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Pentecost 22
9/11/2025

Psalm 135
John 1:1-5, 10-14, 16-18

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ForeWord

Softening the hard thing

In her 2017 book, Doughnut Economics, economist Kate Raworth remarks that there is a graph in economic theory which is rarely drawn: the graph that projects growth into the extended future. This graph is hardly seen because everyone knows that we live within a closed system with limited resources, so that the kind of growth politicians (and many of the rest of us) like to see portrayed in graphs can’t continue forever. Every economist knows there is a plateau coming, or even a cliff. But no economist – and certainly no politician – knows what to do about it. So, let’s not think about it and, just as certainly, not put it in a graph.

But we do know there’s an issue here. And so the compromise, Raworth notes – or rather, the wilful self-delusory step – is the invocation of adjectives to qualify growth. We will still work towards growth, but it will be good growth: “sustainable” growth, “equitable” growth, “balanced” growth, “inclusive”, “resilient” or “green” growth. None of these addresses the big, hairy problem that has everyone on edge in the first place – growth is growth, and it can’t go on forever. But it looks a little less growth-y when we attach the right words to it, and the optics matter enormously in modern politics.

The God of many adjectives

But my interest today isn’t so much the problem of growth in economic thinking as the type of problem it is. Raworth’s observation reminded me of recent developments in churchly God-talk. In a Synod meeting a couple of years ago, I was particularly struck by the way the prayers groaned under the weight of a whole lot of words which, once upon a time, didn’t need to be said. The use of adjectives was especially obvious. The word “God” was often apparently felt to be insufficient – “O God…”. Rather, it seemed better to say, “O good, gracious, all-powerful, all-merciful, all-suffering, all-loving God”. There is a fair bit of adjective-creep in public prayer in some quarters these days. (Listen for it even in my own prayers today!)

And there’s a good reason for this tendency, at least superficially. The problem with invisible things – invisible hands or invisible gods – is that they are…invisible. All-embracing ideas are like this. And so, we throw something over them to give at least some outline and sense of what we are dealing with.

The connection between economic language and God-language here is not merely accidental. Economic language is the determining language of our common life in late Western capitalism. As God once was, economics is now at the heart of how we understand and order ourselves and our world. The economy stands as god, economists as theologians, politicians as priests, GDP is the measure of righteousness, and mortgage holders, self-funded retirees and national debt take turns as the political priests’ sacrificial offerings to the economy. Were theology to return to Melbourne’s secular universities, it would be most usefully located in the economics department. (That is a serious proposal: the God problem is not a “religious” problem but a deeply human one, corresponding to life together in our oik-onomy).

The growth economy and God are equally broad and encompassing things which are, for us, ideas somehow at the heart of the matter – necessary ideas, but also impossible, elusive, not-quite-unutterable.

And so we dress our ideas – colour them, qualify them – to make them seem less the problem they are. We stitch together a few adjectival fig leaves for both the invisible God and the simultaneously impossible but necessary growth economy. We do this because perhaps there really is nothing in our deepest ideas and, if they are left naked, we might see deeply disturbing things which cannot be unseen.

Naming the issue

All ideas – as ideas – suffer from this problem. They are not so much too big to fail as too big to be right. So far as the idea of God goes, the simplest solution is to dispense with the idea of “a” god and replace it with a name. The primary names the church has are the Old Testament’s “Yahweh” (Exodus 3 and passim, which appears in English translations as “the Lord” in small capitals), and the New Testament’s “Father”, which Jesus uses for the one who sent him. Both of these are indispensable, but not without problems.

The thing about names, and what distinguishes names from ideas, is that they are specific. A name denotes a shape – the shape which is given by a story. A name has content in a way that an idea does not. “Donald Bradman”, “Donald Trump” and “Donald Duck” are not three takes on the idea of Donald, but three unique identities, histories, and consequences. The name indicates what is at play – what is given shape and content by the story the name refers invokes.

But the name I’m interested in today is not “Yahweh” or “Father” with their particular possibilities and problems. Rather, I’m interested in the name Jesus – the particular Jesus-of-Nazareth Jesus who features in the Gospel stories and church confession. Whatever we believe personally about this name, its work in the biblical narrative is to be the concrete, specific place where the idea of God becomes unique, storied.

The first eighteen verses of John’s Gospel are an introductory statement of what readers will encounter in the text. For all the details of the story, central is the extension of the idea of God to what Jesus says and does, and is said and done to him. Let’s pause for a moment to hear part of that introduction to John’s Gospel, listening particularly for the last verse: “makes him known”.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 1.1-5, 10-14, 16-18)

Word: Proclamation

Exegeting God

“No one has ever seen God”. This is the “beyond”, the impossible, the unseen unthinkable we indicate with the label “God”. Within Jewish and even most pagan thinking, God had never been an idea. But modern minds think in secularised Greek mode, and our heads are full of ideas.

And so this is how we’re likely to hear, “No one has ever seen God” – as referring to the intangibility and ungraspability of God.. But, John says, the Word, the Only-Begotten, this one has “made [God] known”, or literally in the Greek, “exegeted” God. To exegete something is not to explain it but to unpack it —literally to “lead out” of it. Jesus, as it were, is the leading out of God into what feels like the non-God space, perhaps as one might pull a thread. Each story, each conflict, each word and teaching is such a thread. The hidden God not exposed but here and there implied; the distant God brought near; the shapeless God formed.

Jesus himself is this exegesis, this leading-out. Who has seen me, Jesus says elsewhere in John, has seen the Father (John 14.9). And so, strangely, there is no need for any adjectives to attach to “God” but Jesus himself. The god we are concerned with is not “the merciful” or “the loving” or “the Creator” god, but the Jesus-god. This is what our trinitarian confession grasps after – what God must be like if the crucified Jesus is God’s only worthy adjective.

Faith thinks about God – and, for that matter, about the economy – in this way. To say, as the church does, that Jesus is “the Christ” or “God” is to attach to those all-embracing ideas the details of one life lived. So also for the economy. If Jesus is God, Jesus is the Economy in the same way. And if this is starting to sound quite nonsensical, that’s just the point. Kate Raworth’s argument about economic growth is precisely that it’s a wilful and nonsensical reduction of the economy, and yet we are committed to it, perhaps even to the destruction of the world we inhabit. From the perspective of Christian faith, to say that Jesus is God, or the Economy, is to say that neither God nor Economy mean what we think or hope they mean.

Christian faith commits, rather, to something more concrete, specific – to something more human. Christian faith proposes the life of Jesus, not so much for “salvation” (another vague idea) as to affirm that a human life can indeed be the presence of God, even in a world like this. God, and the economy, can be that small and still be what they fully are.

One of the extraordinary things about John’s presentation of Jesus is the intimacy of the relationship he has with God. Jesus “exegetes” God not by providing information. God is “drawn out”, is present, in Jesus in the way that a friend’s spouse is present in that friend even when the spouse is not in the room, or a parent is present in a child even when the child is by himself, or (negatively), the way a traumatic upbringing is present even at the end of a long life.

This kind of intimacy is the gift of the gospel, an intimacy which changes our sense of what we are and so what matters in the life we’ve been given.

Christian faith has no “idea” about God. Rather, the believer finds herself exegeted, drawn into a new experience of life, a new assessment of what is happening around her, a new sense of how to be, and of what to do.

God meets us in the nitty-gritty of lives, not in our grand visions and plans, our wishful thinking or dismissal of inconvenient details. The Jesus-God is the Jesus-Human. And the invitation of this God is an invitation to be exegeted, drawn out of what we are into what God has created us to be: not a small part of a grand project, but a grand project, despite our smallness.

Jesus makes God known, that we might know ourselves anew.

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Pentecost 21
2/11/2025

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4
Psalm 119:137-144
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4: 11-12
Luke 19:1-10

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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I don’t think I am racist or sexist. I certainly try not to be. And yet I must admit that I am conscious of race and gender differences whenever I am relating to another person. I am aware of the different things appropriate to my speech and behavior according to the other or others in any interaction. Do we not do this all the time. Are we not particularly aware of this as we are bombarded by news local and international conflicts fueled by human racial, political and religious differences.

The Melbourne scholar, Brendan Byrne, offers a startling new reading to this story about Zacchaeus. In his commentary on the gospel of Luke called The Hospitality of God Fr Byrne’s reading of the text suggests that Zacchaeus was not a bad man who became good, but that he was always a good man who was sadly misunderstood. The whole problem lies in the tense of the verbs..

This is not the conventional view. Digby Hannah’s children’s hymn gives the traditional view – “There once was a man as mean as could be; if he could take two then he’d try to take three. Then one day he took Jesus for tea: and Jesus helped him to change.”

Luke tells how Jesus was passing through Jericho and there was a large crowd. Zacchaeus, chief tax collector, and known around town as shorty, wanted to see Jesus because everyone else was taller than him. No one was going to make way for Shorty the tax collector in a crowd seeking to see and hear Jesus who proclaims God’s salvation. If he was to get a look-in, he must abandon any self-dignity. He climbed a tree. This was not the behaviour of a man who aspires to stature and wealth. This was a man desperate to see salvation.

Jesus stopped under the tree and called Zacchaeus down because he was to stay at his house that day. To the chagrin and horror of the good people of Jericho the visiting celebrity chose hospitality from Shorty the tax collector. Tax collectors were sinners because they worked for the Romans, the occupying force.

Zacchaeus hurried down and made a marvelous speech. Zacchaeus said: (here comes the problem with the tense of the verbs) the translators say “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”

Naturally that makes sense to have the speech using the future tense – Zacchaeus has been a rotten cheating tax collector and when he was brought face to face with Jesus he changed and made retribution for his past. He will do the right thing to make amends.

Brendan Byrne reminds his readers that the speech in Greek is not future tense at all, but present tense. “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I give to the poor; and if I defraud anyone of anything, I pay back four times as much.” It is as if the translators have joined with the socially prejudices Jerichoites and judged Zacchaeus to be a cheating swindler because he worked for the wrong administration.

This tense change leaves a more open interpretation possible. For centuries the translations have forced a particular interpretation. The way Luke tells the story another interpretation is possible. If Zacchaeus is telling Jesus what his business practice has always been then we are not meeting a bad tax collector, but an ethical and generous tax collector. If this is the case then the hostility of the good citizens of Jericho is based on prejudice. He works for the wrong company so he can’t be worthy of our society.

Luke concludes the story by reminding his readers that the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost. Our traditional reading of this story suggests that Zacchaeus’ lostness lay in his cheating. Another reading of the story suggests that his lostness may have sat in being ostracised by the prejudice of his community. He could not know the assurance of God’s acceptance of him while his society with its religious leaders, its God people, would not convey their acceptance.

This amounts to a brutal rebuke of all who hold prejudices. Luke has Jesus remind them that Zacchaeus is also one of God’s elect, a son of Abraham. This alternative reading of the story raises new considerations, the possibility that God’s word reaches deeper into our prejudice-ridden society.

We don’t need to get too excited about the different possible interpretations of this point raised by the tense of the verbs in Zacchaeus’ speech. Was he bad and he had a wonderful conversion or was he good and badly misunderstood? What really matters is what Jesus said about him. Jesus received Zacchaeus into the community of the Kingdom, not because of his conversion nor because he may have been good all along. Jesus announced, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham.

Zacchaeus may be a tax collector, but it does not stop him coming within God’s covenant relationship as a descendent of Abraham. But neither does it stop the tax collector hating community who were lost in their prejudices. The argument that assures Zacchaeus of salvation must hold good for all.

Luke makes a lot of the status of being descendants of Abraham. For him it is a touch stone of being worthy of God’s favour. He had Jesus argue that the crippled woman he healed on the Sabbath was a daughter of Abraham and therefore worthy. He had John the Baptist denounce the self-righteous who claimed their decent from Abraham as their right to God’s favour when he declared that the stones that surrounded them could be raised up as descendants of Abraham.

This all presents a problem for those of us who are not descendants of Abraham. Thank goodness we have St Paul to argue our case. To the Galatians he points out that God honoured Abraham’s faith and that it is by faith that we are saved. To the Thessalonians Paul wrote, ‘we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith,  ¹² so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Thessalonians 1:11-12).

There is a consistency in all this. Salvation for Zacchaeus, salvation for the crowd that ostracized him, salvation for the Galatians and the Thessalonians, salvation for us in our prejudice ridden societies belongs to the people of God by the grace of God declared and availed in Jesus.

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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…