August 11, 11th After Trinity
Readings: 1 Kings 19. 4-8; Ephesians 4. 25-5.2; John 6. 35, 41-51
Theme: Seeing is Believing.
For the Anglo-Saxons ‘seeing is believing’. This mindset typically does not like big fancy ideas and speculative schemes, it wants to see the money! Such a typically Anglo-Saxon trait of pragmatic, no nonsense evidential reasoning has a lot to commend it. One might argue that the lure of fascism and communism in the twentieth century was made easier by the fact that certain cultures and nations seem to have a penchant for the big ideas embodied in elaborate political schemes. Whatever the case may be, there can be little doubt that for many, ‘seeing is believing’.
Our continuous reading of the gospel of John at chapter six takes up this theme in a Jewish context. Similar to the Anglo-Saxons, the Jewish heritage has found the concrete more appealing than the abstract. The often quoted half-truth of the opposition between the ‘concrete Jewish’ and the ‘abstract Greek’ mindset that permeates the scriptures comes into a particularly sharp focus in the passage of John that the church presents us with today. It continues the theme that we have been reflecting upon over these last weeks of reading John chapter six; namely, of Jesus being the bread of life, but now we have introduced into these reflections the statement by Jesus that no one ‘has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father’. And we are told earlier in this passage that Jesus is ‘the bread that came down from heaven’. In other words, Jesus has seen God and to see Jesus is to see the Father, as will be explicitly stated later in Jesus’s response to Philip in John 14. 9, ‘whoever has seen me has seen the Father’.
So, the reflections of the sixth chapter of John about the bread of life take on an almost Anglo-Saxon turn in the address of Jesus to the Jewish crowd; namely, they broach the topic of ‘seeing is believing’ by equating Jesus as ‘bread that came down from heaven’ as the one who has seen the Father. Therefore, to see Jesus is to see the one who has seen the Father and even more, to see Jesus is to see the Father. John sets this theme of ‘seeing is believing’, concerning the passages about the bread of life, in the context of how it is that we learn to believe in God. We learn to believe in God by being taught by God, ‘Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me’. In other words, our belief in God is based on God’s belief in us. The faith that we profess is a response to the belief God has in us. God teaches us to see God. How does this happen?
In learning about God from the scriptures we begin a process of shifting from a knowing that God exists to knowing God. This latter ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ is the kind of knowledge we have of a friend after many years. We know them because we have shared life with them. They are no longer a stranger. As the words of the scriptures become a part of our life, the living Word of God awakens our souls to be responsive to the gentle stirrings of God’s presence within and without us. We literally learn to see God in all things. This process of learning is a growing familiarity that we acquire through the living presence of the Word of God animating our power of perception to his presence. Just like a small child crawling on the floor and smelling and touching the world around it, we too crawl around the world and learn what it is to see it as God’s creation and the presence of God in it.
This schooling of our spiritual powers of perception is further cultivated through the sacraments of the church. They are the means through which we also learn to see God. When we celebrate the Eucharist together, we learn to see God in the bread and the wine which becomes for us the body and blood of Jesus. This visibility of God through the sacrament is one of the ways that we learn to believe in God. The sacraments provide us with a ‘sure and certain means of the grace of God’ as it is said in the Catechism of the Book of Common Prayer. They enable us to see God so that we may believe.
Yet, this way of seeing is not self-evident. It is not like seeing the people around you in the church, it is clearly another way of seeing. In fact, this other way of seeing is a way of believing that we may see. Or, as John puts it later in the gospel in response to the doubts of Thomas, ‘Jesus said to him (Thomas). Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ In other words, the act of faith that we make in God allows us to see, but perhaps paradoxically this act of faith is itself a gift. We are taught by the Father to believe so that we might see Jesus, ‘No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me’. It is, therefore, the Father who teaches us to believe so that we might see. And so whilst ‘seeing is believing’ in the light of our reflections of the sixth chapter of John it is believing which enables us to see. The doubts of St Thomas about the resurrected Jesus and the response of Jesus to him reveals that we see God with the eyes of faith. A faith which allows us to see deep into the nature of reality and to recognize it as love. Faith is a way of seeing which is thus somewhat different from the seeing we know through the eyes. It is a seeing which knows by acquaintance God in the scriptures, in the sacraments and in the world around us. It is ultimately a way of knowing through loving and it is a wonderful sight to behold.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.