Is your God too small?
Acts 9.1-6, Revelation 5.11-end, John 19.1-19
Angela Tilby, Canon of Honour
‘When Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea’. (John 21.7b)
John’s Gospel is loved and highly regarded for many things, but not generally for its slapstick humour. So why does it describe Peter, the Rock on which the Church was to be built, putting on his clothes before jumping into the sea? It must be one of the most extraordinary non-sequiturs in literature.
Our Eastertide readings today have Peter and Paul, the two founding leaders of the Christian Church, encountering the resurrected Christ. For Paul, it was on the road to Damascus where he had gone in pursuit of his aim of wiping out the small community of followers of Jesus. For Peter, it was beside the sea of Galilee. Paul saw a light and heard a voice. Peter saw a stranger on the shore and only found out it was the Lord because the Beloved Disciple told him.
What is obvious from these two very different stories is that neither Peter nor recognised Jesus in a straightforward way. Paul was blinded and fell to the ground, Peter jumped into the water. Their reactions suggest that what they experienced was shocking. They felt shamed, exposed, and it was intolerable for them. Paul asks, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ and when the light answers, ‘I am Jesus’, he found he was blind. Peter hears ‘It is the Lord’, and escapes underwater. Shame is a powerful emotion.
And so here are Peter and Paul, the greatest of the apostles. If you’ve been to St Peter’s Square in Rome you can see them in the form of two massive 19th century sculptures that look down on the crowds: Peter with his giant key, Paul holding the sword with which he was martyred and a scroll representing his writings. The two together convey the authority, history, and tradition of the Church from Christianity’s earliest days. Without Peter and Paul, and what they saw and heard on the road to Damascus and by the Sea of Galilee, there would perhaps be no church, no Christianity. But in becoming who they became they both experienced shame, they had to be converted, to cross a threshold, to recognise Jesus in a new way, and to accept that life and death were not what they thought they were.
There was a book written by the Bible Translator J.B. Phillips many years ago called, Your God is Too Small. I sometimes think that the perpetual problem with the Church is that we identify our own little projects and assumptions on to God, who then becomes as small-minded and narrow-focused as we are. Believing in the resurrection, encountering the living Jesus, means being re-orientated in respect of the world we live in.
After the death of Jesus, Peter went back to Galilee, to take up his old life. And it was there that the Jesus he thought was dead, the Jesus he was trying so hard to forget, the Jesus who had once called him to be the rock on which the Church was built and then got himself crucified – this Jesus turned up out of the blue, helping with the fishing, providing breakfast and then, calling Peter back to himself. ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me?’ Three times for three betrayals. And Paul who was simply infuriated by Jesus, who was doing everything he could to erase him and his followers, was literally stopped in his tracks, blinded and made helpless. Strange that both men, trying so hard to control their fate, trying to manage the world on their own terms, ended up undone, helpless, needy and calling on the Jesus they thought they had left behind.
Easter asks us to enter into that encounter. This world we live and die in, this nature, this cosmos is much more than a closed system run by mechanical laws. Your life is much more than trying to take control for twenty, fifty, seventy, ninety years and then you die and that’s it. The risen Jesus is a gate, a portal, a way through, a connection to the heart of God, the personal source of the universe, the truth of all that is, the ‘I am’ who bestows on you and on every creature, the permission to be and become. And not always to be or become the person you think you are or ought to be. Peter and Paul would never have imagined that after the death of Jesus they would be preaching his resurrection in Jerusalem and round the Mediterranean and in Rome.
It is a sad fact that many of our contemporaries have to live without faith because they have never found a God who is big enough to match the enormity of life and death. So they end up thinking that God is the private possession of the churchy, or of those obsessed with the literal text of the Bible, or those who are just very intense about religion. The Good Friday before last there was a post on social media from a militant atheist. Intended to amuse and provoke, it read, ‘Just a reminder. People do not come back from the dead’. And of course that is true.
Jesus was not resuscitated as someone might be after a cardiac arrest. The resurrected Jesus was different. His body had different properties. That’s why he was not immediately recognisable, he appeared and disappeared through walls and doors. His risen presence lifts the veil off our earthly expectations and shows us the world as it really is, and as we so rarely see it, a world in which eternity shines in, the light beyond the veil of our sense experience, shaming our small hopes, our narrow ambitions, yes, and my tedious little fears, my vanity and anxiety. It shames our spiritual, emotional and intellectual poverty.
So perhaps this week it would be good to read today’s lessons again, and to use your experience and imagination to put yourself in the place of Peter or Paul or both, to visualise the story and to hear what the risen Christ might be saying to you: about the things you need to own up to, the forgiveness you need to accept, the areas of shame and guilt. And then about your vocation, your mission, the gifts you have to bring – something to think about in this Season of Generosity. Perhaps he will say: Your sickness, or inability, is a gift. Or, your age, young or old, is an opportunity. Or, why have you spent your life denying me? Listen and respond. If your God has been too small, like Peter, like Paul, this is the time to receive the Easter gift of a new beginning. As the light on the road to Damascus said to Paul, ‘You will be told what you are to do’.