What canst thou say?

Last week I suggested some ways of approaching reading the Scriptures. The main drift of what I was saying was that people “in those days” were not different from us now, and – well, this is so obvious as not really to need saying – God was not different then from the way he is now. It is to us this is spoken, of us this is said.

I hope that in the years I have been standing up here I have not told you what to believe. I may have told you how I see things, I may have told you how the church, or a part of the church, or certain people of God, see things; but the things of God can only, fundamentally, be understood as part of my own, your own, relationship with God as we encounter God in the Scriptures and in our lives: the two elements of salvation history.

Margaret Fell quotes George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement, thus: “You will say Christ saith this, and the apostles say this, but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of Light and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest is it inwardly from God?” Now this is not to say that any old interpretation is fine and that all opinions are equal. We are not talking here about opinions. “Opinions”, if not worthless, are at the least a barrier to true understanding. Because opinions come from the surface, and understanding comes from deep within, whether deep within our brains, deep within our guts or deep within our souls. Gestalt therapy, which some of you may be aware of, relies on that. It relies on the fact that deep within, so deep sometimes as to be inaccessible under normal circumstances, we all hold our own answers, our own healing, our own inward godliness – as George Fox put it, “that of God” within each human being made in God’s image and likeness. And that deep place is where we find peace, understanding, our true selves as God sees them.

What matters when you read the Scriptures is the response the passage draws from “that of God” within you; the message that you hear from God. You do need to ask yourself Fox’s question, “what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?”, but if the passage has not evoked something from your depths, then you have not understood it, however much you know about it academically.

Since I cannot tell you what to believe, or what today’s Scriptures are saying to you, I can only tell you what they are saying to me. And what leaps to my mind as I hear them is St Paul’s phrase: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied”

Paul is our first role model, the first Christian we know anything much about to live like us, the first Christian we know anything much about ever to need to make this statement: If for this life only we hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. During Jesus’ lifetime, I doubt whether anyone even gave that a thought. Yes, there are a couple of references in the Old Testament to life beyond death, and it is a given that God is eternal. But I am pretty sure that the people who came to Jesus came to him for what he could give them in this life. Paul’s statement would probably have made no sense to them at all. It was for this life that they hoped in Jesus, and while some of them rather thought he might be the Christ, the word did not, at that time, have the resonances that it has had since the resurrection and, above all, since Paul’s meditations on the meaning of the resurrection. As for the people who had lived with Jesus and who had stayed the course until the resurrection, they would have been mystified by that statement too. It was patently obvious to them that Jesus Christ transcended death, and in a way quite different to mere raising from the dead back to this life. Jesus was alive and solid, but no longer of this world: his very presence spoke to them of a fuller life with God.

But Paul was the first Christian we know anything much about to have to live by faith as we do. He was the first one to whom that statement of faith, which is also a statement of at least the possibility of doubt, would have made sense, as it does to us. Paul had never seen Jesus in the flesh. His only direct experience of the Lord was in a vision; dramatic it may have been, but it was a vision only, and we do not really know what form it took. It is quite possible that the basic experience was not that different from the experiences of contact with the Lord that many or most of us have had. I can think of a few in my life that I could no more doubt than I could doubt my own existence, and I don’t think I’m unusual in that. But still, you can’t put your finger in the wounds of a vision, or your hand in its side. Jesus knew that very well, and told us that he knew it: Blessed, he said, are those who have not seen, and yet believe. That’s Paul, and you, and me; if indeed we are children of light, and have walked in the light.

We have not seen the Risen Christ. But it is the crucifixion, and the resurrection, that we pin our hopes on; and this is the Paschal season in which we particularly remember and celebrate the source of our hope, for this life and beyond.

So, back to today’s readings. First, the reading from the book of Daniel, and that long, long night he spent in silence, that of God within him so deeply one with the God who transcended him, that during that night earth and heaven touched, and the peace of God reigned in human and animal alike. Please don’t ask me whether “it really happened”. I do not know whether it really happened and I do not much care. At the very least, this story from Daniel is a parable…..an indication of the direction we might take towards the light. But I think that in the context of our second reading, it could also be the foreshadowing of another cave with a stone in front of it, and another early morning discovery.

So tell me, I hear you murmur, did this other early morning discovery “really happen”? I am sorry but I cannot tell you for certain that it did. And, you know, even if I told you with absolute certainty that it did, that would be of no use to you. Because this is a different sort of truth from the ones that we meet in our everyday lives. This is a truth that has to live in you; live in your depths, in the depths of your brain, your guts and your soul. It is a truth on which Christians stake their entire life, their entire hope of happiness, their entire hope of glory. If that early morning discovery did not really happen, our lives as Christians – my life as a Christian – have been a disaster, a bad joke. Because Christ’s resurrection, and our redemption, are so much part of our very identity as Christians, that if Christ is not risen, then the essential part of who I am simply ceases to be. “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied”. The only consolation is that, if it did not, we shall never know. But if it did…then, as that same Paul, our brother in faith and in doubt, put it, the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For the corruptible must clothe itself with the incorruptible, and the mortal with immortality. When the corruptible has been clothed with the incorruptible, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory”.