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Advent 2
7/12/2025

Isaiah 11:1-10
Psalm 104
Matthew 3:1-12

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ForeWord

High spirits

Our little Monday Morning at the Movies cinema group met last week to see The Edge of Life. If you only see one movie per month for a quarter or per year, this is probably one you could afford to miss.

The movie is a documentary concerned with the state of mind of people who have a terminal illness diagnosis, and the possibilities of prescription psychedelic drugs to assist them in their emotional health after such news.

The state of mind of people with such diagnoses is, of course, very often greatly disturbed. And so thinking about how best to assist people in these circumstances must be of the highest order of priority.

And psychedelic drugs sound like they can be pretty good fun, which would surely help at such a distressing time.

Both the experience of knowing how close our death might be and the impact that such drugs might have on our well-being are surely things to be studied closely. But, to me, the most interesting thing about the documentary was the way it interpreted what the drug did for those who have such difficult news to negotiate.

Because the drug has a psychological effect, with various visions and felt impressions, the language of “spiritual” was invoked to interpret the experience of these dying people. The drug, it was proposed, connects ut to something deeper, perhaps, or to a different, spiritual dimension. This was reinforced by crossovers to indigenous cultures in South America, where drugs with similar kinds of effects are routinely taken as part of what is called their spirituality.

Certainly, the illness suffered by the various patients is very real, and we have no reason to doubt their testimony as to what they said they saw in their psychedelic trances, but this is quite different from making connections between their experience and any “reality”. Why should what we experience when lying down on a comfortable bed, wearing noise-cancelling headphones and under the influence of a drug that alters perception – why should what we experience there be any more “real” than the world in which we usually live?

And yet, for no particular reason, the assumption behind the presentation of these various experiences in the documentary was that what happens inside minds loosened up by psychedelics is more real than what happens in our here-and-now world. Such experiences might well be more comforting, but this isn’t the same as it being more real, even if we call this reality a “spiritual” one.

Disturbing spirit

At one level, perhaps, none of this immediately matters: the interest in the use of the drugs was the same as the use of all drugs: to alleviate suffering, which it seemed to do. And it would be fine if we left it at that. But the invocation of a notion of “spirituality” connected to this experience touches upon what we do when we gather like this. And this led me to consider again something you’ve heard me say several times over the years: “spirit” is the second most useless word the church has in its faith vocabulary.

Like all of our god-words, “spirit” is a borrowed word. It has meanings beyond what it might mean, for example, in the church. And we easily succumb to the temptation to jump from one place to another, taking the meaning from the first place to the next, as if the meaning stays the same. “Spirit”, of course, is a church word and so, to that extent, the church is interested in “spirituality”. But words take their meaning not from some internal, fixed notion but from an informing grammar the word takes from its context. And so spirit is not always what we think it is.

In the case of the movies, “spirituality” is a human thing conventional medicine can’t yet measure, a kind of “opposite”, then, of medical science. And so it becomes there a kind of mystical catch-all. Add to this that these unfortunate people are trying to negotiate hard news about the end of life, and “religion” kicks in – the third most useless word the church has.

So, with those thoughts about spirit in mind, we come to our Gospel reading today which, as is the case each Second Sunday of Advent, features the preaching of John the Baptist. The Baptist comes as the forerunner, the herald of Jesus. But more than just announcing that Jesus is coming, the Baptist also announces what Jesus will do. Let’s listen, then, to what it is that John says Jesus comes to do, and this in particular with reference to “spirit”

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: Matthew 3.1-12)

Word: Proclamation

Cleansing spirit

Who John is and what he is doing is of great interest to everyone, and so they stream out to see and to hear. John’s role, however, is not to be noticed but rather to point to Jesus. And he characterises what Jesus will do by contrasting Jesus’ work with his own: “I baptise you with water for repentance”, John declares, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me… He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

This always surprises me – that, in view of all that Jesus does and is said to be in the Gospels, this is the summary statement the (synoptic) Evangelists make of his ministry. Matthew, Mark and Luke each begin their Gospel with this characterisation of Jesus’ ministry: Jesus is the one who will baptise with the Holy Spirit (to which Matthew and Luke add, “and fire”).

Here we have an idea about Spirit – about spirituality even. And what does it have to do with the warm spirituality that comes with noise-cancelling headphones and psychedelic drugs? We might suspect, “Not a lot”. There surely is a place for quiet, for withdrawal – for the spirituality of the Sabbath, perhaps. But the Sabbath is only one day in seven. What has spirituality to do with the other six days? It is these days that Jesus comes to address.

Recall what we said last week about apocalyptic thought. This arose from the very pressing existential and political question: How can such things be happening? Where on earth is God? And it is, as such, a “spiritual” question. But it was not asked as a prelude to a retreat from the world, in order to find God; the apocalyptic mind didn’t expect to have to go anywhere. The expectation was that God would come into the world, into the midst of everything. And so apocalyptic thought was an urgent prayer: Come! The later texts in the prophet Isaiah verge on apocalyptic urgency: “You who remind the Lord, take no rest, and give God no rest until Jerusalem is re-established… (Isaiah 62.7)”.

This is spirituality, but now it has to do with the Zeitgeist – the spirit of the times in which we live, the shape of our lives together (German Zeitgeist: time-spirit) – and with the whole of that time and life. But as a spirituality of the whole of our time, it doesn’t propose that God will be sitting around somewhere, that God will become a visible, tangible thing in the world like everything else we see and touch. It proposes the world not as containing God, but as becoming the glory of God.

Human spirit

And what does that mean?

The glory of God, one of the old saints declared, is the human being fully alive. And what does “fully alive” mean? It means something like what Jesus looked like. He baptises with the Holy Spirit because he himself lives in that spirit. And so everything he does is spiritual: the teaching of the people, the arguments with the authorities, the exhaustion after a long, hot day, quiet Sabbaths with his friends, the emerging possibility of his being crucified – surely a terminal diagnosis – and his very dying on a cross. This spirituality is not always comfortable, but when did “spiritual” come to mean “comfortable” in its usual, thin sense?

The spirit to which John points – the Holy Spirit – is a spirit which burns away what is not real, what denies life as distraction or hidden power. Spirit is already everywhere, long before we realise we’re going to die, and so spirituality as escape is not only active in the taking of drugs to ease our troubled minds. It’s there also in drinking ourselves stupid, in weekends lost to unplanned binge-watching, in sexual gratification through porn, comfort chocolate and retail therapy. These are all spirituality as oppression and avoidance.

And, as appealing and fleetingly comfortable as the spirituality of withdrawal usually is, it’s a sign that we are not exactly human beings fully alive.

We know this, I suppose – that we are not fully alive. But the gospel point is that it’s into the normal, troubled humdrum-ness of life that the Holy Spirit is given. And so the apocalyptic vision was not of withdrawn, disembodied, disengaged souls. The vision was of a city – a living, bustling place. We cannot imagine this: that heaven could be bustle – a city with sirens and sewers. We cannot imagine “your kingdom come”, earth as heaven.

But this is the proposal of the gospel, a different kind of Spirit, manifest in the glory of God in the face of one of us, Jesus of Nazareth.

We cannot imagine this. But surely, we want it. We want not to live under the shadow of death and his many friends. We want that the glory of God be manifest in us, in our faces: a light shining and burning as promise of life, even here, even now.

And so we pray with the wild-eyed, apocalyptic prophet and with the church ever since: come, Holy Spirit, come fire, and make us whole.

And all God’s people say…

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Advent 1
30/11/2025

Isaiah 2:1-5
Psalm 122
Matthew 24:36-44

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ForeWord

The bad-news apocalypse

Those of you who peruse The Conversation online may have noticed a piece last week reflecting on the impact of AI on writing, and this within the threat of an “AI apocalypse” bringing at least that aspect of human creativity – writing – to an end.

I don’t want to spend too much time today on the question of the AI apocalypse, but rather to note the way in which the word “apocalypse” is used here.

We’ve noted before that the Greek word which gives us our English “apocalypse” has the basic meaning of “from hiddenness” or, more simply, “revelation”. This is lost in our modern usage, where apocalypse is not about revelation but about just one feature of New Testament apocalyptic thought, which is the end of the world as we know it, and the great overcoming of satanic power in the battle at Armageddon.

 

To speak of an AI apocalypse is to reference this kind of radical destruction of the familiar order. On this hearing, an apocalypse is always a bad thing: the AI apocalypse, the nuclear apocalypse, the environmental apocalypse, the zombie apocalypse. These are breakdowns in the order of things, usually springing from some very human miscalculation.

The good-news apocalypse

This is not how the apocalypse works within the scriptural testimony. Apocalyptic thinking begins to appear late in the Old Testament, where it serves the purpose of answering a pressing question: Where on earth is God?

The question of the faithful was, Why, if we are faithful, do we continue to suffer as we do? This was a question about whether God is faithful, reliable, and righteous, and about where God’s righteousness will be manifest. The hoped-for apocalypse was the revelation precisely of God’s righteousness. And the apocalyptic mind imagined that righteousness would be revealed in the near future: God is imminent.

The classical prophets answered the same question differently. For them, suffering was the result of the people’s sin. The marauding Assyrians and Babylonians who decimated old Israel and Judah were God’s punishment. But the apocalyptic mind separates suffering from guilt and looks for an alternative accounting for the suffering of the faithful: God is absent, away, but coming. The anticipated arrival of God – and with it, the apocalypse of God’s righteousness – was then something to which the faithful looked forward with eager anticipation. All things will then be well.

Of course, such a setting right involves a judgment against what is not right, and those responsible for any not-rightness in the world. This is to say that the coming apocalypse is only good news for those who suffer unjustly, and is bad news for those responsible for the unjust suffering of others.

With this orientation around apocalyptic thinking, then, let’s now listen to the reading from Matthew’s gospel set for today. The first Sunday in Advent always begins with a reading about the approach of God, in apocalyptic terms. Listen for whether the text comes as good news, or perhaps not.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: Matthew 24. 36-44)

Word: Proclamation

God’s coming as threat

Things arriving at unexpected times are not usually all that welcome: unannounced guests. A heart attack. A stock market crash. A shark in the bay. A fire in the apartment building. Psychologists tell us that our brains are prediction machines: they constantly survey what is happening around us to anticipate what might happen next, and this as a survival technique. Surprises can be dangerous.

It’s in this key that we hear from Jesus, “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your lord is coming”.

We don’t get the impression that this is good news. The hopeful anticipation of the arrival of God to set things right is overshadowed by the arrival of God as the threatening thing: “Therefore you must also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour”. This is the apocalypse we might not want. An element of threat and fear is now introduced. God is coming; shape up. There is something dangerous here.

The idea of the fear of the Lord is politely understated or even dismissed in many modern Christian circles. We would rather say, not that we should fear God, but rather love God: fear is surely bad, and love is good.

But this misses the biblical polemic (for the Bible is always polemical). When the Scriptures speak about the fear of the Lord, the emphasis falls not on “fear” but on “the Lord”. Recalling the notion of “the fear of the Lord” from the Old Testament, the expression “the Lord” is the name of one particular god, among other gods. The point is, Fear the Lord, and not some other god-like thing. It’s like saying, don’t eat chocolate, eat an apple. The assumption is that we will eat something – or fear something – so the question is, What is the best thing to eat, or fear? To speak of the beginning of wisdom as the fear of the Lord, is to say that if you’re going to fear anything in the world, let it be this one.

In this way, the Scriptures pose a theory about us: that the human is a being profoundly given to fears. And these fears make us do things which reduce our humanity and the humanity of those around us. If this is the case – if it is not possible for us to stop fearing – we might as well at least fear that which is ultimately life-giving rather than life-denying. The fear of the Lord is not an addition to whatever else we might already fear, but a revaluation of our fears.

Fear against fear

And so when it comes to our Gospel text today, with its implication that the day and the hour of the coming of God is a time to be feared, the thought is not that God will arrive like AI or a thermonuclear weapon or a roasting climate to disrupt our comfort. It is that our comfort itself is already built upon fear. AI, massively destructive weapons and climate change all have to do with responses we have already made to the fears and desires that drive us. The fear of each other that drives arms races, or the vulnerability and fear of dependence which drives the capitalist economy, or the fear of inconvenience and falling behind which drives the carbon economy – these fears are all very real for us. The fear of rejection by which we push others away. The fear of being overwhelmed by which we justify not doing what we can to help. The fear of judgement which keeps us quiet when something should be said.

But Jesus’ call to be ready for the arrival of God is not the announcement of another front on which to defend ourselves. If the arrival of God is to be feared, it is not for fear’s sake. It is in order to be released from other fears.

Why we do what we do is very much a question of what we fear. If we think and act wrongly – and moral thought and action are important undertones to what Jesus says here – it is for fear of what happens if we don’t. And so the issue gospel apocalyptic seeks to address is less what we are or aren’t doing than why: what fears and anxieties do our moral failures address?

God’s arrival, then, is not merely about reward or punishment – if at all. For those of us – most of us – in the wrong place, God’s arrival is a setting free. What we need from God is that God might set us free from our fears, and from what we do to settle those fears. To fear the Lord is to stop fearing other things. It is to see that we are often in the wrong because we have feared the wrong things.

But freedom from fear is not easy. Freedom from fear is hard just because we have so much invested in keeping fear at bay. Sovereign borders, financial investments, insurances, locks, passwords and secrets – such things protect our way of living, secure our health and longevity, ensure our reputation, safeguard the stuff we might still need.

For most of us, this is all so deeply embedded in how we live that we have forgotten that it’s there. But the revelation – the apocalypse – of God is a revealing also of the nature of the world and the powers within it. It’s because these powers are great and oppressive in the world that we have vivid biblical images not of “apocalyptic” struggles but of liberating struggles. Freedom from the powers we fear in the world is the revolution we need. The biblical apocalypse reveals not only the searing righteousness of God but the freedom of the children of God.

Do we not need to be set free? If we pray, is it not precisely for liberation from fear and oppression?

It is into such a world as ours that God does not threaten but promises to come.

As we hear Jesus’ call to stay awake, then, let it not be for fear’s sake.

Let us, indeed, examine ourselves – our commitments, our investments in life, our permissions, our hesitations – but not for fear that God might catch us unawares.

Let us rather do this towards the freedom from fear we need, and towards becoming ourselves signs of the proximity, the in-reach, freedom and fullness of life God will bring.

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Reign of Christ
23/11/2025

John 19:1-16

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ForeWord

“Jesus Christ”

The expression “Jesus Christ” doesn’t make sense in the way that it once did.

I don’t mean by this that fewer people are familiar these days with Christian language and commitments than once was the case. I mean that the expression “Jesus Christ” once meant something which it no longer can – at least for us in the secularised modern West.

To most of us most of the time, Jesus Christ is the name of a person. It is, however, properly the contraction of a short sentence: Jesus is the Christ. It is the meaning of this that is problematic. This is because we don’t really know anymore what a Christ is, apart from the biblical story, within which its meaning was clear to most of the original actors. And because that meaning was clear, it was also clear that the expression “Jesus Christ” sets two incompatible things alongside each other: the idea of the kingly Christ, and the history of the crucified Jesus.

We can, of course, still understand this contradiction in a formal sense. But we no longer feel its meaning. This is not simply because we have shifted to a different kind of political system where kings don’t matter so much. It is because the connection between our political systems and our wider understanding of the world has changed.

Up to Jesus’ time, and for the next 1500 years or so, kings were not merely political figures, in our modern sense. They were participants in the cosmic order, and representatives of that order. The king was king on earth because God was King in heaven and earthly kings served as signs of that divine order. The world is as it is because God has ordered it so. The earthly king was the sign of that highest-to-lowest integration.

Kings no more

But we don’t live in that world anymore – a world in which mundane things participate in and represent divine order. Our sense of the world and ourselves is self-contained. Kings can no longer represent divine order; they are just “there”, or not.

To speak of Jesus as the Christ, then, is not to say anything very significant within this worldview. It will necessarily be sentimental, with an air of nostalgia. It is certainly not an expression that could move the modern heart, because we don’t feel the contrast being drawn in any moving way. If the contrast would once have been understood and the cause of either rejection or wonder, in the modern world, it’s just one more thing we can take or leave. Kings and queens today are more like celebrities, with whom they share the cover of the kinds of magazines you can pick up at the supermarket checkout. Once the world was disconnected from heaven, kings and queens were destined to become social media influencers.

What, then, might it mean to confess Jesus as king, as reigning, today?

For some orientation around this, we pause to hear again from the Gospel according to St John – today from the appearance of Jesus before Pilate. There are two kingships at play in the story. One involves a real king in the older integrated sense — the Roman Emperor, the fear of whom is part of what sways Pilate against Jesus. The other – I think – less real kingship, in the normal sense of “real”, is Jesus, who has previously said that his kingdom is “not from here (18.36) – not a kingship like the Emperor’s.

Listen for the two presentations Pilate makes of Jesus as he presents him to the howling crowd, and the language Pilate uses – the language John the Evangelist uses – to tell us something about the kind of thing Jesus is.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture: (John 19.1-16)

Word: Proclamation

Behold the human

Pilate presents Jesus twice to the crowds. The first time, Jesus has been scourged and is mockingly dressed as a king, with robe and crown of thorns in the merest semblance of a king. But here Pilate says not “Behold, your king” but “Behold, the man” or, given the Greek here, more likely, ‘”Behold Man, Behold the human”. The reduced humanity of Jesus is contrasted with the imperial kingship Pilate represents.

And this is not a mere “Here he is” but here you are – all of you: behold the human. Know your place. This is how the “king of the Jews” fits into the big picture, or doesn’t.

The second presentation invokes kingship again: “Here is your king,” now dismissed by the crowds with “Only the Emperor is king.”

It’s easy to imagine that what is going on here is a kind of moral failure – that those to whom Jesus was sent reject him and have him executed by claiming allegiance to the Emperor. We are quite capable of such commitments of convenience, of course, claiming some unpleasantness as necessary to rid ourselves of responsibility for it.

But morality is too narrow a framework for understanding what’s at stake here. Something deeper is at play. While the modern separation of earth from heaven – and so the loss of any justification of old-style kingship – is generally said to have begun somewhere in the vicinity of the Renaissance, in fact, it’s already underway here, in Pilate’s presentations of Jesus. Jesus has already told Pilate that his kingdom is not from this world.

But this does mean that Jesus’ kingdom is somehow “spiritual” rather than the worldly one of the Emperor. Jesus’ kingdom is not a somewhere-else, spiritual thing, in parallel with this one or still to come. The contrast Jesus draws is the contrast of the seemingly unnecessary, dispensable human – “Behold the human” – and the cosmic necessities of the Empire – “No king but Caesar, therefore crucify him”.

This is not easy, but it is important. In Pilate’s world, everything happens for a reason. He is the agent of Caesar, who represents (or even is) the divine order. If he says or does anything in Caesar’s name, it rests on the deep logic of the world – its integration with divine things. The king and what the king does represent God and what God wants done. This is how worldly kingship works: everything which happens is part of the divine order, the divine plan.

But John presents Jesus as something different. He only borrows the language of king, to crawl inside it and hollow it out for something else. Jesus is not an alternative monarch, as one might prefer Elizabeth II to Charles III. He is so different as to be unrecognisable as a king. Those who mock him are not, on their own terms, wrong. How could this captive peasant be in any sense “king”? Pilate and his soldiers know what a king should look like, because they have a particular idea of what the gods are like, whom the king represents or embodies on earth.

But John embraces this incongruence. We’ve seen elsewhere how the cross is (for John’s Jesus), both the rejection of Jesus and his coronation. His not-kingliness is his kingliness. Something similar is happening here. True kingship is not being identified with something “spiritual” hovering around somewhere, but with the vulnerable and reduced Jesus.

To put it differently, if the old-style kings of the world represent the divine order, Jesus doesn’t “represent” anything. He just is, not as the sign of some distant or deeper thing, but precisely what we see – a human being who, standing before the world’s self-understanding, contradicts that world at its very heart. The question that matters is not whether Jesus is king. The only question is whether God is there too, in the un-kingly Jesus. With what, we might say today, does God “identify”?

In the end, John is not interested in kings, but notes only that kings are one of the ways we get ourselves and God wrong. To say that Jesus is king is to say that kings are not what we thought they were. The world – political or otherwise – does not “represent” God. Our problem with the kingship of Jesus these days is, then, not that our worldview has shifted, but that it took 1500 years for that worldview to begin to catch up with the gospel and, for the most part, we still aren’t there, to the extent that we continue to try to establish this or that king, Jesus included.

And so we can easily elevate Jesus in the wrong way – as if he were an alternative representation of God. But there is a better, more gospel way of understanding the “kingship” of Jesus. He does not represent a divine ordering of things, and so is not constrained by that order, or his God similarly constrained. Jesus is “king” in that he knows that he still belongs to God, even as anything like order is crashing down around him. Jesus is “king” in that God embraces him.

“Behold, the human being”, Pilate commands, and it is God who obeys: there he is, Jesus, one of my children, I see him, God thinks. And for this God, to see, to regard, is to own, is to create. Jesus is not king because he is a particular part of a divinely ordered cosmic machine, but is king because he is seen and has a place in the heart of God. Pilate has been put in place in order to do particular things; Pilate is constrained. Jesus is not, has no particular thing to do but to be the Child of God. Pilate’s truth – as we saw last week – limits him; the truth of Jesus sets free.

This is the difference, the not-of-this-worldness of Jesus’ “kingdom”. The kingdom of Jesus is a kingdom with no kings, an ordering not on the model of a machine but springing from the gaze, the embrace, of God.

Monarchs, all

And, as it is for the human being Jesus, so it is for the human being that each of us is, here and now. The human, pastoral significance of the kingship of Jesus is not that he is our boss, rather than some monarch, president or other despot – and a “nicer” king at that. To be “in Christ” is to be ourselves kings and queens (or whatever), and this because God sees us “in Christ”, as God sees Jesus.

We are not required to “be” anything – certainly not to represent something about the divine order. We are to be ourselves. Our life is possible because God hears and obeys the command: Behold, the man … the woman … the child … the beggar … the billionaire … the young one … the sad one … the sick one … the near-dead one. God obeys, sees, and claims them – us – as God’s very own.

There is no divine order to which the world conforms, through kings or any other means. There are, rather, as many divine orders – or re-orderings – as there are those of us whom God sees and re-creates between blinks.

For Jesus to be “king” is for all things to be elevated under the gaze of God. To confess that Jesus is king is to commit ourselves to live without fear of circumstance, but to let our circumstance be the form in which we will encounter God, be embraced by God, become our true selves. Let us, then, with Christ rise and reign into life, living towards demonstrating a world which has no need of kings or queens because, with this God, it all matters, it is all seen and valued.

Behold the human being, God says. See yourself, as I see you.

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Pentecost 23
16/11/2025

Psalm 25
John 8:31-38

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ForeWord

You can’t handle the truth

Some of you will have seen the 1992 film, A Few Good Men – a courtroom drama turning around the accidental death of an American Marine. Two other soldiers have been charged with the death of their colleague, and their defence hinges on whether they had acted on orders to administer an irregular disciplinary action, which then went wrong, or whether they had acted of their own volition.

The film is best known for an iconic scene at the culmination of the drama – an exchange between the lead defence attorney and Colonel Jessup, the gnarly and powerful commander in charge of the military base on which the Marine died.

The courtroom exchange between the defence attorney and the colonel increases in heat until the attorney demands, “I want the truth!”. And then comes the withering response which launched a thousand memes – something of a controlled explosion delivered in a way that perhaps only Jack Nicholson could: “You can’t handle the truth!”

Jessup then begins to lay the truth out for consideration: “…we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns.” And he continues, pointing out a few inconvenient truths about what it takes to mount the defence of such walls.

As a courtroom drama, of course, the whole story is about finding the truth – the truth surrounding the Marine’s death. It’s in the context of that enquiry that the colonel lays out his confronting account of the truth of his own existence, a truth he sees even the defence attorney relies upon for his own existence and well-being.

The movie poses a dilemma about conflicting truths. And yet, at the same time, the opposing parties both hold to the same kind of truth; both have the same sense of what kind of thing a truth is. It’s this I want us to consider briefly today. My concern is less what the truth is – as a given we can state and analyse – than what kind of thing it is – how it operates and affects us.

Handling the truth

Truth is a central theme in John’s Gospel, and many of us will recognise some of the key occurrences of the notion:

^1.17 “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”;

^4.24 “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth”;

^14.6 “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life’”;

^16.13 “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth”;

^18.38 “Pilate asked [Jesus], ‘What is truth?’”

What is true, and what truth is and does, is a key concern in John. And so, let’s pause for a moment to hear another well-known truth-saying from John’s tenth chapter. In particular, listen for what Jesus says the truth will do for those who grasp it…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 8. 31-38)

Word: Proclamation

The truth that constrains

There is a stark difference between truth in the account of the colonel from the film and as it appears in the gospel. For the colonel, and indeed most of the time more generally in the wider world, the truth is something which constrains and restricts: “…we live in a world that has walls…”; a dropped apple falls with an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second per second; you owe the bank $452,567. The truth is non-negotiable fact, expecting a prescribed response.

In the case of Colonel Jessup’s truth, walls constrain. Of course, they protect and so to some extent liberate anyone within the walls, but the walls limit the freedom of anyone outside of them. And the need to defend the walls leads to the kind of moral compromises no one really wants to have to acknowledge. A price has to be paid, sacrifices have to be made. In the case of the narrative of the film, it seems that one such sacrifice – even if unintended – was a young man’s death, the death of one of our own. The cost of truth-as-constraint can be very high.

My interest here is not quite what is the truth – the fact – but what kind of thing the truth is, how the fact is received. For the colonel, whatever the particular truth is, it is a constraint which requires certain things be done, however distasteful. He invokes “honour”, “code” and “loyalty” as indicators of how the moral actor – each one of us – is constrained. These are all very much binding words, words to do with limitation. This is how one is required to act. Under truth-as-constraint, actions are pre-determined.

And there is, of course, much such truth around us, and necessarily so. If life is to be secure and predictable enough that we can sleep soundly at night, there are many things which must be done. Our manipulation of the world depends upon a basic if-then predictability to which we must conform for peace of mind.

The truth that liberates

At the same time, this is not the only, or even the definitive sense of “truth”. As we’ve heard from Jesus, truth is not only – if at all – constraint: “…the truth shall set you free…”. The truth will not bind or limit you, but will liberate. At the very beginning of John’s Gospel, we heard that “[t]he law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (1.17). The “grace and truth” here are not two things but one. By itself, law binds: there are walls, barriers, rules which must be observed. But grace breaks such bindings and barriers. Mercy is a setting aside of what “must” happen – of hard, pre-set truth – so that something else, indeed something fundamentally new and unexpected, can happen. Grace doesn’t deny the barriers are there, but acts as if they are not.

Grace is not the “truth”, in the sense of a new kind of limitation or requirement. Rather, we get closer to what’s offered here if we say that grace truth-s – makes true. Truth as limitation, as binding and constraint, cannot release and remain itself. Such truth is always negotiated, always subject to an arrangement of give and take, of exchange, of if-then relationships. Again, such controlled exchanges in nature and in society are a crucial part of a liveable world. But if that is all the world is – walls to be acknowledged and defended, rank and status to be observed, rights to be demanded, obligations to be met – then we are but cogs in a machine built for nobody-knows-what purpose, doing things simply because they “have to” be done.

Colonel Jessup imagines himself and those under his command to be just such cogs in the confining machinery of human politics. There is nothing to be done but maintain the dividing walls. There is nothing to be done but to destroy the enemy. There is nothing to be done but what we have always done, according to the truths by which we came into being and which, perhaps, we perpetuate in our every action.

Alongside this is laid an alternative. No argument can finally be made for the alternative because arguments leverage constraint and necessity – this because of that. And so the “alternative truth” Jesus declares is genuinely different. A truth which sets free – truly, newly free – sets argument aside and, as it were, begins again.

This is the proposal, the invitation, the gift of Jesus: that it doesn’t have to be like this. Our next action is not – or doesn’t have to be – predetermined. Or, what is the same thing, there is no final judgement to fear if we act, and act wrongly.

Once again, as seems always to be the case in John, love lurks in the background here. While Jesus hangs this truth-as-liberation on observing his word, the word he gives he characterises as the “new commandment” – to love as he has.

And we must then ask again, how did Jesus love? He loved without necessity. This is what we see in the optional, unnecessary cross. The cross is not forced. It is a consequence of his actions, but it need not have been; the response to Jesus’ teaching and actions is out of his hands. But those who crucify him are not free in the way Jesus promises. “We live in a world that has walls”, High Priest Caiaphas effectively says – anticipating Colonel Jessup – and so this has to be done (cf. John 11.50).

But Jesus’ love is not forced. He is not constrained by a requirement to love. It is gift, invitation rather than command, seeking reception but not conditional upon it.

To recall another saying of Jesus we heard a few weeks back, what will set us free is not of the world but can be in and for it. Such liberating truth will sometimes reveal a constraint or obligation as unnecessary and life-denying. Sometimes, mere obligation will be transformed into loving service. In either case, a new experience of God, the world and ourselves is at hand.

Let us, then, not be weighed down by the weight of the world. We are not built for such a load.

Let us, rather, lift up our hearts, seeking Christ – and becoming with him – the truth which sets free.

And all God’s people say…Amen.

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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.