'Come & See'

 First preached at Croydon Minster on Sunday 17 January, 2021. Gospel reading John 1.43-end

‘You will see greater things than these’ (John 1.50b)

 

+

 

St John’s gospel is wonderful! It’s full of connections, links and allusions. It begins with everything distilled into 18 pregnant verses, known as the Prologue, that are fleshed out through the next 21 chapters.

 

Take today’s gospel reading. Philip and Nathanael are invited by Jesus to see so much more than they could believe possible about themselves, God and the ways of heaven.

 

A couple of verses of the Prologue seem to encapsulate Nathanael’s encounter with Jesus:

 

‘The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 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.’ (John 1.17-18)

 

As Jesus said, Nathanael was an exemplary Israelite, and knew the law given through Moses (cf John 1.47). He had never seen God – no one ever had - but what Philip, Nathanael and we will see – and now have seen - is grace and truth in the face of Jesus Christ.

 

When they meet, Nathanael discovers that Jesus had already seen and known him. Seeing Nathanael goes beyond spotting him by a fig tree; this is deep knowing.

 

Nathanael is amazed, ‘How did you come to know me?’ The answer was given in our psalm this morning:

 

‘O LORD, thou hast searched me out and known me : thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising, thou understandest my thoughts long before’ (Psalm 139.1).

 

Jesus beholds him and knows him; he beholds you and knows you, because in beholding you, he loves you.

 

And beholding, knowing and loving you he invites you to ‘come and see; taste and see’.

 

‘It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.’

 

Come and behold; come, feast your eyes, and you will see even greater things than these - says Christ, the Bread of Life - and in knowing me, and feasting at my table, I will open to you the very heavens, the very depths of the mystery of God full of grace and truth.

 

Love-shaped Church

First preached as a sermon at Croydon Minster on the Fifth Sunday of Eastertide. The readings were Acts of the Apostles 11.1-18; John 13.31-35

‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should love one another’ John 13.34

+

Love beyond distinction; love beyond discrimination: boundless love.

What is the Gospel, what is the church, when everything is stripped away? Surely it is love beyond distinction; love beyond discrimination: boundless love. St Paul says ‘faith, hope and love endure, these three; and the greatest of these is love’ (1 Corinthians 13.13).

This is expressed in the new commandment that Jesus gives to his disciples and, by extension, to us. This new commandment is called in Latin, the Mandatum Novum, which is where we get the word ‘Maundy’ from, as in Maundy Thursday.

This new commandment lies at the heart of the Maundy Thursday liturgy. Flowing from that commandment and the Last Supper is Christ’s action of loving service, washing his disciples’ feet, demonstrating that it is in acts of loving service that we see the deepest revelation of love.

The remarkable Jean Vanier, who has very recently died – and may God grant him eternal rest – embodied this loving service. He founded the L’Arche communities in which people with disabilities of body and mind live, with those we call able, in communities of mutual support. Out of his obedience to the new commandment, and his deep love for the church and scriptures, he exemplified the Gospel imperative to love. Today L’Arche communities around the world live out the command to love one another.

Reflecting on our gospel passage, in his remarkable book Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus through the Gospel of John, Vanier writes:

Peter, Judas and the ‘beloved disciple’: three men who react in different ways to Jesus’ love.

Judas rejects and fears love. He pushes Jesus away.

Peter cannot understand Jesus. He loves Jesus but wants to do things his own way.

The beloved disciple surrenders to Jesus’ love and becomes his intimate friend.

These three attitudes are in each one of us at different moments of our lives.[1]

What an accurate summary of how Judas, Peter and John respond - or not - to love. And how searing and honest to observe that we are each prone to all three in our lives: rejection and fear of love, lack of comprehension of love and the embracing of giving and receiving love.

Understanding what love is all about is Peter’s challenge, and is it something picked up on in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles.

This is Peter’s ‘now I get it’ moment. In that slightly bizarre and unsettling vision Peter comes to a ‘penny drop’ moment: he fully understands now that ‘God shows no partiality’ (Acts 10.34).

God’s love is love beyond distinction, love beyond discrimination; boundless love.

And Peter asks, ‘who was I that I could hinder God’?

The task of the Church is to work with the movements of the Spirit, and not to go against.

Peter, representative of authority in the church, understands that any that varieties of service, structures and tradition, what has been handed on to us, is the scaffold that supports our proclamation of the message of God’s love.

The washing of feet by Jesus embodies the command to love: what of the feet to be washed around us? What does it mean to be the parish church of this local community and a Minster at the ancient heart of Croydon?

In a parish that has a local government ward with the highest percentage of young adults in any ward of London, that has the third highest incidence of mental health issues, that has areas in the bottom 5% of deprivation index, that is ethnically and religiously very mixed, that has high levels of loneliness and isolation, that has many complex lives: what does loving service look like?

In the light of all that is on our doorstep how do we respond without partiality and with the loving service of Christ?

From these two readings this morning we can see that the church is to be characterised by love: love of God and love for one another, and that loving service flows from that love.

Love is a resource we will never run out of and the more we give it away the more we receive it. That is true in our personal lives and true for the church. Be lavish in sharing love, and be ready to receive much.

All this helps inform our coming Vision Day as we reflect on who we are as a church so that we may 1) proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom, 2) teach, baptise and nurture new believers, 3) respond to human need by loving service, 4) seek to transform the unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation and 5) to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.

Three figures personify the characteristics of the church for us to keep in mind: Mary, Peter and John.

Mary is radically obedient to God: saying ‘yes’ to God’s will; giving her humanity to the service of the Kingdom; pointing constantly to Christ; patiently standing at the foot of the cross; anticipating the coming Holy Spirit. May we be a Marian church.

Peter, the Rock, is entrusted with authority in the church: given of the keys of the kingdom; forgiving and releasing; shepherding and, with Christ, laying down his life for the sheep; connecting the apostolic church in her mission of love into the whole world. May we be a Petrine church.

John, the Beloved Disciple, is the Apostle of the Love of God: nestling in the love of Jesus; telling us that ‘those who live in love live in God and God lives in them’; passing on to us Jesus’ new commandment that we love one another as Christ has loved us. May we be a Johannine church.

In that way we become a Christ-shaped church, attentive to God, connected in mission and filled with love.

Almighty God,

throughout the ages

you have blessed our church

with your presence and love:

Help us to cherish

all that you are doing in our midst,

that as young and old, women and men,

we may embrace your future with hope,

serve our parish

and sing your praises

now, and to all eternity.

Through Jesus Christ,

our risen and ascended Lord.

Amen.

---

[1] Jean Vanier, Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus through the Gospel of John (DLT: 2004) p. 240.

Passion Sunday: Show me things I've never seen before

First preached as sermon at Guildford Cathedral on the Fifth Sunday of Lent, Passion Sunday, 2018.

Gospel reading: John 12.20-33

‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’ (John 12.21).

'What do you see?'

Many people are familiar with a trip to the optician. Famously on the wall there are letters of ever decreasing sizes to test your sight. But we know that sight does not always equate to vision and seeing things on a deep level.

Seeing, recognising and believing are constant themes throughout St John’s gospel.

The climax of the Prologue to St John’s Gospel, speaks of the Word being made flesh, Jesus Christ, who dwelt among us ‘and we have seen his glory’. John continues ‘No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father who has made him known’. (John 1.14, 18).

John also deals in signs, visual pointers to the profound truth of Jesus Christ’s mission and purpose. Famously he records seven signs – a perfect number – and says there were many more: water changed into wine (John 2.1-11) showing the coming hour of transformation in Jesus Christ; the healings of the royal official's son in Capernaum (John 4:46-54) and the paralysed man at Bethesda (John 5:1-15); the multiplication of loaves and fishes to feed the five thousand (John 6:5-14); Jesus walking on water (John 6:16-24); and the raising of Lazarus (John 11:1-45). All signs to be seen to point to Jesus’ divine power. They ask us, ‘now do you see?’

The remaining sign is of the man born blind whose sight is restored such that he can see who Jesus really is (John 9:1-7). The story culminates in Jesus speaking to the man whose sight has been restored saying,

‘Do you believe in the Son of Man? He answered, ‘And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.’ He said, ‘Lord, I believe.’ And he worshipped him. (cf John 9.35b-41)

Seeing in John’s Gospel is far more than a visual reception of data and a function of the retina; this seeing is seeing with the eye of the heart. What I coin deep-sightedness.

It is this sort of seeing that Mary Magdalene has when at first she fails to recognise Jesus through her tears on the Day of Resurrection but on hearing Christ speaks her name she sees, as says ‘Rabbouni, teacher’ (John 20.1-18). And Mary Magdalene the first missionary, the Apostle to the Apostles, proclaimed, ‘I have seen the Lord’ (John 20.18).

The apostle Thomas sees with his eyes but not with his heart, and he seeks visual evidence of Jesus’ resurrection: but then a moment of recognition comes and he says ‘My Lord and my God’ (John 20.24-29).

***

So, those Greeks appear saying to Philip, ‘Sir we would see Jesus’. Well, what have they come to see? What do we see in Jesus? What does their question demand of us if we place ourselves in the shoes of Philip the disciple when someone else says to you, ‘I want to see Jesus? There is a missional edge to their request.

Quite what the Greeks made of their seeing Jesus, history does not relate. It is in St Mark’s gospel that the centurion gazes at the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, on the cross and declares, ‘Truly this is God’s son’. Many did see and believed; many saw Jesus and saw nothing beyond.

‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’. This notion of seeing is important. The Greeks arrive to see Jesus, and their own mother tongue, Greek, has a variety of words that mean ‘to see’.

Their request to see could be from scorpion from which we get the word ‘scope’, as in telescope and microscope. Were they scoping Jesus? Getting the measure of him? Assessing what it would mean to follow him?

‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’. It could be, that far from be intrigued and seeing Jesus to get the measure of him, that there was a different edge. Their request ‘to see’ could be another Greek word sképtesthai from which we get the word ‘sceptic’. It was true then, as it is now, that there are sceptics about who Jesus Christ is. They may want to be entertained or to dismiss, as in Herod’s request to see Jesus (Luke 9.9). Sometimes, though, even scepticism can lead people on the journey of encounter with him; that’s true even today of people who come to see Jesus sceptically and find their lives turned around by him. When Jesus encounters two of John the Baptist’s slightly sceptical disciples he says, ‘Come and see’ (John 1.39)

‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’. The word John’s gospel actually uses is idein which means ‘to see’, in the sense of ‘to visit’ or ‘to meet with’. But it can also mean, in the context of John’s gospel, ‘to believe in’. ‘Sir’, they could be saying to Philip, ‘we wish to believe in Jesus’.

In meeting them Jesus he doesn’t say, “well, here I am have a good look”. Rather he unveils what is hinted at in the Prologue to John – and we have seen his glory –as Jesus declares that now his hour has come. And what will be seen is his glorification, the glorification of the cross, when he is lifted up from the earth.

Window in Guildford Cathedral - South Aisle

In the wilderness the Israelites who were being infested by poisonous serpents could be cured by looking at a pole erected by Moses (it features in the window on the south side of the Cathedral nave). Therein lay their healing and restoration. The cross is the new sign to be gazed upon for salvation. That is the image Jesus is drawing upon as he speaks of the Son of Man lifted up. (cf also John 3.14-21)

This takes us to Good Friday and the Proclamation of the Cross and we hear the haunting verse of Lamentations, ‘Is it nothing to you all you who pass by. Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow’ (Lamentations 1.12a). We hear that as we gaze upon the stark wood of the cross. Not just a bit of carpentry but the sign of our hope and salvation.

It is this deep-sightedness that enables St John Chrysostom to say of Jesus on the cross: ‘I see him crucified; I call him King’.

***

Today is Passion Sunday. It is the day in the Church’s year, before the intensity and drama of Holy Week, on which we begin to contemplate more intensely what we see in the glorification of Jesus Christ and ‘behold the wood of the cross, whereon was hung the Saviour of the world’, as the Good Friday liturgy puts it.

As the time of his Passion draws near may we consider how we see Jesus Christ, and behold God in all people, moments and things. Passion Sunday is a spiritual optician’s check-up (from another Greek word optikos "of or having to do with sight and seeing’).

My prayer is that believer and enquirer alike may cry out to the Lord: ‘I wish to see Jesus: show me things I’ve never seen before’. Amen.

© Andrew Bishop, 2018

Reflections on the Advocate & advocacy

The definition of advocacy from the mental health charity Mind is the act of ‘getting support from another person to help you express your views and wishes, and to help make sure your voice is heard’. 

There is a growing recognition of the need for this sort of advocacy and its real power and worth. Advocacy enables those who, for whatever reason, cannot articulate their own story: in other words those who cannot give an account of what makes them, them; their identity; who they are.

Classically, in legal terms, we are familiar with the role of the advocate as the person who has the expertise and training to articulate the story or case of another person in their defence, the role a barrister takes in our system. The advocate gives clarity to the defendant’s story, marshals evidence and articulates the case. The advocate is not the defendant. The advocate does not even have to believe the defendant, but comes to inhabit the defendant’s story such that it can be put on the defendant’s behalf.

That is the case for someone accused of a crime, but advocacy goes wider than that. We can add to the example of ‘Mind’ those of advocacy for the many groups of people whose voice goes unheard in society, like carers at home, minorities, children, those undergoing coercive control, survivors of abuse or trauma, those for whom life is being sucked out of them by over domineering colleagues or family members.

This sort of advocacy in a social sense, either in the workplace, at school or society, draws on the same skills. This often hinges on helping someone not simply articulate their own story, but to help them to understand it and take hold of it. The advocate in this sense also helps identify when someone else is suppressing a person’s story or their identity and sense of who they are.

So for example, part of my role as a chaplain, indeed in my job description, is one of advocacy. This is advocacy in the second sense that is not about a courtroom. That might be advocacy on behalf of a student who extenuating circumstances affecting his or her work, or a member of staff who is feels victimised or bullied by another.

More generally I am, with fellow chaplains, an advocate for the place of faith and belief on campus, which involves telling the story of the way personal faith and belief within a community of faith is integral to the identities of so many people.

In the Christian Church the role of a priest is to help God’s people to articulate their story corporately and personally. That is the sense in which a priest is a storyteller. Not spinning yarns, but holding together a narrative of identity, into which is woven the hope, the faith and the love of God presented to us in Jesus Christ, who, in the power of the Holy Spirit, gives us the narrative of what it is to be human and a creature made in the image and likeness of God, where we find our first identity.

This is where our dedication to the Holy Spirit at this Cathedral points us to the importance of advocacy because advocacy is at its heart the work of the Holy Spirit, named in the Gospels as parakletos, the principal meaning of which is ‘lawyer for the defence’, ‘defender of the accused’, or in the words of the Te Deum sung at Morning Prayer, ‘the Holy Spirit, advocate and guide’.

The Spirit is the advocate who helps us articulate our identity in Christ, and draws into the narrative of the love of the Father and Son. This is the process of sounding the depths of our faith, seeing who we are in relation to who Jesus Christ is, all the better to understand how we take hold of our humanity and the person we were created to be.

That is the context of Advocate in the passage of St John 15.12-end. Read in the context of the imminent prospect of martyrdom and it has a very pressing character: the parakletos is what gives the martyr the ability to speak and act as one shaped by the story of the death of Jesus that becomes more than a wasted life but one that is enveloped in the friendship of God, the fruitfulness from God and testimony of God.

For those of us not facing martyrdom, the parakletos still operates to shape our lives that we, like the martyrs, abide in the love of God that gives wholly of itself.

So then we have the parakletos on our side, but that implies that there is someone or something not on our side. This is what the Bible, and Jesus, term Satan, a name which means the adversary, the one who puts the case against us, the one who wants to declare us guilty.

The adversary wants to unravel the story of God’s love, faithfulness and simply being on our side. The adversary wants us to believe that we are laden with guilt, never good enough. The adversary wants to tell the church today a story that takes us off in directions of despair and patching things together, not remaining faithful to the story of God.

As the story unravels we become gospel amnesiacs and then we really are lost and in need of seeking out, which of course God will do. Counsels of despair about the future of the church or the worthiness of human beings disregard the work of the Holy Spirit, our Advocate and Guide.

Perhaps sometimes the problem is that we tell the story against ourselves.

Surely inspired by the Spirit, the Advocate, St Paul asks in Romans, ‘If God is for us who can be against us?...who will bring any charge against God’s elect?’ (Romans 8.31b, 33a). It’s a question that comes in a passage where Paul has asserted that the Spirit helps us in our weakness. Paul knew as we do that our live and hope comes from the extent to which we are grafted in, to use St John’s imagery, into the life of the True Vine, Jesus Christ. It is this life that gives us the capacity to love in a way that counts nothing of the cost, to be fruitful and to testify to that love for as Paul answers his own question:

“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8.37-39

There’s the case for the defence, the story into which we are grafted, the story of the self-giving, saving love of Jesus Christ articulated for us in our life in the parakletos, our Advocate and Guide. 'Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful people, and kindle in us the fire of your love'.

© Andrew Bishop, 2016