Questions from the Upper Room, Part 3
"Philip's Question: Show Us The Father!"
Be careful what you ask for.
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, March 23, 2003
Text: John 14:8-21
Like many little boys, I adored my father. I always wanted to follow him, no matter what he was doing. If he was mowing the lawn, I followed him up and down the yard (I was one of those irritating children who had one of those plastic lawn mowers). Whenever he washed the car I got out my own bucket and washed the wheels (I got the better deal on that!). When we walked on the beach in Bermuda, I used to try to leap into the footprints that my father left ahead of me. Of course, I realized that I could never do it until I had grown to his height and stature. Nevertheless, one of the goals of my life was someday to be able to make my footprints conform with his - then I would truly be a man.
I think Philip was seeking to do exactly the same thing with Jesus and the heavenly Father. He really wanted to be able to stride in Christ's footsteps. And so, as a realist, he expressed to Jesus what I'm sure many of the disciples were saying behind Jesus' back. They wanted Him to show them the Father in order that they could walk in His footprints and know the way.
If you look at this wonderful story from John's Gospel it seems that there is a delightful flow in its logic. Philip wants proof. Jesus points to who He is and then He makes a promise. Proof, person and promise - these three symbolize this marvellous story.
At the heart of all of this is Philip's desire to have some proof, some tangible evidence. Show us the Father, he said and that will be, to use the Greek word, arkeo - that will be sufficient. That will be good enough for us. And if you will just do that, Jesus, then we will all be happy and content. Now, many scholars have speculated as to precisely what Philip wanted. I suspect that he probably wanted the similar experience that Moses had on Mount Sinai, when God appeared to him in a cloud and spoke to him, and Moses was able to argue with God from a distance.
Maybe he wanted what the great prophet Isaiah had when he experienced the seraphim in Isaiah Chapter Six, that upon his call he heard the voices of angels and had his lips touched with coals. Or maybe, he wanted the experience of a Jacob in Penuel: to wrestle with God and meet one of God's angels. And so, when Philip comes to Jesus, as a Jew, thinking back to all those great events in the Old Testament, he is saying to him, show us the Father, do these great things and we will be satisfied.
But Jesus understood the danger of what Philip was requesting. The Bible makes it abundantly clear that those who see God will die. God's presence is always mediated. God's love comes through a cloud. God's love comes through angels. But Jesus understood something more. He understood that His role and His purpose (and no Gospel captures this better than John's) was to reveal in His person the Father, to the disciples and to the world. Jesus makes it clear - and this is as a great scholar of the New Testament said, the highlight of the whole of the Gospel of John. "He who has seen me," said Jesus, "has seen the Father."
In other words, "Philip, what more do you need than what I am giving you? Why do you insist on knowing more?"
Then He took him to one side and said: "Listen to my words. Look what I have done. Can you not see that the Father is revealed in what I have said? Can you not see that the Father is revealed in what I have done? Can you not see that the words I have spoken about the Father, I have spoken to you? Can you not see when I've talked about myself, I am revealing the Father to you through me, the Son? Can you not see through the miracles and the signs and the wonders, that I and the Father are one? And, if you do not believe in me and the things I have said, what about the other things I have done? What about the miracles? What about the signs and the wonders? What about the healing of the woman that was bleeding or the water being turned into wine?"
Jesus, you see, was both pleased that Philip was seeking, and upset that he hadn't seen fully. For there was a synthesis between Jesus' words and His deeds. There was an integrity to what He said, because of what He did, and there was an integrity to what He did, because of what He said. Very often, however, people see a dichotomy between words and deeds.
There is a story of such hypocrisy, though that tells of a German boy who grew up in a strict Jewish home. He practised the law. He read the Torah. He was faithful to the dietary laws. He went to synagogue regularly and his family observed the Sabbath. He was in a good Jewish home. His father insisted that it was important to be religious - to do the right things.
A few years later, though, his family moved to another German town where the only places of worship were Lutheran churches. The father decided that the only way to get ahead in business was for he and his family to attend the Lutheran church and turn their backs on the ways of Judaism. And so this Jewish boy started to attend a Lutheran church and observe the Sabbath on Sundays. When he asked his father whether he was doing this because he'd had a conversion experience, the father made it clear that it was purely because it was good for business: We're now in a town of Lutherans, we should be Lutherans to get ahead.
Eventually this boy grew up and moved to England. He sat down in a great library and wrote his views on the world. The boy who had been brought up a Jew and ended up, purely for material reasons, going to a Christian church, sat in a library in England and wrote a book that would affect 150 years of human history. You see, the boy was Karl Marx. He was writing "Das Kapital" and in it he declared was that religion was the "opiate of the people."
When words and deeds do not coincide they lead to hypocrisy. But Jesus was not a hypocrite. Unlike so many others who have come and gone, His words and His deeds coincided with who He was. Jesus would not reveal to Philip all that there was to know about the Father. There was still a mystery to God that even Jesus in the fullness of His incarnation would not reveal to the disciples. Sometimes Jesus' silence gave room for God to do more things, later.
It reminds me of a woman who tells the delightful story of how as a girl she and her brother used to drive across the country in a mini-van with her mother and father. (As many of you will know, driving children can be a difficult thing to do, over long distances.) The only way their father could keep peace is if he gave everyone the opportunity to play one music cassette of their choice a day. Her mother would choose religious music and hymns, her brother would choose rock music and she would choose contemporary Christian music. But the father: He put into the cassette player a 90-minute, blank tape.
Sometimes my friends, silence speaks volumes. Jesus did not say everything to Philip that Philip wanted Him to say because of one other thing: the promise. He promised the disciples that they were not to know the fullness of everything then but one day they would know.
There is a wonderful verse from the poetry of Robert Frost that I have always loved. It was quoted by President Kennedy and by Nehru, the former leader of India. The words are simple:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.
Jesus, you see, had promises to keep and things to do before He slept. It might have been easy for Jesus to reveal everything to those disciples in the upper room, but He still had to bear the cross for the sins of the world and to give Himself for those beyond that room.
One of the frustrations that I had as a little boy was my father's refusal to take me to live soccer games. He refused because in those days you had to stand on the terraces and if you couldn't see over the people in front of you, you couldn't see anything. Every Saturday he and my uncle would go off to Whitehart Lane and watch Tottenham Hotspur play soccer and I was left alone with my mother. (It was as hard on my mother as it was on me, trust me!) Until one day, when I had exhausted every avenue to convince my father that this was a crime against humanity, he, my uncle and grandfather conspired to do something. My uncle and my grandfather came to me and said: "Andrew, we know that this is the biggest game of the year - Tottenham Hotspur against Manchester United - and we know you want to go, so we're going to take you."
You know what they did? Because my father had a bad back and couldn't carry me for very long, they decided to take turns in putting me on their shoulders so I could see the entire game.
My friends, Jesus of Nazareth does that for humanity. What we are unable to do for ourselves, Christ does for us. When we cannot walk in the footprints, when we cannot know fully the way of the Father, Jesus takes us on His shoulders. Only from that perspective can we see the Father. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.