Date: 19 January 2025 at 18:00
Place: St Mary Star-of-the-Sea, Hastings
Preacher: The Revd. Mat Phipps
Season / Theme / Scripture: Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2025
I had an e-mail yesterday from a friend I haven’t seen for 10 years, a Mexican Catholic. He and I met when we were students together in Madrid. We sat next to one another on the first day of class, we got chatting, and we visited each other’s homes and churches. I remember the pleasant surprise of discovering when he came to a Eucharist at the Anglican Church in Madrid that we used the same creed.
As we have been reminded, that creed was composed 1700 years ago this year. For 17 centuries the Nicaean Creed has functioned as a symbol of unity. So I could hold up this creed, which we will say together, and say, “Do you believe this?”. And you could all say yes, and we could all go home. Ecumenism. Job done.
That is one idea of ecumenism, for certain. We all believe the same things, at least the important ones. And what we disagree on isn’t important.
But this notion of ecumenism doesn’t do justice to the things we do not agree on. It pretends that they are unimportant. We cannot pretend that is the case without discarding centuries of history, and the present reality in which we live and worship. And to pretend that what we do differently does not matter is to exclude any possibility of learning from one another. And so it seems that the words, “Do you believe this?”, must mean more than that.
For this, we turn to John’s Gospel. Let’s start with Thomas. Poor Thomas. A man whose name for centuries has been associated with doubt, and probably isn’t given enough credit for his exclamation of belief upon seeing the risen Jesus: “My Lord and my God!”. The funny thing about this encounter, it always strikes me, is that Scripture doesn’t actually tell us whether Thomas did put his hand in Jesus’ side before declaring his belief.
This story of Thomas is not so much about doubt, as it is about the question, “What will it take for you to believe?”
Let us make no mistake, John’s Gospel is about believing Jesus.
The word believe occurs more than 70 times in the Gospel of John. That’s more than three times as often as it occurs in all the other Gospels put together. Virtually anything we care to remember from John is about belief. This morning’s Gospel, the Wedding at Cana, concluded with the words: “and his disciples believed in him”.
From the Prologue, that first chapter that we read over Christmas: “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” (John 1.12)
And then there’s possibly the most famous verse in the bible: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (3.16)
Salvation, life eternal and to the full, comes through belief in Jesus. From the people who heard the testimony of the Samaritan woman at the well (4.39) to the man born blind (9.35-37), the people who meet Jesus believe in him.
To believe in Jesus is to believe in the Father, the one who sent him. Jesus’ followers, the ones he prays for in the upper room before his death are the ones who believe in him.
And, of course, the invitation to believe is the one extended to all of us. The verse which immediately follows the passage about Thomas which I have just read is the verse in which John the Evangelist shares with his reader the purpose of his Gospel: “these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” (20.31)
But what are we to believe? For Thomas, it was that Jesus had returned from the dead. But now let’s look at Martha…
Martha meets Jesus by the roadside at Bethany. She is mourning the death of her brother Lazarus: Jesus’ words to her are: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
What is it that Martha is invited to believe? Not the Nicaean Creed. According to John, simply that Jesus is the resurrection and the life. It’s a lot shorter, that’s for sure. Imagine how early you’d be having your Sunday lunch if the Council of Nicaea had decided this would do…
Do you believe this? Something tells us, instinctively, that these challenging words are at the same time words of reassurance. What is Martha asked to believe, invited to believe? She is invited to believe that Jesus is, in that moment, what she most needs him to be. The promise of resurrection for her brother. Jesus is everything she needs him to be. He is the resurrection and the life.
Do you believe this? It is a question, but it is also an offer. It is an outstretched arm. It is a promise to be received.
This is the grace of God. It is the discovery that when God asks us, invites us, to believe – he has already done all the work. “Do you believe this?” is the outstretched arm of God. It is the Father’s love, it is the power of the resurrection, it is the light on the path, the water of baptism, the body and blood of Christ offered in Holy Communion.
It is the outstretched arm of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2, “Come with me if you want to live”. It is the rope lowered down the Cliffs of Insanity by Iñigo Montoya to the Dread Pirate Roberts.
So we find that to be asked “Do you believe this?” is somehow to be invited to believe both something much simpler than wors of the creed, and at the same time to believe more than.
It is simpler because, as John’s Gospel reminds us, the invitation to believe meets us where we are, just as it did Thomas and Martha. It ought to reassure us when, as St Anselm said, our faith is seeking understanding, and we say the creed not being sure we fully understand it. It ought to reassure us on the days when we say the creed in the midst of doubts, conscious of where our faith is weak, wanting to believe more and yet battered and beaten by what exceeds not so much our understanding as our capacity to grasp through pain and tears. In those times we say “we want to believe” – not so much a statement of unbelief, but something approaching “I believe with difficulty”. Do you believe this? When we say yes, and reach out to take the outstretched arm of God, we find that he has already come to meet us.
But if we are asked to believe less than the creed, it is also true that we are asked to believe more. Because when we respond to that offer, when we take Jesus’ hand, we discover that there is a great deal more to the relationship than what can be contained in a thousand creeds. That shouldn’t be surprising. I couldn’t sum up a friendship in words, I certainly couldn’t sum up 25 years of marriage, so how could one exhaust the depths of a relationship with God. The unfathomable mystery of God, draw us in, calls us deeper.
Where does that leave us? It means, I humbly suggest, that we might celebrate together the anniversary of a creed that expresses the tenets of our faith, the things we believe about God. But the words of Jesus invite us to see in one another those who are in the grasp of our Saviour’s hand. Each of us with faith seeking understanding. Each of us called deeper into the mystery of God. Each of us is, to use a familiar image, a fellow pilgrim. As much as our faith might be the truth to which we hold, it is the truth that holds us.
When Eluned and I were working with Evangelical and Catholic Churches in Spain, we were greatly influenced by a book written by some people doing similar work in France: “As Pilgrims Progress: Leaning how Christians can walk hand in hand when they don’t see eye to eye”. You don’t even need to read the book to have a sense of what is going on here. The conversation does not relativise all differences between Christians as inconsequential. Nor does it accept them as insuperable obstacles.
My friend from those years in Madrid is now a parish priest in the USA. The fact that we say the same creed says something about the faith we share. But the lasting impact of his faith in mine is owed to the fact that he and I were companions on our journey of faith, and his companionship was for me the grace of God.
In the world in which we live, in a polarised political climate, where shrill voices are amplified by partisan media, where peace is hard won and fragile, to be able to bear witness to our unity as believers in Jesus is to lay hold of something that has the potential to bring healing to communities and nations. This is worth praying for, and we rejoice that by merely being here together, the answer to that prayer is a little more visible. What we are seeking is not just unity of witness, but the witness of unity – all for the greater glory of God.
St Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church Hastings 