A Sermon by The Very Reverend Dr Trevor James
Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral
Text: John 14:23-29 When Paradigms Shift
Preached at Cathedral Choral Matins (Easter 6) 5 May 2013
If you are someone who likes to think in clear sequential narrative terms, the second lesson this Sunday might be confusing. This Sunday we are getting set to celebrate the Ascension and, soon after that, Pentecost. But in this morning’s gospel we are hearing (or reading) a narrative that (in John’s gospel) chronologically precedes the crucifixion: so we are hearing a farewell that belongs to the Last Supper – but, in our liturgical present, we are a community still rejoicing in Easter and trying to make sense of the resurrection. It feels odd.
Yet as an Easter people, a people now bracing ourselves for the Ascension, this tension in the sequence is essential. God has not stopped working with his people and with what is being done in Jesus.
Forget chronology for the nonce: the Risen Christ tells us that he is going away! Imagine the impact of that disclosure on the disciples. Can you?
Might it be something like: What? Going away? Where? You’ve only just got out of the grave. You’re still popping in and out of closed rooms and through locked doors; coming up beside us on the highway; cooking breakfast on the beach! You’re bending all the laws of physics as we know them! What do you mean you’re going away again? And what’s this about our not coming with you?
We can understand the emotions here. The fear of abandonment, of being left alone and desolate; the fear of being disconnected from the one in whom we have set our trust; the fear of being orphaned. All such images are emotionally understandable and easy to identify with; we all carry them in some form.
And yet, a fresh and intolerable uncertainty must now be faced: the risen Christ must depart from this world, this dimension of time and space. A new paradigm is now emerging. A new way of being in the world is imminent. On the surface, the world appears unchanged; but the inner reality is shifting. Christ must ascend, must leave – so that the disciples can become what they were called to be; and so that the church can come to be.
The intellectual, spiritual and emotional trauma of changing paradigms should not be underestimated. When the world as we think we understand it changes, we can be deeply traumatised. The world ceases to feel dependable and trustworthy. We no longer feel at home in it. We feel we are being drawn into a black hole. We struggle to make sense of this new reality.
The history of science can be traced through moments when paradigms shifted and caused immense alarm and despair. I understand that Thomas Kuhn defined the idea of paradigm shift in a ground-breaking work The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962). The demise of the Ptolemaic model of the universe in the face of Copernicus’s discoveries would have been an immense paradigm-shift; but that is now too distant for us to imagine the full impact of that shift in thinking. In the 19th century the debates that responded to Darwin’s discoveries marked a paradigm shift. In modern popular theology one might reasonably talk about a paradigm shift occurring with the ‘Death of God’ debate in the 1960s when radically different ways of thinking and talking about God became very topical. For some that shift would have been threatening and painful. Today the ‘explosion’ of the internet and technology has within a decade virtually ‘shrunk’ the world and accelerated a multitude of changes to how we order every aspect of our lives
So this morning we stand alongside the disciples whose way of understanding the world has not only changed utterly – but even what they think they have believed seems to becoming ‘undone’. This is a turning-point for our faith – as something new emerges, so the disciples face what feels like yet a further bereavement. T.S. Eliot in The Journey of the Magi (c.1930) voices the confusion and anguish of an experience of this kind:
… but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
On this Sunday before Ascension we, with the disciples, are called to a deeper faith, a deeper way of being in the world. Paul in his epistles talks about the new creation; the birth pangs and uncertainty as to just what God is doing; and the writer of the Revelation can only use the visionary apocalyptic imagery to suggest a new and greater glory emerging – far beyond what we can see at any one moment in this world. So today we stand with those first disciples: uncertain, confused even; but waiting and hoping for what God is bringing into the world.
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