A sermon on John 14:1-14 the Sunday after the Port Arthur Massacre
by Nathan Nettleton

One thing we have tended to pride ourselves on in this church community is a well grounded faith. We see ourselves as a church whose faith operates in the real world, with all its ambiguities and confusions, rather than a faith that is so heavenly minded it’s no earthly good as the cliche goes.

Well it is a hard week for well grounded faiths. Its a hard week because this week such a faith must be grounded at the front door of the Broad Arrow Cafe in Port Arthur, Tasmania. That name is deeply embedded in the Australian psyche this week, and its mention sends shudders through most who hear it and leaves an uncomfortable sense of numbness and insecurity. That’s not new to Port Arthur. Little more than a century ago, the name evoked fear and horror to most who heard it. Now its back. We are jolted back to the recognition of what Port Arthur already was – a monument to the brutal atrocities that human beings are capable of inflicting on one another.

We come together this morning as a people who gather around another stark symbol of human brutality (point to cross). And this week more than ever we need to know what that means and how we can find a faith that can enable us to find direction in a world where Port Arthur does not stand alone.

There has been a debate running for ages among the philosophers of religion about what they call the problem of evil. Basically the argument runs that the existence of evil proves that there cannot be a God who is both all-powerful and all-loving. This makes sense to some extent. An all-loving God would want to prevent the slaughter at Port Arthur and an all-powerful God would be capable of stopping it. Therefore since the slaughter was not stopped either God isn’t loving enough to care or God isn’t powerful enough to prevent it. And throughout your life you will hear a million different versions of that same argument, occasionally as a debating case and more often as an anguished cry from people wanting to know where God is in the midst of suffering. There are actually logical answers to the question, which I’m not going to bore you with here, because although they are useful in an intellectual debate, they sound utterly irrelevant and heartless when you stand at the front door of the Broad Arrow Cafe.

For the most part you might as well accept the argument, because for all intents and purposes, God is powerless to stop these things happening. You can debate what sort of powerlessness it is and whether or not that threatens our doctrines of God, but all the debates are not worth a pinch of spit when there’s a crazed gunman walking around and you’re trying to stop someone bleeding to death. All you can do is press your hand over the hole and pray, and if the gunman turns around and comes back, the prayer won’t help much either. If he points the gun at you, you may, like Steven, get a vision of heaven and experience God’s love and peace, but when the trigger is pulled you will find, like Steven, that God is powerless to stop bullets and stones. And that’s probably just as well because I for one would not worship a God who was so unjust as to single out the Christians for special protection and leave everyone else cowering under the tables.

In our gospel reading we heard Jesus say that if we know him we know what God the Father is like. From now on, he said, you do know him and you have seen him. Whoever has seen me has seen God. The Biblical scholars say that this passage is the absolute heart of the theology of John’s gospel. It spells out what we call the incarnation. God made flesh.

He doesn’t say if you have seen me you have seen an image of the Father. He doesn’t say if you have seen me you have seen something of the Father. He says if you have seen me you have seen the Father. What you see is what you get. Nothing about additions or subtractions. Nothing even about emptied of power. If you have seen me you have seen the Father. Because we have seen Jesus we know that God is loving. Because we have seen Jesus we know that God is just. Because we have seen Jesus we know that God is compassionate and merciful and self giving. But if you want a God who intervenes miraculously to divert bullets and hold back the hand of murderers, you will be disappointed. You won’t find that in Jesus. Instead you will find a man who on one reading of the story is just another victim statistic in the long blood soaked history of human violence. At best reading you will find another man throwing himself between those with murder on their minds and those who may have been the victims. At least five of the men who died last Sunday are reported to have been doing the same thing. Whether it was bullets or nails, they were powerless to stop them any other way than to thrust their bodies between the onslaught and those who they loved. There is no greater love than that. God was there in the Broad Arrow Cafe, for God is love.

But don’t despair at the powerlessness and vulnerability of the God made known to us in Jesus. Hear what else he said in our reading this morning, and remember that this conversation took place around the table the night before Jesus died, and he has just predicted his own death, his betrayal and Peter’s denial. Speaking of his imminent death he says, “Don’t be worried and upset, for I am going to prepare a place for you, and I will come back for you so that you can be where I am.” God may not have the power to prevent violence and destruction and death, BUT, God does have the power to ensure that it does not have the last word. God does have the power to ensure that death is not the end of the story. That’s what we have been celebrating in this Easter season – resurrection! But never did we need to cling to it as tightly as we do this week. And so we cling to the promise that those thirty five beautiful lives so mindlessly snuffed out last Sunday have not been snuffed out of the mind of God but will be raised back to fullness of life when death is no more and every tear is wiped away.

The trouble is, for those of us on this side of death, it all gets a bit murky there and we get very unsure. Jesus says, you know the way to the place where I am going, and it all looks very unclear and hazy and with Thomas we say, “Lord, we don’t even know where you’re going, how can we know the way to get there?” We panic when we have to step into unknown and uncertain pathways, and with Thomas we are desperate for some clarity and definition. But there is none. And the danger is that in our need we will try to create it where it isn’t. How many of the fantastical descriptions of life after death and heaven and the end of the world are the desperate attempts of insecure people to create certainty where there is none and can be none.

I spent a couple of hours this week with someone who used to go to a church a lot like ours and who now goes to a Christian Revival Centre. And she was worried about the churches like us because often we seem a bit wishy washy. We aren’t very certain about lots of things and we don’t lay down a hard line about some of the issues of personal morality and that can make the world seem all over the place and its so hard to know whether you’re on the right path. But she’s worried about the Revival Centre too, because they lay down so many hard lines that the narrow path begins to feel more like a box with no way out at all. In one place she felt there was so much freedom that she didn’t know which direction to head in. In the other, the direction is so clear that freedom has gone out the window.

I’ll tell you honestly, I really struggle with that as a pastor. I might be comfortable enough these days living with open questions and ambiguities, but there are a lot of people who don’t feel nearly as secure as me. There are a lot of people whose lives haven’t been as surrounded by security as mine and who have far greater needs for something they can be sure about and something that doesn’t change with the times and keep sliding around under your feet every time you think you’ve got a firm footing. And I struggle to know how to adequately support those people, because I can’t bring myself to be intellectually dishonest and pretend to be absolutely and utterly convinced about things that the Bible seems to be still wrestling with.

You probably think I’ve gotten off the topic here. What has this got to do with John 14 and Port Arthur? Let me show you the connection. Firstly Port Arthur. If you’ve been reading any of the accounts of the gunman’s life, you’ll know of his strange relationship with a woman named Helen Harvey who was thirty five years his senior. The descriptions from people who knew them included lines like, “He always walked obediently behind her to the shops. She was like a sergeant-major. I reckon he needed that kind of direction in his life.” “She had total control over him, giving direction to his life. When she died in the car crash he lost that direction.”

How many people who are desperate for some clear direction in life get ripped off and exploited by people who are only too willing to step into their need and give them some clear direction, saying “Trust me, I’ll show you the way,” with no intention of enabling them to grow up into self-reliance. And it happens in the church too. “Trust me. God has spoken to me, and he wants you to do this, this and this. And if you don’t God will punish you.” And do they envisage a day when you won’t need their guidance any more. Not likely. And what happens if the bond is suddenly broken; you’re kicked out of the church or the pastor is jailed for tax fraud or something? “When she died in the car crash he lost that direction.” Lost, confused and damaged people. Sometimes even potentially dangerous people. If the only thing certain that gave direction and meaning to life is gone, then maybe nobody else’s life means anything either.

Not many lose the plot that badly. Mostly we’re just left with Thomas saying “Lord, we don’t know where you’re going, how can we know how to get there.” Jesus’ answer is so simple isn’t it. “I am the way. I am the way, the truth and the life. If you want to get to God, you get there by me.” It’s so simple. You don’t have to know the way so long as you know that I know the way, he says, Just follow me. Even if you don’t know where I am going, if you follow me you will end up where I am going. But you’ve got to trust me enough to follow.

You see following someone is not necessarily wrong, and it’s not a sign of weakness. The question is how do you choose who to follow. Do you follow the one who claims to know all the answers, who has the explanation for every mystery and claims complete control over your life? Or do you follow the one whose touch has given you new hope and confidence in yourself, and who has proven his love by laying down his life for you?

It’s a very different experience, and in some ways the former can seem more secure. Jesus said that the path that leads to eternal life is a narrow path. That’s a favourite verse of those who like to control the rules for others. But Jesus did not describe the edges of the path. Crowds like the Revival Centre are very good at describing in exact detail the edges of the path. They always know exactly what things will tip you over the edge. So did the pharisees who were always reprimanding Jesus for joining hands with people who were supposedly off the path. Jesus did not say you’ll stay on the narrow path by having an intimate knowledge of the edges of the path, he said I am the way and so you’ll stay on the path by following me. And if you’re following me you won’t need to know where the edges of the path are. Sometimes the path will pass through the darkest valleys, and you may feel very insecure. You may feel that your torch is barely bright enough to make out Jesus’ back in front of you. You certainly can’t make out the edges of the path. “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

This week all Australia has certainly travelled through the valley of death. Some have had to stare it in the face. Some have been horrifically swallowed up by it. All of us feel insecure when its darkness closes in. No matter how deeply and maturely we trust in Christ and determine to follow him, we all find our steps trembling when we find him striding purposefully into the valley and into the face of crazed men with blood on their hands and murder in their hearts. To a greater or lesser extent we all get like Thomas at that point and feel sure we don’t know where Jesus is going or how to get there. But we do. Just follow Jesus. And while I pray that none of you ever have to face what the diners at the Broad Arrow Cafe faced last Sunday, each of you will some day reach the point on the path where following Jesus leads into the darkest, murkiest and most uncertain valley of all – the valley of death. And at that point, no matter how sure you are about the path here, you will know nothing of what you are about to face except that you are following Jesus and that he has negotiated a safe course through it.

“Don’t be worried and upset, for I am going to prepare a place for you, and I will come back for you so that you can be where I am.” God may not have the power to prevent death, BUT, God does have the power to negotiate a way through it and out into the sunshine of resurrection! And so this week as we shudder beneath the chilling shadow of death, we cling to the promise that when our time comes, we too with those thirty five will not be snuffed out of the mind of God but will be raised back to fullness of life when death is no more and every tear is wiped away.