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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
It’s tempting to think God wants us to be Christians. Real Christians, of course. Christians who believe the right things, live good, clean lives, and do everything we can to make other people Christian—as many as possible, as quickly as possible. But no. God does not want us to be Christians, at least not in any conventional sense. God wants for us to be Christ. Co-conspirators and more than co-conspirators. Bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. Not two, but one. As St Paul says: “anyone joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (1 Cor. 6.17).
This is a great mystery but believe it or not (and it is hard to believe) Jesus is not himself apart from us any more than he is himself apart from the Father. How can that be true? Because he asked for it to be—and his intercessions cannot fail.
In one of his last prayers, offered on the brink of his passion, Jesus asked the Father to make his life and our lives one life so that his story would be incomprehensible without ours. Although this prayer is often described as a plea for the church’s unity, that fails to do justice to what Jesus actually said (Jn 17.1, 6, 20-23):
Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you… I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word… As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
Only Jesus would’ve or could’ve dared to pray this prayer. And because he’s the one who prayed it, it has always already been answered. His own life is the answer, in fact. The answer that makes all things possible.
St Paul was one of the first to come to know this mystery. He was made to come to know it (in both senses of that phrase). He mercifully suffered the Father’s Amen to Jesus’ prayer. As a result, he came to want exactly what Jesus wanted. We heard his cry in the third reading tonight: “I pray that… Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith… so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3.14, 21).
To say, as St. Augustine did, that God has made us for himself does not mean God created us to lord over us or in hopes we would choose him over other gods. God did not create us to prove—or improve—anything. God made us neither to meet a need in himself nor with needs that would make us dependent solely on him. No, God created us for no reason at all. And he did so just by being happy that we exist. As Julian of Norwich put it, in a sentence almost infinitely dense, “God never began to love mankind.” Think of what that must mean. There’s never been a time in which the Father has not looked at you with the same delight and pleasure he feels in seeing the Son. Is that not exactly what we overheard Jesus say in his prayer? “You have loved them even as you have loved me.”
Many of us have been taught or at least have learned to think that there are limits to God’s love, knowledge, and power. Either because he set them for himself or because we determined them for him by the exercise of our “free will.” It is true, of course, that God’s care must be for now particular and partial, given to us as we are able to receive it. (That, by the way, is why we are given the mediation of angels and the intercession of the saints.) Nonetheless, there are no limits to or controls on God’s loving or knowing or acting. There are no restrictions on God anymore than there are contradictions in God. And the Father is no more stinting in his love for you or me than he is stinting in his love for his own Word, his own Breath.
We know, then, what the future must hold (and not just because Scripture says it outright): God will be all in all. He who does all things well, withholding no good thing and leaving no good work unfinished, will at last bring all things into their fullest flourishing by filling them with his own ever-fuller fulness. How could it be otherwise? He cannot be false to himself.
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Now, we are ready to hear the Gospel.
I want to direct your attention to three lines in particular. Here is the first: “He said this to test him” (Jn 6.6).
You wouldn’t know it from much of our preaching but Jesus as the Gospels give him to us was something of a trickster. Playful. Mischievous. Shrewd. He learned this from the Scriptures, thanks to the Spirit, and judging by what the Gospels say about her also from his mother. Here, he teases Philip. Why? To tease something out of him. A shift in awareness, a change of attention. To alter Philip’s awareness is to give him faith, freeing him from the fear of death and the forces that use that fear against him.
He’s doing the same with us now, for the same reason.
“Gather up the fragments, so that nothing may be lost” (Jn 6.12). Why are there leftovers? Did Jesus make too much? He could’ve made it so there was just enough. Who are these fragments for? Where will they be kept? How will they be distributed? All good questions, which lead to the heart of the matter: what did he mean to teach us by this excess? He meant to show us he intends to leave nothing to waste. He means to gather the fragments—not only the plenty left by good works but also the wreckage that trails evil works—so that nothing may be lost. This, finally, is the hope the gospel affords us: when Jesus is done doing all he means to do, nothing will be lost. Nothing.
In May 1373, Julian, lying on what she feared was her deathbed, received her revelation of love in sixteen “showings.” Twenty years or more later, she completed a lengthy reflection (scholars refer to it as the Long Text), which Rowan Williams has called the most important work of Christian theological reflection in the English language.
In the third showing, she hears Christ say to her, “full blissefully” (that is, brimming with delight): “See, I am God. See, I am in all thing. See, I do all thing. See, I never lefte my handes of my workes, ne never shalle without ende. See, I lede all thing to the end that I ordaine it to, fro without beginning, by the same might, wisdom, and love that I made it with. How shoulde any thing be amisse?”
In the thirteenth showing, which includes the best-known lines from her works, she admits to herself that she is troubled by how God has acted, the apparent failure of the providential order in making a world in which it is possible to sin:
I saw that nothing letted me but sinne. And so I behelde generally in us alle, and methought: “If sinne had not be, we shulde alle have be clene and like to oure lorde as he made us.” And thus in my foly before this time, often I wondred why, by the grete forseeing wisdom of God, the beginning of sinne was not letted. For then thought me that alle shulde have be wele… morning and sorow I made therfore withoute reson and discretion. But Jhesu, that in this vision enformed me of alle that me neded, answered by this worde and saide: “Sinne is behovely, but alle shalle be wele, and alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thinge shalle be wele.”
I believe this. I do. Do I believe it too easily? Is it true that all shall be well for Bathsheba? For her child who died? For her child who lived? Is it true for Uriah the Hittite, her husband, whom David had killed? Uriah’s name means “The LORD is my light,” which strikes us as horrific given how he is betrayed. Is it true for the servants and soldiers forced to participate in David’s wicked deeds? Is it true for all the other countless women and men and children who’ve been made to suffer the death our sins have brought into the world? Yes. We can’t yet know how, but we can trust that it will be done. We shall all be free. All shall be well. Nothing will be lost. How should anything be amiss?
I believe that. I do. I believe it because I’ve seen Jesus and you can’t see him and doubt what he can do. But there is something I still find almost impossible to believe. I find it almost impossible to believe that I do not need to be afraid. More to the point, I find it almost impossible to believe that I do not need to be afraid of myself. My weaknesses, my failures, my fatal flaws. And that brings me to the third line from today’s reading that the Spirit wants to underline for us: “Then they were glad to take him into the boat” (Jn 6.21).
The disciples, the evening after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, go down to their boats, meaning to cross to Capernaum. As night falls, they find themselves far out over the deep, sculling in a stirred-up sea. Out of nowhere Jesus appears, suddenly and without warning walking across the waves to them. And they are terrified.
They are not afraid of the wind or the waves, mind you. They’re afraid of Jesus. Afraid of what they suddenly realize they do not recognize in him. Afraid of what might happen if they take him on board. What unnerves them is that this both is and is not the Jesus they’ve known. Seeing him as one unknown, they feel themselves utterly unprepared for his new weight.
The same is true for us, is it not? One way or another, we are afraid of what we do not know about what life and death may at any time require of us. We are afraid of what we cannot know about what God will surely at some point reveal to us about ourselves. We fear we will not be able to rise to the demands of his mercy. I’ve learned that it’s not so hard, really, to believe Jesus died for our sins. It’s more difficult to accept that he loves us, sins and all. But it’s hard beyond belief to accept that sin is behovely because love makes it so.
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All this makes me hear today’s Psalm, Psalm 14, quite differently. In the light of the other texts, it reads to me like an X-ray of a troubled heart:
The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.”
All are corrupt and commit abominable acts;
there is none who does any good.The Lord looks down from heaven upon us all,
to see if there is any who is wise,
if there is one who seeks after God.Every one has proved faithless;
all alike have turned bad;
there is none who does good; no, not one...
This is not only revelation; it is also exposure. What it exposes is the moral and spiritual exhaustion that comes when we are honest to God about what life as we know we are meant to live it demands of us. We need this Psalm, and others like it, because knowing ourselves is harder than knowing God. Julian saw this clearly: it is only the knowing of God given in the vision of Jesus in his agonies that allows us to begin to know ourselves at all. In her words,
it is redier to us and more esy to come to the knowing of God then to know oure owne soule. For oure soule is so depe grounded in God, and so endlesly tresored, that we may not come to the knowing therof tille we have furst knowing of God, which is the maker to whome it is oned.
The psalmist is coming undone before God—because of God. Not so much losing faith as being lost to faith. The prayer must sound to the inexperienced like nothing more than self-righteous grumbling. In truth, however, it is an artifact of sanctification, a testament to what it feels like to be delivered from self-righteousness into the righteousness of God.
The saints tell us this again and again: it is exhausting to do good, to seek after God, to live wisely. We need to ask why, but the answer they have to give is sure to leave us puzzled. It is exhausting to do good, to seek after God, and to live wisely because God resists our religious and spiritual strivings. Do you know what it feels like to grow tired of yourself? To be sick of hearing yourself pray? The fatigue and the disillusionment that comes with it is the upshot of what Julian calls “noughting,” the effect of the Spirit stripping us (sometimes gently, sometimes not) of our obsessions, illusions, anxieties, and attachments. This “noughting” is a grace, the most precious of all graces, even if we wish God didn’t offer it so freely.
The Psalm points a finger at the fool: “The fool has said in his heart ‘There is no God.’” It does because the psalmist is thinking about the fool (whom he imagines as the definitive Other) because he has been made to feel foolish, made to look the fool by the futility of all his best efforts. The God the psalmist imagines the fool denying is a grand and serious God, a master, dominant and superior to all. It is this God the psalmist has been trying to please and appease. But this God is shown by Jesus’ death to be nothing but a shadow cast by our fear. What the psalmist cannot yet see is that the only God who actually exists is the Father of the fool who makes foolishness of all that we call wisdom and brings to nothing all that we call power. But he will see it. Soon enough. The fool has said in his heart “There is no God.” Yet it is only what God says in his heart about the fool that matters. And what he says is: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”
Traditionally, the church is likened to a ship of fools. An image that makes sense to anyone who’s had any experience of Christians. What is hard for us to believe is that Christ wants to be on this ship. Yet that is precisely why he comes to us. He could walk on water, but he prefers our company—however frightened we are. He is glad for us to take him into our boat. “It is I; be not afraid.”
Absolutely wonderful! First section reminded me of St. Augustine:
“Let us rejoice and give thanks: we are not only made Christians, but made Christ” (Homilies on John 21.8)
Thank you for sharing, Chris! You said something here that I think resonates so profoundly, and that is it's exhausting to do what is good and right in the likeness of Christ. It reinforces the reality for me that God alone empowers us for his glory in that very humility and weariness that Jesus himself must have endured and I would confidently say, is still enduring with us. Indeed, paradoxically, we toil in this race and have so far to go, but the Lord's love must be strong and present enough to compel us to continue, otherwise we would never have had the strength to begin at all.