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13th Sunday after Trinity

16 August 2024

25 August, Proper 16: Joshua 24.1-2a,14-18; Psalm 34.15-end; Ephesians 6.10-20; John 6.56-69

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AT THE end of John’s chapter on the eucharist, we reach a turning point. Jesus speaks of his flesh being eaten, his blood drunk. Some disciples, shocked, exclaim, “This teaching is difficult — who can accept it?” “Difficult” is a weedy translation. The New Jerusalem Bible nails the offensive quality: “This is intolerable language. How could anyone accept it?”

We must not dilute the Lord’s teaching to minimise offence. It will always be shocking. It did make me think, too, about Jesus’s absolute certainty about God’s will. In his commentary, Raymond Brown remarks that “While Jesus himself is said to ‘know God’, he is never said to believe in him.”

The moment I read that, my thoughts flew to Plato. When I studied Plato as a student, I found him annoying. He adopted the persona of his teacher, Socrates, as a way to explore philosophical questions, from justice and goodness to politics. Ideas were tested through conversation, on the grounds that dialogue was the best way to truth. That bit I had no grumble with. But the abstractness was often frustrating, and, without knowing how to label the tricks he used to make his points, I felt that I was being cozened into agreement.

Understanding Plato a little better now, I have nothing but respect for his teaching us that, when we explore the nature of truth and reality, we must always take care to distinguish between what we think and what we know.

I may have a lot of opinions, and many of them may happen to be true. But I cannot always claim to “know” the truth of them. And, yes, you saw it coming: God is like that. We do not “know” God in the sense in which Plato used the term. We have opinions about him. They are based on good evidence. They are confirmed by history and our own experience. But they remain opinions, not knowledge.

This matters, both for John’s Gospel and for my commentator’s point, because Jesus does not need to believe in God. If we want a Christianised version of Plato’s perception, here it is. Belief, as a religious phenomenon, goes into Plato’s “opinion” category. It may rest on good evidence, and be confirmed by wide and long experience, all of which shape the intuitions guiding faith-full Christians. But it cannot yet be knowledge.

Recently, 1 Corinthians 13 has been in my mind, because it is wedding season. Some couples’ wedding choices make clergy hearts sink (“All things bright and beautiful”; “One more step along the world I go”). Others we never tire of, however many times we hear them sung or read. For me, 1 Corinthians 13 is like that. Now I “know” in the ordinary sense in which people use the term, Paul says (ginosco); one day I shall “come to an understanding”, or “recognise”, or “know fully” (epiginosco).

Believing, or having faith (Plato’s “opinion”), is the way in which God has chosen to disclose himself to us. Christ needs no such disclosure, because with him all is knowledge, not opinion. We do not need to immerse ourselves in Platonic dialogue to drive home this point. It is here, in the Gospel, when Peter makes a connection akin to what flesh and blood could not reveal to him at Caesarea Philippi (Matthew 16.17).

The setting is sombre; for many of those who have been following Jesus are beginning to turn from him. They seem to be doing so because Jesus has not love-bombed them, guru-style, with flattering estimations of the place that they will have in the coming Kingdom. Instead, he warns them: “I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.”

Asked whether he, too, wishes to leave Jesus, Peter makes a passionate declaration, which is also a pointer to the hope in which we share: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” For him, the time of choice and decision is over, and so the verbs are in the perfect tense: “We have come to believe”, he says, “and we have come to know.”

In the recognition of Jesus as Messiah, Logos, Word, Peter comes as close to true knowledge as any earthbound mortal can. And for that we honour him.

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