View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 13
7/9/2025

Psalm 1
John 12:27-36

---

ForeWord

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council is probably not a name any of you have ever had reason to invoke.

That said, some of you will have fond memories of having read or listened to the radio play versions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the Vogons feature, and which opens with the destruction of Earth to make way for an intergalactic highway.

The end of our world is announced with the arrival of a fleet of bulldozing spaceships. A line which has fixed itself in my mind ever since I first read the book describes the sight of these “huge as office blocks, silent as birds” ships: The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

Quoting more fully:

The great ships hung motionless in the sky, over every nation on Earth. Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

The striking thing about this last sentence is that it’s both immediately clear, and then immediately not so clear, what is meant.

Clearly, bricks don’t hang in the air, if we take “brick” and “air” to mean what they usually mean. And a spaceship, in this description, corresponds to a brick. But it is clearly also not-brick, because if the air is just air, the spaceship should fall.

It matters here that the ship doesn’t hang in the air in the way a helicopter might. The noise a helicopter makes indicates how hard it is trying not to be like a brick. And, presumably, there would be a technological explanation for why the spaceships don’t do what bricks do. But this is not the point. The point is the “blasphemy against nature”. The ships don’t “fit”. They have no meaning in the sense we’ve considered before: we can’t “locate” them. And yet they are there, in such a way that we have to speak about their “thereness” as something sheer. They are wrongly, but starkly and strongly, “there”. And this sheer thereness corresponds to the shock of the news: the world is about to end.

My interest in all this is not the possibility of space travel or how advanced alien tech might be. I want instead to compare Douglas Adams’ description of those cosmic bulldozers to the crucifixion of Jesus.

Admittedly, this is a connection you’ve probably not thought much about until now, so let me fast-track you into it. An apparent difference between Jesus and the spaceships is that Jesus hangs in the air (on the cross) precisely the way a condemned criminal does. There is no surprise here. Seen it all before. People get crucified, and this is what it looks like.

If we think about the cross these days, it’s typically in terms of the suffering it entailed and so the “price” Jesus paid. But there’s not a lot of this in John’s Gospel. Disrupting once more our normal sensitivities, John doesn’t quite do suffering. He’s not dispassionate; he is just doing something else. (We might note in passing here that Jesus asks, ”…what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. ”)

Our Gospel text today has Jesus speaking of his being “lifted up”, in an apparent reference to his crucifixion. But, for John, this is not merely a crucifixion. While Jesus is made to hang there in the way that condemned criminals typically did, this lifting up also has Jesus hanging there strangely, in the way that bricks don’t.

But, before we go any further, let’s pause for a moment to listen for the Word of God in the hearing of the Scriptures…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 12. 27-36)

Word : Proclamation

Jesus speaks several times in John’s gospel of being “lifted up”. The expression is one of John’s many wordplays.

The lifting up is clearly a raising in the ghastly mode of a crucifixion. But the term also has overtones of a different kind of elevation. In particular, this elevation can also be a coronation.

And this changes dramatically what we are invited to see. The cross is now not a place of suffering or some saving transaction. The cross is here more like a throne upon which is “seated” (hangs) the king.

But, as an elevation, a coronation, the point is not quite that a king is crucified, whether intentionally or accidentally. To the extent that the crucifixion is a coronation, Jesus becomes king in the process of crucifixion. And so, on this reading, Jesus’ death upon the cross becomes the high point of the story, the point at which he comes to himself, rather than merely the point at which his executioners reject him.

But now a strange question presents itself. If the cross is indeed the high point of the story, what then of the resurrection? We have to say that the resurrection is no longer necessary for the story to be true or complete, although it’s essential if we are to know that the cross is the high point. We’ve seen this once or twice in our Gospel of John reflections over the last few months. The story peaks at the cross, but no one will know this unless something happens to give us a different way of seeing the cross, which is the work of the resurrection.

But if the cross is the climax of the story – the point at which Jesus becomes king – then the crucifixion is no longer a familiar tragedy but is suddenly deeply anomalous. Jesus, like those cosmic bulldozers, hangs “motionless, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature” – against everything by which we have measured what is right and what is wrong, what is divine and what is worldly, what is life and what is death.

Here, as with the arrival of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz with all his bureaucratic planet-destroying efficiency, is the end of the world, the revaluation of all values, a kind of blasphemy against what had been true until that moment. The cross is the least human, least kingly, least Godly of places. But it’s here that Jesus is declared to be the one in whom God reigns: the “king”.

This is not merely neat or even profound “theology”. Faith doesn’t interpret the stories of Jesus to make sense of them. Rather, out of those stories, faith interprets the world to make sense of it. The cross is to our sense of ourselves and our world what a suspended brick would be: a blasphemy against our typical ordering of things and, so, a new thought, a new vision.

How Jesus is, is how we are to be. The Christian – or, better, the properly and truly human being – will be strange like this, will be blasphemous like this, will surprise and shock.

The cross is what it would be like for all the guns and the bombs just to stop, without explanation. It is like the soldiers just packing their gear into their jeeps and going home, not because the war is over but to make the war over. The cross is the stunned, brick-in-the-air-like silence which such an impossible thing would require – before the ecstatic, jubilant, shout-out-loud joy.

The cross is like living as if death were not there, lurking, fearsome.

The cross is mercy which shatters the shackles of hard justice.

The cross is all such impossible things, hanging in the air in much the same way that a brick doesn’t, inexplicable, and utterly glorious. In the midst of death’s dismal order, this has the power to draw all people, to see and to marvel that such things could be (Nicodemus, again! ).

This is our faith. And to hold this faith is to hear that this is what we ourselves are to become: such impossible things, such unexpected blasphemy against the natural but oppressive order of the world – the light of the glory of God in a humanity fully alive, contradicting the reign of death.

This is our gift, our calling, and our prayer.

And all God’s people say…

 

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 12
31/8/2025

Jeremiah 2:4-13
Psalm 81
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Luke 14:7-14

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

---

A “Jeremiah” is a word for a pessimistic prophet who foresees a calamitous end. That is unfair to the prophet who addressed us so powerfully this morning. True, he lived through a disastrous time in the history of the people Israel, he saw the signs plainly.  He had his own exile in Egypt, but he knew the destructive power of the neighbouring nation of Babylon and in his last chapters, he returns to a message of hope.

The psalm we have just read has the same message in brief, and was written around Jeremiah’s time – so Howard Wallace assures me.  It begins “Sing merrily to God our strength”, recognizes that God’s people preferred their own counsels and were ‘sent away’, but ends with that intriguing image of the honey from the Rock. The moderns among you will also recognize a recent Hillsong hit with that name, which combines several such images to form a song of hope – there’s water from the rock too, and manna on the ground, all of them difficult to imagine, which is the point. Grace often appears in unexpected, even impossible places!  In the same spirit, in the early centuries of the Christian faith, the newly-baptized were welcomed to the Lord’s Table with a cup of milk and honey.

So between promise and hope, both the Old Testament readings remember the troubles of the journey of the Exodus. Jeremiah has hard words to say about their faithlessness as they marched towards the land of milk and honey.

The final verse of our reading sums it all up in a watery image:

¹³ My people have committed two sins:
they have rejected me,
the source of living water,
and they have dug out for themselves cisterns,
cracked cisterns which can hold no water.

These were the people who were called ‘holy to the LORD’ (2:3). This is covenantal language, expressing a sacred bond between the people and their God; yet they had abandoned the God who called them out of enslavement and had led them to a land where they could flourish in the freedom which faith in the LORD gives.  On the journey, they received the Ten Words to live by. It is unfortunate that they gained the title “Commandment”; the Hebrew simply has “words” and commandment opened the door to legalism and punishment; they were words of fullness of life. Yet, settled in the Promised Land, they strayed from their high calling and pursued what passed for religion where they now dwelt.

Thus the LORD’s question:

⁵What fault did your ancestors find in me,
that they went so far astray from me,
pursuing worthless idols and becoming worthless themselves?

The religion of the ancient East took many forms but the most popular was the fertility god, Baal, for reasons obvious to us!  It suited their most carnal desires and demanded nothing of their way of life.  One commentator (R. E. Clements) says, “Religion cannot remain true religion if it bypasses genuine moral concern for the welfare of society”.  Faithful believing and living demands the distinction between true and false, otherwise you are living an illusion.  The illusions are on offer every day in our present world culture, in the news, in the evening’s entertainment on TV, in the commercials, and through those mobile telephones.

So Jeremiah goes on to notice others who also lost their way:

⁶ The priests did not ask, ‘Where is the LORD,
who brought us up from Egypt
and led us through the wilderness,
through a barren and broken country,
a country parched and forbidding,
where no one ever travelled,
where no one made his home?’

His words even heighten the difficulty of their trek.

Perhaps the question “Where is the LORD” might be put differently: “What is the LORD doing?” Where is God in our experience, in our life, our culture, our nation? Where does the LORD discover himself to us?  It was the priests’ business to know that.

The “people who handled the law”, a nice phrase – and the prophets, all of whom had a holy obligation to the God of the Exodus, all failed. The lawyers did not know the source of justice and morality – they rejected the very source of living water; the prophets preferred to trust in Baal, a god they made with their own hands. Yet, ⁷ “I brought you into a fertile land to enjoy its fruit and every good thing in it”. So,

¹³ My people have committed two sins:
they have rejected me,
the source of living water,
and they have dug out for themselves cisterns,
cracked cisterns which can hold no water.

“Foolishness followed faithlessness” comments Howard Wallace, as it inevitably does. Of course, not all priests, not all prophets, not all rulers of the Law were faithless, as the scriptures themselves attest.

Jeremiah took care to address all of them, people, priests and prophets. He spoke to Judah and to the families of the house of Israel. With St Paul, he believed that “all have sinned and all are deprived of the divine glory” (Rom. 3:23 REB).

The lectionary’s choice of Hebrews to accompany Jeremiah is helpful. The chapter consists of a series of instructions to Jewish Christians. Every one of them deserves a sermon. They begin with the beautiful ‘Ἡ φιλαδελφία μενέτω”, “brotherly love, let it remain” – but that won’t do these days, so “let mutual affection continue”.  Be hospitable to strangers, Resist the love of money. Remember in prayer those who lead you in the faith. Live life as a continual sacrifice of thanksgiving to God.  Do not neglect to do good and share what you have.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is contrasting troubling table manners with what true hospitality involves: not the admiration of the wealthy and influential, but of aligning ourselves with “the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. This is the way to find happiness, because they have no way to repay you.” (14:13-14).  And with their modern additions: those who suffer from the wars of ‘strong men’, and all whose lives are turned upside down because of our neglect “to care for our common home” as Pope Francis put it.

No-one will pretend that this is any easier than some parts of the Ten Commandments, but we are bidden to remember the generosity of God, and the indiscriminate divine love in Christ Jesus – and how we live derives its truth and its strength from there.  Jeremiah has several more chapters of indictment. There will be a call to repentance, and there will be a final judgement, but not ours.

And so we come before God in repentance, that is, to turn our lives again on to the path of Christ, to make our offerings of our concern in prayer, and to offer our gifts in response.  And then to the table of the eucharist, the place of thanksgiving where sinners are welcome.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 11
24/8/2025

Psalm 148
John 11:20-24

---

ForeWord

Some of you, of course, attended Norah’s funeral earlier this week.

I want to introduce our Gospel reading today by saying a bit more about what I offered in the sermon there, which has become an almost “standard” thought in my funeral sermons over recent years. (And so this could be an insight into what I might say at your funeral, should that privilege fall to me).

To remind those who were there, and bring everyone else up to speed, I observed on Tuesday, the obvious: that funerals are convened not least to remember the one who has died. But, when a funeral is intentionally “Christian”, a second story is also told. If the first story is the story of our experience of the one who has died, the second story is an account of God’s experience of her, and of us.

This seems to me to be a useful framing of what a funeral does for two reasons. First, it’s true. Christian faith sees our lives as resting in a larger work in which God is engaged. Second, this framing seems to be a gentle way to invite everyone gathered – believers and unbelievers alike – to think a little differently about their own story. Do I understand myself to be living within a bigger story? And what is that bigger story?

One of the things we’ve seen over the last 30 or 40 years is the growth of eulogies in length and number. This is undoubtedly true in non-religious funerals, but we see it even in the churches. And it makes perfect sense. If we don’t believe that we’re part of a grander story than our own, then it becomes imperative that we tell our own story as loudly and lengthily as we can. This is for sheer sanity’s sake, else what was it all for? If there is nothing that makes sense of us, then what little sense we’ve managed to make or be becomes even more important.

But my concern here is not how to do a good funeral. The two-story concept is a thought we might entertain at any time, and certainly long before we’re dead. The question is then only, What is the second story which justifies, which gives sense and meaning to, our own personal story?

Our Gospel reading for today tells part of the story of the raising of the dead Lazarus. Up to the point at which our reading begins, Lazarus has died and Jesus has arrived, and speaks with Martha and Mary, the dead man’s sisters.

We’ve thought about this text a couple of times before, with closer attention to the miracle itself, but today my interest is in what Jesus says about his relationship to resurrection and life, that he says this before his own resurrection, and what this might mean for our two-storied humanity.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 11. 20-44)

Word : Proclamation

Last week, we noted two related things about Jesus’ death and resurrection, one more straightforward than the other. The simpler draws on what we saw then in the exchange between Thomas and Jesus: the risen Jesus still bears the scars of the crucifixion, which seems to be the basis of Thomas’ extraordinary confession: “my Lord and my God. ” The risen Jesus is the crucified Jesus; the marks of Jesus’ life are not expunged with the resurrection. Jesus’ history continues into whatever resurrection life he now lives.

The second, more challenging thought was this: that the crucified Jesus is the risen Jesus. What this doesn’t mean is that the crucified Jesus is the one who will be raised. Rather, he is crucified as the risen Jesus. Or, still more pointedly, Jesus is “already” risen when he is crucified (and before the crucifixion). This makes little sense because we are accustomed to thinking about the cross and resurrection as sequential events, for the obvious reason that this is how the story unfolds.

But, as we’ve noticed before, the Gospeller John does not much respect our sense for things. What is at play for John is more who Jesus is than what he does or is done to him. Central to the “is-ness” of Jesus is that he does not change throughout the narrative (which John has in common with the other Evangelists).

To say that nothing of Jesus changes is to say that nothing is taken from him, and nothing is added, throughout the story. The Jesus calling disciples in chapter 1 is the Jesus raising Lazarus in chapter 11, is the Jesus being crucified in chapter 19, and is the risen Jesus in chapter 20. The stable thing throughout the narrative is the identity Jesus has from the one who sent him, and towards those to whom he was sent.

What this means for the cross and the resurrection is that Jesus is the same before the cross and after it; the resurrection doesn’t change anything about Jesus. (What does change at Easter is perception, but this is outside of him. We saw this last week in Thomas and Peter, and earlier again in Mary. )

To put it perhaps a little surprisingly, the resurrection doesn’t matter for Jesus. It doesn’t add anything to him.

It does matter for us, although not for the reason we usually think. The resurrection doesn’t tell us that there is a life which follows death. This would be resurrection-as-addition thinking: that the dead Jesus got a bonus extension, as Lazarus did, and so we might too. Rather, the resurrection matters for us because it is light by which we see now what Jesus was all along: he was always the presence of the reign of God in the world. And what else is the resurrection but just the sign of the presence of God in Jesus – which was always the case. Even before he died, then, Jesus was living resurrection life. His word to Martha – “I am the resurrection and the life” – is about now, not what’s to come.

This is not a straightforward thought, but an important one. But even if we can accommodate it, we might well ask, So what? This is all quite neat theology, stitching up who Jesus is (or was), but why do normal, sensible people (as distinct from theologians) need to think such curly thoughts?

The thing about neat, stitched-up theology is that it’s only properly neat when it makes a human difference. Here, to get our head properly around who Jesus is and what happens to him, is to get our head around ourselves.

Remember that we began all this by recalling a funeral sermon’s proposal that our experience of ourselves rests in the broader and deeper experience God has of us.

For Christian confession, this broader and deeper experience – God’s experience of us – is Jesus himself. As small as one person is, in the context of all the people who will ever live, this one person’s story is confessed to be the story within which all our stories are properly nestled.

For Jesus to be “the resurrection and the life”, then, is for him to be the possibility that we can be like him: living a “resurrection life” now, and not in some distant (or not so distant) future, as if we would be incomplete without a resurrection. The second story, God’s experience of us, is our completeness.

That Jesus is the resurrection and the life might be proven to be true by his resurrection, but it doesn’t become true at that point. It was always the case: he lived as if there were no death.

And so also for us; our second story becomes our first. Whether we think we’ve a little time left or a lot, whether it will be energetic time or now has to be less so, what matters is that the life we have now is given for living, now.

To believe in Jesus is to believe that we have been given all we need to live life in all its fullness. It is, then, time to begin to live.

Do not wait for heaven.

The resurrection and the life are much, much closer than you think.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 10
17/8/2025

Psalm 118
John 20:19-31
John 21:15-19

---

Gearing for hearing

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve set myself the goal of slowly working through the book, “1001 movies you must see before you die” – an exercise pitting cultural breadth against personal longevity.

One of the films I’ve recently seen from the list is the 1972 Academy Award winner for best film, actor and director (among other things): The French Connection. Some of you probably saw this when it first came out. For my part, it wasn’t a good film for a six-year-old. The French Connection is a gritty police drama treating the rise of the drug trade – in this case, out of Turkey through France into New York. It’s still well worth watching if crime dramas are your thing.

But I mention it because I had previously seen another movie on the same drug trade but set on the other side of the Atlantic: the 2014 French film La French, for which the English title was The Connection. You can see the connection!

The French film is also worth watching, but something which struck me about the two had nothing to do with the stories themselves, but a feature of the timing of the storytelling in each case. The 1971 film was shot in 1971 and told the story of things happening in 1971. This meant that, once the drama moved onto the streets, we saw a 1971 New York street just as anyone would have seen it as they left a New York cinema after watching the film during its first release.

The French film, however, tells the story of 1970s Marseille from some 40 years later. And so everything must be reconstructed to translate the viewer back to the 70s. They do a pretty good job. But the thing which struck me was the cars. While the production assistants of the 2014 film had done a marvellous job finding all sorts of 1950s, 60s and 70s French cars to stretch along the roads in the street scenes, every car is straight and shiny. The problem here is that only dedicated collectors keep old cars. And they don’t keep them “old” – they fix them up like new. Every second car lining the street in the 1971 version of the story is dented, rusted and muddy. Every car in the 2014 version of the story looks like it just rolled out of the showroom. The collector doesn’t want the dents; she wants the “real” car – the car before anything happened to it.

This might really spoil your enjoyment of new movies about old things because it happens everywhere. New movies featuring old streets seem always only to have new (old) cars. There’s no place movie makers can go to find a car that sits between the painstakingly restored classic and the rusted out, utterly unroadworthy equivalent languishing in some farm shed.

But at this point, I’m more interested in the collector than the movie maker. The collector identifies the real thing as that which is as close as possible to its original condition. Something is of greatest value when it is closest to what it was in the beginning. A mint-condition coin is worth more than one that has been spent, and collectable toys are worth more if the box has not been opened.

In all of this, it seems that the wear and tear we call life is a process of diminishment. At least, this seems to be the case with “things”: tools, clothes, toys, cars.

And what about people? If we ourselves were collectable, as dolls or stamps and Lego sets are, what would constitute the ideal of a person – the ideal of any one of us? What does the “collector” edition of a John, a Sue or a David look like?

It’s a stupid question, of course. But it goes to what we think we are, and so what is of value about us, and when we are most this valuable thing.

This brings us, finally, to our readings for today – two texts from John’s Gospel, from the resurrection narratives. In one, Thomas makes a statement about what he thinks the real Jesus – a resurrected Jesus – would look like. In the other, Jesus reminds Peter what his – Peter’s – reality is. Listen for how the scratches and the dents are handled.

(John 20. 19-31
and John 21. 15-19)

Extending the hearing

Most of us know those texts pretty well and so know also how they are typically interpreted. Thomas is the apparent sceptic who won’t believe unless he can see and touch; Jesus interrogates Peter three times, seemingly to drive home Peter’s earlier three-fold denial that he knows, loves, Jesus.

But there’s more to be found here. Thomas finally declares that Jesus is “Lord and God” when Jesus’ wounds are revealed, but it is precisely the scratched and dented Jesus who is praised there. The marks of the crucifixion are not marks like the colour of Jesus’s eyes or the shape of his nose. The marks are not the means by which Jesus is identified; they are his identity. The real Jesus is not the perfect “no crying he makes” baby in a manger, before he says or does anything, or before anything is done to him. The real Jesus is the “used” one: dusty, dented and discarded. What is raised is not a fully restored, just-rolled-out-of-the-showroom Jesus. The scratches and the dents are not “on” him; they are him. It is not Jesus, the confessing Thomas says, if he’s not marked with the marks of the crucifixion.

And as it is for Jesus, so also for us. In Peter’s exchange with Jesus, the great disciple learns this for himself. Our few verses today began mid-story, but the narrative commenced with Peter declaring, “I’m going fishing”: a return to Galilee, a return to the beginning. It’s as if nothing has happened, and Peter and the rest of the disciples have hit the reset: forget and begin again. And then Jesus appears, as if to affirm the re-fresh.

But, in what we heard today, Jesus draws the enthusiastic showroom-restored Peter to one side. And with his repeated question, Jesus presses Peter to acknowledge his own brokenness. There is no mere forgiveness here, in the forgive-and-forget mode. It is as the one who three times denied Jesus that Peter is installed as the shepherd to Jesus’ lambs.

This is one of our “know-ing” texts, which we considered last week. Lord, Peter says, You know everything; you know that I love you. But by the third posing of the question, Peter’s statement of his love is deepened, because with that third question from Jesus, two things happen.

First, Peter’s failure is revealed to him again – Jesus “knows everything”; Jesus knows that Peter has failed him in his threefold denial.

And yet, second, the Jesus who knows of Peter’s failure is also the one who now appoints him as pastor: feed my sheep. Peter says three times, “Lord, you know that I love you”, but the third is different from the previous two, because the Jesus who is loved has now changed in Peter’s perception. This is no longer the Jesus the enthusiastic Peter wants him to be. This is the Jesus who knows the dinged-up, broken-down Peter and loves him nonetheless, just as he is. And more than loves him, Jesus commissions him to continue Jesus’ own work.

And so the collection-edition Peter is not the strong, vital fisherman at the start of the gospel, is not the confident, sometimes over-reaching disciple mid-story, is not the fearful one at the end. The collector-edition Peter – the truly valuable Peter – is the one who – at each stage, in every condition – has been loved. Peter’s value doesn’t change with his changing behaviour and fortunes in the story. At his best and his worst, and despite his own attempt to go back to BNIB, what has mattered most is that he has been valued. We are not our best selves at any stage of life, but in life, in flight.

What does the collector’s edition you look like?

You are each, here and now, the best you’ve ever been. Now are your glory days, now matters as much as any other moment you imagined was more “you”.

And so this can have nothing to do with how you feel about yourself. God help us if we were worth only as much as we think we are. And God does help us here, because this is a scratch-and-dent God. Our here and now is our best time because, at each stage of his life, Jesus was the presence of God: in the heady days of the calling the first disciples and in the glory of a resurrection from the dead, but also when struggling with the powers and nailed to a cross. The crucified Christ is not the one who will be risen, but the one who is risen; the risen Christ is not the one who was crucified, but the one who is crucified. This is the point of Thomas’ insistence on the marks of the crucifixion. The marks are not “on” Jesus, but are him. It’s as if everything which Jesus does and everything which happens to him is coincident: it all occurs at once, in the sight of God, and each is as valuable, each is as much the true Jesus, as the other.

The gospel is that, as with Jesus, so also with us. All that we do and is done to us coheres in God. There is no better you than the you sitting here and now because your here and now is wrapped up in the God who draws near to us in all things and binds them together, to make all things God’s own.

Understand, then, as Thomas understood, and step up, as Jesus called Peter to do so. Because if, in all things – in our very best and our very worst – we are already seen and loved, then we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 9
10/8/2025

Psalm 139:1-6, 15-18
John 2:13-25
John 15:12-17

---

Sermon (Part the First)

I discovered something rather surprising last week, which I thought I’d share with you all via that very annoying process that more or less involves you guessing stuff until you get the right answer, which only I know (or until we all lose patience).

The first question: Consider for a moment the text of the Gospel according to St John, to the extent that you think you know it. Imagine that we were to remove all the little words – the “the’s” and the “ands” and the “have’s” the “was’s” and the pronouns and the helpful little conjunctions and whatever. Of the words remaining, what do you imagine is the most frequent substantive word we read in John’s Gospel? [Jesus]

The second question: What do you guess might be the second most common substantive word? [Father]

Third question – and this is the thing which surprised me – what is the third most common word in John’s Gospel?

The third-most common word in John’s Gospel is “know”. When you add the past tense “knew” to the count, this verb appears almost as often as the noun “father”.

Know-ing is everywhere in John – roughly a half dozen times each chapter, though it tends to clump up here and there. I thought I was onto something, that the word “know” appears so many times in John because John wants us to know something about knowing. And he almost certainly does. An influential and antagonistic background noise to John’s Gospel was the developing Gnostic movement – a broad range of mystery religions which emphasised the importance of a particular kind of knowledge. (It’s worth noting here that “gnostic” and “knowledge” have a common root in the Greek gnosis – one of the words for “knowledge”. And John may, in part, be engaged in a polemic about what it is to know).

But then I discovered something else. Not only in John’s Gospel is the verb “know” so frequent. It’s also the case in more general texts and speech. In natural language, the word “know” ranks in the top 50 words, and almost all the other top 50 words are just the little ones: “her”, “at”, “if”, “not” and so on.

I did not know how important knowing was. But now that I know – and that you know – I wonder, what do we know, now that we know this?

Or even better: given that knowing is so central to what we talk about, what does John know about knowing that might make a difference to our knowing?

Listen to some of the ways knowing appears in John:

^1.10 [The Word] was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.

^1.18 No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

^4.22 [Jesus said to her, ] You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know… 

^6.69 [Peter said to Jesus, ] We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.

^8.31 [Jesus said, ] “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; ³² and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.

^11.49 But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all!

^20.13 [The angels] said to [Mary], “Woman, why are you weeping? ” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him. ” ¹⁴ When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus.

^21.17 [Jesus] said to [Peter] the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me? ” Peter felt hurt because [Jesus] said to him the third time, “Do you love me? ” And [Peter] said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you. ”

In these texts, knowledge is sometimes the just grasping of simple facts. But more often, at least here in John, knowledge presses towards intimacy. To know something is here not to possess it but to be connected to it, to be held by it:

^10.14 I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me…

^17.25 “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these [disciples] know that you have sent me. ²⁶ I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them. ”

Those of you who grew up with a Bible translation in the King James version tradition have probably noticed what looks like the coy way in which those translations would speak of sex: “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived…” (Genesis 4. 1), and many other places besides.

“Knew” is, in fact, in the Hebrew, the word for ordinary knowing, so we don’t have an English euphemism here. We have here not euphemism but a metaphor: knowledge is intimacy and, just as much, intimacy is knowledge. And when the same Hebrew word for knowing is used elsewhere – say for God’s knowledge of Israel – it’s not directly sexual, but it is often deeply intimate. (See, for example, “know” in Hosea – a knowing both intimate and deeply compromised).

But this intimacy is not easy or natural, which brings us, at last, to the two texts indicated in our service order, which are both “knowledge” texts.

(John 2. 13-25; John 15. 12-17)

Sermon (Part the Second)

^2.23…many believed in [Jesus’] name because they saw the signs that he was doing. ²⁴ But Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people ²⁵ and needed no one to testify about anyone; for he himself knew what was in everyone.

This too is knowledge as familiarity, as intimacy. But now the depth of knowing does not bode well. Jesus keeps his distance: “…[Jesus] would not entrust himself to them” because he knew them. We know(! ) this experience ourselves. We “know” others – at least we imagine we do – and often we hesitate. If intimacy is the possibility of being ourselves with another person, it has to do with the presence of (or at least openness to finding) trust, which further requires mutuality. But the intimacy in our text is one-sided. The people have seen something about Jesus – his impressive “signs” – but that is all. To recall what we said last week, they’ve seen the wrong kind of “there-ness” in him, and so they’ve gotten wrong what he is and what it would mean to know him appropriately.

And yet, the gospel is finally about a mutual intimacy:

^13.15 “[Jesus said to them, ] I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.

In this passage, “servant” denotes the wrong kind of there-ness, a lesser knowledge, an absence of mutuality, over against the intimacy of what Jesus calls “friends”. The achievement of Jesus in the gospel is precisely this “friendship”. To say that God saves is – in John’s account – to say that God makes friends.

What the crowds do not know at the beginning of the Gospel is finally known at the end by the disciples. The knowledge which matters takes time. It requires the slow overcoming of misunderstanding and conflict. And it is because this knowledge takes time, that it can’t be the knowledge of mere facts. Facts are easy: “The surface temperature of the Sun is about 5500 degrees Celsius”. This is true, but the knowledge John is concerned about is what it feels like, mid-morning in late September, to stand under an open sky.

We are accustomed these days to separating knowledge and faith, as if faith somehow overreaches, beyond the limits of knowledge. But for John, faith is not contrasted with knowledge but is a kind of knowing. The faithful don’t hold to anything more than anyone else. They just order everything differently, feel everything differently.

And so the invitation to knowledge, to faith, is not an invitation to know some new thing. It is the invitation to a deeper knowing of everything we already know, a quality of knowing rather than a quantity.

^15.15 I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. ¹⁶ You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. ¹⁷ I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

Nothing is added to make a servant a friend, but everything changes. The “fruit that will last” is the knowing that is love, is the love which is a deepening of mere knowing. To bear such fruit is to struggle through what passes for knowledge in most of our talk – a disconnected knowledge – into a deeper, integrated knowledge, which is the mutuality of love: the knowledge of persons, not of things.

This is the call to faith.

Or, pun intended, faith is knowing better. Faith is knowing better because we have come to know ourselves as God knows us: a knowing which is indistinguishable from love.

Faith is knowing that we have been searched and known, as our psalmist will put it in a moment (Psalm 139). And we have been found wanting but still loved, nonetheless.

Let us, then, know better.

Let us press past the mere possession of facts about each other and the world, into the knowledge which integrates, into the re-creative love by which God is making all things new.

Pressing into that love, let us become that love.

[And all God’s people say…]