Sermon preached at Evensong on the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity 2025

Some years ago, the Catholic theologian James Allison wrote an important book with the rather wonderful title of The Joy of Being Wrong. In it, Allison argues that all Christian doctrine flows from Christ’s resurrection, and that the resurrection marked a total sea change in humanity’s understanding of God. Despite Christianity’s continuity with the revelation we know from the Hebrew Bible, the ‘new thing’ which God has done is to show God’s total and complete freedom in Jesus, which reveals the depth and strength of his love in a structure which is totally indifferent to that which has captured human limitations, a structure which includes the separation of death. Allison writes, ‘For God, death is as if it were not, which is why Abraham, Isaac and Jacob live in God.’ Humans tied into the human reality of death, now find a new and previously unimaginable freedom in and through Christ. This, Allison argues, is a decisive change in how humanity has understood God. It demonstrates ‘the impossibility of perceiving God within the frame of reference structured by death. ‘This’, he writes ‘is a step made by the “fact” of the resurrection: that, in the midst of history, this man who was dead is now alive. The second step is made by the “content” of the resurrection: that this man who was dead is now alive.’ 

This afternoon’s second reading is part of a long dialogue from St John’s Gospel with those surrounding Jesus, including we are told, some Jews who had believed in him. The scene takes place somewhere within the Temple precincts during the Festival of Tabernacles or Booths. They are on holy ground here, and they are really wrestling with serious identity markers. They are wrestling with holy ground; what it is, where it is, who it is. Jesus is accused of being a hated Samaritan, and both sides in the drama invoke the figure of Abraham. Their discussion refers not only to Jesus’s identity, but also to the identity of his conversation partners as descendants of Abraham. There is a real stretching of received categories here. It is almost as if they are speaking different dialects to one another within the same family. The dialogue about freedom, in which the Jews celebrate their freedom as heirs of the promise to Abraham, turns not on their being Abraham’s descendants (an essential marker for the Jews’ covenant identity), but on Jesus’s status as Son and icon of revelation. His conversation partners are witnessing a disorientating and new thing here, as Jesus even stretches their understanding of time and temporality. Abraham, they say, is dead, as are the prophets, and we are Abraham’s descendants, sharers of the promises given to him by the Lord. There is a system, a pattern, and an established way of understanding this, not least involving the worshipping life of the Temple where they are having this conversation.

Jesus on the other hand recasts the whole thing. His is not a structure or a frame of reference limited by death. He declares that he has seen the full revelation of the Lord’s glory, in his Father’s presence, rather than just heard of it. In other words, he has witnessed and participated in the Lord’s glory to an extent far beyond even that which the High Priest encounters in the Holy of Holies, at the heart of the Temple. That is shocking enough. You can almost hear the system cracking. But the conversation really falls apart towards the end of the scene, when Jesus refers again to Abraham, who has been dead for quite a long while, claiming that Abraham rejoiced to see his day. Those around him try one last time to control things, to wrestle the conversation back to their own safe ground with teasing, mocking, eye-rolling humour – ‘You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?!?!’ And then Jesus drops the bomb: ‘Very truly, I tell you’ he begins, using the introduction which acts as a fanfare for his most important teaching, ‘before Abraham was, I AM.’ Now, it is not just time which is stretched, but theology, and language, and concept.  

What we translate as ‘I am’ is the expression of the Divine Name, at the Burning Bush, that site of holiness so volatile that even Moses turned away and removed his sandals. This was the Name which was so holy it could not be spoken apart from once a year, and then only by the High Priest, on the Day of Atonement. In the scrolls of the synagogues of Jesus’s day, there was a gap in the text where the Divine Name should be recorded. In this scene, Jesus appropriates it to himself, articulating himself as the revelation of God’s covenant with Abraham, a covenant of blessing for the whole earth. And he does so in the Temple itself. The scene explodes and those around try to stone him for blasphemy; Jesus, in John’s beautifully multi-layered Gospel, the one who has just revealed himself, God’s living and eternal Word, the Lord’s perfect revelation, now hides himself from them. They, perhaps, cannot comprehend his glory – unlike the man blind from birth, an outcast, who then sees him and believes, in the chapter which immediately follows on from this scene.

The job of good theology is to articulate the truth about God and God’s ways with the world, whilst remembering that we cannot box God into a system. When we are dealing with words and concepts, even the most trustworthy words and concepts, we are essentially gesturing towards iconic truth: truth which reveals itself in Jesus Christ, through the Spirit, in the life of the Church. We best encounter such truth in worship and prayer. All our talk about God, all our theology, needs to spring from and be fed by worship, because God is not ‘a god’, and Jesus is not simply a good man or holy teacher who points to God. The earliest Christian witness is one which restructures our categories and stretches our concepts. Christ’s resurrection is the first fruit of a restored and renewed world, uncontrolled by death. And that is not just a point about biology, and renewal at the end of time. It is also about our move away from a culture of death, that framework of violence, revenge and greed, which acts as a kind of fence around so much human existence, which permeates our politics, our social lives, our financial systems, our societies.

The Jesus of St John’s Gospel will go to the very end and beyond to show us this. Cross and tomb become places for divine glory to be revealed. Angels will flank the empty space where his battered body lay because death itself has now become the ground zero of new creation, not the end, but the place from where a whole new kind of life emerges. The eye of faith can perceive this, but our systems will need a reboot from time to time in order to learn how to receive it. We might just occasionally be reminded about the joy of being wrong.