SERMON PREACHED AT St
AIDAN’S, CUNNAMULLA
SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (16th
May) 2004
Psalm
Revelation 21.10, 22 –
22.5
John 14.23-29
As the public ministry of Jesus
picked up momentum – (in John’s gospel version it was a ministry of only one
year, not the synoptists’ three) he was clearly becoming aware that his work
would need to be carried on without him. This is not to suggest that he had
some crystal ball or even divine insight into the future, but rather that he
knew by now the extent to which he was pricking the conscience of his own Hebrew
people and the conscience of the Roman realm in which he lived and taught. Like
a parent pining for the future of their child – (you may have seen the episode
of All Saints in which a grandparent
understandably frets at the pregnancy of his Downs Syndrome grandchild) – Jesus
knows that his followers are capable of losing direction without his presence
with them. They have been, God knows, obtuse enough even with him amongst them.
But he is human, and to worry about life after we have died is fundamentally
human.
He also reveals a clear sense of the
working of the Godhead. This in theological terms is not surprising; he is,
even in the flesh, fundamentally a part of Godhead. If Jesus is the revelation
of the heart and the purposes of God then he recognizes that in the purposes of
God, God’s energy and purpose will go on. It will go on through and after his
death and after the resurrection that will be the signature, the authentication
of God of all that he is and all that he has done. He knows this not as a
forlorn hope, and certainly not with the kind of desperate gloom of a Jeremiah,
but as an essential certainty. If he is the exposé of the heart of God, then
death cannot undo all that he has been. For if death does defeat him, if death undoes
his exposé of the heart of God, then death is greater than God, God is less
than death, and life is meaningless. Or, as Paul puts it, more are we to be pitied
than all people.
Certainly by this stage there is
something dark lurking around the periphery of his circle. Judas, as well as
Jesus, is making his way towards Jerusalem
So Jesus promises peace, and the
Paraclete as the bearer of that peace. There is peace and peace. I experience
peace as I cross the God-breathed wide red and brown and occasionally green
lands that make up this continent; as I drive to Quilpie or to Birdsville (or
more especially as I stop travelling and be still) I can experience a depth of
peace that is beyond words and which hints at the magnificence of God. But such
an experience is only a part of the peace of which Jesus speaks, and which, in
John’s resurrection stories, he breathes into the lungs of the disciples.
For many years in the history of Christianity
the words of peace that we will shortly share in liturgy, words which echo these
words of Jesus spoken in our passage and in the resurrection story, were
considered so special that they were heard only by the baptised, and baptism
itself took place only after up to three years of preparation. The experience of such
peace, sacred peace or shalom, was considered to be a foretaste of the coming kingdom of God
The shalom of God was more than mere
stillness. More, however much I love it, than a landscape or oceanscape that
takes breath away by its beauty. Nor in Hebrew thought was the presence of
peace just the absence of war. It was the presence of justice, the presence of
the God-enabled compassion and justice that seems at times to be so far away
from the hearts of the world’s leaders and our leaders. The timelessness and
eternity of space of Jesus’ thought was not the absence of walls but the
presence of active concern to bring in and give hospitality to the stranger and
the outsider. That way they too might know the touch of God so absent in our
brutal policies of alienation and extermination. Inclusion and compassion and
justice: these would be and can be the signs that the Paraclete of Jesus
continues to draw near long after the events of Good Friday and Easter and
Pentecost.
And it is we, however small we are,
however without hope the task sometimes seems to be, who are called to be the
bearers of that hope and comfort and justice and compassion (and to be
receivers of it too) long after the events that Jesus was seeing and John narrating
in our gospel story. As the early followers of Jesus addressed by John were
persecuted by their neighbours and needed the reminder that the Spirit of
Jesus, now liberated in space and time, dwelt with them, so now we experience
the persecution of parody, disinterest, and the tyranny of distance[1].
We too are called to realize and make present and be ourselves comforted by the
One who draws near to us, and through us and our compassionate love and justice
draws near to those around us. Such is both our comfort and our commission.
TLBW
[1] Cunnamulla is an isolated community in the far south west of
Queensland, 800 kilometres from Brisbane. It has experienced massive economic
and well-being decline since the glory days of the sheep’s back in the 1950s.
St Aidan’s church was built on the back of the sheep’s back and resultant
optimism to seat 2-300: this sermon was preached to a congregation of a half
dozen.
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