God Is Closer Than You Think
Preacher: Revd Dr Roger Dawson SJ
Readings: Acts 17:22-31; John 14:15-21
Zac Brettler was born into a comfortably off, middle-class North London family. He was funny, mischievous, and charming, and knew how to tell a story or spin a yarn, even if he did embroider the truth somewhat. He was privately educated, and at his schools he met the sons and daughters of the super-rich: children of billionaires and oligarchs from around the world. He glimpsed this gilded world of wealth, luxury, and status, and was fascinated by it.
Unknown to his parents, when he left school he told people he was not Zac Brettler but Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch, an heir to a fortune of $200 million, and that his family was looking for ways to invest it. Doors opened, but they did not lead to good places. In addition to the world of conspicuous consumption, fashionable restaurants, and flashy apartments, he also came into contact with shady businessmen, bankers who would launder money, drug dealers who provided the cocaine, and gangsters who would extort money. It all ended tragically on 29 November 2019, when 19-year-old Zac, faced with a businessman and a gangster with a penchant for violence, who both realised that they had been conned, decided to take his chances by jumping from the fifth-floor balcony of the luxury apartment into the Thames rather than face what was coming to in the room behind him. This was no James Bond-like escape from the villains’ clutches, and he was tragically killed as he tried to escape the world he was trapped in.
And what a world! Patrick Radden Keefe’s book, London Falling, does not just tell the story of Zac and his parents, but reveals the dark side of London. When I go to London, I enjoy the energy and vitality, the culture and diversity. But there is another side of this world: a world for the super-rich, with the multimillion pound houses, car showrooms, expensive shops, and restaurants that service and entertain them, bankers to manage your money, lawyers to protect them and the schools to educate their children. And there is an underworld that will not ask too many questions, will launder not just money but reputations, and provide cocaine and even muscle for protection and extortion if needed. What a world!
And Zac’s poor parents, who knew their son was troubled but had no idea of this double life, found that the institutions they trusted were unable to tell them the truth, and were reluctant to find the truth: an inept police investigation, a coroner’s inquest that lacked basic curiosity. What a world!
If this seems a long way from Jesus talking to his disciples at the Last Supper that we have just heard in the Gospel, having just washed their feet and promising them the Holy Spirit – the Advocate, the Paraclete – it is because it is. But it is a world that he knew. In John’s Gospel, ‘the world’ has two meanings. The first is of the created order, the physical universe, the earth, and the human beings living on earth, as in: ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.’ The second meaning is ‘all that opposes God’: the rebellion against God, the hostility and rejection that Jesus experiences; it is the fallen world ruled by Satan and his empty promises, promises that Zac heard and believed; it is a world that is driven by pride and greed and status, and the symbols that go with them, and abuse of power. It does not care about the truth and is not open to revelation. This was not abstract for Jesus. In a matter of hours he was to be delivered into the hands of this world, and we know what happens next. What a world!
But what of the world that Jesus preaches? You won’t be surprised to hear, and you know, that this is a world of love. In John’s Gospel, love is the basis of all, because it is the basis of all. And those who follow Jesus keep the commandments. Which commandments? The Ten Commandments? The 613 precepts of the Old Testament law? The fundamental commandment for John is the command to love: to love God and love one another. This is not sentimental or necessarily even emotional. For Saint Thomas Aquinas, to love is to will (or desire) the good of the other. So it is not necessarily about feeling; it is more about an act of the will, a decision. It is not about emotions, but more about wanting the good of the other, and it is lived out by following Jesus’s teaching and example of service and practical care, such as washing feet.
All this is linked in John to obedience. This is often translated to ‘keep’ my commandments, rather than obey, but John links love and obedience. We are understandably nervous about commands to obey in our culture. Autonomy is highly prized, and we have seen too many examples of abuse of power; and authoritarianism is on the rise rather than in decline. What if obedience leads to a dilemma, a conflict of conscience, where truth and honesty are at stake? How are we to navigate this?
We need to remember what we are being asked – or commanded! – to do: to love. And the root word of ‘obedience’ comes from the Latin word audire, to listen. Ob-audire means ‘to listen towards’, or give attention to, as in: I’m all ears. And what are we giving our attention to? What are we giving our ears to? The voice of Jesus. And what is he telling us? To love.
This is so important that it is a commandment and it must be kept; otherwise things go wrong. These are like the maker’s instructions: we have to follow them, otherwise things go wrong. It’s not that God will punish us if we do not obey, but things will go wrong for us, because things won’t work. If we do not obey this commandment, we can find ourselves slowly sliding out of this world of love, and into the other world as Zac did, which may be attractive and gilded: this world of status and wealth, and luxury and power. Most of these are not bad things in themselves, but they are bad in excess, they are bad when they dazzle us and when we get attached to them rather than to God, to them rather than to love of our neighbour, or we try to get them at the expense of the good of our neighbour. Then we can find ourselves in a world where no one desires the good of the other, only their own selfish needs. Dazzled and seduced by glamour and glitz, this was the world that young Zac Brettler found himself in. No one desired his good, just part of his supposed $200 million, not even knowing that his parents’ love was only a phone call away. They were closer than he thought.
If this command to love one another and to keep this command all seems a bit much, it is because it is. If you are not sure that you can do this, it is because you cannot; and I cannot either. We need help, and in this Gospel, so full of promises, there are eleven future tenses. Jesus promises not to leave them orphans, and to send the Paraclete. The Greek word parakletos is almost untranslatable, and is rendered variously as ‘advocate’, ‘comforter’, or ‘helper’. Perhaps the closest we can get to it is ‘someone who is called in’ – called in to give witness, called in to advise, called in to advocate, or speak on our behalf, called in to encourage. In other words, to help, and so to support us, to stay close to us. The Paraclete will also teach us – how to love, how to see, how to hear: how to love, see, and hear each other; and how to love, see, and hear God. Because God is close, closer than you think.
John Henry Newman, the great 19th-century theologian, said that we need to cultivate a ‘religious mind’ in order to see the things of religion: faith, hope, and love in action; beauty, truth, and goodness; God himself; and to respond with reverence. Just as an astronomer, or an art expert, or a radiologist can see things I cannot see, we train our eyes and our ears to see and hear the things of this world of love and mercy, of God’s world, to know that God is close. What a world! If we do not cultivate a ‘religious mind’ through prayer, worship, and reading, we cultivate a ‘secular mind’ where none of this makes sense and none of this is sensed, and we live as if there is no God, when in fact God is close, and sometimes as if there is no love. Zac slipped into that world. Jesus went there too, but he showed us that greed, violence and lies will not have the last word. Life and love will, and the Advocate will help us.