that, instead of seeing all this clearly, we get the general picture but it’s all rather blurred. We aren’t really sure about our final destiny. We don’t really expect to attain the vision of God by looking long and hard at Jesus (or why would we do anything else?). And we don’t pray for solid, substantial definite things that will bring the Father glory in the Son.
The great statements earlier in the chapter are likewise at a discount in our half-hearted, lukewarm-blooded Christianities. Jesus, we are told, couldn’t have said that he was the way, the truth and the life. Many now make that denial the shibboleth of a new orthodoxy. (What this amounts to, of course, is the statement that the Enlightenment, or perhaps postmodernity, is ‘the way, the truth and the life’; is that any less ‘arrogant’, the charge normally advanced against John 14.6?) We don’t want our own worldview disturbed by someone telling us that Jesus has upstaged it all.
Which was, of course, what Stephen did with the world-view of the chief priests and the hardline Pharisees. The Temple is under judgement, he said; Israel has always rejected its heaven-sent rulers, and has now done so again, once and for all. That would have been arrogant, fighting talk if it weren’t for the fact that it was Jesus he was talking about; as it was, it was suffering, forgiving talk. In the great Jewish tradition of martyrdom, the dying called down curses on their persecutors; the first Christian martyr followed his Lord in praying for their forgiveness. But forgiveness wasn’t what they wanted (despite the fact that this was what the Temple stood for!); they wanted their worldview left intact. That’s the stuff that stonings are made of. But God has laid in Zion the true corner stone, precious beyond imagining to those who believe.
The Sixth Sunday of Easter
Acts 17.22–31
1 Peter 3.13–22
John 14.15–21
In a spectacular (and presumably heavily abbreviated) speech, Paul takes on culturally sophisticated Athens with the new upside-down wisdom. He begins on their own territory, with the altar to the Unknown God: even the Athenians had left a window open, a gap in their well-worked-out theology, where fresh air could blow in from an unexpected quarter. Some of the poets, too, had pointed towards a God who was both other than the world and yet intimately involved with it.
Yet Paul is not simply finding points in the local culture he can affirm, as though Christian mission simply pats people on the back for being as they are. Affirmation is more than balanced by confrontation. Even today, if you stand on Mars Hill, where the highest court of the city used to meet, you have a wonderful view of the Acropolis, with the Parthenon and the other temples clearly in view, the pinnacle of a culture and its theology. Paul, against that backdrop, tells them it’s all a waste of time: the creator of all doesn’t live in houses like that. Nor does he need the whole paraphernalia of the sacrificial system. Nor – despite what not only traditional Athenians but also the pre-Christian Paul would have said – does he make any ultimate distinctions between one race of humans and another. Paul may have found an open window in the culture, but what’s blowing through it is a hurricane that will turn the room upside down.
In particular, Paul takes on the Epicureans and Stoics with whom he’d been debating in the marketplace. Epicureans, like Deists, thought of the gods as remote and detached, happily unconcerned about our world. Stoics, like some other pantheists, thought of God as the inner divine essence within our world. Both can lead, and sometimes do, to atheism (the gods are either so distant that they might as well not exist, or they turn out to be simply a metaphorical projection of our feelings of wonder) or at least to relativism (the gods are so far away that all religions are just vague approximations; or they are so present that all religions are different expressions of ‘the divine’). Both are confronted head on by Paul’s message of one God, the creator, who is both different from the world and compassionately involved with it. Both, in particular, are confronted, as is all atheism and relativism, by the fact of Jesus’ resurrection, and the message which it brings: the God of Israel is the one true God, who is bringing to the world the justice for which it longs.
Paul knew, as did Peter, how unwelcome this announcement would be. Yet the consequent suffering of Christians is itself to be part of the witness, because the justice proceeds from self-giving love. And the witness itself, as John would remind us, proceeds from the Spirit, God’s wind blowing fresh spring air through whatever windows, in whatever culture, may happen to be open.
The Seventh Sunday of Easter
(Sunday after Ascension Day)
Acts 1.6–14
1 Peter 4.12–14; 5.6–11
John 17.1–11
‘When his glory is revealed.’ The ascension gives us a glimpse in advance of the great truth which will one day be unveiled – or rather, the glorious Person who will one day be revealed. It is as though the universe is throbbing with the secret knowledge that Jesus, the Messiah, is its true Lord, a knowledge that cannot yet be spoken, that would not be understood. To be a Christian is to be privy to this secret, to have it indeed engraved into one’s life; because the other side of the secret is the Christian call to suffer. The transformation of suffering is a further key part of the meaning of the ascension.
The ‘suffering’ that comfortable Western Christians endure often seems small in comparison with that which our brothers and sisters still face day by day in (for instance) the Sudan. Much of it – the stresses of contemporary life and all that they produce – is partly self-caused, at least at a societal level. But there is a deep suffering, unquantifiable and hence impossible to compare, which comes from living as one who believes that the crucified Messiah is the world’s true Lord, in the midst of a world that lives by the rule of force, or pleasure, or wealth. We are called to be out of tune with the world’s orchestra, swimming against the world’s wind and tide. Not merely cross-grained and awkward; rather, in tune with God’s hidden music, buoyed up by the submerged swell of his love.
It is therefore vital to remember that the ascended Lord is precisely the one who was crucified. In John’s Gospel, indeed, reaching something of a climax in the great prayer of ch. 17, crucifixion and exaltation seem to be merged together, so that the ascension, when it is promised in John 20.17, does not ‘reveal his glory’ any more fully than the cross itself.
Without this, Acts 1 would simply be a triumphalist rant. In Luke’s readers’ world, the way Roman emperors were formally declared divine after their deaths was to have someone declare that they had seen him ascend into heaven. Ascension was the instrument of power and glory: the power of the Roman state to keep subject peoples controlled with religious, as much as military, threat; the glory of the imperial system and the all-powerful person at the top of it.
For Luke, however, as the whole of Acts makes clear, the fact that it was the crucified Jesus who was now exalted to share the throne of the one true God (he has Daniel 7 in mind as well, of course) means that the mission of his followers will carry power, and indeed glory, but of a very different sort. It will be the power, and the glory, of suffering love. When Jesus speaks of the glory the Father had given to him being shared with his followers (John 17.22), this seems to be central to what he has in mind.
Day of Pentecost
