Acts 7.55-end & John 14.1-14

Today in our reading from Acts, we heard the story of Stephen, the first Christian killed for their faith. On my left, you can see a stained glass picture of the story. Arrested for his ministry of healing and preaching, Stephen was stoned to death by the religious authorities.

As he died, he “saw the heavens opened”. What was once obscure, hid from our eyes, was revealed. He saw the “glory of God”, and fulfilled completely the desire of every mystic to see something of God. He saw Jesus “standing at the right hand of God”. And in case we are in any doubt about what that means in his moment of death he prayed “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”: a prayer prayed to a human being that would normally be prayed to God.

The story of the first Christian martyr is as much about Stephen’s courage in his willingness to die for his faith, as it is about the truth about Jesus Christ that it reveals. With regards earthly events, Stephen’s vision revealed that his death was not the execution of a blasphemer as his killers thought. Regarding heavenly things, Stephen’s vision revealed that the man Jesus, who grew up in Nazareth, is not only now with God in heaven, but when he walked on earth was one and the same as God.

Now the most extraordinary thing is this. In life through religious experience, we may only fleetingly glimpse something of the divine, ‘as through a glass dimly’. But those who met Jesus in person saw God face to face.

In our reading from John’s Gospel, Jesus prepares his disciples for his death by telling them that he is going to his Father in heaven. Jesus says “In my father’s house there are many dwelling-places”. This is the language of Jewish mysticism, where the meditator is taken up and experiences heaven as a palace with many rooms.

This sounds rather wonderful, and the disciples Thomas and Philip are keen to know how to experience it. Jesus answers “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”. This saying is often used in churches to assert that Christianity - as an abstract idea - is the one true religion. In context, however, it speaks not of ideas, of formulas or creeds, much less of institutions, but of a person. The next verse explains the same in different words “If you knew me, you will know my Father also”, repeated in verse 9 “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”.

If you know Jesus, if you have seen Jesus, you have seen God. Why? Because as Jesus says in verses 10 and 11 “I am in the Father and the Father is in me”.

Jesus is the perfect revelation of God because Jesus is God. Jesus is God in a way that a dying man can commend his soul to Jesus as he would to God. Jesus is God in a way that those who knew him personally, knew God personally. He is the Way to God because in his own person he reveals God to us. He is the Truth because he reveals God most fully. He is the Life which knowing God fully brings.

We can but envy those who over 2000 years ago met Jesus of Nazareth face to face. How can Jesus reveal God to us now?

First of all in the Gospels we have accounts of Jesus’ life. Taken as a whole, they present the character of Christ and tell us who God is.

When at a wedding and he turns water into wine, or when he talks of the splendour of the ‘lilies of the field’ he is showing us his joy in being alive. God is not dour or serious, but delights in what he has made.

When he weeps at the death of his friend, He is showing us the closeness of God. God is not cold and distant, but intimately involved in human affairs.

When he refuses to condemn the woman caught in adultery but saves his harshest words for those who are self-righteously religious, he is showing us the mercy and compassion, and also judgement, of God. God is close to the brokenhearted, but far from those who think they have got it all right.

Sometimes you hear people say “I like Jesus, but I don’t like God”. The problem with that is that Jesus reveals who God is. Looking at Jesus in the Gospels corrects our distorted views of God.

Further, although Jesus is ‘seated at the right hand of God’ in heaven, he has not left us bereft. We must not forget, in the words of the famous John Betjeman poem, “That God was man in Palestine, And lives today in Bread and Wine”. More controversially, we can know Jesus through the memorial meal he left us, Holy Communion. On one level we can see in bread a metaphor for God who is gentle and allows himself to be broken, and who desires to be close to us and to bring us all together. On another level, I would say that we can discern the real presence of Jesus in the bread and wine, a presence that, when I do feel it, I experience as a heartbreaking, as a melting or as a longing, but one which always leaves me feeling lighter and happier.

Finally, Jesus told us, that what we do for the least among us, we do for him. We can see Jesus, and therefore God, among the poor and marginalised. God is so close to the brokenhearted, that we may feel his presence when we are with them. Our commitment to welcoming the outcast finds its theological basis in seeing Christ in the stranger.

I would go so far as to say that contact with the marginalised preserves the spiritual life of a church community. When churches withdraw into cliques of comfort, wealth and privilege, theological distortions soon follow. The Bible was written by humble people, and can only be read correctly through the eyes of the poor.

Jesus said “I am the Way” but he also told us to take up our cross and follow him. It is when we are on our own way of the cross that we may feel our closest communion with Christ. We have in this church an image of another martyr, Bahram who was murdered for his faith on 6th May 1980 in Tehran and is buried in Isfahan. Shortly after, his father Bishop Hassan Dehqani-Tafti wrote this prayer in Persian in his diary, and it is with this prayer and the Christ that comes close to the brokenhearted, that I finish today.

Give me Thy joy, O wounded man of sorrows, Thy joy filled full in those dark hours of pain. Joy in thy fellowship, despised, rejected, Bearing all grief that Love may live again. Amen