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A sermon preached in Salisbury Cathedral on Sunday 2 May 2010 by Canon Edward Probert, Chancellor
Acts 11.1-18, John 13.31-35
"WHO WAS I THAT I COULD HINDER GOD?"
Acts 11.1-18, John 13.31-35
In the Acts of the Apostles Luke continues his account of the salvation of the world by showing how what began in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus was spread out through the work of his disciples and of Paul. So, in the course of the book we see these people beginning together in Jerusalem, and then separating and moving out and around the Roman empire in the Mediterranean. Along with this geographical spread we see a different kind of dispersal: what begins among Jews in their holy and royal city, becomes the common property of all peoples, and so it is no accident that the book finishes at the point where the messengers and the message have reached Rome, that world’s focal point.
This inexorable spread, charted by Luke as the work of the dynamic Spirit of God which has come upon the apostles in Chapter 2, came through a series of random encounters and uncontrolled developments. Philip overhears a foreign traveller puzzling over the meaning of a Bible passage; an invalid begs from Peter and John; Paul is caught up in a riot and appeals to Rome. Spread out and acting apart, the apostles have to reach their own conclusions and seize the moment. If these were party politicians in a General Election, their party managers would be living in terror. How could they be confident that these inexperienced and widely separated spokesmen were going to stay on message?
Of course they couldn’t be confident, and it was their anxiety about what was being said and done beyond the Jerusalem bubble which caused what might be called the ‘church managers’ around James to call Peter to account for his actions in Joppa and Caesarea – prompting the explanation by Peter in our first reading. They would have even more to worry about in due course when Paul got properly going.
The urge to manage the message, to control events, is a natural enough one, particularly when the stakes are high. But the story of the Acts is that the actors, the agents of God in this phase of his salvation, are far from being in control. In fact they’ve stepped onto a rollercoaster and find themselves variously in prison, shipwrecked, flogged, stoned, and dispersed around the known world, all the time discovering what it is they’re talking about. After all, at the very beginning of this book, following the resurrection, Jesus has told them that they will be his witnesses ‘to the ends of the earth’; they have then experienced the Babel-reversing effect of the Spirit coming on them at Pentecost; yet it’s only now beginning to dawn on any of them that the Gentiles have an equal part in this news, and with that dawning come quite a lot of suspicion and distrust and division.
Suspicion, distrust, and division were also manifest at the Last Supper. In John’s account Judas goes out to betray Jesus immediately after receiving part of the common meal from Jesus’ hand. This is the very moment when Jesus tells the rest that he is glorified, and says to them: ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another’. What’s startling about that sentence is not the commandment, but the description of it as ‘new’. Way back in the foundation scriptures of the Jewish faith, in Leviticus God commands ‘you shall love your neighbour as yourself’; this is repeated two books later in Deuteronomy, and Jesus himself quotes this in the other three gospels to the young man who asks what is the greatest commandment. Phrases of such hoary antiquity are very rarely described as new.
Perhaps Jesus could describe it as a new commandment because it’s not really a respectable piece of information to be grasped; rather it only has meaning in so far as it becomes fact. In other words, it is always new because we are always stepping into completely new situations in which to apply it. It’s a great thing that I loved my neighbour or my fellow Christians yesterday; but today is a whole new thing, and I have it to do all over again. In responding to the call of God in the ever-new circumstances of our lives we make real the presence of Christ among us.
We are heirs to a vast tradition and are privileged to be part of that Christian inheritance. But we are not called to mug up on that message like an insecure candidate with their manifesto or their daily news focus from the party managers. What is old for us is also ever new; it makes the news rather than seeking to manage or control it; like the apostles, the bearers of the good news who were also discovering new truths about it as they went along, we will find out the meaning of the old as we experience it in the new.
Peter asked himself a powerful question. ‘Who was I that I could hinder God?’ Our attempts to be in control of events are natural enough, but are ultimately futile. Life is substantially made up of random encounters and events, from things as vast and unwanted as a volcano or the gushing of oil into the sea, to the small reactions of people in our daily conversation, to the way other people choose to put their X on the ballot paper. In each of these things we have to act in faith, knowing that we will not always get it right, but knowing too that the grace of God has gone before us, and that insofar as we are motivated by love and follow that grace, we will both come to know God better and be his messengers.
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This inexorable spread, charted by Luke as the work of the dynamic Spirit of God which has come upon the apostles in Chapter 2, came through a series of random encounters and uncontrolled developments. Philip overhears a foreign traveller puzzling over the meaning of a Bible passage; an invalid begs from Peter and John; Paul is caught up in a riot and appeals to Rome. Spread out and acting apart, the apostles have to reach their own conclusions and seize the moment. If these were party politicians in a General Election, their party managers would be living in terror. How could they be confident that these inexperienced and widely separated spokesmen were going to stay on message?
Of course they couldn’t be confident, and it was their anxiety about what was being said and done beyond the Jerusalem bubble which caused what might be called the ‘church managers’ around James to call Peter to account for his actions in Joppa and Caesarea – prompting the explanation by Peter in our first reading. They would have even more to worry about in due course when Paul got properly going.
The urge to manage the message, to control events, is a natural enough one, particularly when the stakes are high. But the story of the Acts is that the actors, the agents of God in this phase of his salvation, are far from being in control. In fact they’ve stepped onto a rollercoaster and find themselves variously in prison, shipwrecked, flogged, stoned, and dispersed around the known world, all the time discovering what it is they’re talking about. After all, at the very beginning of this book, following the resurrection, Jesus has told them that they will be his witnesses ‘to the ends of the earth’; they have then experienced the Babel-reversing effect of the Spirit coming on them at Pentecost; yet it’s only now beginning to dawn on any of them that the Gentiles have an equal part in this news, and with that dawning come quite a lot of suspicion and distrust and division.
Suspicion, distrust, and division were also manifest at the Last Supper. In John’s account Judas goes out to betray Jesus immediately after receiving part of the common meal from Jesus’ hand. This is the very moment when Jesus tells the rest that he is glorified, and says to them: ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another’. What’s startling about that sentence is not the commandment, but the description of it as ‘new’. Way back in the foundation scriptures of the Jewish faith, in Leviticus God commands ‘you shall love your neighbour as yourself’; this is repeated two books later in Deuteronomy, and Jesus himself quotes this in the other three gospels to the young man who asks what is the greatest commandment. Phrases of such hoary antiquity are very rarely described as new.
Perhaps Jesus could describe it as a new commandment because it’s not really a respectable piece of information to be grasped; rather it only has meaning in so far as it becomes fact. In other words, it is always new because we are always stepping into completely new situations in which to apply it. It’s a great thing that I loved my neighbour or my fellow Christians yesterday; but today is a whole new thing, and I have it to do all over again. In responding to the call of God in the ever-new circumstances of our lives we make real the presence of Christ among us.
We are heirs to a vast tradition and are privileged to be part of that Christian inheritance. But we are not called to mug up on that message like an insecure candidate with their manifesto or their daily news focus from the party managers. What is old for us is also ever new; it makes the news rather than seeking to manage or control it; like the apostles, the bearers of the good news who were also discovering new truths about it as they went along, we will find out the meaning of the old as we experience it in the new.
Peter asked himself a powerful question. ‘Who was I that I could hinder God?’ Our attempts to be in control of events are natural enough, but are ultimately futile. Life is substantially made up of random encounters and events, from things as vast and unwanted as a volcano or the gushing of oil into the sea, to the small reactions of people in our daily conversation, to the way other people choose to put their X on the ballot paper. In each of these things we have to act in faith, knowing that we will not always get it right, but knowing too that the grace of God has gone before us, and that insofar as we are motivated by love and follow that grace, we will both come to know God better and be his messengers.