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Pentecost 20
26/10/2025

Psalm 65
John 17:11-17

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ForeWord

Something must be done

Our most recent “Quarterly Conversation on the Quarterly Essay” – looked at Marian Wilson’s “Woodside versus the Planet”. Wilson recounts the processes towards extending fossil fuel extraction permissions for the energy company Woodside, in the context of growing concern about climate change.

There are no real surprises in the Essay, including the not particularly encouraging conclusion that the “next three years are crucial”, but we live in a world in which are continually made the kinds of compromises Wilson describes in the Woodside saga.

A couple of leading reasons present themselves as to why we might act with respect to climate change. One is the perceived necessity of preserving nature as it is. With all its creatures great and small, the world is bright and beautiful, and must be preserved for its own sake. A second reason is that we depend on the world for our own survival. No healthy world, no human future (and we have an interest in a human future). An extension of this concerns the human generations that will follow us, who could be significantly affected by what we do (or don’t do) now.

Behind both of these concerns, of course, is the assumption that we can make a difference here. The expected climate changes are not natural effects; they are the result of human action, human decision. This is why we think climate action matters: we have acted to cause this, now we must act to mitigate it. Natural processes involve no decisions and so have no moral element. But this looming crisis seems to be a matter of decision, and so is experienced as a moral imperative.

But, now being moral, the question ceases to be “scientific” or “rational” or even “natural”. We are now in the realm of balance and interpretation: a question not of the necessities of nature but of risks of action and accountability.

This becomes clearer if we shift from the possible extinction of beautiful but dumb creatures to the plight of future human generations. Less predictable weather patterns, higher temperatures and rising sea levels could adversely affect, displace, or kill hundreds of millions of people. What responsibility do we have towards them?

The easy answer is at least “some” – we have some responsibility. Many would say that we have much more than just this. But why does this not move us to radical action, even if just for the sake of our future selves?

A failure to love

The answer is that we do not love the people of the future as we love ourselves. Perhaps it’s surprising that love might appear here, although less so when we consider that this is a question of moral action, which action is always finally about love.

We have done so poorly in responding to a crisis which has been looming for more than 40 years because we are lousy lovers, especially outside of our closest connections. The difficulty we might have in sympathising with future generations and moderating our actions to improve their prospects is precisely the same difficulty we have here and now in acting sympathetically towards those around us. We are afflicted here and now by contempt and violence, ideological and economic divisions, loneliness and oppression, for the same reason that climate futures look bleak: the lack of respect for the other, the poverty of our efforts at love. We do not love others – present, or to come – as we love ourselves.

Now, that’s pretty bleak, pessimistic even. But, bleak or not, is it correct? Because if it is right, we are about as likely to act successfully in the future interests of the bright and beautiful creation as we are to act successfully to bring peace with justice in our own time, here and now. (And where is that peace? )

This is not to suggest that there is nothing to be done about climate change, or that what action we might take would be pointless. It is to say that, to the extent that what needs to be done depends on human moral agents like us with our limited capacity to love each other as we love ourselves, we will not do enough to avert a major environmental catastrophe. Things are going to get a lot worse, climate-wise. And, in view of what we are – as evidenced by our collective action – there is little we can do about that getting worse.

As pessimistic as this sounds, it’s closer to the mark to speak here of gospel realism. This realism hears a command to love across 2000 years (and more) as a new word, because we are not yet good lovers, despite how many times we have heard the command to love. The new problem of climate change is the old problem of love.

And, as we’ve seen before, the old problem of love – as a problem – is shown in the appearance of love in the Gospels in the guise of a command. The problem in the struggle with climate change is the problem Jesus addresses in his great prayer for his disciples (John 17), and at the heart of his moral teaching: love one another, as I have loved you. That we need to hear the command to love is the bad news here – and why we’ll likely not act according to the threat of climate change. The good news is in the “as I have loved you” – that we have been loved in a particular way, which is where the good news begins.

The long defeat

What are we to do with the gospel’s uncomfortable realism about our moral capacity, in the face of the very pressing moral imperatives, not only of climate change but also the many other encroaching powers which reduce us to less than the glory of God? Is nothing to be done? Is it all hopeless?

That depends on what we think “hope” is. Towards an answer, we must keep in mind that the biblical testimony has always been pessimistic about us. But this has also been part of the gospel, part of its good news. Things are no more hopeless now than they ever were. Hope just isn’t what we usually think it to be – the hope that we can win, that we can save ourselves, whatever we think “win” or “save” might mean here.

In another piece on climate change I read earlier in the year, I came across a notion from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth sagas: the notion of the long defeat. The long defeat refers to a struggle against the odds in a losing battle – a defeat which is long precisely because of the struggle and which is inevitable because of the kind of world we’re in. The life of the long defeat is one in which you know you are going to lose, and yet you fight on anyway. Why? Because that struggle is the form truth’s light takes in a dark world. The struggle will yield victories along the way, but the challenges will continue. What victories we might manage, are only temporary.

On that happy note, let’s pause to hear again part of a passage we visited a couple of weeks ago, within which Jesus draws a distinction between being in-and-of the world, and being in-but-not-of the world.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 1711-19)

Word: Proclamation

In the world.

We’ve already thought a bit about what Jesus had to say in our text today – being in-and-of, or in-and-not-of the world. The point there was that generative AI tools are in-and-of the world, and so lack any novelty; they produce more of the same.

But we can come at the passage from a different direction, beginning with the “in” the world. Jesus prays for the novel – for what is not “of” the world but jis still in the world. The disciples might – might – change, but the world does not. And what of the world does not change? The world’s need for the command to love, given its continued failure to love.

The shape of this general condition is the experience of Jesus himself: Jesus struggles and finally succumbs to the unloving world. Jesus is finally defeated, on the cross. A reading of the cross as defeat is much stronger in Mark and Matthew than in John (or Luke), and we’ve seen how John twins the defeat with victory, making the cross itself in-but-not-of the world: the cross is more than defeat. (Paul is clearly here, too).

But it is still a defeat; God is rejected, the resurrection notwithstanding. And then prays precisely that this experience – his experience – be the experience of the disciples. This sharing he calls “a sanctification in truth”.

And what is this “truth”? It’s not a doctrine, not a list of credal statements. It is a way of living in a defeating world. It is Jesus’ own way of living: in the midst of death, life in all its fullness. The of-the-world defeat still looms but the gospel refuses to allow it to be understood on the world’s own terms.

And so the defeat, in Jesus’ terms, is “not of this world”. It is not tragic. It speaks something new. John’s word for this new thing is “love”, a love-in-the-midst, : a local, temporary, re-ordering “of the world” into something not-of the world.

Perhaps the work of love stands for a while, perhaps it is fleeting. Whatever the case, the imperative is the same: not “save” the world but “love”. Be human in the midst of inhumanity, because the inhumanity will continue.

Love has failed; long live love.

Discipleship – being friends and followers of Jesus, loving despite unlove – is about having cool heads in a hot world. It is the willingness to struggle against the long defeat. The world is going to need love, and heads, like this.

Let us, then, play our part in love’s work. And all God’s people say … Amen.

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Pentecost 18
12/10/2025

Psalm 111
John 17:6-8, 13-19, 22-24

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ForeWord

The AI-generated sermon
I was at a church committee meeting a couple of weeks ago, the kind of meeting that has an opening “devotion”.

The colleague leading the reflection began by observing the increasing presence and usefulness of “artificial intelligence” (AI) in our lives, and then asked what this might mean in a churchly world of smaller congregations, fewer trained ministers, and so on. To demonstrate what might be possible, she declared that her reflection had been totally written by an online AI text generator.

As those of you who have used these online tools might already suspect, the generated material was in fact very impressive. It was clear that the machine had “read” the Gospel text, and no small amount of commentary and sermon material based on it. The teaching was along the lines of what you would expect to find in a devotional resource or a general homiletical guide on how one might preach on that particular text, with a moral or spiritual lesson presented at the end. The output was the kind of thing we’ve heard others do with the same material.

At the same time, precisely because we recognised it, there was also something rather prosaic about the analysis of the text and its application to our context. It lacked freshness. And there is a reason for this. To overstate it just a bit, this kind of program – a so-called Large Language Model text generator (LLM) – works by summarising pretty much everything that’s ever been written about a particular subject. And so, these machines work by telling us what is already known. We might not know that we already know it, but it is part of us, nonetheless, to the extent that we are part of the same world and discourse.

Now, I’m not really concerned here with whether or not one “should” use AI in this way – to write devotions at meetings or write sermons. There was nothing inherently wrong with what the machine had generated. The risk it presents is not that it might be wrong (although it could be that, too). The real risk is that it might just be boring, the summary of a whole lot of things we have heard before, which we already know. (The most interesting thing in the presentation at the meeting was a remark the leader made about the reading before we heard the AI-generated stuff – interesting because it drew attention to a part of the text usually eclipsed by the standard and familiar focal points. )
John’s Gospel might not be the most obvious source for thinking about the limits of Large Language Model text generators. But, having in mind what we’ve just said about what those machines do and the kind of stuff they produce, let’s now listen to some selected verses from John, with an ear for what Jesus says about being “in but not of” the world.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 17. 6-8, 13-19, 22-24)

Word: Proclamation

Being of-the-world

Our condition is, generally, that we are a product of everything that was ever said or done up to this moment. This is more obviously the case when we consider our immediate personal experience. We are the product of our family, our language, culture, and education. But each of those is itself the summation of a vast number of actions and words which preceded them in history. Every one of us is the smallest tip on the most massive but hidden iceberg.

LLM text generators tap into that deep subsurface of our being. Any question we ask of them has already been asked and answered. You might not yet know the answer – which is why you asked the question of the AI – but you recognise the answer because of what else you know about the wider context of your life. The answer “makes sense”, as we say, because we’ve been there, thought that, and the machine, in a way, just reminds us of what we’ve forgotten. (There are shades of Socrates’ midwifery here, for those who know of that).

This relationship between what we are and the whole world of words and events which have created us is part of what Jesus speaks about in our passage from John this morning. Several times, he draws a distinction between being “of the world” and not of the world. “Of the world” is what LLM text generators do. What they produce impresses us because we recognise it: this is how such things are said, described, properly structured. An AI-generated sermon on a scriptural passage sounds like all the other ones we’ve heard. That sermon, then, is “of the world”. Our computers have the capacity to do all this very, very, very quickly and, because processing speed is a characteristic of intelligence, AI looks particularly intelligent. But whether the work is done quickly or slowly, it remains a reconfiguration of something which is already in place. What is produced is in the world – obviously! – but also of the world. The limitation of AI is that it brings us nothing new; what it produces is, quite literally, mundane.

Being not of-the-world

But Jesus speaks of something else – what is in the world but not of the world. Perhaps more clearly, he poses the possibility of the radically new. “In” the world and “of” the world is more of the same – as in the case of AI-generated texts. In the world but not of the world is the presence of the new. Jesus speaks here about this kind of newness.

Yet it’s one thing to see that this is what Jesus poses; it’s another thing to conceive how such newness might be possible. Can anything be radically new in this way? This question arises not because our text prompts it. It’s in the text because our deepest desires are about precisely such newness, about the possibility of starting over, about the clean slate. But how could we possibly get to there – to the profoundly new and restorative – from here, mundane as we are? We are as constrained by our icebergs as AI is.

Not surprisingly, John’s response to this desire is “Jesus”. But we need to hear this in a new way. “Jesus is the answer” is a tired trope. John doesn’t present Jesus as answer-to-question but as new in place of old, as outside in the inside.

Shifting from in/of language, John hints at the excess in Jesus when Jesus speaks of his having been with God “before the foundation of the world”, another impossible thought – that Jesus had time before time. But John has to strain the language in this way to speak about the possibility of something new happening, something which could not have been predicted. This unpredicted thing is the appearance of Jesus himself, who, beginning before time, is more than time contains, is more than just “of the world” and so is the presence of something not mundane but “new”.

Now, if you’re keeping up with all this, congratulations! I’m trying hard not to present a “heard it all before”, AI-style sermon! What we desire, need, is the newness Jesus presents, and not more of the same. Can there be something new in this way?

The possibility of the new: prayer

The possibility of something new can’t be separated from how such newness might be realised among us. When we ask “Can? ” we also ask “How? ”: how could such a thing be, to quote old Nicodemus again (John 3), for the umpteenth time in our reflections on John.

For a thought about this, let’s note one last thing about our reading today. Jesus is not teaching here, is not giving moral instruction, is not arguing. He is praying.

Prayer – for ourselves or for others – is always for the impossible, for that which has not yet been observed or experienced and so which cannot be predicted. Prayer seeks what cannot be generated out of the world itself, what is not mundane. Prayer asks for an occurrence within the world of something which is not worldly: in, but not of, the world.

AI can write prayers because it can read our liturgies, which are simply the product of all the church has prayed through the ages. It predicts what a prayer would be in a given context. But AI will never pray, at least not the AI we have now. It only knows the “of” the world, and not the “not of”.

But prayer is not about reconfiguration of the parts we already have, of all we have already prayed. It is not about what, by earnestness or cleverness, we have earned. Prayer is about gift. Or, in older churchly terminology, prayer is about miracle.

It is for such a miracle, such a gift, that Jesus prays. “May they have what we have, Father”, he prays. And this for no “thing”, shiny and new in our midst for honour and adoration. The prayer of Jesus is for a new kind of relationship, and so a new community. “I pray for them, that they might be new as I have been new, that they might enjoy what we enjoy, Father”.

And this is not a withdrawal from everything in the world but rather for its enrichment. This strange newness, not-of-ness, is for the life of the world.

Whether or not we imagine Jesus is the answer is the wrong place to start. The Jesus we usually think of here is merely “of” the world, an answer on the same terms as the question, and that isn’t going to get us anywhere new.

The crucial question is whether what Jesus talks about, and is said to have been himself, is important. Is the human just more of the same, merely “of the world”, or are we really only ourselves when we exceed all that has been, when we are not “of the world”? And if the latter, what might it take to see and feel the new and the fresh?

This is the concern of faith, and why we come together each week like this: the desire, the possibility and the way of becoming something new, fresh and enlivening, in and for the world.

Most of our lives, most of the time, are about where we have been and how that limits what we can be. Faith – at least, faith in a God like this – looks for more. This more is God’s call to us, and God’s gift when we respond. Let us, then, open ourselves to this new, this excess, this more.

And all God’s people say…

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Pentecost 17
5/10/2025

Psalm 42
John 13:1-35

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ForeWord

Last week, we recalled the genre of comedy, noting among other things that a comedy is not necessarily a funny story. It is, rather, a story that follows a particular narrative arc, opening at a comfortable emotional level before the protagonist is pushed into some uncomfortable situation, before a final resolution of some sort. Most of the stories we tell are comedies, even if most of those stories are not necessarily very funny.

But today I want to pick up on the concept of “funny”, and to come at this from some reflection on what we do when we laugh.

What’s so funny?

Why do we laugh? The obvious answer is that we laugh because we’ve seen something funny. But then we have to push the question a little harder; what is it that makes something funny?

When we watch a movie intended to be humorous, we laugh at the point at which everything goes wrong. The funny thing is that the protagonist finding herself in some difficult situation. We laugh at her vain attempts to get herself out of that situation and the silly faces that she draws as her situation gets worse and worse despite her best efforts. In a humorous story, laughter is our response to the trough in the comedic arc.

And so, the laughter stops once things begin to settle again. That final settlement might well be a place of relief, but it’s no longer a place of laughter. We might be happy there, but we don’t laugh because we’re happy. We’re happy because we have laughed and no longer need to. What makes us laugh – what is funny – is displacement. Someone is suddenly and unexpectedly where they should not be. Our laughter points to that being out of place, to that being wrong, and we stop laughing at the end because the wrongness has been resolved, and we anticipate “happily ever after”.

There is, then, something slightly sadistic about laughter. The object of the laughter – the displaced protagonist – is not the one laughing. It is we who watch them. There’s nothing that the protagonist wants to laugh about when he or she is at the bottom of the trough. She doesn’t know she’s living a comedy and fears the tragedy of never getting out again. Laughter, then, is one of our responses to suffering.

This, I think, is unexpected and provocative. But laughter gets still more interesting. We know very well that laughter is contagious but it’s not the case simply that we laugh because somebody else laughs, like catching a cold.

Laughter is invitational. It proposes a community. By noticing that something is going wrong, we invite others also to notice the wrongness, and so we create a space within which a certain sense of normality is implied. This normality is stated negatively in laughter when we see something outside of that zone: “Hey, look at him – ha ha”. Joining in laughter is not catching a cold, it is expressing agreement – “Yeah, that’s pretty weird”. Laughing with others creates community over against that weirdness.

Funny as exclusion

This is why laughter can hurt – it’s socially exclusionary. It is inherently critical and exclusionary, although of course in varying degrees. There is a place for the gentle and good-natured gibe, but the nature of laughter as invitation to community also operates in more malicious circumstances, where laughter indicates mockery. Mocking laughter invites us not only to notice that the funny person is outside the group’s norm, but to reject him because of this. We laugh here because he is not one of us, and the laughter marks this outsideness. Mockery makes fun of – makes funny – a black person in a white space, a woman in a male space, a captive in a free space, a native in a colonial space, a poor person in a rich space, a short person in a tall space, an awkward person in a graceful space, or a saint in an unholy space. We know all these tropes from our comic stories, funny or not.

We might wonder then, if it is a reconciled and inclusive place, whether there is any laughter in heaven. Laughter would have to be something else if there were to be.

So, with all that in the back of our minds – the dynamics of laughter and its connection to inclusion and exclusion from a community – let’s listen to a passage from John’s Gospel about community and the laughable Jesus.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 13.1-25)

Word: Proclamation

The laughable Jesus

As is usual in John, a lot’s going on in the passage we’ve just heard, but there are two things we might notice today in connection with comedy and community.

First, the funny thing – the odd, wrong thing – which happens in the story is that the rumoured messiah takes the role of the servant. No one bursts out laughing, of course; it is more a case of shock, as Peter expresses. Jesus is funny – in a funny peculiar, rather than funny ha-ha, kind of way. And this peculiarity, this outsideness, is something all the disciples see, as all Jesus’ opponents have already seen. (Judas the betrayer is woven through this story, and while we don’t know his internal motivation, his actions are consistent with a mocking rejection of the ministry Jesus has exercised.) The community of disciples has in common that what Jesus does is not common but is strange. In terms of the comedic arc, Jesus is here at the low point, has fallen from the messianic perch, from normality, from his place in the community. This is the cross.

But, as we noticed last week, though Jesus has bottomed-out here, the arc of the story doesn’t do the natural comedic thing. He isn’t persuaded by Peter, and so doesn’t stand up straight, apologise and get on with being a proper messiah. And if this humility is the equivalent of the cross, there comes here no equivalent of a resurrection fix, swung in to salvage the moment now that Jesus has lost his mind.

Rather, Jesus pushes further into the humiliation:

What I have done down here in the lowly place is odd, strange, funny, mockable. And you are to do and become this as well. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another – love such as I have shown you.

This is not a call simply to do what Jesus did. It is a call to be strange, as Jesus was. It is an invitation to be remarkable by not avoiding the humiliation of the comedic protagonist who then desperately wants to get up and out again, but by becoming intentionally displaced. This displacement has something to do with the oddness of the command to love we considered a few weeks ago. And so the imperative here is not to be “loving”, in a moral sense, but to enter into an ethic of strangeness.

The community of the laughable God

More pointedly, the call to discipleship is a call to be laughable, in the mode of the laughable God – the God who does weird, ungodly things. The thing about the gods is that they are all about order and appropriateness, insideness and outsideness. The gods define and guarantee the nation, or the religion, or the class, or the race or the gender, or whatever. And so the gods tell us what to laugh at, in the mocking and exclusionary sense.

The God of the gospel, however, is laughable, is the definitive outsider who does strange things. This God kneels to wash our feet, is mocked under a crown of thorns and a purple robe, is crucified outside the city.

Love is strange. In a world like ours, specialising as it does in mockery and exclusion, love which reaches further than the community of the local gods. And to be of this particular God – a disciple of Jesus – is to be learning to be as Jesus himself was. “As I have loved you” means “Remarkably”, “Strangely”, “Laughably”.

But things are twisting now, so that what was laughable and excluded becomes the means of community and inclusion. A new kind of community is proposed, in which being laughable – being different, being outside, being less than others – is embraced.

Laughter is now being transformed, rehabilitated. Instead of the laughter of the many which expresses oneness by marking the outsider, the wrong, Jesus’ action is a Laughter-of-One which proposes a community, a oneness, a normality, which is not yet there.

Because it is properly always particular, love always isolates – always laughs. Yet this is a laugh which does not exclude but embraces the funny other, the lost, the not-fitting, and gathers them in. And so, unlike with the other strong, mocking gods, this laughable God’s laughter creates a new kind of community and calls us to laugh with him, to laugh as he does, to laugh into being what does not yet exist – the community of peace and justice which comes from loving as Jesus loved us.

Laugh, Jesus says, as I have laughed you.

And all God’s people laugh, Amen.

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Pentecost 16
28/9/2025

Psalm 23
John 5:19-25

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ForeWord

There is an old joke about asking for directions, which comes in many versions but generally runs something like this: a city slicker finds himself out on the back roads in some sparsely inhabited part of the countryside, trying to find the church at which his cousin is being married that afternoon. Exasperated, he pulls up to ask directions from an old farmer he sees leaning on a fence. Hearing where the cousin wants to go, the farmer responds, “If that’s where I was wanting to be going, I wouldn’t be starting from here. ” The local then proposes how the visitor might get to the point from which one should begin such a journey.

The reason for telling the joke is fairly obvious, and it’s often told to mock the Irish or some other national identity. But if we look past the mockery, we can see something of ourselves in the lost cousin – having a very strong sense that we should be somewhere else, but also having no idea how to get there. We knew where we were, but now we don’t, and we want to know again.

We’ve noticed before that this sequence of good-bad-good-again reflects the literary form of the comedy. A comedy is not just a funny story – not even necessarily a funny story. It’s a story the arc of which moves from a happy beginning through a troubled middle into a happy – often happier – resolution at the end.

In a comedy, the good guys ultimately triumph, no matter how catastrophic the odds. And the vast majority of stories we tell are comedies, as distinct from bad-guys-win tragedies which never rise out of the catastrophe. We see the comedic in the children’s classic, in the latest easy-watch rom-com, the smash hit sci-fi action flick, and even in your average horror movie.

The joke about the yokel farmer’s directions has the city slicker stuck in the middle of a comedy. But he doesn’t know this, doesn’t know whether he’ll get to the wedding on time. And this is one of the problems with recognising the genre of a comedy. Our stories generally follow the comedic arc, so that in the end at least someone survives and lives happily ever after. But, as we live our own lives, even if we imagine that they might be comedies, we don’t know how or in what way our story will be positively resolved. In the middle – and pretty much the whole of our life is spent “in the middle” – it feels like it might yet turn out to be a tragedy.

We’ve also noticed before that comedy is very much the genre of the biblical narratives. Consider the stories of Ruth, or Abraham and Sarah, or of Israel taken into exile and then restored it again. Even the book of Job follows the comedic arc. More broadly, the whole biblical narrative moves from the paradisial Garden of Eden, through the struggle of fallen human life, to the promised reconciliation of all things in the book of Revelation. And, within all of that, is the story of the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus, which also appears to follow the comedic arc.

When I spoke a few weeks ago about the reference a Christian funeral makes to a “second story” within which ours is placed, this indicated the greater divine comedic arc within which we live our own personal story. And that is all very good and true. But along the way, our lives are mostly lived in that trough between the happy and joyful promise we were at our beginning and the promised eternal life at our end, whatever that looks like.

And, in this middle, we find ourselves very much in the situation of knowing where we want to be, but not being in the right place to start from to get there.

(With all that in mind, let’s hear a short passage from John’s gospel in which Jesus speaks to the where and what of our life and action)…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 5. 19-25)

Word: Proclamation

“. . . whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me”, Jesus says, “has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. ”

I suspect that our hearing of this declaration typically falls on the first part: that we need to hear and believe Jesus. This is true. But what comes at the end of the declaration is unexpected: not that there “will” be life for the believer, but rather that the judgment has already been set aside. The one who hears and believes has already crossed over from death to life. Such faith doesn’t secure a future but effects a new present.

The strangeness of this is not unlike the strangeness we’d hear had our yokel farmer told the lost fellow that he was already where he wanted to be, when that was clearly not the case. How can “here” be “there” when it doesn’t look like there? In the terms in which Jesus speaks, how can what feels here and now like the comedic trough be its elevated resolution? How can the uneternal now be eternal life?

In this connection, we also noted a couple of weeks ago that the resurrection of Jesus didn’t “add” anything to him. Jesus’ death was not an incompleteness; he was as much king upon the cross as he was when risen from the dead.

This is why Jesus can say that eternal life is already present to those who understand the gospel. If there is nothing to be added to Jesus beyond his death, there is nothing to be added to us either if, like Jesus, we are doing the works of the one who sent us. Now is enough to be whole. Unlike the lost cousin on his way to the wedding, we are already precisely where we need to be. By the word of Jesus, the eternal life typically held over until some distant future becomes a possibility here and now.

Jesus says this to those of us whose experience of day-to-day life is probably closer to being lost on the way to a wedding: feeling that we are not where we need to be, or want to be. And the incompleteness in this is made worse by the feeling that we need to be somewhere else in order to begin to become ourselves. There are no signs to tell us where we are or where to go. We don’t know whether the serial killer is still in the house. We don’t know whether we should go through with our convenient engagement for marriage, or let it be swept aside by the new and disruptive love interest which has suddenly appeared. We don’t know whether our fairy godmother will arrive in time to lift the witch’s curse. We don’t know what the good is we should be doing. This is what it feels like to be told we’re living a comedy when we’re still only in the troubled middle.

And it’s this experience that Jesus addresses: “who hears and believes my word has eternal life”. To believe Jesus is to hear that you are already where you need to be.

The gospel has much less to do with the promise at the end of all things than with the promise which might be realised within the uncertain, messy middle of all things. The gospel is concerned with the fullness of the here-and-now life Jesus once lived, and the continuing presence of Jesus’ word so that we might also live here-and-now in the same kind of fullness. That word doesn’t point beyond the life we live but directly to it. Eternal life is less what happens tomorrow than what happens today. And what happens today is not what we do to bring about or earn ourselves a happy tomorrow. It is testimony to the truth of human being: fullness of life is for now, whatever our circumstances , not later.

There is, then, a kind of collapsing, or reaching back, of the comedic ending into the unhappy middle, so that there will sometimes be something quite unfunny about the comedy of the gospel. Sometimes it looks and feels like a cross.

But the cross is now not the triumph of the tragic but the refusal of life to give up, a testimony to a different way of seeing.

And so the struggle is no less the truth, no less a fullness of life which contradicts its uncomfortable form to declare: God is already here, in the messy middle. Eternal life, then – the life of a different time – is a life we can live now, a life which can make our times different.

This is God’s call to us, and God’s gift.