18.5.14
‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’
Like the other contribution from Thomas that we looked at a few weeks ago, this question is not as
hopeless as we maybe sometimes think. John puts into the mouth of Thomas a question that was
no doubt on the minds of most – and it’s a question that offers hope for the future, even if we don’t
always see it in that light.
And the hope it offers is presented through the uncertainty and the puzzlement that it contains. The
disciples are in a position where the certainties of the past have been taken away; their connections
to the traditions of their faith have been severed; the old has gone – but they’re not really sure what
the new might entail, or where it might lead them. And that is a source of hope; it’s a reason to
rejoice; because it means they are open to possibility. Once certainty takes over, possibility is
pushed away.
And certainty can often push quite violently if possibility appears too threatening. Look at the story
of Stephen. The last time this story came round in the lectionary, a group of us were in Iona Abbey,
where I spoke about the reasons for the execution, the stoning, of Stephen: about the
reinterpretation of faith that so often upsets religious people.
If you look at what leads up to the culmination of the story, which is what we read this morning, you
will see a very long speech. The speech may or may not have been given as it is reported, but it’s
perhaps more likely that these are the things Stephen was saying in a variety of places – things that
were enough to sign his death warrant.
Stephen’s speech starts with Abraham and with Isaac; he describes the traditional history of Isaac
being the father of Jacob, and Jacob of Joseph and the twelve patriarchs, the fathers of the twelve
tribes of Israel. He speaks of how the people of Israel ended up enslaved in Egypt, until Moses came
on the scene. And in his account of Moses you get just the first hint of where his speech is going:
Moses, he says, killed an Egyptian who was mistreating an Israelite, and Stephen goes on:
He supposed that his kinsfolk would understand that God through him was rescuing them,
but they did not understand. The next day he came to some of them as they were quarrelling
and tried to reconcile them, saying, “Men, you are brothers; why do you wrong each other?”
But the man who was wronging his neighbour pushed Moses aside, saying, “Who made you
a ruler and a judge over us?”
It’s just a small comment in the middle of the story, but it’s a signal, a moment of revelation: the
people of Israel did not understand. Here’s the first clue for those looking for reasons behind
Stephen’s death: the people of Israel did not understand.
So Stephen’s story goes on: Moses disappears. He goes to Midian, where he becomes a resident
alien. And at this point we notice an echo of what we didn’t notice earlier, where Stephen says:
And God spoke in these terms, that his descendants would be resident aliens in a country
belonging to others, who would enslave them and maltreat them for four hundred years.
The theme of ‘resident alien’ is another clue – it refers to Egypt, and it refers to Midian; might it
begin to have a wider significance?
And, while in Midian, Moses encounters God in the burning bush, and he is sent back to Egypt –
reluctantly, unwillingly, uncomprehendingly. And at this point in his story, Stephen returns to what
he said earlier:
It was this Moses whom they rejected when they said, “Who made you a ruler and a judge?”
and whom God now sent as both ruler and liberator through the angel who appeared to him
in the bush. He led them out, having performed wonders and signs in Egypt, at the Red Sea,
and in the wilderness for forty years. This is the Moses who said to the Israelites, “God will
raise up a prophet for you from your own people as he raised me up.” He is the one who was
in the congregation in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him at Mount Sinai, and
with our ancestors; and he received living oracles to give to us. Our ancestors were unwilling
to obey him; instead, they pushed him aside, and in their hearts they turned back to Egypt,
saying to Aaron, “Make gods for us who will lead the way for us; as for this Moses who led us
out from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him.” At that time they
made a calf, offered a sacrifice to the idol, and revelled in the works of their hands. But God
turned away from them and handed them over to worship the host of heaven.
‘Our ancestors were unwilling to obey him.’ They had challenged Moses, rebuked him, ignored him,
driven him away – and now the story reaches the Golden Calf. Do you sense the resentment
growing among the listeners?
Stephen goes on to talk about the Ark of the Covenant, and how it was carried with the people until
they came to the land of Israel; and he speaks of David and Solomon, and of how a temple was built
to house the Ark – the temple that was the centre of Judaism, the point to which all eyes turned, all
roads led, the beating heart of all that the religion was, the place of certainty, the place of assurance,
the house of God. And then Stephen says this:
Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands; as the prophet says,
“Heaven is my throne,
and the earth is my footstool.
What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord,
or what is the place of my rest?
Did not my hand make all these things?”
‘You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are for ever opposing the Holy
Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not
persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, and now you
have become his betrayers and murderers. You are the ones that received the law as
ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it.’
Stephen has taken the sacred history of the people he is addressing, has taken the certainties of
their faith, and has given them a new ‘take’ on it – a new look at it. He has taken what they had
understood as the story of their ancestors’ faithfulness, and turned it into one of disobedience,
ignorance, backsliding, rebelliousness. He is not doing this to win a popularity contest!
And his fate is sealed. He has taken the people’s certainties, the stories of the heroes of faith, and
thrown them up in the air; he has taken their understanding of the faith, the foundation stone of the
Jerusalem temple, and brought it tumbling down. He has taken their assurance of God’s favour, and
his promise of a home forever, and relativised it – insinuating that their proper place is as resident
aliens. He might as well have signed his own death warrant.
And in many ways the confusion which Stephen sows in the faith of Israel is the same confusion
sown among the disciples by what Jesus says. Thomas and then Philip plead with Jesus to give them
a bit more certainty, a map, a vision, a clear understanding. They want a destination; they want
reassurance. And Jesus’ answer to both of them is the same answer: I am all you need.
‘We need to know the way,’ says Thomas; ‘I am the way,’ says Jesus.
‘We need to see the Father,’ says Philip; ‘if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father,’ says Jesus.
But it is perhaps an unavoidable part of the human condition that we always return to questions of
assurance, to the need for certainty. We want, like Stephen’s listeners (and executioners) to have a
sacred history full of heroes we can look up to, admire, rely on. But we have often found the history
of such people to contain disappointment, even disillusion; we discover that saints were usually only
saintly some of the time, and that they were all capable of getting it wrong; we discover that those
whom we set up on pedestals are only human, and often flawed. And so Jesus takes our
expectations, our demands, our needs, and says ‘forget all that; I am all you need’.
Peter writes about building the church, but he writes about people, not temples. He writes about
how the followers of the way of Jesus of Nazareth are themselves the stones that create the temple.
He is writing when the Jerusalem temple has been destroyed and he, like Stephen, takes the sacred
history of Israel and reinterprets it: ‘I am laying in Zion a stone’ is used now not to speak about rocks,
but about Jesus: the living, breathing, walking, talking, human life which gives the only sure
foundation.
It’s the life, the truth, the way followed by Stephen who, in imitation of his Lord, challenged the
religious certainties of his day, was willing to let go of his life rather than hang on to it at all costs,
whose last words were words of forgiveness, because Stephen (as with the one whose example he
follows) knows that forgiveness is the key to resurrection.
At the General Assembly, now meeting in Edinburgh, we are sure this week to hear talk about where
we are as a church, how we move forward as a church, how we build foundations for the future,
how we need a roadmap for the future, how we have an inheritance from the past, or how we need
a vision. What we hear from Stephen, what we hear from Peter, what we hear from Jesus as he
answers Thomas and Philip, is all about possibility, about being opened up, about a life that does not
depend on the certainties of religion, but is far more concerned with the adventure of faith.
Jesus is the cornerstone; Jesus is the way; Jesus is the truth; Jesus is the life; Jesus is the Saviour. We
are not permanent possessors of the land on which we walk, or even of the life we lead; we are
resident aliens, always open to a new call, a new place, a new future.
For each of us, for the church, for the General Assembly, Jesus is all we need.