Easter 6  Year B

The readings for this Sunday, beautiful though they are, were really challenging to get a handle on for the purpose of writing a sermon. In some ways they’re too beautiful…. They’re a bit lovey-dovey - full of feel-good language about how wonderful it is to believe, without really coming to a point that helps us grow in that wonderful faith.

Maybe there’s a message to the preacher in that! We don’t always need to be looking for a point, I guess. Sometimes it’s good and right just to be able to rest in the wonder of God and God’s love, to offer our praise to God and get caught up in the sheer joy of it.

Certainly there’s nothing wrong with that, and based on past experience I’d guess that for about half of us that is really our motivation for coming here Sunday by Sunday. We want and we need to get in touch with that same experience of God those first Gentile believers had, that led them to speak in tongues and “extol” God in the same way the apostles did at Pentecost. We need to let everything else grow dim and slip away in the glory of God, so that we can be fed and re-clothed and re-equipped to go out and live a new week of life to the glory of God.

And maybe that was the reason for my initial point of resistance towards these readings. They are just about resting in the glory, and not about what happens next. That’s all the more ironic considering where they come from. Jesus in the gospel is preparing his friends for the awful events of Good Friday. John, in the letter, has just finished telling us that you can’t say you love God, whom you can’t see, if you don’t show you love your neighbour right in front of you. And the Acts of the Apostles are full of stories showing how much it cost to put your faith on the line and do something with it.

None of these scripture stories really allow us to let God be our escape route, to be blind to the earthly dimension of living our faith. In John 16 Jesus tackles that problem head on, when he says to the disciples “In the world you will have trouble.” That’s the bad news - the hard truth about being a Christian. Then right away he goes on to say “But be of good cheer…” - and of course we’re all rooting for him to say, don’t worry, any time you want you can get away from the world and come and rest in me, because you know I love you.

Rats! He doesn’t say that. Instead, he says “Be of good cheer - I have overcome the world.” The good news is not an exit ramp. It throws us right back into the hurly-burly and trouble of life, but with the assurance that Jesus is right there with us, and has already won all the battles that really matter. There’s nothing left that can cause us any hurt in the long-run: not being betrayed by a friend; not falling off the wagon; not losing a job; not even facing death. Those are troubles, for sure, and we’re not offered a way to escape them - but what we are offered is a way to live through them and transform them in the light of the glory of God, knowing that Jesus has been there ahead of us.

It’s that light of God’s glory which is really at the centre of these stories, and at the centre of the Easter story which is still echoing in our worship six weeks later. So far through this Easter season, we’ve mostly been reflecting on how Easter changes our image of God - we know more about who God is, what God is really like, what God is capable of doing. Easter opens our eyes to new dimensions of this God that we put our trust in, and it makes us want to trust Him more.

But the Easter light doesn’t just shine right back on God, it shines on us and on the people around us as well. We see them, and we see ourselves, in a new light as a result of Jesus’ rising from the dead. Our new self-image is captured in the gospel when Jesus says, “I do not call you servants any longer… but I have called you friends.”

In the half-light before Easter, God was the Great Power and the Great Mystery, something we could not possibly understand, whose plans and purposes for the world and for our lives were beyond our control or comprehension. Now it’s different. We are friends of the one who died and rose again. That doesn’t just mean that we like to get together with him and have a good time!

In context, being friends is clearly about being comrades, companions on the journey, sharers in the mission. Jesus is opening the Father’s plan to us, letting us in on the secret - not so that we can feel special, but so that we can actually do something about it. And it’s in working with our Friend, following his directions with full understanding, contributing our own gifts to the cause - that’s where we’ll find the “complete” joy he talks about.

That’s a very different picture of ourselves in relation to God. Not servants, but friends. And it’s matched by an equally new and revealing spotlight on the people around us. It turns out, they are there so that we can lay down our life for them (John 15:13). Loving God and following the commandments means loving the people that we see in front of us (1 John 5:2). And who knows what God might already have got up to in their lives - think of Peter, shocked to discover that the Holy Spirit would inspire Gentiles just as much as Jews (Acts 10:45).

That’s the new light of Easter. We are different people because Jesus has risen, and we live in a different world. We are not people who need to be afraid of what life might bring. We are not people who need to huddle together to keep warm and safe. And the world is not a big scary place that we want to run away from. It is full of the reflected light of Easter morning.

Last October at a diocesan meeting, David Greenwood talked about his sense of call as a deacon in exactly this way. He said it wasn’t really his job to go out and do God’s work in the world. Through the resurrection of Jesus, God has already done and is already doing that work - God is changing people’s lives and the societies we live in. Sometimes he does that through us, and sometimes not. Our job is to notice. To see where God is at work, to enjoy the way that, as his friends, we get to see and share what God is doing. To celebrate that, to bring it back here in joy and praise and thanks, and then to go out again to look for more.