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Pentecost 4
6/7/2025

2 Corinthians 4:1-6
Psalm 27
John 14:8-13

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I don’t know how many of you here are fans of the sitcom. Perhaps it was I love Lucy, or Fawlty Towers, Seinfeld, Friends, or Big Bang Theory.

A feature of the sitcom is that the actors specialise in a kind of personal “transparency”. This means that, were you to turn the sound off and just watch the action, you’d pretty much be able to tell what is going on, and how everyone feels about it. What you need to know is in the face, in the stance, in the gesture. The characters in the story are transparent: we know close enough to exactly what she feels on the inside by how she looks on the outside.

Contrast this with the murder mystery. Opacity – the inability to see below the surface – is central to this kind of storytelling. For the most part, the investigating officers themselves are quite transparent, but the various suspects aren’t. The story is a process of getting under the deceptive surfaces which people present. Very often – and satisfyingly so for the viewer – the baddie turns out to be the one who looked the least murderous.

In a sitcom, we are set at ease to enjoy everyone’s suffering. We know where everyone stands by how they manifest in front of us, and so we know what to expect from them. But in the murder mystery, our experience is much more anxious because, as a rule in these stories, murderers don’t look like murderers.

This is all of interest because it seems to me that what we experience of each other – and more broadly of life in this world – is very much a matter of whether we think we are living in a sitcom, or a murder mystery.

How we feel about that depends, of course, on where we are. At home, it’s mostly sitcom, unless we live with a deceptive or manipulative person, which is going to get not-fun real quick. But in most of our natural exchanges outside the home, we tend to act as if we’re living in a murder mystery. We don’t know who we can trust, or to what extent. We take small steps, risking small things before we risk larger ones.

This caution matters because the world can be a dangerous place to those who are not paying attention. Conmen (and -women) don’t look like swindlers. They can scam us because they project a false transparency which sets us at ease. Like a trompe l’oeil painting on a wall which makes us think we see a window opening onto a garden, the scammer projects false transparency, so that we think we see depth but in fact it’s just superficial, and there is no garden, no intention to fulfil the promise the scammer makes in exchange for our money.

But this dynamic doesn’t play out only in the distance between our exposed faces and our hidden hearts. Over the last 200 years or so observers like Marx, Nietzsche and Freud have shown that our reading of our society and economics, of our history and morals, and even of ourselves is quite superficial. These self-readings miss hidden dynamics among and within us. We are more than we can see, and the “more” is mostly bad news. Behind the bright and sunny image on the wall is cold, hard brick: dark economic powers, untested assumptions about ourselves, and everything I’ve suppressed about what mummy and daddy did to me.

Where can we find confident clear-sightedness when opacity like this is so deeply ingrained into our experience of the world? Where do we see clearly into the depths, so that we know truly where we stand?

Nowhere, perhaps.

But in connection with all this, we might consider what Jesus says in this morning’s selection from John’s Gospel. “Lord, ” demands the disciple Philip, “show us the Father, and we will be satisfied”. Show us the heart of the matter – let us look behind the veil, let us peer inside – and then we will know what we are dealing with.

To this, Jesus responds, But, what do you mean, Philip? “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. ”

This is perhaps the most extraordinary thing said in John’s Gospel. Or, better, it’s a restatement of the extraordinary thing John says in many different ways: that Jesus is the coincidence of the superficial and the deep, of the world and God, such that to see the one is to see the other. To see Jesus is to see God; to seek God is finally to find Jesus.

The problem with this is that we don’t believe that the heart of God could be visible in this way. We are accustomed to closing our eyes to seek God – when praying, for instance. What we see – the superficial world – seems precisely not to be the heart of the matter, and so we close it out, as if what we see is the last place God would be found.

Against this – articulated by Philip’ question – Jesus declares: to see me, tangible here and now, is to see God.

This is an astounding assertion. But even it were true, how is it true now? If Philip and friends should have seen the Father in Jesus, what of us? Is Jesus himself not now obscured behind the surface of 2000 years, and the revelation of the heart of God with him? Where is the coincidence of God and the world now?

The problem now becomes, What does it mean for us to “see Jesus”, given we are not in the room with Philip and Peter, Mary and Martha? “Where is God? ” becomes “Where is Jesus? ”

God was once present to the disciples in Jesus himself. This presence only continues if Jesus continues to be present as the window into God.

Where, then, is Jesus present?

The answer is…here, in this place. Or, that’s almost the answer. Perhaps more accurately, Jesus is what we are becoming, by being in this place.

We spoke a few weeks ago of the Holy Spirit as the means by which we learn the humanity of Jesus in the church, in the life of forgiveness, reconciliation and community. In the community of Spirit, we are formed into that humanity. So, though our creed runs from the Father to the Song to the Spirit, our experience of God runs the other way: from life in the Spirit, being formed into Jesus’s own humanity, into an experience of the Father, the heart of God.

When Jesus says, Who has seen me has seen the Father, he says also that Who has known me as the Father knows me becomes as I am, experiences what I experience, is with the heart of God as I am.

We have here, then, no proposal merely about Jesus and God, but one about ourselves as well. God is about what happens between us, is about our formation in and our manifestation of the humanity of Jesus.

The God which matters is not hidden away in the past experience of Jesus, or behind our eyes closed in prayer, or lurking somewhere under or within all things.

God appears on the surface of life, is manifest in things said and done, and in how they are said and done.

God is something done, lived, enacted.

And so, not to be theologically mysterious but to be plain and open, Jesus says, Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. I work the works of God, speak what God speaks. There are be no hidden surprises. What you see in me is what God is.

This matters because what is true for Jesus is true for us. Or, it could be true for us. It is our vocation, however well we hear and respond, to live sitcom-like – transparently – in a murder mystery world: openly, honestly, without guile. We are called – and are being formed – to say, What you see in us is what God is.

This is surely a terrifying thing. How could we be that important? Who among us wants to be that important? How much more convenient, if the truth of God were hidden somewhere else other than in our faces, if the truth of God were indeed opaque.

But No. Whatever depth and hiddenness might correspond to God, it is one with the surface, with the life that Jesus was, with the lives we are to be in him, with him.

Let us, then, recommit not to merely “believing” in God, as if this were to assent to some theory or inner conviction about what and where God is, buried under the face we show to the world.

Let us do God in word and deed that the world might see, shining in our faces as in Jesus’ own, the knowledge of God which is the light of the world.