Hebrews 1:1-4:2; 5-12; Mark 2:10-16
‘We do not yet see everything…but we do see Jesus’
Apparently you can now use AI – Artificial Intelligence – to make your dinner. According to my son – and he is a digital native so he should know – you can just type some or all of the ingredients in your fridge and it will come up with a recipe for you to follow. It’s a sort of digital Ready Steady Cook.
AI is, so we are told, going to change the world. It already touches on education (although students need to hear the warning not to use it for your essays) and is meant to help with healthcare and business and journalism and pretty much everything else.
But we didn’t need a headline in The Times this week to remind us that AI can’t solve all our problems. ‘Don’t expect AI to just fix everything, professor warns’ ran the headline on Tuesday. And in the same paper was all the example we needed, with pictures and reports of missiles flying across the Middle East, and another bloody chapter in that region’s history beginning to be written. AI can’t bring the reconciliation we long and pray for. It is not able to answer the question of why human beings cannot leave in peace with one another.
Closer to home we might be conscious of other questions which AI cannot answer. Why has this relationship failed? Why has this cancer returned? Why do I feel like I am living under a cloud?
It is sometimes assumed that the Christian faith can – or should – provide answers to these sorts of questions. People can form the view that the Bible or the Christian tradition should be able to give explanations for all questions great and small. When I have done Grill a Christian events it is striking the questions people expect to be answered.
I think our first reading from the letter to the Hebrews invites us to think about this rather differently. Instead of suggesting that there are answers to all our questions, it puts forward Jesus, not as the answer to all our questions, but instead as a new way of looking at the world. For Jesus is much more than the answer to our earthly questions. He is introduced to us as nothing other than the one through whom all things were, the reflection of God’s glory and imprint of God’s being.
Although these words in the passage make a specific point about subjection of all things to angels, I think they have a broader reach. ‘We do not yet see everything… but we do see Jesus.’ It is almost as if seeing Jesus is enough while much else remains unclear.
And there are two parts of Jesus’ story that the writer of the letter to the Hebrews invites us to see and attend to. The first is the sufferings of Jesus, by which we understand his passion and death on the cross. While suffering was in the ancient world often a source of shame and thus to be avoided if possible by everyone, especially deities, Jesus – God on earth – embraced suffering in order to taste death for everyone. Whatever else we think and struggle about our suffering world and our suffering lives, Jesus has been there.
Second, we are invited to see the glory of Jesus, as he is now crowned and sitting at the right hand of the Majesty on high. While so much in our world can seem cyclical and short of hope, Jesus still reigns and holds all things in his hands.
It is striking that in churches of an Orthodox tradition the first image you see when you go into church – either in the apse behind the altar or in the dome above you – is an image of Christ in glory. It is a physical reminder of the reigning Jesus. Yes you do see images of the crucified Jesus, but they are often on the rear wall for you to consider as you go out.
I am always reminded of this when I pray in the Feretory with St Cuthbert in the mornings. Cuthbert’s tomb faces up to the tester by Sir Ninian Comper, and our great saint sees the glorified and reigning Jesus Christ.
As I contemplate the news of a hurting world and pray for hurting lives closer to home, I am invited not to see everything clearly, but I am invited to see Jesus, crucified for the sins and brokenness of the world, and glorified, keeping this world – tragic though it often is – in his hands.
But let us ask a further question: if this is how we are to see Jesus, how might Jesus see us? Here we come onto our gospel reading and two encounters Jesus had, with the Pharisees and the little children. The first is the most challenging, and while we might value the clarity of Jesus affirming the sanctity of marriage as part of God’s created order, we will recognise the pain this causes for those whose marriages have ended in the sadness of divorce.
But context is everything. It is striking that Jesus’ most challenging words are to self-righteous people who were trying to trip him up. For that is what the Pharisees were doing, people convinced of their own moral rectitude trying to test Jesus and trap him. And so Jesus dials up the pressure, challenging the Pharisees to take sin more seriously and not less.
His approach to the children is completely different. Here were people with no claims to status or privilege (children had no rights back then). And yet Jesus is full of compassion for them, giving them a blessing and inviting his disciples to model their lives on these children and their simple trust.
When Jesus sees us, he humbles the proud and he lifts up the humble. He humbles the proud and he lifts up the humble.
If we think sin is something that other people do, if we look down on other people as needing a forgiveness we don’t, if we find ourselves constantly reviewing with pride our own moral CV, we must prepared to be humbled by Jesus. His standards of holiness are such that all of us fall short – whatever - to use the example from today’s passage – our individual story of marriage or sexuality. We need to pray, as the old prayer puts it, ‘we do not come to this thy table, merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness…’
But if we think that God couldn’t love us, that God probably hasn’t noticed us, that if God has, God is probably disappointed in us, we can be prepared to be lifted up by Jesus. For it is not about what we bring, but about the blessing only Jesus can offer. As the old prayer continues, ‘but thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy.’
‘We do not see everything…but we do see Jesus’
In our troubled world we will not have all the answers - however good AI turns out to be. Our view will be partial and the questions will remain. But we do see Jesus, as the crucified Saviour and the glorified Lord, the one who suffers for and with us and who continues to hold this fragile world in his hands. And that Jesus see us, children for whom he died and children whom he invites to come to his table even today not in proud self-confidence but in humble trust and earnest prayer that we will see him more clearly, love him more dearly and follow him more nearly, day by day. Amen.