, or is our true orientation forward, ‘forward in faith’, toward something yet to be realised?

For many of our contemporaries the Church is irredeemably locked in the past. They see it as being about the past, always trying to reach back to its own roots, denying the contemporary world and resisting change and the future. That is why many of them have little time for us.

But if you read the gospels, you very soon come to realise that Jesus’s concern was emphatically with the future: with the coming Kingdom of God, here but not yet fully here, and with all that was yet to be revealed through his own living and dying. It was Christ, after all, who told those who wished to be his disciples to leave the dead to bury the dead, to let those who had no eye for the future busy themselves with the debris of the past.

Christ was about the future; and we see him talking about the future in today’s gospel. He talks about it in a particular way, one that is not altogether natural for us, and I shall say something about that in a moment. But the point for us is that Christ’s whole mission was directed forward; yes, he was profoundly aware of the tradition out of which that mission had grown, and he saw himself as the fulfilment of that tradition: but it was the future, the coming transformation in the Kingdom, that he preached.

We might say, of today’s gospel, that Christ is speaking of the end of the world, and of his second coming: “And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars … for the powers of heaven will be shaken” (21, 25-6) In the ‘mainstream’ of the Christian tradition we have become a little shy of talking about such things, a little nervous of apocalyptic language, even though every week, in the creed, we say of Christ that ‘he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.’ We have tended to leave the end of the world and the Last Days to what we often think of as the undergrowth of the Christian tradition—to millennialists of various kinds, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Adventists. We associate such preoccupations with predictions and endlessly revised dates, with Jonesville poisonings and Waco massacres. We tend to say rather little about the future. We behave, generally, as though our business is to remind the world of a wisdom that comes from the past, rather than to point ahead to what is still to come.

Advent itself may offer a way through this difficulty. We expect—we look ahead to—the Incarnation. But the Incarnation has already happened. What sense does that make? None at all, of course, within normal historical logic. What has happened has happened; what is still to come has not yet happened. But though the Incarnation is an event within history, it is unlike all other events. Jesus himself makes this clear in his exchange with the Pharisees in the eighth chapter of John’s gospel. They challenge his right to speak in the name of God, and he answers by claiming a continuity with the past and a rootedness in the tradition. He tells them that “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.” The Pharisees object, not unreasonably; they say to him, “Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?” To which Jesus replies, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, before Abraham was, I am.” (John 8, 56-8).

This is a strange saying, because Jesus is claiming something very strange, something quite impossible by all normal standards. He is saying that he is contemporary to all history. Unlike the rest of us, he is not confined to one historical point: he does not start in the future, come into the present, and then depart into the past. He is equally close to all historical moments. Notice that he does not say, “before Abraham was, I was,” but “before Abraham was, I am.” He is there in an eternal present that is contemporary with all time: that was why Abraham could see his day and rejoice in it, though for all normal historical understanding that day was far in the future.

If Christ is the eternal contemporary; if he belongs as much to Abraham’s time and to ours as he does to the first century in Palestine; then the Incarnation, his entry into history, is also an eternally contemporary event. When, in this Advent, we look ‘ahead’ to the coming of Christ, this is not some kind of pretence (that something has no yet happened that has already happened), nor is it a re-enactment of an event that we know, really, to be two thousand years behind us: it is a true looking ahead. Just as Christ, eternally contemporary, was, is and is to come, so the Incarnation is an eternal happening: Christ is always coming into the world, in this moment as much as in 6 BC, because the Incarnation is the point where our time connects with God’s eternity, and that eternity is equally close to all time.

For a moment, let us go back to the gospel of the day. Christ says, “There will be signs in the sun and moon and stars … men dying of fear as they await what menaces the world … and then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.” We may try to get round our uneasiness by referring to the apocalyptic expectations of first century Judaism, and so consign it to the past. But if Christ is indeed eternally contemporary, we cannot consign his words to the past. Yes, he may be using the forms of speech of another age, but we still need to listen. He is telling us something about how history relates to the purposes of God.

There was a time, about twenty years ago, when it looked as though history had finally come right. The Soviet empire had collapsed. Israelis and Palestinians were shaking hands. The stock markets were set into a long upward climb. Francis Fukuyama assured us that history, in the old sense of the wars of empire and ideology, was over. Democracy was now the only serious game in town.

Well, things have moved on. History doesn’t stop, nor do we escape from it. And one thing that Jesus is saying in the gospel passage is simply that: history is history, and don’t expect history to save you. History will always serve up its reliable menu of slaughter, terror and disaster. Left to history, there is no hope for humanity.

But he also reminds us that he, Christ, is there, eternally present in every moment of history, as close to us now as he was to Mary in the stable or the disciples in the Upper Room. History will always be tough, and so he says “Stay awake, praying at all times for the strength to survive all that is going to happen”. But if we do that, we shall be able to “stand with confidence before the Son of Man”, both at the end of time and now.

What does that mean for us as we approach Christmas 2010? It means that we should expect Christ in our lives. We should watch for those occasions, whether through the sacraments or the word of God or the love of our neighbours, when we know that we are not the prisoners of history, that we are not entirely the victims of time; when we know that we, with Christ, can enter the freedom of his eternal Advent. Amen

Unity

To equip the saints … for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. Eph 4, 12-13.

The unity of the Church is usually a topic for January, for the week of Christian unity; but this evening’s lesson very much suggests it, and in a week of surprising conjunctions and unexpected discoveries of common ground, unity and how we achieve it may even have a touch of topicality. How do we overcome the deep divisiveness of human affairs, within the Church as well as outside? Are Christians inevitably caught up in the partisan conflicts of our world, or do they have some special resource for overcoming all that? The recent history of our own Church is hardly encouraging. Paul’s words in Ephesians have, as often, a freshness and originality of insight, and may even suggest some practical conclusions for the Church in our own time.

    The first point to be taken from what he says is that there was never a golden age in which Christians all thought and acted as one, a moment of originating purity before division set in. The history of the Church is, from a certain angle, a history of disagreement. Paul is writing to the Ephesians in the 50s of the first century, and his words reveal that there was already disunity in the church. He finds it necessary to implore the Ephesian Christians to make “every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Earlier still, the Acts of the Apostles gives evidence of disagreement—about the keeping of Jewish law. Even earlier, the gospels themselves show the disciples disagreeing and jostling with each other for position. Even when Jesus was alive, there was imperfect unity. And we know that through the succeeding centuries, from the first-century arguments about the admission of Gentiles to the great fourth-century debates about the nature of Christ and the conflicts of the Reformation, division and conflict have marked most stages of the way.

    That doesn’t mean that we should give up on unity and settle into rancour and division as the inevitable way of things. We don’t stop struggling against sin because we have, so far, not defeated it. And division and rancour belong with sin, however justified they may sometimes feel. But it does mean that we should reflect on what we understand by unity and division, and how we approach the business of overcoming them. Here Paul has a great deal to say.

    First, he helps us see what unity is not. It is not, for him, a matter of institutional organisation. When he talks about ‘building up the body of Christ’ he does not mean the administrative organisation of the Church. He is not trying to answer the question as to whether there should be bishops or not, or who counts as a priest. Indeed, in the decade when this letter was written, twenty years or so after the Resurrection, that kind of church organisation hardly existed. (Ask yourself the question: was Paul a priest or a layman? The irrelevance of the question, as well as its unanswerability in modern terms, tells you something about the nature of the Church in the first century).

    Second, Paul does not try to foster unity by referring people back to origins. He doesn’t remind them of what Jesus taught (he hardly ever refers to Jesus’s teaching). He doesn’t say, ‘go back to the pure ways of the primitive church’ (he knew only too well how far back division went, how long it took for the leaders in Jerusalem even to talk to him). He calls in question an instinct we mostly have when we try to resolve differences, which is to go back to some pure point of origin or authority that we feel comes before all the arguments and so can settle them, something that has not yet been contaminated by the history of strife. So people look back to a model of unity in the Bible, or in the life of the early church. But the Bible is full of unresolved arguments (think of the Epistle to the Romans alongside the Epistle of James) and the New Testament witnesses to the divisions of the early church. Or people look to the magisterium of a Church that overrides history and argument, and holds, in a pure and protected form, an unvarying truth beyond conflict and division.

    Notice that Paul uses neither of these ways to bring the Ephesians back to unity. He doesn’t point them to the scriptures: there were, in any case, no acknowledged Christian scriptures at this point, and he uses the Hebrew scriptures to illuminate the nature of Christ, not to establish norms of Christian doctrine. Nor does he ever refer to a normative Church, to the magisterium of an institution that defines the truth of faith.

    In fact, in his concern for the unity of the body of Christ, Paul doesn’t look backwards at all: he always looks forwards. The unity of the faith lies ahead, not behind; it is something that believers grow towards, not decline from. Paul reveals none of the nostalgia for some mythical earlier, purer age that has infected the history of the Church in many different ways at many different times, from the separatism of the Anabaptists in the 16th century to the spiritual primitivism of the Pietism of the 18th century to the medievalising ritualism of the Oxford Movement and its Anglo-Catholic descendants. True, Paul had only about twenty years to be nostalgic about; but the point goes deeper than that.
  
    Paul’s discussion of unity goes far beyond the question of the historical, even the creedal, organisation of Christian believers; it arises from his deepest understanding of what the Christian faith is. Unity was at the heart of that. Paul was, in himself, a divided man: a Jew who had grown up in exile among Gentiles, a Pharisee who had been formed in a Greek-speaking world, a persecutor who had become the principle advocate of the new faith, one who struggled to keep the law against the fibre of his being which always failed him. Paul felt himself riven by difference and conflict, but he also believed that Christ was offering him a truer life, a life in which he might be, for the first time, unified, coherent, whole. In some sense that life already existed, even if, for the moment, it was (as he put it) hidden with Christ in God; but since Christ would not offer what was not already a reality, that transformed life was already his. His task was to grow towards it, to mature into it, to learn more and more how grace was giving it to him. Unity, in Christ and with Christ, was the goal of his journey.

    It is this same unity that, for Paul, is the goal of the Church. The question for him is not how, given the divisions among the followers of Christ, you set about arguing or persuading or organising them into unity, but how you point them forward to the unity of being that is Christ himself. But where does that leave our real and important divisions, our unavoidable arguments about the way forward? It should at least relativise those arguments, make us realise that it is not out of our debates, nor even out of our convictions, that the unity that is in Christ will come to us. When some of us denounce homosexuality as an abomination before the Lord, or when others insist that it is God’s will that women should be bishops, we should all remember that we are not the legislators of the Kingdom of Heaven. It is not out of our certainties that Christ’s unity will come, but out of that maturity that Paul speaks of, that growing into him who is the head of all. Until that time comes, Christians should remind themselves that they remain citizens of this world, human and divided, doing the best they can (as Paul puts it) to speak the truth to each other in love. But the blessing of unity, individually to each divided one of us and communally to all followers of Christ, is the end of the road along which we are being led, in Christ’s gift and not ours. Paul has the focus right when he says, in this same chapter of Ephesians, ‘There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.’

Raising the dead?

[Jesus] came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Luke 7, 14-15.

One resource of the trade for preachers is the Bible commentary. When you are faced with an unfamiliar or difficult passage it’s useful to take a look at a commentary, to see what the more learned have to say about it. For this morning’s gospel I did just that: turned up a couple of commentaries and learnt a good deal. I was told of the likely poverty of widows in first century Palestine when their main support, a son, died. I was reminded that touching a corpse or even the bier made you ritually unclean, and wasn’t something an observant Jew would readily do. I was told that it showed Jesus’s feeling for this woman that he didn’t hesitate to incur that uncleanness.

    All that was useful. But as I read I became aware of a very large elephant in the room. Here was a dead man being brought back to life. Didn’t that deserve comment? Was I expected to take that as given, as the kind of thing that happens in the Bible, if nowhere else? Why was nobody talking about that?

    Well, you could say that commentaries don’t deal with that kind of issue; the big questions are for theologians or philosophers. Commentaries operate on the level of detail; they give you context and background, not ultimate answers. But I still felt that there was an assumption here, that we were all on a level as far as this event was concerned; that as a presumed Christian I was over the hurdle of the obvious difficulty and could move on to talk of other things.

    But of course I’m not over that difficulty, nor, I imagine, are many of us here this morning. The gospel writers tell us that Jesus brought three people back from the dead: the daughter of Jairus, his friend Lazarus, and this man, the son of the widow of Nain. Every gospel has at least one of these stories. The first century writers are quite clear that Jesus did these things. Yet our assumption is that the dead stay dead. Whatever happens to them after death, they don’t come back to us. (Think, for a moment, of preachers in Cumbria this morning, who have to deal with this same text). Rarely are the gospels so out of line with our sense of the world.

    Well, what can we say? Let’s start by eliminating two unhelpful approaches.

    The first tells us to suppress all doubts and simply believe, because these are the gospels. Of course, the gospels have authority. But apart from the difficulty of doing that—can we really force ourselves to believe something?—we know how dangerous it is to switch off critical faculties when faced with a religious text. Thought, reflection, criticism, are part of what makes us human; and faith should make us more human, not less.

    The other unhelpful approach might, at first glance, seem more rational.  It starts from a law of nature: the dead do not come back. Therefore this story must be false. But this also offends against reason. Our knowledge of the world starts from observation; it is only from observation that we derive general laws. To use the general laws to decide what might or might not have been observed puts things the wrong way round and is deeply unscientific.

    OK; but that still leaves us with the problem of the dead man who came back to life. Did this happen or didn’t it? Since we weren’t there at the time, we can’t be sure.   All we have is the certainty of others, of the gospel writers, and we might have questions there, too. What if Luke wanted to set up a comparison between Jesus and Elijah? Certainly his account of Jesus’s miracle echoes that of Elijah in the Old Testament reading. Has the Elijah story somehow transferred itself to Jesus?

        Even if we trust the evangelists, we may not trust the mind of the first century. We tend to think that in those days people believed such things, as a matter of course, because they didn’t know any better. Magic and miracles were part of their world. So whatever happened they would read it in that way. Perhaps these people weren’t dead at all: collapsed, or in a coma. If we’d been there, we could have told them what was really going on.

    Notice how patronising that is. We are saying to people who lived in a very different world that our understanding of it is better than theirs. We are implying that they did not know death when they saw it. In fact, the average person in the first century would have been much more familiar with death than we are.  We can take it that they knew when a person was dead.

    Notice, too, that there is nothing magical in these stories. In none of them does Jesus lay on any performance of ritual or gesture or even special holy words. In this morning’s story, he doesn’t even pray. He gives simple instructions. To Jairus’s daughter he says the most touching words he ever spoke, ‘little girl, get up.’ To the widow’s son, he says, ‘young man, rise!’ To Lazarus he says, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ No magic, no invocations, no laying-on of hands. Just the most ordinary words.

    This might be the key to our problem. The ordinariness of the language stands out against the extraordinariness of the event. And that is true, not just of these stories, but of the whole image of Christ in the gospels.

    If you wanted to summarise the impact that Jesus had on the people who knew him, it would revolve around those words, ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’. On the one hand there was this ‘ordinary’ man—the carpenter’s son, the son of Mary. On the other, it seemed that in him, with him, and through him, extraordinariness was coming close to the world, that the surface of the ordinary was breaking up to allow the extraordinary to show through. This was as true of what he said as of what he did. And it remained true right up to the end. This sense of the extraordinary come close, of the unexpected at every turn, was so powerful that his followers never quite figured out what was going on. Mark’s gospel conveys the strong impression that Jesus’s disciples were in a constant state of bewilderment.

    The abiding impression that all the evangelists give of Jesus’s life and death was that the normality of the world had been shaken, that something unexpected but profoundly gracious had been brought to bear on their lives. What it was, you couldn’t explain; you simply had to take notice because it had become part of common reality. And that is how it is with these stories of the raising of the dead. They are the most extraordinary stories, to the point of being incredible. But they happen in the most ordinary way, with their feet—as it were—firmly planted in the plain ground of our world. A touch, a few words, and the miracle happens. The problem we have with these stories turns out to be the problem we have with Jesus altogether: can something so extraordinary, so unexpected, so impossible, be this close, this human, this familiar? But that, after all, is the point of the Incarnation.

Freedom on both sides

“Blessed be the Lord, the God of my master Abraham, who has not withheld his steadfast faith from my master. For I have been guided on my errand by the Lord, to the house of my master’s kinsmen.” Gen 24, 27.


Some years ago I used to be a fairly regular attender at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Kensington, at the time of Archbishop Anthony Bloom. He would preach at the Sunday morning liturgy, advancing to the top of the altar steps, fumbling with the microphone, and delivering, with great intensity, an impromptu sermon around the gospel of the day. He had a constant theme: that the incarnation should lead us to the full glory of our humanity, a humanity that God had taken on himself. In the congregation there was an old Russian lady scarred by a tragic life, who would denounce other worshippers, if they stood too close, for casting an evil influence on her. One morning, as Archbishop Antony began once again to preach on the grandeur of humanity, she turned and said, loudly enough for him to hear, “The same old thing. We’ve heard it all before.”

I tell the story because what I have to say this evening may seem rather close to what I said in a sermon a few weeks ago. I was arguing that faith is not just an event in our heads, but an objective structure in which something is given us. ‘Our society tells us repeatedly that faith is a private affair, a matter of personal opinion, and no more to be taken into public account than our taste in music or in painting. Religion, it is suggested, should have nothing to do with the objective, public world, where generally it will only cause harm.’

This evening we have heard part of the story of Abraham; and there is no space in that story for a privatised, internalised view of faith. Abraham’s faith was about action: leaving Haran, travelling to Canaan, founding a lineage, offering up his son Isaac. We are never given Abraham’s private opinions on God. Instead we read his belief from what he does. His faith is the drama that is enacted between himself and God, and that drama has the objective quality of real happenings in a public world.

But Abraham’s actions raise broad questions about how we act toward God and how God acts toward us. One familiar view says that if we act toward God in faith, then God will satisfy us: he will give us material blessings, the life of a loved one, spiritual gifts of love and grace. When that doesn’t quite happen, the focus shifts to God’s action toward us: notwithstanding appearances, we are told, God is actually giving us his gifts in everything that happens, even if those gifts don’t accord with our desires and we can’t see them as gifts at all.

I have caricatured those positions slightly and there is no doubt that they do contain spiritual insight. But there are also dangers. Each, in a different way, removes freedom from our relationship with God. The idea that acting in faith ensures God’s gifts, binds God to our purposes. We set the agenda; if we apply sufficient faith, God is bound to deliver. The second position binds us to God’s agenda. God is, invisibly and often incomprehensibly, writing the script of your life, a script which you may not understand and which makes your purposes a secondary consideration.

It’s easy to read the Abraham stories in these terms. Abraham has faith in God and God gives him what he wants: lands, descendants, the life of his son, Isaac. All that is the reward of faith. Looked at the other way, God has from all eternity written the script of Abraham’s life, and He prompts and nudges him along the way to a determined conclusion. You thought that sacrificing Isaac would rather destroy the play? Just wait for the next scene to see how my script will be played out.

Crudely put: either Abraham manipulates God or God manipulates Abraham. But to read the story in those ways is to leave out of account a crucial word, a word that governs all of this: the dull old word ‘covenant.’ Abraham’s actions, and God’s actions, are not just one-offs: they are held within, and given meaning by, the overarching frame of the covenantal relationship.

A covenant, as anyone who has bought a house will know, binds parties into a relationship of freedoms and obligations. I may grow cabbages in my front garden, if I wish, but I may not erect a public funfair. The point of a covenant is that it gives each party a position. The covenants of Genesis—between God and Noah, and between God and Abraham—recognise the standing of both parties and the freedom of each in respect of the other. Humanity is given its freedom, its dignity, which is different from the dignity of God. Men and women are no longer the vassals of the gods.

Look again at this evening’s story. Abraham has decided that Isaac must marry a woman from his native land, and not just from his native land, but from his kinsfolk. That is Abraham’s decision; God has issued no instructions on the point. For whatever reasons, good or bad—maintenance of a pure line, dislike of the Canaanites—this is what Abraham wants.

Abraham has his purposes, and no doubt he thinks they accord with God purposes. Can he be sure that they will come about, that God will see to their fulfilment? No, he can’t. His steward asks him: what if the girl from your kin won’t come back with me? Abraham sees that it is a possibility. If that happens, we think again. But even then, he says, don’t take Isaac back home.

So Abraham doesn’t think he can determine God’s actions simply by applying sufficient faith. God is free; he may do something quite different, faith or no faith. But Abraham is also free: the purposes that he sets out here are his own. These are human choices in a human situation.

This freedom is crucial to understanding covenant. God has promised his favour to Abraham. He will be close to Abraham and his descendants; as the steward says, he will show steadfast faithfulness. But this doesn’t mean that God relinquishes his freedom as far as Abraham is concerned. Things may still not happen the way Abraham wants them. Nor is Abraham bound to give up his freedom. He will continue to make his own choices, for his own reasons; but they will be made within the covenant, toward a faithful God.

As human beings, we act in freedom toward a God who, in his faithfulness, acts in freedom toward us. Neither binds the other. This is Abraham’s covenant, and it is the covenant that Christ renewed when he said to his disciples, ‘this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many’ (Mark 14, 24). Again, there was freedom on both sides. Christ’s wishes could not control the Father: ‘if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.’ Nor could God’s purpose override Christ’s freedom: he was free to refuse the crucifixion, to hide or disguise himself, to escape back to provincial obscurity. Christ was free; God was free. But at that moment in the upper room, the two freedoms came together; in that perfect conjunction of human freedom with the freedom of God the covenant was fulfilled, and human nature, as Archbishop Antony used to say, displayed its full glory.

Letting God Be

“You shall triumph by stillness and quiet; your victory shall come about through calm and confidence.” (Isaiah 30, 15, JPS translation).


Among the many problems of the Church in our time, there is one overriding problem: the disappearance of God from our world. This is partly a problem of cultural representation. If you had lived in an earlier age, say five hundred years ago, you would have been reminded of God at every turn, from the great religious festivals of the year to the statues of Christ and the Virgin along the public highway to priests going about in clerical garb to the constant invocation of God in the public utterances of rulers and dignitaries. Now that has almost wholly gone. The visual texture of our world is relentlessly secular; most churches are closed most of the time, and even the great festivals of Christmas and Easter have been detached from God. The resurrected Christ has been replaced, for the majority, by what one of David Sedaris’s more pedantic characters calls ‘the rabbit of Easter.’

But the problem goes deeper than this withdrawal of visual prompts and cultural reminders. God has largely vanished from the conversation of our society, from that level of thought and argument which forms our understanding of ourselves. Public references to God tend to be embarrassed or jokey. Insofar as he does survive, he survives in the language of the Church; he is real for us because we go on talking about him. But step beyond that language, talk to someone for whom the familiar words absolutely do not work, and even that reality begins to seem wishful and insubstantial. You may quite soon begin to feel, with them, the emptiness and incoherence of most religious language.

So: how can God be real for us? Tonight’s readings suggest two different approaches. On the one hand we have St Paul, encouraging the Christians at Corinth to contribute to the collection for the church in Jerusalem. He tells them that if they show active love to their fellow believers, do something real to help them, they will receive every blessing: possibly material, but certainly spiritual. Through love of their neighbour God will come closer to them. On the other hand we have Isaiah, telling the Jewish people that they have trusted too much in activism, in plans and strategies, and that this has led them away from a God who can only be known in stillness and quietness.

We live in the age of an activist church. Churches are busy with the love of their neighbours, from coffee mornings for the homeless to collections for disaster victims to street pastors to offering a listening ear to those with unmanageable problems. We are often told that we will know God in loving our neighbour. And no one is going to speak against that, partly because Christ enjoins us to love our neighbour and partly because doing good to others is about as objectionable as motherhood and apple pie.

But this pointing to our neighbour as the place where God is found may be an evasion. In an age when the Church has real difficulty in talking directly about God, it can be easier to point to something that no one questions: human neighbours and their need. But sometimes this move can sound glib. What, in reality, is the link between loving one’s neighbour and a closer sense of God? After all, many care for their neighbours without any such expectation, and not all Christians find themselves drawn closer to God through problematical humanity. Think of Mother Teresa, whose heroic life of care was not, apparently, rewarded by any sense of the closeness of God. Caring for others, taking up even a small part of the burden of human misery, can leave you drained, diminished in yourself, less sure of your spiritual footing than you were before you began.

This is not an argument for closing your chequebook and forgetting the suffering in Pakistan. There are compelling human reasons for doing good. It is an argument for saying that the Church needs to look more directly at the problem of God’s disappearance. It needs to look hard at the fact that the God who is assumed in our churchly discourse may be a diminishing reality for many in the Church, not to speak of those outside. It needs to address the questions that lie at the heart of the religious crisis of our times: what do we mean by God and how do we know him?

At which point, of course, I am about to chicken out and refuse to answer the questions that I have just put. My excuse—and it is an excuse—is that those questions can’t be answered in a short, or even a long, sermon. But I will offer some proposals as to how each of us, for ourselves, might go about finding some answer. I have three points.

First: try to look beyond the inherited stereotypes of God. For more than fifty years, ever since John Robinson’s Honest to God, the Church has been assuring the contemporary world that it no longer believes in an old man with a white beard seated on a cloud. But the image that most of us have of God the Father, that rather remote and certainly elderly first person of the Trinity, is really not very different. If I investigate what goes with my use of the word ‘God’, something abstract and distant, grand and slightly featureless still tends to come to mind, more a theoretical possibility than anything I can relate to.

The German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber spent some years in the 1920s translating the Hebrew Bible into German; and when he came to the passage in Exodus chapter 3 where Moses speaks with God on the mountain, he made an important translator’s decision which is also an important theological insight. You will recall that after God has commissioned Moses to go to the enslaved people of Israel in Egypt, Moses asks God to name himself: who, Moses asks, shall I say has sent me? God answers cryptically, with three words, in Hebrew ‘Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh.’ The King James Bible translates them, solidly and emphatically in capital letters, as ‘I AM THAT I AM’. But Hebrew is much less precise about tenses than English. The same verb can refer to the present or the future. Buber’s translation, or its English equivalent, is ‘I will be howsoever I will be.’ In other words: when Moses asks God to define his being, to name himself for the benefit of humanity, God refuses. Instead he says, ‘my being will be whatever my being will be. You cannot fix me, you cannot define me, you cannot pin me down to this form or that, however religious, however much sanctified by your tradition.’ Buber, incidentally, thought that Christianity was at fault on precisely this point, for having tried to fix God definitively in the figure of Christ. So: try to look beyond your stereotypes, remember that God is absolute freedom and that he will be for you whatever he chooses to be.

My second point: experience of God is always a part of the experience of something else. The experience of God does not come in a pure form. Which is to say, if you feel you have no direct experience of God, this doesn’t mean that you are not experiencing God. That experience may be hidden in your experience of something else. In searching for a pure knowledge of God, we may be making the mistake of trying to separate and isolate something that can’t be separated or isolated.

But if God is a part of other experiences, we would expect that his presence would leave some trace, some odour or flavour that would point to his being there. That is my third point. The closest I can get to describing the trace of God in experience is that it has something to do with an excess, an overflowing; in theological language, a transcendence. I mean something like this. We can make a description of an action or situation in what I would call local terms. I am giving this man two pounds. I am sitting in silence in this church. I give him two pounds so that he can buy a sandwich. I sit in the church to allow some of the debris of my life to fall into shape. Those descriptions of what I am doing work perfectly well, in local terms. But in each case I may feel that something has been left out. The giving of the two pounds was more than a practical act. The sitting in the church was more than a moment of self-therapy. There was an excess, something larger, something that overflowed both the act and the moment, something that I can’t describe in local terms. To talk about it, I have to reach, however hesitantly, for language which begins, at least, to enter the territory of talk about God.

That moment of overflowing can occur as we help others, as it no doubt did when Paul’s converts in Corinth gave to the Church in Jerusalem. But in order for the flavour of God to emerge in the texture of our experience, there has to be what we can only think of as stillness and quiet. We should listen to Isaiah as well as to Paul. Perhaps the first duty of the Church in this age, when God has disappeared for so many, is to be that place of quietness and stillness where the flavour of God can be found, where we and those around us can begin to rebuild a sense of the reality of God for our age and in our lives.

Vanity of Vanities

Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before evil days come and the years approach when you say, ‘These give me no pleasure.’ Ecclesiastes 12, 1.


The short book of Ecclesiastes has often been a problem for the church. It sets out a view of life that is at least uncomfortable for believers, and which may even negate belief. It says, in essence, that everything in life comes to the same end, which is death. Wisdom and folly, wealth and poverty, effort and idleness, love and hate, all end in oblivion. True, it is God who has ordained things this way, and we should remember him, but his purposes are unknowable and death is final. All we can be sure of are the good things of life, eating, drinking, and the worldly rewards of effort and achievement. The best life is the one that maximises those pleasures, without pretending that there is enduring value in any of them.

Even though it was written two centuries before the birth of Christ, you might say that Ecclesiastes is the most modern book in the Bible, because its outlook is so close to that of the present day. Just take a look at the Sunday papers, particularly the ‘quality’ papers. For all their seriousness about the great issues of the day, there is in the background a view of life not very different from that of Ecclesiastes. The final news about human life is bad, both individually and collectively. We do the best we can, for ourselves and for each other; but the only sensible course is to maximise the good life, with a nice house and a good car, enough money, interesting holidays, and regular visits to the best restaurants. That is the creed of our age. It takes different forms according to class, but that is what most people base their lives on. And Ecclesiastes gives it Biblical support. It even gives backing to the cult of youth: enjoy yourself when you are young, while you can, because the days are coming that will give you no pleasure.

The word usually associated with the writer of Ecclesiastes—let’s use the Hebrew name for him and call him ‘Qoheleth’, the preacher—is ‘vanity.’ His first verse: ‘Vanity of vanities, says the preacher. Vanity of vanities. All is vanity!’ His point is that if you look hard at any aspect of human living, it doesn’t justify itself, it has no real substance, it dissolves into air. Act well or badly, your fate is the same. Gain wealth and reputation, and you still end up dead and forgotten. We never connect with anything that is enduring. We spend our lives chasing the wind.

Even in religious terms, there is something to be said for this view; because ‘the preacher’ is bringing out the incompleteness of the world as human beings experience it. The world makes sense up to a point, but there is something missing. We manage our lives toward certain purposes, but there are no ultimate ends, none that justify what we do by rising above the wash of time and chance. We have the values of love and of truth, but they have no final substance or validity; the world negates and obliterates them. In the most serious endeavours of our lives, we have no firm ground to stand on.

Many people, perhaps in our time the majority, have arrived at the same conclusion. There is something missing that human beings reach out for. But having arrived at a sense of the world’s incompleteness, there are various things that you can do about it.

The first is simply to deny it. You can say that the world makes perfect sense in its own terms, that there is no incompleteness. We are the creatures of this world and our being is adjusted to it. If the world doesn’t satisfy us at every point, that is because we are looking for the wrong things or living out the dissatisfaction that drives the evolutionary process. Satisfied animals don’t survive.

Or you can accept the analysis and choose to live with it. That is Qoheleth’s position and that of most people today. Our sense of an incomplete world is real and our dissatisfactions are real; but there is nothing to be done about it except to maximise the satisfactions that are available to us. The Sunday papers will tell you how.

Where does Christianity stand on this? The church would say that the analysis is correct as far as it goes, but that there is more to be said. Our sense of the world’s incompleteness, of its vanity in its own terms, is a correct one. The world does not offer any final firm standing for values and purposes. Death, in worldly terms, does indeed obliterate the effort and the good of humanity. So far Qoheleth has got it right. But that is not all.

Look at what Qoholeth knows about God. It is not very much. He knows that God is there and that God has ordained things the way they are. Therefore God is to be feared and respected. But he knows no more than that. He doesn’t know why God has made things this way or what his ultimate purposes may be, if he has any. God is simply an inscrutable reality that has willed this incomplete, vanity-ridden world.

Christianity claims to know more than that, and to place lving and effort in a larger and justifying framework. Christianity claims to know that God, through Christ, shares in all human living in every detail and gives that living ultimate significance. What seems to us incomplete or pointless gains completion and purpose insofar as it is done toward this loving God. In that relation, nothing, however trivial, is vanity.

If that is what the church has to say, how is it that after two thousand years of Christian history the mindset of our time is so close to that of the writer of Ecclesiastes? How is it that two millennia of teaching and preaching seem to have brought us back to the same point?
That is a huge question, perhaps the largest question hanging over Christian civilisation. I can offer one thought.
Most people, looking at the world as it is, will gravitate toward Qoheleth’s view because it seems to be the only sensible position. You make the world as pleasant as you can for yourself and those around you; and, notice, this is not necessarily a selfish position to adopt. Certainly Christianity shouldn’t go around trying to make life miserable for people by denouncing everything as vanity. That has been tried on occasions, and it produces wretched results. But Christianity shouldn’t settle into a too easy relationship with the Qoheleth view, as though there is nothing more to be said. It shouldn’t make itself the spiritual garnish to the nice life, so that along with the nice life you can have the aesthetic, moral and emotional goodies that the church has to offer. This, for many of our contemporaries, is where Christianity has finished up. It’s not true, but they love the St Matthew Passion as one of the good things of life.

But the church isn’t there to provide the aesthetic or emotional or moral trimmings to a life that, finally, understands itself as vanity. It is there to say that something more has been shown to us; that there is a truth, that in Christ’s incarnation the vanity of our being has been reclaimed and transformed into the ultimate and substantial and enduring meaning of God.

History and remembrance

When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place, but the end will not follow immediately. Luke 21:9


If I’m not in church on a Sunday morning, I can be fairly sure that around eleven o’clock there will be a knock at the door and I will have a visit from a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their opening gambit is usually to present me with some Bible passage foretelling the last days and to ask whether I see any signs of the end in the world around. As they talk I feel two contradictory things: one, that they have got both history and the Bible by the wrong end, and two, that there is an awful lot of such prophecy in the Bible and that—unlike the Witnesses—I have chosen simply to ignore it.

Well, in our gospel this morning Jesus seems to be having a go at the same thing. The end is at hand; the Temple is about to be destroyed; get ready to flee from the wrath to come. His words are reminiscent of all those millenarian prophets of recent centuries, not just the Witnesses but the Adventists and the Mormons and the Jonesites and dozens of others whose faith is built around a catastrophic end to history as God marches in to sort us out.

Embarrassed scholars of a more liberal tendency have defended Jesus by pointing out that these passages carry the fingerprints of the Church almost two generations after the resurrection. Luke’s gospel is dated around 80AD, and by then the Temple had indeed been destroyed and the Church was indeed under heavy persecution. For those Christians, it must have been reassuring to be told that Jesus had foreseen all this. Luke was writing to the needs of his audience.

But Jesus can’t be excused as easily as that. There is plenty of evidence that Luke was building on a genuine element in Christ’s teaching. All the gospels show that he believed he was living in the last days, that God’s final intervention wws very close. Paul picked this up in his early writing: and the last words of the New Testament are in the same key: ‘“Surely I am coming soon.” Even so, come, Lord Jesus.’

What did Jesus mean by these sayings? He may simply have been reflecting the historical instability of his time. The political arrangements of first-century Judea were fragile, to say the least. Trouble was only too much to be expected, and he may have felt the need to point that out. But there is more.

These prophecies convey a recognition that history cannot save itself. The processes of history, of human choice and action, will never generate the Kingdom of God. We can work within history for the good; but history, left to itself, will never bring about our salvation.

Today is Remembrance Sunday. That should remind us both of the horrors of history and of the tendency, particularly strong in the last century, to believe that with a little more enlightenment and good will the Promised Land is in sight. The First World War was to have been the war to end wars. The League of Nations and the United Nations were to have established a peaceful, co-operative humanity. Fascism and Communism were supposed to deliver their different utopias. Even liberal democracy had its own utopian moment: in 1989, with the triumph of the free West, it seemed as though the broad sunlit uplands lay open before us. History had come to an end.

Twenty years on, it doesn’t quite feel that. History is closing in again. Utopias don’t have the following they once did. What do we, as Christians, do about that? Do we give up on history, join the JWs and start counting the days to the end?

We can’t do that because God didn’t give up on history. The incarnation is God’s presence in history, his acceptance of history, and so Christians have to take history seriously. Even as we remember the Somme and Hiroshima, we can’t back off in despair; we have to take ownership of history as Christ did, with all the pain and responsibility that entails. But we shouldn’t fall for the deception that history of itself will save us, however enlightened and moral we are, however glistening our ideals. In these strange passages, Jesus is telling us that. Jesus wasn’t going to fool his followers with an easy utopia. His gift to them was the true source of salvation, able to embrace and suffuse all history: the life of the Father, the life which the Father shares with the Son.

Starting from nature

“Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is God from of old, creator of the earth from end to end.” (Isaiah 40: 28, JPS)

It is a good idea, sometimes, to remind ourselves of the distance that separates our thinking from that of the people who wrote the Bible. This evening’s Old Testament lesson is a case in point. The writer, whom we know as the second Isaiah and who may date from the sixth century BCE, is encouraging the people of Israel after the trauma of their exile in Babylon. Having been dragged away from their homeland, they suspect that God has forgotten them, that he is ignoring their sufferings as they return to a wrecked and desolate land. Isaiah assures them that God forgets nobody, that he is in charge of all the processes of history. But his argument is not historical or political: it has to do with God as creator. He points his hearers to the natural world; there, he says, you see the unquestionable evidence of God’s power. The one who shaped the heavens, raised the mountains, made every living thing, is obviously in control; so he asks, ironically because the answer is so obvious, how can you doubt his control of history and his care for you?

This is not an argument that we would be likely to use in our own time. Looking at the much greater disaster that overtook the Jewish people in the 20th century, would anyone think it an adequate response to point to the natural world, to the evidence of God in creation? Not only would it seem like avoiding the issue; we don’t see the natural world in that way. Whereas Isaiah points to what is for him a public fact, God made visible in his work of creation, none of that is obvious to us. We know the history of the cosmos; we know how the mountains were formed; we have a pretty good idea of how living things came about, and none of that involves God. Nature speaks to us of its own laws, not of divine intention and control.

This may be why, in our age, when we look for evidence of God, we tend to point people inward; not to history or creation but to their own experience, to what it is like to be a human being capable of giving and receiving love. We offer God less as Creator than as the Lover, the Affirmer, the one who accepts what we are and sustains us toward what we shall be. But have we wholly parted company with Isaiah, with the Old Testament mind that saw God not just as private sustenance but also as public reality, displayed for all to see in the unquestionable act of creation?

A closer look at Isaiah may help. When he tells his hearers to look at the created world, two distinguishable things are going on. The first answers the question, how did things come to be the way they are? Why is the sky as it is: blue, radiant, apparently a dome, the source of rain, snow and lightening? Why are there plains and mountains? Why are some things alive and others not? All these questions must have occurred to human beings over tens of thousands of years; and in the absence of science the only plausible answer was that some greater being had made them that way, giants or gods acting out purposes that human beings could only guess at.

The Old Testament God, Yahweh, is to an important extent that kind of being: a supernatural maker and destroyer, a largely incomprehensible shaper of things, to be obeyed by human beings if they know what is good for them. So it is natural for Isaiah to ask, in the earlier part of this chapter, “who measured the waters with the hollow of his hand, and gauged the sky with a span, and meted earth’s dust with a measure, and weighed the mountains with a scale and the hills with a balance?” There could be only one answer, and it was an obvious one: Yahweh did all that.

Here the distance between our thinking and that of the fifth century BCE is most apparent. We still ask the question, how did things come to be the way they are; but we don’t answer it in the same way. For us the Yahweh-god, as supernatural mover and fixer, is redundant; the ‘how’ question is for us a question for science, not for theology. That is what science is about: the ‘how’ of the universe. How were the stars formed? How far does genetic inheritance determine personality? How do microwaves affect the brain? Because we already have good answers to many of these questions, and know where more can be found, we have gotten rid of the army of invisible agents, gods and spirits and nameless ‘forces’, that were once thought to explain the ‘how’ of the universe.

To that extent Isaiah inhabits a different world from ours, a world that we cannot re-enter; a world, one would have to say, grounded in and limited by ignorance; and ignorance is no kind of virtue. If that were all Isaiah had to offer, we would be reading him only for the beauty of his language. But there is something else going on in these chapters. Isaiah is grappling with a question much harder to formulate: the question raised by the very existence of the universe. What prompts that question is not how things came to be the way they are, but that they are at all. Isaiah is full of amazement at existence itself, in all its grandeur and diversity; he is struck with astonishment that all these things should be. He points us to the richness and multiplicity of being itself; he says “lift high your eyes and see: who created these? He who sends out their host by count, who calls them each by name: because of his great might and vast power, no one fails to appear.” He is filled with amazement at the endless flow of being, of things emerging into the light, of the unimaginable generosity of existence as it takes on all possible forms.

This is no longer the ‘how’ question; indeed, it is hardly a question at all, in the usual sense. Whereas asking ‘how’ can lead to a precise answer, can point us to some matter of fact, Isaiah’s amazement before the actuality of the universe can’t be answered by any simply factual statement. Which is to say that Isaiah’s further question, if we can call it such, takes us beyond science. Because even if we were able to answer all the ‘how’ questions, we would still find ourselves standing before the panorama of being that so amazed Isaiah and wondering what it means that there should be any of this at all, and ourselves there to be amazed by it.

Here we reach a great parting of the ways in human thought. On the one hand there are those like Isaiah, for whom the amazing reality of the created order is the ultimate question, the question that preoccupies them above all others. For them the amazing fact of being calls out to be set in a larger context, a context adequate to the miraculous event of existence. On the other hand there are those who see this as no question at all, as a pseudo-question. Being just is. Being needs no larger context than itself. The natural world is simply a given; there are no further implications. Any further question is spurious because there can be no conceivable answer to it; it is not the kind of question that science can answer. And science is the only kind of knowing that human beings have.

But the point is that Isaiah, in his amazement before the universe, has moved beyond the territory of science. He is no longer asking how; he is being amazed that. To him it seems obvious that this astonishing panorama of the infinite diversity of existence cannot be context to itself. Some of us will share that reaction; others won’t. But it is at that point, if we go along with Isaiah, that we can begin to talk again about God as a public reality; not only an inwardness in the depths of our being, but a reality that can, like Isaiah’s God, be pointed to, that can be shared with the whole community of humanity, that can become once again, as it was for the Jews returned from Babylon, the ground of confidence for the history of the human race. Amen.

Recognising Jesus

“My teaching is not mine but his who sent me. Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether this teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own.” John 7, 16-18.


The writer of the fourth gospel, whom we know as St. John the Evangelist, faced a central problem as he looked back over the life of Jesus: how was it that some people recognised him for who he was, whereas most did not? Since Jesus was the life of the world, why did most people fail to see that? He states the problem at the start of his gospel: “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him” (Jn 1, 10-11). John had seen something overwhelming and unmistakable in Jesus; as he puts it in his first epistle, “We declare to you … what we have heard, what we have seen with our own eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands … the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us” (1 Jn 1, 1-2). Yet most people missed it entirely.

What is involved in knowing Jesus? This question is central to Christianity; if it was a question for John, it remains a question for our time. Most of our contemporaries do not see, in Christ, what we claim to see. For them, Jesus is a great moral teacher, a religious reformer, perhaps a victim of religious bigotry; but not the eternal life of the Father incarnate in our world.

Nor is it a problem just for those who stand outside the church. When Christians talk about ‘knowing Jesus’, what kind of knowing are they talking about? It is not like knowing the person next door, or even ‘knowing’ a figure from history, such as Spinoza or Queen Victoria. It is not a matter of direct physical encounter or biographical information or familiarity with a body of ideas or even theological definition. To know Jesus, as John presents it, is a matter of recognition; of seeing something quite outside the range of our experience which is at the same time familiar, already known, intimately related to who we are and to the direction of our lives.

But where does this recognition come from? John makes this a central issue for Jesus himself. Throughout his gospel, he shows us Jesus talking about knowing and recognising, about how people come to know him for who he is. His meeting with Nicodemus, like his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, is all about recognition: “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet do not understand these things?” (Jn 3, 10). John even makes recognition an issue for Pilate, who struggles to decide what it is that he is looking at in this strange prisoner, suddenly brought before him.

In chapter 7 of the gospel the immediate issue is whether or not Jesus is to be recognised as the Messiah. This is the debate that is going on around him, in Galilee and in Jerusalem when Jesus goes up for the Feast of Tabernacles. The question for his followers and for the crowds is ‘how would we know?’ For some the matter is settled by the miracles that Jesus has performed. For others, Jesus’ Messianic status is confirmed by placing him within the prophesied sequence: first will come Elijah, then ‘the (unnamed) prophet’, and then the Messiah himself. If John the Baptist were the prophet, then Jesus must be the Messiah, the chosen one of God.

Jesus rejects both these arguments because they obscure who he really is. If people follow him because of his miracles, they will see him simply as a wonder-worker. If they understand him in terms of traditional Messianic expectation as a national leader, again they will miss the point. In verse after verse Jesus can be seen struggling against these modes of false recognition, against being assimilated to a pre-determined model that will prevent people from recognising his true identity.

But if these approaches are misleading, what is the true one? How can people recognise who he really is? Jesus has an answer, but it may not at first glance seem a very helpful one. Essentially he says that whoever knows the Father will know him too, will know who Jesus is. So he says things like “If God were your Father, you would love me” (Jn 8, 42) and “Whoever is from God hears the words of God. The reason you do not hear them is that you are not from God” (Jn 8, 47). So in order to recognise who Jesus is, we need already to know the Father. But elsewhere in the gospel, Jesus tells us that the way to the Father is through him: “No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14, 6). We need to know the Father in order to know Jesus; but we need to know Jesus in order to know the Father. There seems no way into the circle if we find ourselves on the outside of it.

This corresponds, I think, to many people’s experience of faith. To find a way in, it seems as though they must already be at a point that they cannot reach without the faith that they are looking to find. So rather regretfully, like John Humphries in his recent book, they say that they lack ‘the gift of faith’. Faith is fine for people who find themselves within the circle; but from outside, it is hard to see where you begin. By giving assent to a set of dogmatic statements? By trying to live a virtuous life? People are intuitively aware that neither will open the Kingdom of Heaven. They seem fated to hover on the margins.

Can John in his gospel do any better than that? There are two clues, I think, that help to open this self-enclosed circle. One is in verse 17 of our reading. Jesus says, “Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own.” Those who try to do the will of God will recognise that Jesus comes from God. This recognition arises not from miracles or a study of the Messianic prophecies or a degree in theology, but from something practical, the steady directing of one’s life toward God’s will. The people who know Jesus are those whose living tends toward God. Their recognition is not an intellectual act but the outflow of a whole life: such people will know who Jesus is, and where he has come from.

But how is ‘doing the will of God’ different from doing what most people do, trying to lead a moral life, keeping an eye on the rules? If trying to be good was all that it took to recognise who he was, the Pharisees would have flocked to Jesus; but they didn’t. They were the experts on the will of God, but that did not bring them to Jesus. Something else is involved, and again Jesus provides a clue, in the next verse of this same chapter: “Those who speak on their own seek their own glory; but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and there is nothing false in him” (Jn 7, 18).

There are two kinds of teacher, says Jesus. There is the one who speaks on his own behalf, out of what he himself possesses, out of the learning that he has made his own. And there is the one who knows he possesses nothing, and simply teaches that. The Pharisees are of the first type. They ‘own’ the law, speak from their understanding of it, condemn Jesus for healing a man on the Sabbath. But Jesus is different. As he keeps on insisting, “My teaching is not mine but his who sent me” (Jn 7, 16). Everything that he gives to others is given him by the Father, including his own being. He lives within an economy, not of possession, but of gift. This, Jesus says, is the only way not just to speak the truth, but to be the truth: “the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and there is nothing false in him.”

What Jesus wants us to recognise in him is his total openness to the Father, an openness so complete that it is impossible for him to set a boundary between the two. Jesus cannot say where his being ends and that of the Father begins. This is why he is so sure that those who know him also know the Father; not because of some moral perfection, but because he cannot separate who he is from the Father who gives him everything that he is.

Well: fine if you are the second person of the Trinity (we might think) but what about us? Let’s go back a step. Jesus directs us to doing the will of his Father. But for Jesus, doing the will of the Father was not any kind of rule-keeping but that mutuality of giving, that borderless exchange of love, that he knew in his life with the Father. So e can start on the way to seeing who Jesus is when we begin to realise that our efforts to do the will of the Father will always fail as long as they remain our efforts, our project, a goodness that we seek to own for ourselves. But Jesus is not about owning, not even the owning of virtue. The eternal life of the Father, the life that Jesus shared, is nothing to be possessed, but pure gift; Jesus knew himself to be living within that gift, that he was that gift. Gifts do not require historical or intellectual credentials; whatever is offered in love is a gift. We recognise Jesus for who he is when we see that he is not defined by any formula but by his total gift of himself, a gift that comes from the heart of the Father and draws us back into that eternal life. Amen.

Incarnation

Who for us men, and for our salvation came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, And was made man.

About a week before he died, my father, who for sixty years was a Methodist minister, had a visit from a friend. Both knew that they had little time to live. Afterwards, my father reported their conversation to my mother. The friend had said to him, “I am resting on Christ.” My father said to my mother, “I can’t say that. All I can say is that I am resting on God.”

Christ has always been a problem for the Church. God we think we can conceptualise: an eternal being, omnipotent, omniscient, etc., etc. But Christ—man or God? Man and God? The Church spent a large part of its early years agonising over this strange figure, trying to get him right; and though the formulations were arrived at, the question has never gone away, nor will it ever go away. It is not that kind of question.

The Incarnation is the great difficulty in Christianity. It is most of what sets us apart from Jews and Muslims. It was a difficulty for my father, who would sometimes say that he thought his theology was more Jewish than Christian. After a lifetime of preaching, he would not, I think, ever have claimed to have ‘met’ Christ; though God was a different matter.

I suspect that there are many like him in the churches. They may not dissent from the creedal statements concerning the Incarnation, but the Incarnation as an experienced reality, as encounter with Christ as the living presence of God in our world—that is a different thing; an aspiration, perhaps, and no more. On their behalf we should ask the question: what does the Incarnation mean for us? Is it more than a theological definition? Can it be an experienced reality? It ought to be, because Christ was incarnate not just for thirty-five years of the first century, but for all time, for all humanity.

The heart of the question—and perhaps the heart of Christian faith—is this: how can we, here and now, know the truth of the Incarnation? Partly, of course, we know it because we are told it, by the Church and by the scriptures; and there is nothing wrong with that. Being told something is the way we come to know most things. But there is a certain second-handedness about being told; it is better, in the end, to know something for ourselves. How, then, can we, directly, know Christ the Incarnation of the Logos alive in our world?

Let’s start with some inadequate solutions to the problem. One is to relate to Christ simply as a memory, a memory held in the mind of the community that we call the Church. The Church remembers Christ and so makes him available to us. Now it is undeniable that this is partly what the Church does. The Church does remember Christ; holds him in a collective consciousness. But many groups do this for their founders. In the days when there were Communist parties, the comrades would piously remember Marx, or Lenin, or even Stalin. Human memory is capable of sacralising some appalling people. At the same time they would talk of the ‘spirit’ of Lenin being at work in the world. None of that requires an Incarnation. And if that is all we mean by knowing Christ, then the Church is rather like the mausoleum in Red Square: a shrine of memory.

Another inadequate answer is to generate what might be described as a virtual Christ through the way that we use religious language. If we refer to him often enough, invoke him often enough, then he will certainly become part of our world of reference. But the living Christ must be more than the result of an effort of imagination, a figure generated within the discourse of a dedicated community. This is not how Christ is real to the Church. We can certainly construct Jesus for ourselves as a kind of super-buddy always at our elbow, always knowing what we should do. But it may be hard to distinguish his reality from the reality of those imaginary friends that children often invent. We may run the risk of creating a Christ in our own image; and true meeting involves otherness, the unknown, surprise, even danger.

Not every sense of Christ is the presence of Christ. “Seeing Salvation,” the exhibition at the National Gallery a few years ago, conveyed very powerfully a sense of Christ within the artistic tradition of Europe; but that is not the same as the presence of Christ. What we are looking for is the direct encounter that will enable us to say, for ourselves, that we have known the Incarnation. How can we move toward that?

We could do worse than to start from the Epistle to the Hebrews. The writer of that amazing text makes a central point about the history of human relations with God. There was a time when God was out there somewhere, distant, separated from us by a gulf, across which human beings tried, endlessly, to throw bridges of sacrifice. But it never worked. We were here and God was there. But then, amazingly and against all expectation, we discovered God standing with us on our side of the gulf. So in a sense the gulf had vanished; we were with God because God was with us.

This is, of course, an account of the Incarnation; and it tells us that not only is the relation between God and man transformed by Christ’s coming, but also that our experience of God has changed. You might say that, apart from the Incarnation, God remains something of a speculation; an idea thrown out toward the hidden mystery of things. This idea may be vivid and it may be passionately embraced; but it remains, always, disconcertingly conceptual, something rooted in our attempts to make sense of the universe. It becomes the material for endless philosophical dispute.

But the writer of Hebrews is not talking about a concept. Something has happened; we have discovered God alongside us, as though we had glanced over our shoulder and suddenly seen him standing there. God has come close, and we can expect intimacy where before there was only distance. Whereas Yahweh belonged to the world of the patriarchs, the Ancient of Days always to be placated with sacrifice, Christ stands within our world. The concluding note of Hebrews is expectation: “Jesus … suffered outside the gate to sanctify the people with his own blood. Let us go to him, then, outside the camp, and bear his humiliation. There is no permanent city for us here; we are looking for the one which is yet to be” (Heb 13: 12-13).

Let us go to him: we go out to meet Christ, to share his life as he shared ours. Expectation is the key. Something so new is happening that the old order of faith, deep and true though it was, is overthrown. The Incarnate Christ has come very close, and our normal model of seeing—me here, you over there—does not work with Christ. If we wish to see him, we must change our way of looking.

Here a passage from St Augustine may help. In his Confessions, he describes a time of intense searching, when he tried to find the Lord in the objects of creation—sun, moon and stars—and in the images of his mind. He was looking desperately, trying to see the truth as an object set before him. But all the time he was looking in the wrong place: “But you, O Lord, were more intimate to me than I am to myself.” Just as the writer of Hebrews sees Christ as closing the gap between God and humanity, so Augustine sees Christ when he can no longer measure the distance between himself and the Lord.

But again, we have to ask, what does that mean for us? I have one suggestion: it works for me, it may perhaps work for you. I was listening to the Nunc dimittis recently at Evensong: “Lord, you let your servant go, in peace; because my eyes have seen your salvation.” What was Simeon saying? He was saying that in Christ he saw, unmistakeably, what he had always looked for, the redemption of all that he was. He knew that if he kept his eye fixed on Christ, he was saved—his life had been taken up into the life of God.

It seemed to me, hearing those words of the canticle, that I knew what they meant; that I too had seen my salvation. Not necessarily at that moment or in the way that Simeon did. But if someone had asked me whether, in the course of my life, I had been shown that which had the power to redeem and to transform my whole being, I would answer ‘yes.’ I might not easily be able to describe what it was—a sense of transforming love, of infinitely patient grace?—but I had been shown it. Whether I have done anything about it, is, of course, a different matter.

Look into your life, and ask yourself if you can join with Simeon in saying those words: “my eyes have seen your salvation.” Look for that glimpse of something that you would trust absolutely with what you are. When you find it, you are looking at Christ. It does not matter if it bears another name. If you have known the touch of salvation within yourself, you have felt the touch of Christ, because salvation comes from nowhere else.

Where does that leave my father, who, with death a week away, could rest on God but not on Christ? Well, names do not matter to God. He was resting on Christ. He was resting on that intimacy with which God, incarnate, enters our lives, shares in them, and saves us. That is Christ, whatever name we choose to call it. Amen.

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.

Epiphany

We know very little about the Magi, but we do know what they were looking for. They were looking for a king: that is why they went to Jerusalem, because that was where the King of the Jews was to be found. When they had spoken to Herod, he too knew what he was looking for. He was looking for a child who would threaten his power, and he wanted to kill him.

But Epiphany—the word means ‘showing forth—is not about looking, but about showing. When we look for something, we generally know what it is that we expect to find. We have a frame of expectation. But showing is different. To be shown something, you have to lay aside your expectations; otherwise you will not see what is in front of you. If looking is grounded in expectation, showing goes with surprise, with the paradoxical recognition of something that you have never seen before.

Our age does a great deal of looking, and it is pretty clear about the limits of what there is to find. Read a Sunday newspaper: the world is a dangerous place, faced by threats that are likely to be terminal, but in the meantime there are nice things to do, nice places to visit, nice things to eat. If Christmas began as the pagan world cheering itself up against the bleakness of winter, for us it is despairing humanity cosseting itself against the bleakness of a world from which hope seems to have withdrawn.

What did the Magi find? Certainly, not what they were looking for, not what they had expected. The birth of Jesus was no great event, nothing that initiated a new age of monarchical triumph or conquest.

Yet we know that they were not disappointed: ‘when they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy.’ They knew they had come to the right place. When they entered the house, it was no longer a matter of looking, but of being shown something; they recognised what they saw as the goal of their journey, the reason for their joy: ‘they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage.’

Showing goes with surprise, with the recognition of what we haven’t expected. But it also has consequences. When the Magi saw what they had been shown, they knew that their plans would have to change. Instead of going back to the ever-so-helpful Herod, they returned to their own country ‘by another route’.

Surprise, recognition of the never-before-seen, a change of plan: that is Epiphany. Ask yourself at this time of the year, not ‘what am I looking for?’, but ‘what have I been shown?’ Not in some mystical vision, but in the detail of your life. What have you been shown that breaks the frame of your expectations, that leads you back to hope, that frees you from the despairing scenarios of our world?

Like what? Well, it could be some words said to you in love. It could be the music that you have heard this evening. It will be different for each of us, and it almost certainly won’t carry a religious label. But there will be surprise, recognition, and the possibility of a change of direction. And when that happens, we have known Christ’s epiphany; because it is only Christ who breaks the frame of our despairing expectations to illumine our lives as the star illuminated the house at Bethlehem.