Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity
“And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken”
“Faith cometh by hearing”, Paul famously tells us, adding “and hearing by the Word of God”. It is a challenging and important concept especially in our rather visually fixated age where so much emphasis is placed on images seen on screens, on what is curiously called ‘virtual reality’ which already suggests something not entirely real, something not fully actual. It is commonly said that ‘seeing is believing’ and yet we are only too aware of the ambiguities and the distortions about what is claimed for as being seen. Is it actual or merely a simulacrum of reality; indeed, something merely photo-shopped?
But then isn’t there a similar ambiguity and uncertainty about what is said and heard? Especially in the current culture where truth seems to have flown completely away, at least if the American presidential election campaigns are anything to go by. We confront a world, it seems, where fear and negativity and lies that are known as lies triumph over truth and honour, over considered belief and honesty, what Rex Murphy has called, with due apologies to Tom Wolfe, “the bonfire of the inanities”. But the world wants, it seems, something good to come out of America. Perhaps that explains the awarding of the Nobel prize for literature to Bob Dylan, one last paean of praise to the sixties and its siren calls to a kind of peace and truth, to a kind of innocence in contrast to hypocrisy and deceit, for “Where preachers preach of evil fates/Teachers teach that knowledge waits/Can lead to hundred-dollar plates/Goodness hides behind its gates/But even the president of this United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked.” Not exactly a pleasing mental image in the current situation, to be sure. Yet the idea that “Goodness hides behind its gates” is a powerful thought and, perhaps, just perhaps, it is in the context of that awareness that this gospel can begin to speak to us.
It is really a question about the resonance of God’s word in us, about our being alive to truth over and against the lies and the deceits of our own hearts. Here in this powerful gospel story what is heard and seen stands in stark contrast to what is wanted, even demanded and required to be seen. Jesus addresses this directly. “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe”. He speaks, it seems to me, to an almost universal feature of our humanity – the desire for signs and wonders. Jesus names our expectation and its consequence – our unbelief. For where God is wanted to be tangibly present – immediately there for us, subject to us, as it were – faith has no meaning. The Word has, literally, no resonance in us.
