The latest request put to me for a sermon is the most challenging so far: it is to preach on ‘Symbols and Ultimate Reality’. The example offered was the golden crowns of heaven. I think we have largely outgrown those particular wish-fulfilment symbols; early Christians were plagued with persecution, and needed all the consolation they could get, but we are not, and need not take the book of Revelation as literally true.
Actually, most of our religious language is symbolic. The problem is to identify the substance behind it. For instance, whatever you think about the Virgin Birth, it is clear that, though God is infinite love, he has no sex and in eternity is no older than Jesus; the relationship between them is therefore not like that between father and son, though it may have felt like it to the human Jesus, as it does, in a different way, to us.
The implication of the subject given me is that we ought to concentrate on Ultimate Reality instead of symbols. What is Ultimate Reality? In the first place, clearly, it is what we call God. What do we know of God? We are usually advised to look for him in revelation, tradition, and experience. The best revelation of God we have had is Jesus Christ, which is why I am a Christian, but I do not pretend that it is easy to disentangle a clear picture of who and what Jesus was from two thousand years of obfuscation. The Gospel-writers had their individual prejudices and specific audiences, and produced differing accounts. S Paul and other New Testament writers similarly interpreted what they knew of Jesus in various ways. As the Church developed it responded to the demands of its day with complex doctrinal and disciplinary innovations which had nothing directly to do with Jesus Christ, so that today his image is presented to the world in many different ways. It seems to me that though the revelation of Jesus Christ must be our primary inspiration, the choice of what kind of Jesus to accept as our guide is very much a matter of what church you happen to go to and of individual temperament and intuition. Thus, although I do not accept the fundamentalist model of Jesus, full of rules and condemnation, I do not really know how to refute it because we have no certain description of him. For me, the clearest windows into Ultimate Reality in the New Testament are the Gospel and the First Epistle named after John. These hardly pretend to be chronicles; they provide little more than a series of meditations on the life and teaching of Jesus and his relationship to God, but I feel they offer the most convincing portrait of him, as at the same time divine and human. I find the most inspiring thing about Jesus the concept of God coming to earth. But Paul, and with him many Christians, thought that the most important thing about Jesus was his sacrificial death. It suggests that finally love involves suffering and it emphasizes the destructive violence and cunning of humanity beings. The Resurrection shows that God’s love is active in the world and can defeat violence and ensure that death is not the end. It promises grace, confirms hope, and offers the opportunity of a personal relationship with God.
I do not propose to go into further detail about revelation, though I do not pretend that I have said all there is to say. As for tradition, I am not in any doubt that today’s Eucharist is a means of grace, an expression of the relationship between God and humanity and a promise for the future; it also reflects the way we in the Church depend on each other.
Finally, experience. I have told you before that I have had some mystical experiences, through nature, and through the Blessed Sacrament, not often, but a few. I do not know what value to place on these; I do not trust my own mind that much. But I would cite the insights which great human beings have given me. through art and music and literature, Piero della Francesca, Mozart, and Shakespeare. To these I would add experience of the Creation, which seems to me to demonstrate very definitely the power, the ingenuity, and the love of its Creator. I do not regard that as incompatible with Darwinianism.
And beyond all this is something more, a sense of mystery. There are aspects of reality which I cannot describe today, but which I believe to be just as real and ultimate as those I can. I am certain that there is much behind all this, and I think I shall find out more about it when I am dead. This is, of course, in the context of my belief in a wise and loving, though powerful, God, whom Jesus called Father.
As a summary of ultimate reality, the foregoing may seem fragmentary. I realize that I have said less than I might have done about the significance of symbols. The fact that they are not precisely what they communicate does not mean that they are not worth using and thinking about. Many, probably most, Christians might dazzle you with more detailed accounts. But I am grateful to have found a raft to hang on to in the sea of life and I do not envy those with the self-confidence to construct for themselves the odd ocean-going liner.
The other day I suggested to you that God was so careful of our freedom as individual spirits that he sedulously avoided proofs of the nature of ultimate reality, in case they forced us into a spiritual straitjacket. If this is so, it means that you are personally free, within limits, to form your own image of ultimate reality. If it is not so, it may mean that I have missed out on important information. I am afraid it is too late now for me to do anything about that.
Amen
Alan Goodison