It is one of the more attractive features of British government that the Prime Minister lives in a rather modest little town house in Westminster – except of course that it’s not quite true. There is a little flat at the top of 10 Downing Street, but it’s not big enough for a family, so the Camerons will actually live rather more comfortably at No 11, as both his predecessors have done. Nevertheless, when it was time to leave, we saw Gordon and Sarah Brown with their two little boys emerging from the front door of No 10, shortly to be followed by David and Samantha Cameron being ushered in through the door of the house they are not going to live in. It’s all very odd. We like to imagine the Prime Minister and his family living something like a normal family life behind the ordinary townhouse door of No 10, when the reality has long since ceased to correspond to the image.
Although our TV screens show us families going in and out of 10 Downing Street, I think we can be reasonably confident that the desire to live there has more to do with exercising the power that is associated with that address than with anything you and I would recognise as home. Coming home, going home, being at home are frequent and powerful images in our Bible, because they tell us something very important about our relationship with God. The exiled Israelites to whom Ezekiel was speaking were full of a longing to return home to ‘the land that I gave to your ancestors’ (Ez 36.28). At the same time, Ezekiel understood that God was yearning for them to come home to Him, to come home to the relationship so often expressed in the Old Testament in the words of the promise that ‘you shall be my people and I will be your God’ (Ez 36.28). All too often the people of Israel would interpret that promise in terms of occupying or re-occupying the territory – stepping through the door of No 10, if we adopt that analogy. But Ezekiel is trying to tell them not to confuse the superficial reality of territorial occupation with the underlying truth about being at home in the land given by God. Home is not defined by land, or a house, still less by a door, but gy how we relate to one another when the door shuts behind us. Ezekiel’s message to his contemporaries – and to us – is that if we are to be at home in the land which God has given us, we have to undergo major surgery. In place of the heart of stone with which we may have made our way in the world, we need a compassionate heart of flesh, and that heart needs to be animated by a new spirit, the spirit of God himself, which will inspire us to follow in His Way.
The radical transformation that Ezekiel glimpsed was to find perfect expression in the life of Jesus. Here at last, in one in whom all that is most wonderfully divine co-inhered with all that is most wonderfully human, here was one whose heart of flesh was utterly and completely inspired by the God of all compassion, the God whom he knew as Father. It is no easy matter to be at home with God. As soon as we think about it, we feel uncomfortable about all the things we have done wrong, which we would rather he didn’t know about. We understand that the evil that nailed Jesus to the Cross, and the love for us and for all mankind that did not flinch from such a death – all of this is entailed in the narrative of our salvation – but we reject as cruel and repulsive the picture of an angry and unyielding God demanding the cruel death of an innocent victim to pay the price of sin. We cannot reconcile such a picture with the God of Love that meets us in the gospels, and especially in John’s gospel. No, the truth has to be that only an act of supreme Love, not demanded but freely given, could break the vicious circle of sin and evil, that otherwise takes us all down into a hell of ever-deepening resentment, revenge, and loveless misery. Thank God for the spark of human compassion in so many people that often acts to mitigate the worst effects of that vicious circle, alleviating the misery of many. But that’s not enough. As Christians we believe there is a grander meta-narrative.
Our gospel reading gives us the closing words of the prayer that Jesus used as he sat with his disciples after the last supper, the prayer that animated him as he went to his death. In John’s profound understanding of Jesus, the great prayer for unity is not primarily about healing the divisions of the Christian church, though that was already an issue in John’s day, and one which we should take to heart. No, the unity for which Jesus prays is far more profound than that. He wants us to share with him and with one another the unity of love perfectly given, and love perfectly received, that characterised his relationship with his Father. His obedience was never a question of being told what to do, but rather of discovering the common mind that he shared with his Father. He does not therefore pray, as Ezekiel does, that we should follow his statutes and be careful to observe his ordinances (Ez. 36.27), but rather that we should share in the unity of love which bound him to his Father. The last words of his prayer are that ‘the love with which you (Father) have loved me may be in them, and I in them’ (John17.26). So, not Ezekiel’s heart of stone, not even Ezekiel’s heart of flesh, but the compassionate heart of God himself, the very spirit of the God who is love, responding to the love of God the Father in the same spirit of perfect unity that Jesus himself knew.
That is the ideal, from which of course we continually fall short, not because the power is not there, but because it takes us a lifetime and perhaps more than a lifetime to learn to rely upon it. It’s so difficult not to trust our own instincts, our own complex games of triangulation, so different from the steady flame of Love that animates the Trinity. How are we to be changed? Jesus knew how difficult we would find it to rely on the promptings of the Spirit whom we cannot see, when all out instincts would lead us to rely on our own sharp tongues and elbows, our guile, our negotiating skills. It’s the personal chemistry that we trust in the end. The world does not know God, but Jesus knows His Father, and he has made known to his disciples his Father’s name – that is to say his nature which is Love. And now he prays that the same spirit of love will be in them, so that the people they encounter will also come to know the love of God.
We see that happening in the Acts of the Apostles. Despite the cruelty and injustice to which Paul and Silas have been exposed in Philippi, not least at the hands of the jailer, their first act on being miraculously set free by an earthquake is not to make good their own escape, but to save the jailer. The love which they have shown, because they have known Jesus, transforms the jailer’s life, and causes him in his turn to discover and embrace the spirit of Christ. Not only does he come to faith and seek baptism; he shows his own new spirit of love by washing their wounds, and throwing a party for them. The chain reaction has already spread from Jesus to the apostles, from the apostles to Paul, from Paul and Silas to the jailer and his family – and it’s still going on, not least through the work of such organisations as Christian Aid. It is still the Spirit of God’s Love that meets people in their need, and wins their allegiance. On this Sunday after Ascension, as we wait with the apostles to celebrate at Pentecost the gift of the Spirit, we pray that the Spirit will so enter into our hearts that we too will become part of that great chain that has channelled God’s love to us and is now ready to turn our hearts of stone to hearts of flesh, as we in our turn believe in his name, and become by his grace the channels of his love to others.