A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on September 14, 2025 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Reading for address: John 17: 20-24
I want you to imagine two great arches, one inside the other. The inner arch I’ll call ‘The story we usually tell.’ The outer, larger, arch I’m going to call ‘The more encompassing story.’
The story we usually tell goes like this. There’s a man and a woman in a garden. They eat an apple – and everything goes wrong from then on. God tries to fix it with Noah and frankly a bunch of complete animals. Then God gets serious with Abraham and Moses and a covenant. And to be fair, that lasts 39 books of the Bible, but somehow things remain sub-optimal. So God sends Jesus, and Jesus dies on the cross and all the bad stuff goes away. Which means when we die, we’ll be fine. God’s got this. That’s the inner arch.
Here’s the outer arch – the more encompassing story. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are totally absorbed by utter adoration, complete belonging, sheer joy. That perfect pattern of love for one another becomes effervescent: the Trinity wants an other to share this joy, an other for the Trinity to be gloriously with. So the Trinity’s shaped to be with that other. And we call this the incarnation. And that triggers creation, because there needs to be a theatre in which God, the incarnate one, whom we call Jesus, meets that other. And because Jesus needs to belong, there’s an Israel out of which Jesus comes, as much as Jesus comes from God. And because creation is finite, and nothing in it lasts forever, God prepares a time when the being-with-us that God embodies in Jesus will ultimately become a forever thing, and we and everyone else and the whole creation will be taken up into forever to be with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, which is what we call heaven. That’s the outer arch.
Now you can begin to see what’s wrong with the inner arch. If Jesus becoming incarnate is the most important thing about God and humankind, isn’t it a problem that it only comes about by an unfortunate accident? And if Jesus came to fix all the things wrong with the world, how come those problems seem as much with us as ever 2000 years after he came?
Both these problems come down to the same problem. The inner arch is a story all about us. What matters is our problem with the ways the world isn’t perfect; Jesus comes like a plumber we summoned to fix a pipe; and now we want our money back, because the pipe’s still leaking. When we turn to the outer arch, the more encompassing story, we find a story that’s all about God. It begins with God having a great time. It ends with God having a great time. It still has Jesus in the centre of the story: but Jesus doesn’t come to fix our problem. There was always going to be a Jesus, because there always has been a Jesus, from before the foundation of the world. Jesus doesn’t come like a plumber to fix our pipe: that would be to define God and the whole story by a deficit. Jesus comes because God wants to be with us.
Now in the small-arch story we usually tell, Jesus goes to Jerusalem to die. That’s because Christianity’s created a host of theories by which it explains how the cross takes away sin or destroys death or defeats evil. There’s two problems with these theories. First, as we’ve seen, they don’t work: evil, sin and death seem to be very much still with us. Second, they distort the picture of God that Jesus gives us. Jesus shows us a God who created the world to be with us and will go to any lengths to be with us and will ultimately be with us always. These theories turn that God into either a God subject to some external law of justice or honour or, even worse, a God committed to exacting horrific punishment: in other words, some kind of a monster.
I want to draw your attention to something you might not have noticed. Four times in the New Testament we hear the phrase ‘before the foundation of the world.’ We find it twice in John chapter 17, and also in Ephesians and First Peter. It means that God’s intention to become incarnate in Jesus was the reason for creation. So Jesus couldn’t have come to fix the results of the fall – because God’s decision to become incarnate in Jesus was made before there ever was a fall. Jesus came to be with us in time so that we could be with him forever.
The fact that Jesus didn’t come to die to fix the sin problem doesn’t make the cross less important. It makes it more important. Look at it this way. God creates the world to be with us in Christ. God prepares to bring the world finally to an end and to be with us forever. The whole story is about being with, beginning, middle and end. If Jesus can’t stay on the cross, even in the face of being abandoned by the Father, the whole initiative to be with us now and always goes up in smoke.
The cross is the ultimate test of whether God is serious about us. And what it shows in the face of agony, desertion, abandonment and isolation, is that God is so serious about being with us that God is willing to jeopardise being with God. Jesus is so committed to being with us he endures separation from the Father. And the Father is so committed to Jesus being with us he endures not being with Jesus. And in the great mystery of being with, the Spirit remains with the Father and the Son. And two days later the Spirit reunites the Father with the Son and God with us in the resurrection.
You know the hymn Be thou my vision? You ever checked out the penultimate line of that hymn? Heart of my own heart, whatever befall. That’s what the cross means. That’s what the incarnation means. From the foundation of the world. From the dying Jesus. And forever. God is singing to us, ‘Heart of my own heart, whatever befall.’ Whatever befall. I am with you always. Forever.
