A sermon on John 14: 1-14 & Acts 7: 55-60 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
What is God like? It is a simple enough question. Answering it is another thing. It might even be the fundamental question that most religions are trying to answer. And while it might not be entirely wrong to say that different religions answer it in different ways, it is probably more true to say that different people answer it in different ways, even within the same religion.
Tonight we heard one of Jesus’s disciples asking it. Philip says, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” We just want to know for sure what God is like. That’s all. Can you show us?
And if ever you are feeling down on yourself for not having these things all worked out, just remember that Philip hadn’t just met Jesus when he asked this. This conversation happened at the last supper. He’s been with Jesus for three years. If you haven’t got it all worked out yet, at least you’re in good company.
That’s not to say the answers don’t matter though. Turn on the news and you can see how much they matter.
There have been numerous reports about the teachings of the church attended by the US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, and its aggressive hyper-masculine version of Christianity. It helps explain why Hegseth can frame the war in Iran as divinely sanctioned, and express certainty that God is on the side of the US military. In a worship service held in the Pentagon, he prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” — a prayer so shocking that Pope Leo appeared to be responding when he said that God ignores the prayers of those whose “hands are full of blood” from making war.
Right there you have two leaders with very different understandings of what God is like, and the stakes couldn’t be much higher.
The root cause of such disagreement is something that Jesus addresses in his answer to Philip’s request to “show us the Father.” Jesus says, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”
This is more important than many people often realise. It’s not just a random bit of trinitarian doctrine. The most startling and important bit of what Jesus says here is not so much that Jesus is God, but that God is Jesus. Those things might not seem immediately different, because at the level of basic logic, they are not. But in practice they very often are.
You see, ideas about what God was like had been developing for a long time before Jesus stepped among us. Our earliest concepts of God were probably born in our first attempts to explain terrifying cosmic events like earthquakes and volcanoes and thunder and lightning. So we began with assumptions that God was often angry and terrifying. Human systems of religion and morality began as ways of trying to stay on the right side of this angry God.
When people began to believe that Jesus was God, there was an obvious clash with these previous understandings of God, and we kind of split into two camps and went different directions on it. Some — like Hegseth and co — hung onto their previous beliefs in a fierce muscular God, and tried to fit Jesus into that picture. That often meant that Jesus and the Father became like a “good cop – bad cop” routine, and sometimes even ended up like some of the Christian nationalist memes that depict Jesus in military fatigues firing rocket-powered grenades at his enemies.
But the other camp took the opposite approach, taking literally what Jesus is saying here — if you have seen me, you have seen the Father — and concluding that Jesus was saying we had been misunderstanding God all along, and we needed to start again. The startling news is that what you see … with Jesus, is what you get … with God.
Now it is pretty easy to mock crass examples like pictures of Jesus firing grenades, or prayers for God to bless “overwhelming violence”. But these issues can be far more subtle, and a lot closer to home.
Let me show you what I mean, starting with the story we heard tonight of Stephen being stoned to death by a religiously motivated mob.
The religious motivation is real. If you believe in an angry God who sends earthquakes and lightning bolts to punish entire communities for sins committed in their midst, then you can’t afford to tolerate the likes of Stephen. The crowd are not just angry because he is saying they are wrong about God; they are terrified that his heresies are going to bring down the wrath of God on the entire community. And notice what they do. They don’t just kill him. They cover their ears and kill him. His message is one they cannot bear to hear. They have to shut it out and silence him. He is lynched on the spot, dying under a hail of rocks.
There is something worth understanding about execution by stoning; something that has a local connection that Uncle Den and other Aboriginal elders have been telling us about. When a crowd stones someone to death, no one in the crowd feels personally responsible for the death. “It wasn’t my stone that killed him.” That’s part of why it has often been used in religiously motivated violence. It wasn’t me, it was the community, God’s people. So in a way, it was God acting through his community.
There were massacres of Aboriginal people here in Australia, including at least one down on the Mornington Peninsula not far from where some of us are now, that involved a similar dynamic. A hostile mob would crowd their victims towards the edge of a cliff and, just like stoning, no one felt individually responsible when they ran out of space and fell to their deaths. We’re not just talking about distant history here either — cliff lynchings have been perpetrated in quite recent years against the LGBT+ community in Sydney. And as always, for the perpetrators, the delusion of being a righteous God-fearing community dispensing God’s wrath reinforces that old view of an angry God dealing out violent retribution.
Now for most of us, it is still pretty hard to imagine ourselves getting caught up in that kind of mob violence, or even in the belief that God would sanction such retribution. But I wonder. Something happened this week that unmasked something similar in me.
In Alice Springs, a little five-year-old girl was abducted and murdered. A few hours after her body was found, the alleged killer was arrested, and just in time, because he was already being attacked by an angry mob. And while he was being detained and treated for his injuries in hospital, a much larger angry mob gathered outside the hospital, demanding that the killer be handed over to face traditional tribal payback.
And I don’t know about you, but I found my sympathies gravitating quickly to that crowd. Surely anyone who would abduct and murder a beautiful little child deserves retribution. I’m right there, waving my fist in the air. The impulse to make him pay feels absolutely justified. I’m certainly feeling it. Maybe you are too.
But you know what? Here’s the scary thing. Suddenly I realised that down deep in my heart, I was doing the Pete Hegseth thing — I too was praying for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
Discovering that me and Pete Hegseth are not that different terrifies me. Where do I go with that? Well, I don’t think this story of the lynching of Stephen is done with us yet. The Jesus we encounter here is beckoning us to go further, to go deeper.
Even as the rocks are beginning to rain down on him, Stephen has a vision. We’re told that he sees “the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.” The writer repeats that line for emphasis. Usually the Bible speaks of Jesus sitting at the right hand of the Father. But here we are told not just once, but twice, that Stephen sees Jesus standing at the right hand of the Father. Why the change?
Well, this is the moment when judgement is being passed. It is like we are seeing into two parallel courtrooms, dealing differently with the same case. And at the precise moment when the angry crowd passes its verdict and erupts in righteous violence, Jesus is seen standing up like a witness taking the stand in the counter-courtroom, or like a judge rising to pass sentence, and delivering a very different verdict.
So right here, in the moment when the crowd is most consumed by its own feelings of righteous fury and its own need to see, or even deliver, divine retribution, a counter-vision interrupts the story, and interrupts me and Pete Hegseth in our common prayer. And as those two visions stand face-to-face in that moment, we see again exactly how much it matters what we think God is like.
And surely we are also seeing where Jesus stands on the question. Jesus stands in solidarity with Stephen, and in affirmation of the truth of the message that Stephen is proclaiming. When put under the most horrifying pressure to abandon his message of a God who looks like Jesus, Stephen has stood firm and paid the price, and even as he does, even as the rocks rain down, Jesus stands to welcome him home.
It is possible here to get caught back into the loop of that old misunderstanding, even as we think we are rising above it. We can fall back into taking sides — God vindicates Stephen, therefore God is condemning those who condemned Stephen. But that’s not what we see happening. Instead, a God who is just like Jesus reaches out in love, even to his attackers, not condoning or overlooking their violence, but offering to forgive and transform it.
We are given two signs to make sure we don’t miss this. Firstly we are told that as the mob began to stone Stephen, a man named Saul was there, applauding their zealous violence, and they got him to hold their coats while they finished off the victim. If we had read on two or three verses further, we would have heard that a severe persecution of the church began that day, headed up by this same Saul.
And one chapter further on again, we’d arrive at the story of this same Saul being knocked off his horse on the Damascus Road and encountering the risen Jesus who asks “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” In that moment, Saul sees what Stephen had seen, Jesus standing with the victims of his violence, and he knows that he has been wrong about what God is like, and been deluded about the righteousness of his own overwhelming violence. Saul is forgiven and transformed and commissioned to become the one we know as the Apostle Paul.
The second sign is even more compelling. As the rocks rain down, Stephen says two more things, both of them echoing the words of Jesus at his own death on the cross. “Into your hands, Lord, I commit my spirit,” words of surrender and trust that in turn Jesus was quoting from the psalm we heard tonight. And more astonishingly, Stephen echoes Jesus in saying, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”
That’s astonishing on so many levels, but perhaps most importantly, it shows how thoroughly Stephen has been transformed by the conversion of his understanding of God. So completely has he let go of that old view of an angry God who demands retribution, who demands that every sin must be paid for, that now, even under the worst pressure imaginable, he is not reverting to crying out for a God of vengeance to destroy his enemies.
What we are seeing here in Stephen is a revelation of what can happen in us. Letting go of those old misunderstandings opens a new door, and as we pass through that door we begin to inhabit the life of a different God, the life of a God who looks exactly like Jesus. There we are no longer living in fear of God and anxiously trying to prove that we are more righteous than those people over there. Instead we find ourselves immersed in an overwhelming love, and filled with a longing for all the world to be flooded with such love.
The more we inhabit the life of the God who looks exactly like Jesus, the more we are ourselves remade in the image of Jesus, and the more we are ourselves set free from the deadly logic of retribution and liberated to be that love for the world, to love even our enemies, as God, in Christ, has loved us.