A sermon by the Reverend John Bradley
Only thirty years after Jesus of Nazareth had been tortured to death on the cross, a despised fate reserved for the lowest criminals in the Roman Empire, his followers were making the most extraordinary claims about who he was. It wasn’t just that he had cheated his executioners and come back to life again. It was that he, the man with whom they had trodden the dusty lanes of Galilee, was no less than the one who makes the universe hold together.
Today when we hear of experiments in the Large Hadron Collider coming nearer to detecting the Higgs Boson particle (if such a thing really exists), those of us who are not quantum physicists can only stand back in amazement at science beyond our understanding. Someone has nicknamed it the ‘God particle’ since without it, in the moments after the Big Bang, the primal elements would have simply dispersed into the void rather than be attracted into the first matter.
When Paul wrote his letter to the Colossians he wasn’t telling them about astrophysics or quantum mechanics but he was affirming something very important about power. At that time most people thought that the greatest power on earth was the Roman Emperor. That’s certainly what Caesar thought. As a personal affirmation of civilisation and the peace and security which Rome had brought to its empire, the Pax Romana, a man would simply say ‘Caesar is Lord.’ It meant paying taxes, and nobody likes having to do that, but it also meant safety and security without the danger of some local chieftain deciding that he needed his tribute too. But instead of ‘Caesar is Lord’, Paul was teaching the Christians to affirm that Jesus is Lord.
The Colossians were part of the Greek-speaking world where, apart from the pantheon of various deities who behaved like characters in a soap opera, the idea of God was defined negatively. God is what we are not. We are aware of limits to our power but God has no limits; God is omnipotent. We know there are limits to what we know but God knows everything; God is omniscient. However fast we travel, we can only be in one place at a time but God can be everywhere all the time; God is omnipresent. We only live for a time and then die but God lives forever; God is eternal. I don’t think the Greeks speculated about what God eats but if they did, they probably would have concluded that God is omnivorous! One problem with this theoretical ‘God of the omni-s’ is that he is always distant from us. To be approached by such a God would be as terrifying as coming near to a black hole or a supernova.
Paul came to the question of who God is from a completely different starting point. The Hebrew understanding of God was not a philosophical construct like that of the Greeks. The God of Israel reveals himself through history. This is why one of the earliest Hebrew creeds, recorded in our Bibles in Deuteronomy 26, is not about what God is like but about what God has done. The God of Israel can still be terrifying and it is significant that whenever God’s angels appear to mortals, their first words are usually “Don’t be afraid!”
But something essential both to Paul and to the writer of the Fourth Gospel is that it is of the nature of God to reveal himself, to enable us to know him in ways that we can understand. According to Luke, when Paul went to Athens he found people offering worship to ‘the unknown god.’ There has been much speculation about what this was and no archaeological remains to confirm such a shrine but Luke takes it to be Paul’s starting point for engaging with the Greek philosophers. It might have been a popular catch-all insurance in which worshippers were saying to the various deities “I didn’t miss you out; when I offered incense at the altar of the unknown god, it was for you!” But another idea from further away fascinates me. After Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire, his land stretched from Greece as far as the Indus valley which is today in Pakistan but had been the birth place of what today we call Hinduism. Within the Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, there is the idea that the highest concept of God is Nirguna Brahma – the unknowable God, the God of whom we can say absolutely nothing, not even whether or not such a God exists! Indeed, Nirguna Brahma is beyond existence and non-existence. So was the deity worshipped in Athens not just unknown but unknowable?
The writer of the Fourth Gospel was quite sure that God is knowable and that he chooses to make himself known to us in ways that we can understand. Our understanding will always be far less than the reality of who God is but that does not mean that it is deceptive. God reveals to us true truth, public truth, not just ‘oh that may be true for you, dear’ truth! In the beginning was the Word, God’s self expression, and everything which came to be owes its existence to the Word. The ultimate question is not a scientific one but it is philosophical or theological. The question is why is there something rather than nothing and the answer given by our readings today is God. But God did not wind the universe up like a clockwork toy and then go off to do something else. The Word became human flesh like yours and mine and so ‘set up his tent’ among us. So Charles Wesley wrote
He laid His glory by, He wrapped Him in our clay;
Unmarked by human eye, the latent Godhead lay;
Infant of days He here became, and bore the mild Immanuel’s Name.
Our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made Man.Here is the power of Christ the Lord, the total opposite of the power of Caesar the Lord or any of his modern would-be equivalents. In Jesus Christ, God reveals his power not in spectacular acts of vengeance on his enemies but in radical powerlessness. Instead of being born in the luxury of a royal palace, he is born in an ordinary peasant home. Some shepherds are told ‘this shall be the sign for you… a baby wrapped in swaddling bands and laying in a manger, just like their babies would be and just unlike the babies of the rich and powerful. Then he grew up in an obscure town at the edge of the Empire, far from the corridors of power. When he began his public work those he called to be close to him were ordinary common workmen, not the greatest brains or the wiliest politicians available. When 5,000 men, miraculously well-fed with bread and fish, were longing to make him their political leader, he refused. Instead he took the powerless route, the ignoble way, and set his face steadfastly towards Jerusalem knowing all that must happen to him there.
We shall soon be in Lent when we will again follow our Master in his journey to the Cross. Be prepared to be turned upside down. As Martin Luther once said,
“Only the weak shall be strong; only the humble exalted; only the empty filled; only nothing shall be something.”410 Creator of the earth and skies
263 O Lord of every shining constellation
398 Christ triumphant, every reigning
584 Thanks to God, whose Word was spoken
Self-revealing God, beyond our understanding yet nearer than our closest breath, show us how to live as creatures made in your image and bring your grace to its goal in our weakness. Amen.
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