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(1 John 5:9-13; John 17: 6-19)

          This period in the Church’s year can seem rather strange – our Lord has ascended to sit at the right hand of the Father, yet we are waiting for the Spirit to come down at Pentecost and settle upon the disciples; so that the Church can begin to grow and go out into the world. It can seem like a time of hiatus – perhaps somehow similar to that curious passage in Revelation, where we are told that after the Lamb opened the 7^th Seal, there was silence in heaven for half an hour. Perhaps this is another time of silence, as though for this week or so until Pentecost, God has absented Himself from the world. Yet if we believe in the God who is Emmanuel, the God who is with us, then we know that cannot be the case.

          If we look to today’s readings for guidance on the significance of this time, it doesn’t seem immediately apparent that we have much of an answer. The reading from the letter of John tells us that we have ‘the testimony of God’, and that for those who believe in His Son, this testimony is in our hearts; and that perhaps rather circuitously, this testimony is that ‘God gave us eternal life, and this life is in the Son. Whoever has the Son has life, whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.’ The choice of this passage at this time implies that we are to see this ‘Testimony’ as the Holy Spirit, that we have the Spirit working in our hearts, giving us life. This implication would have been clearer if the compilers of the lectionary had made this passage from the letter of John slightly larger. Because the verses we have had today are preceded by those proclaiming that our ‘testimony’ is Jesus Christ, who ‘came by water and blood, and the Spirit is the one that testifies, for the Spirit is Truth.’

          I was struck by this because quite by chance this week I had been reminded that in earlier times these verses were greatly expanded by a text that had been interpolated here into John’s letter. The verses, which are now considered to be a pious fraud, were used for centuries as a Biblical proof for the doctrine of the Trinity. That is, until the revival of classical learning, together with better understanding of what were the oldest Biblical texts, led scholars, beginning with Erasmus, to come to the uncomfortable realization that this verse didn’t exist in the oldest surviving texts of the New Testament. We can now usually find these expanded verses in the footnotes of modern editions of the Bible, and I may be deluding myself but I couldn’t help but think that perhaps they can help us understand what this apparent time of hiatus for God really means.

          What verses 7 and 8 of the 5^th chapter of John’s letter formerly said was this – ‘There are three that testify in heaven, the Father, the Word , and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three that testify on earth – the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree.’ It is after this that we have the words we heard today about the ‘Testimony of God’ being greater than that that of humankind. These verses may help us understand what this time can mean for the Church, because perhaps not too surprisingly, given when these words most likely begin to appear in the New Testament, they seem to echo what the Fathers of the early Church said about the Ascension. They seem to echo what they understood about the role that our Lord returning to the right hand of the Father had in the economy of our salvation.

          For instance, Cyril of Alexandria believed that in the Ascension, the Christ opened for us ‘a new and living way’ into God’s presence – Christ has now gone up not for his own benefit, because ‘He was, and is, and always will be in the Father.’ Instead the significance of the Feast of the Ascension is that on it, the Word, in Cyril’s words, ascended as a human being, revealing himself in a new and unfamiliar way.’ This is so that ‘being like us…and hearing the command to ‘Sit at my right hand’, he might transmit to fellow members of the human race, the glory of being children of God.’ For Cyril, the great mystery here is that the Christ became man, so that it could be ‘as one of us that he sits at the right hand of God the Father, though in truth he is above all creation and is one in being with his Father.’ In Cyril’s scheme of things, Jesus appeared as a human being before the Father at this time, so as ‘to enable those who had been cast out from the Father’s presence because of sin to once again behold the face of God.’

          This didn’t mean that for Cyril or the other Fathers that they thought it took God a week or more to sort this out, before he was able to send the Spirit out on his people. But that this was the time when we could again reflect on what God has done for us in Christ, and on this part of his plan of salvation. In the words of another Father, Pope Leo the Great, Cyril’s near contemporary, the significance for us of the Ascension is that the Son of Man is ‘revealed as Son of God in a more perfect and transcendent way once he (has) entered into the Father’s glory.’ He has now become in Leo’s words, ‘indescribably more perfect in divinity to those from whom he was further removed in humanity.’ This enables us to have ‘a more mature faith’, whereby we can stretch our minds upward ‘to the Son in his equality with the Father’, as our faith is summoned to the heights where the Son now sits with the Father.

          I hope that it is not too much of a stretch to see the glory Leo and Cyril are talking about as being the same as that which we heard Jesus talking about in the passages we heard today from John’s Gospel. As Jesus said there to his Father, ‘All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I have been glorified in them.’ And we are glorified, because he has given us the Word, because of which ‘the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world.’ Here we have one of the paradoxes of John’s Gospel, a paradox which gives this gospel its Gnostic air of despising the world, so seemingly despising the creation that the Bible also tells us is good. In this same discourse, Jesus says that we are not to be taken out of the world, and he asks his Father here and now to sanctify us in the truth, so that just as the Father sent his Son into the world, so Jesus can now send us into the world. This seems to mean that Christ is glorified in us if we are prepared to do what he did – if we are prepared to witness to the Truth, the Truth of God’s Word, which is of course also paradoxically Jesus the Christ.

          The truth that there is always something greater than this world, the truth revealed in Jesus that not only sustains and upholds the world, but which loved it enough to send its Word to it, as John’s Gospel also proclaims. The kind of love that led Jesus to the way of the cross, which of course begins in the following chapter of John’s Gospel from the one we have heard today. The way of the cross that finds its completion in Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension, so revealing that Jesus’ return to the glory of the Father’s right hand is through the cross, through his suffering love for our world; a love that we are called upon to share and which will glorify us.

          Earlier on, I shoehorned into this sermon the old Trinitarian proof text from the 1^st letter of John, and I will return to it again, because in its witness to the Trinity, it reminds us of what can sustain us in our discipleship, as we face up to a world indifferent or hostile to Christ, and whose understanding of love can now be very different from ours. It can sustain us, when being willing to suffer in witnessing to God’s love to the world can seem futile or foolish. In the first part of the old 7^th verse, we have the heavenly testimony to God, Father, Word and Spirit. The testimony revealed in this Word coming into creation, joining itself to us completely, being willing to suffer and die for our sakes, and to take our humanity and creatureliness back to the Father, so that it can ultimately be what God has always intended it to be when we were created.

          As we heard in John’s Gospel, Jesus had said that we are to be in the world, but he prayed to protect us from the evil one, and asked his Father to protect us in his name, so that we may be one in love, as he and his Father are one. To that end, the old 7^th verse tells us that we are to look to the three that testify to God on earth – the Holy Spirit moving among us who brings together the testimonies of Heaven and Earth; the waters of repentance which cleanse us from our sins and enable us to hear the Word, and which gives us admittance to Christ’s body. And perhaps most importantly of all for us, as we try to navigate our way through this world, the Blood. The Blood outpoured that witnesses to God’s love for our world, and for each of us – the love and the paradoxical glory revealed in the sacrament that we are about to share. In the Eucharistic mystery, we share as the Body of Christ, we come face to face with the Word, with the Bread of Life, we encounter that Word in the fragility and seeming insignificance of the bread that will be broken, and the wine that would normally be poured out for us in other times, to be the blood that we would share. The Eucharist is the supreme reminder that we can always call upon the Spirit, the water and the blood as we navigate our way through this world, and remember that we are called not just to be one body as the Church, but we are called to be one with Jesus, as he is one with the Father.           As we look to Pentecost, may God, Father, Son and Spirit, give us the strength, wisdom and faith to live up to the glory he has called us to, and to show the glory of his love to our suffering world. Amen.

In last week’s Economist there was a photograph of a huge robot in the shape of a human being, and where its head should be there was a driving-cab with a real man inside operating the controls. That’s how we tend to think about our minds and our bodies. Our mind is the most important thing about us – our body belongs to a lower order of things and the mind controls it. This picture of the little man in the robot is a deep image within each of us, a deep image of our culture. So you get the view very dominant in our society that each person should be free to make themselves, to express what is within them rather than follow what is outside them. This gives us the revised Brownie promise introduced not long ago, that “I promise that I will do my best, to be true to myself and develop my beliefs …”. God has gone, and instead there is myself. You can’t criticise the guiding Association – what else can you say in a society like ours? There is a deep link between the Brownies here and German 19th-century philosophy. The German thinker Wilhelm Humboldt for instance believed that the individual ought to be free to determine themselves and develop themselves, and any restraints or influences outside ourselves were to be seen as a challenge to be overcome.

These assumptions are deeply ingrained in the modern mindset – but they are in fact outdated. Science, anthropology and philosophy are all now telling us that this image is mistaken – we are all in fact intertwined with each other. Because we are so used to it we don’t notice it, but all our life, even if we live relatively alone, is woven through this intertwining with one another. We have been learning a thing or two about that during lockdown. And not only that – our intertwining with the physical world goes right down to the deepest hidden parts of our minds. Even if you look at a cup and saucer for a few moments and try to think of all the thoughts that it conjures up, you realise that cups and saucers in your lifetime have laid down all sorts of things in your depths. The physical world is all the time contributing to our make-up. In the same edition of the Economist another article described how Tesla self-drive cars need a great multitude of sensors of all sorts. We are the same without realising it – we unconsciously take in masses of information from all around us.

St John in today’s gospel shows us Jesus saying, “love one another”. You could say that love is the perfecting of this intertwining. You can’t do what love does and be what love is without making yourself vulnerable, without loosening some of your control. You have to come out of the driving-cab, leaving behind its protection.

What is this love that Jesus talks about? It isn’t at all something you can simply turn on. If we make a great effort to love, we can end up with something debased. Love for others can be patronising, it can be manipulative, it can be deaf to what they want to tell us. Love can be erotic and even destructive, love can distort things. We are never in a position to reckon that something we are doing is love. If that’s the case, doesn’t this paralyse us? It only paralyses us if we see ourselves as a driver in a cab. In our gospel passage Jesus in fact says this: “as the father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.” This love is outside us. Wilhelm Humboldt, following his principles, will never find it because he is sufficient to himself, and any influence outside himself is something to be challenged. If we are to love, we have to go out from ourselves. The message of the gospel is that there is something, someone greater than us, and that we will find ourselves by sitting under this Mystery. Following Christ is paideia – that’s Greek for being a learner, an apprentice. “You have not chosen me; I have chosen you”. Kierkegaard said about St Paul that “the call to be an apostle is a paradoxical occurrence, lying always beyond Paul’s personal self-identity.” Beyond our personal self-identity. My sense of myself, and my picture of the world, will grow and change as I am taken outside of myself. Towards the divine Other. God is love, and Christ is the face of that love. Love is not something we do; love is being in Christ. It’s because of this that St Augustine could advise us to love God and do what we want.

In this Eucharist we are 2 communities: a religious community and a theological college. And there is another community intertwining with us, everyone present with us over the Internet. The Eucharist which brings us together is a place of abiding in that love which is Christ. Lord, you are in the midst of us, and we are called by your name. The Holy Spirit calls us constantly to wake up and be aware of the Lord in the midst of us. One way of being a learner in the School of love is simply to be awake and stay awake. Karl Barth, although belonging to the Swiss Reformed Church, was a great admirer of monastic life – despite all its failings he thought that over the centuries monastic life had repeatedly modelled what the Church is called to be. He wrote to the Abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat in Spain that renewal in monastic life cannot be something that happens every now and again. It’s every day. Monks and nuns, and the whole Church, stand and fall by the fact that our Lord… orders us anew at every moment. So for Karl Barth every moment of our Christian life is an event; monastic life is an event, triggered by the living God. To love as we were meant to love, is to be in Christ, in the Christian community, and for others, open to the world.

If associations like the Brownies are like a canary in a coal mine, having to reflect reflect what is in the atmosphere, then we must pray for our contemporary society to be transformed in such a way that the promise will need to be revised again, to refer to a desire to go out of ourselves, outside of our selves to find that love which is beyond all understanding.

Fr George CR

The Gospel for St Philip and St James Day is part of Jesus’s farewell discourse with the disciples before he goes to face his enemies and the Last Enemy. The Lord speaks in riddles and paradoxes and the disciples’ questionings show both bewilderment and impatience. He talks of leaving them, of some unknown Comforter after he is gone and of bringing them to some mysterious house with a lot of rooms in it.

Somehow it doesn’t sound like good news especially when he adds ‘in the world you will have tribulation’. ‘Be of good cheer I have overcome the world’ is not really helpful when the evidence appears to be to the contrary. So they press him.

Simon says ‘Why can I not go with you? I would lay down my life for you?’

Thomas ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going, how can we know the way?’

Jude ‘Lord how will you show yourself to us without the world seeing you?’

Jesus seems to have a bit of trouble getting the disciples to understand. This has been so since the beginning of their association. He may appear confident but this is the man whose spirit is troubled within him, who in a few hours’ time will pray ‘my God, my God why have you forsaken me?’

Why are they still so dull-witted? Why don’t they see?

There is so much to explain, there is so little time.

Perhaps that is what prompts his sharp answer to Philip’s request: ‘Lord show us the Father and we shall be satisfied.’

”Have I been so long with you Philip and yet you do not know me?”

Who can see the Father? Who can show the Father? Who can manipulate the Creator?

The heaven of heavens cannot contain what Philip asks for. We are a dot in the Milky Way Galaxy; there are a hundred Billion stars in that galaxy. If you begin counting one two, three… allowing one second each time it would take thirty-two years to count to one billion. Our galaxy is one of four hundred billion known galaxies. The Father made all this. The heaven of heavens can contain him.

St Philip and St James’s Day is followed by that of St Athanasius who gave his name to the Creed that says ‘the Father is incomprehensible’. This is the God that Philip wants Jesus to show to them. It is no wonder that Jesus doesn’t give him a straight answer.

‘To see me is to see the Father.’

It is also no wonder that the disciples find frustration in the paradoxes and riddles with which Jesus seeks to teach them. How can they see the Creator, the Infinite, Immortal, Invisible God in this thirty-year-old that they have followed, broke bread with and laboured beside for at least three years?

The aforementioned clause of the Athanasian Creed is followed by one that says ‘the Son, Incomprehensible’. You can’t argue with that!

But there are other paths of incomprehensibility. However we might try to understand God we find that he is unfathomable. His power, his wisdom his love are beyond the capability of human reason. In these discourses Jesus is trying to draw his disciples towards the meaning of love. These chapters of the Fourth Gospel are filled with the language of love and Jesus says ‘If you want to see the Father look at me’ Is this any more comprehensible?

No. But Love itself is a mystery. So far among all those four hundred billion, billion heavenly bodies we have only evidence of one species in which the idea of love has blossomed. And it is incomprehensible that this species with a history of greed, cruelty and brutality could develop into a race, however imperfect, in which parental and fraternal love, sacrifice, adoration, love of country, tenderness and selflessness are seen as ideals that all should strive after. Art, music poetry science even physical culture come from hearts and minds that have learned how to love.

In the last discourses Jesus is trying to spell out the meaning of love. God made humanity in his own image. God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son. Paul tells us Jesus is the image of the invisible God and here we are at the heart of the mystery of love. In giving us Christ God is sacrificing himself to save us.

Charles Dinsmore put it thus – ‘There was a cross in the heart of God before there was one set up on the green hill outside Jerusalem.’

Or as Isaac Watts put it: Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were a present far too small; Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all.

Fr John CR

Some years ago I made a long retreat at St Beuno’s in Wales, that lovely Jesuit house where Gerard Manley Hopkins lived, and wrote the Wreck of the Deutschland. Each afternoon I would go out for a walk up and down the hills, enjoying that wonderful countryside, as Hopkins had done:

“Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales

All the air things wear that build this world of Wales.”

And I got to know Welsh sheep. They were everywhere. They were big and dirty, their wool matted with mud and other less pleasant things. They were not like those sparkling white sheep that one usually sees in pictures of Jesus the Good Shepherd. It’s nice to think of Jesus as a shepherd. It is not so nice to think of ourselves as sheep! Not only are sheep dirty – it’s not for nothing that Pope Francis said priestly shepherds should have the smell of the sheep about their person! They are also not very bright. They tend to fall into ditches, get stuck in the mud, get tangled up in barbed wire fences. It’s not a very flattering picture of us, but I fear it may be a true one. Maybe today we should reflect a bit on our own lives and consider how much like sheep we are. Grubby, not very bright and inclined to get into messes. It is extraordinary what sort of people God calls to monastic and priestly life. Perhaps he has no choice because that is all there is. But enough of us. What about the Shepherd.?

When we think of the shepherd we think of that other story of the shepherd who went off after a single lost sheep and brought it home. That story has given rise to many thousands of beautiful sermons full of love, care and gentleness. I wonder if that is what it is really about. I once heard a talk from the New Testament scholar Kenneth Bailey, who grew up in the Middle East, spoke Arabic and knew shepherds. He reminded us that shepherds were businessmen. Their flocks of sheep were their bank, or the bank of those they worked for. If you lose a sheep, you lose money. You go after a lost sheep to get your money back. It’s as basic as that. Jesus the Good Shepherd is as basic as that.

It reminds me of a cousin of mine who raises cattle in Zimbabwe. There was a big problem in his area with stock theft. Every farmer was losing cattle to thieves.  My cousin never lost a single animal because right at the beginning he took to giving each of his three herdsmen a calf as a Christmas bonus so they could build up their own herds. “But” he said, “If ever I lose a cow I will come and take one of yours.” They made sure he never did, out of concern for their own. The moral of the story is that love costs money. God loved us, and he paid for that love by suffering on the Cross.

That gives a different take on Jesus as the good shepherd. He is jealous of his sheep. Like a businessman or a miser, he will not let his money get lost. In the Old Testament we are often told that God is a jealous God. Jealousy is supposed to be bad, but in God it is good. It shows that God really loves us with passion. He will not let the devil capture us and take us away. His love is not a pale, gentle benevolence that is easily blown away by the breeze. It is strong, violent, passionate love. It is the kind of love you meet in the Song of Songs: “I found him whom my soul loves; I held him and would not let him go.” God was so determined not to let go of these lost sheep on earth that he became one of them; he suffered death on the Cross and pursued his sheep down to hell. It can be a bit frightening to discover love like that, but it is also good to know that that is how we are loved: a love that pursues us through the darkness of our lives and will not let us go.

That leaves me with one question: why did the compilers of our lectionary give us this gospel of Jesus the Good Shepherd to read during Eastertide? To read it in Lent would make good sense – the Good Shepherd who is willing to lay down his life for his sheep. What does it tell us of the risen Christ? Well, I do not know what the compilers intended, but I have an idea of my own. It goes back to a number of years ago when I was visiting Romania. We were in a small village in Transylvania up against the Carpathians when a couple of shepherds brought their flock of sheep through the village. These shepherds bore no resemblance at all to that willowy, pre-Raphaelite picture of Jesus the Good Shepherd which you see so often in children’s bible books. They were big, tough, bearded men. They exuded energy and strength as they walked fast through the village. They were, in fact, a bit scary. They lived on the mountain side with their sheep in rain and snow, in heat and drought. They defended the sheep against bears, wolves and thieves. They were real men. Is that what the risen Jesus is – the most real man, or person who has ever existed?

We have trouble representing the Risen Christ. Sometimes he appears pale and willowy as if he needed to be thin and unsubstantial to slip through doors and walls. Other times he is full of light as if a star has come down to Earth. In Caravaggio’s Emmaus he is meaty, more like a butcher than a God. Christ is not less human for having resumed his Godhead. He is more human. He is the kind of human we will be if we make it through to the Resurrection, not less real but more so.

What are the implications of this? Where is this powerful, human, Risen Christ? Faith tells us he is all around. Is he doing anything? We look at the world today and see a trail of disasters – the pandemic, climate crisis, the destruction of our environment, the wars raging in Africa and the middle East. Some think God has abandoned the world, that he is hanging around to collect the last faithful Christian off this doomed planet before he lets it go its own way to hell. I believe the world is still here, and the human race still here only because this big strong Risen Christ is working to make it so. I believe that we are finally beginning to deal with issues of climate change, inequality, destruction because Christ is dragging us into doing so. The challenge for us in today’s world is to find out what the Risen Christ is already doing and work with him. That is what shows we believe he has risen from the dead.

Fr Nicolas CR