LATEST SERMON; The uniqueness of Jesus

Easter 4, 26 April

Readings: Acts 2. 42-47; 1 Peter 2. 19-25; John 10- 1-10

Theme: The uniqueness of Jesus

The formation of the early Christian communities is recounted in our first reading. We are told that they were nourished by the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, by the breaking of bread and prayers. There is obviously a strong culture of community between them because we are also told that they had all things in common, selling whatever they had to be distributed for the community and for those in special need. This focus on God and each other allows for the growth of the community: “and day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”

And, in many church contexts today, the agenda of growth is ever-present, and this is not surprising. As some congregations get older and struggle to maintain their services, especially in a European context, they require new members to come and to renew the membership. This is a typical process of organizations that want to survive and thrive over time. It is no different for churches. However, the style of growth in a church is defined by the fact that it is ultimately the Lord who causes it to grow.

As the first reading tells us, it is the Lord who adds to our numbers. That is to say, the natural mechanisms of replenishment are permeated by the grace of God. It is the Holy Spirit who calls people to the church, and this calling is of divine origin. The calling of a person comes from the Lord himself, and this calling comes with the charge of building the kingdom of God. This is the task of the church, and it makes the church the chosen medium of God through which the kingdom of God is proclaimed and embodied. At the end of this long work of the church in history, the Lord Jesus will present the kingdom that has been built to the Father and God will be all in all.

Such calling to the church often comes through very ordinary human ways. A person being kind to us when we first arrived. Someone taking us under their wings as we find our feet in a new church community. All these very ordinary, very human, ways of welcome are the channels through which the grace of God flows to incorporate us into his body, the church.

But, as the second reading from 1 Peter tells us, this calling to be a part of the church and to work for the kingdom comes at a cost: suffering. Doing what is right brings suffering and this is because sin resists the focus being on God and the community. Sin makes us place the focus on that which is not to the good of all. 

In freeing us from this orientation to sin, Jesus heals the wounds which we bear and that cause us to lose this focus. And it is good for us to realize that keeping the focus on God and on the good of all is something which will cost us. It requires of us that we hold the long-term perspective of the coming of the kingdom of God. This ultimate orientation to the goal to which we are straining enables us to keep the focus on God through good times and bad. Through periods of growth and through periods of decline. The kingdom which we are building, as co-workers with the Lord, is the kingdom of justice and peace in which Jesus is the Lord of all. Such is the perspective on redemption which incorporates all our efforts at church building into an even greater horizon of the coming of the kingdom of God, which will only come to completion at the end of time, when Jesus returns in glory.

In this process of redemption and of building the kingdom, we need a clear orientation and guide. That is what is given to us in Jesus. Jesus is the shepherd; the gate through whom we enter to join the community of those who are being saved: “I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture.” Yet, even more than a guide, Jesus is also the way itself: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14: 6).

This set of claims about Jesus in the scriptures provides a singularity to Christianity. And that, in the contemporary pluralistic world presents us with a challenge: how do we articulate the uniqueness of Jesus and respect those of different convictions, religious ones included? This is the complex contemporary context in which we find ourselves today. It has grown into the world of interreligious dialogue and indeed of dialogue with those who are not religious, especially in the European context. The growth of the kingdom of God among us through the work of the church is now incorporating the mysteriously permeable frontiers between religious traditions which have formerly been hermetically sealed containers of homogeneous and exclusionary beliefs of the “we are right and you are wrong,” type. 

There are no simple answers here as to how we should approach this intensely pluralistic context in human history. And, indeed, it is new. In former times, we could avoid this because it was possible to simply assume that everyone else is wrong and we are right. Living in tribes and sects has been the typical way we have approached this, and even with previous examples of the great faiths encountering one another there has never been the degree of the pluralism of beliefs in common spaces that we typically find today.

In such a context of contemporary pluralism, the challenge for us should be to find our own ways of being clear about what we believe and at the same time to understand that this same God of ours works in mysterious ways that go beyond what we can comprehend.

We do not all believe the same, and assuming that we do is not an appropriate position to adopt as a Christian. Being a Jew or a Muslim is self-evidently not being a Christian. Claiming that “Jesus is Lord,” and this is definitive of what it means to be a Christian in any age, is.

But Jesus also tells us that “I have other sheep who are not of this fold” (John 10. 16). And in the New Testament, especially in the writings of St Paul, we begin to see the emergence of the Spirit leading the growth of a new community, the like of which has never been seen before in history. A community that includes the diversity of peoples, traditions and backgrounds that have often excluded one another. So, perhaps clarity, sensitivity, and the humility to know that God is always greater is the complex combination to these matters required of us as Christians living in the twenty-first century.

As the medieval theologian, Anselm of Canterbury, taught God is “that than which nothing greater can be thought” (id quo maius cogitari nequit). That being the case, in our limited categories, let us never limit the ways of God of drawing all peoples together through the unique Way, who is Jesus, the risen Lord.