When did you last see God?
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Stephen Lea

Today’s readings give us three of the most famous encounters with God in the bible. The last time I preached here, I remember we were talking about Jacob’s meeting with God by the brook Jabbok. To-day we look at the different ways in which Isaiah, Peter and Paul encountered God. In planning to-day’s service, I rearranged the traditional order of the readings, so as to preserve the historical order of the events described, because the historical sequence reflects some very important developments in our understanding of what it is to see God. We need to remember, though, that although the passage from Luke’s gospel describes events that occurred earlier than those the passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthian describes, Paul was actually writing two or three decades earlier than Luke - a quarter of a century in which people’s understanding of the role and mission of Jesus changed quite a bit.

Differences between the three accounts

The three accounts represent three very different ways of seeing God. They belong very clearly to the traditions of the Old Testament, of the earthly ministry of Jesus, and of the post-Easter life of the church. By comparing them, we see rather clearly what it is to have a “revealed religion” - one that says that something unique happened at a particular point in time, so that during that time, things were different from the way they had been before or the way they are now, but also so that since that time nothing has ever been quite the same.

The prophet whose writings are preserved in the first 39 chapters of the book of Isaiah is usually referred to as “First Isaiah” or “Isaiah of Jerusalem”. He lived in the 8th check century BC, not long before the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians, but before the southern kingdom, Judah, had been defeated by the Babylonians and its people taken off into exile. He’s quite different from the writer of the second part of the book, which includes the famous “servant songs”; those were written to comfort and inspire the exiled Jewish community in Babylon. Isaiah of Jerusalem lived in the troubled times when the little kingdom of Judah was looking increasingly vulnerable, as a seemingly endless series of powerful empires grew up to the north and east, and Judah seemed likely to be extinguished as they expanded to challenge the declining power of Egypt to the south. We tend to pass over the opening line, “In the year that King Uzziah died...”, but it’s significant: Uzziah, known as Azariah in the books of Kings and Chronicles, was the strongest and wisest king who had arisen in Judah since the death of Solomon and the division of the kingdom, and honest enough to carve out a policy that might preserve the kingdom. With Uzziah’s death, Judah was plunged into uncertainty. Isaiah lived in the capital of Judah, Jerusalem; and he was closely associated with the temple. So his vision of God was a temple vision. He had, no doubt, gone to the temple as he often did, to worship the unseen God, whom the Israelites imagined as taking his seat on the ark of the covenant. But there to his amazement, he saw the temple as it were opened to heaven; the earthly temple though but a pale reflection of its heavenly counterpart nonetheless providing the point of contact from which his spirit could soar up to the eternal.

How different for Peter! He had no intention of encountering or worshipping God that morning. He and his workmates were simply returning home after a fruitless night. All he saw was the wandering preacher, the Nazarean, who had been around the village lately, standing on the shore watching him - as people will stand on the shore watching sailors, and fisherman. And as people who stand and watch sailors, or fishermen, will, the preacher asked a stupid question - a harmless conversational gambit, “What luck, guys?” - but galling in the extreme when you have had no luck at all. And then he makes a crack about trying the other side of the boat. The biggest puzzle in this whole story is why Peter and his friends took Jesus’s advice; maybe he already had a reputation as a miracle worker, maybe the consquences of going back to their wives to say they had caught nothing were sufficiently dire that they were game for one more throw anyway. The rest, as they say, is history. Of course Peter did not exactly know that he had met God that morning; he did not even decide that he had met God’s anointed one, the Messiah, the Christ; that realisation came later. What he did know was that he had met someone quite extraordinary; notice how he uses the word “Lord” - the Greek word Luke uses (êõñéïò) could mean no more than “Mr”, but was also the word used in the worship of the Roman Emperor, when people were commanded to say, “Caesar is Lord”.

Different again for Paul. Notice how in this, his own account of his encounter with the risen Christ, he gives us no detail at all. The story of the Damascus Road conversion comes only in Luke’s, later, description, in Acts; and despite the fact that Luke writes as though he travelled with Paul for a time, we do not really know how close the two men were. But Paul had, I think, told the Corinthians the story of his conversion, when he was staying with them before this letter was written. He refers to it as though it would have been familiar to them. And we too have the story, as Luke has given it to us, in the backs of our minds. Paul’s belief is that his vision of the risen Christ is a rare and strange privilege; he implies that it will not happen again. “And last of all...” In one way, we are back to the Old Testament world of Isaiah in the temple. Peter meets a man walking along the beach, making small talk and offering unwanted advice. Paul, like Isaiah, has a heavenly vision. And yet similarities All the same, there are similarities between the three experiences that are much more significant than the differences.

None of these three people has a mere “religious experience”. I think we have all met the kind of person who goes out of their way to get religious experiences. Once they would have been pious churchgoers; nowadays they are more likely to be New-Agers, or amateur Buddhists. None of these three people were on a spiritual trip, though. They were going about their different kinds of business, that’s all. For Isaiah and Paul it was, admittedly, religious business, but for Peter it was simply his everyday work. And when God does reveal himself to him, they don’t revel in the privilege: they are literally overwhelmed, partly by the greatness of God, but mainly by their own unworthiness and sinfulness in the presence of that greatness. All of them, in fact, say things that are almost stupid - as we are apt to when something quite overwhelming happens to us.

But that is not the end of the matter. It turns out that God has not appeared to them to prove his own existence, or to allow them to feel superior to ordinary religious folk, or even to satisfy their deep spiritual hunger. He appears to them because he has something to say, and something for them to do. And so the first thing he does is to deal with their sense of unworthiness and guilt; graciously and not impatiently, but firmly and without wasting undue time. And then he gets on with the business of the meeting, as it were: he gives them a job

How was it for you?

There’s a Trinitarian sermon struggling to get out of this one. Isaiah has an encounter with God the father, the all-powerful, all-worshipful creating God as the ancient Israelites had learned to understand him. Peter has an encounter with the Son - the Son of Man as Jesus described himself, the Son of the Living God as Peter later called him, but a fully human figure. Paul ought to have an encounter with the Spirit... but he doesn’t. He meets the risen, living Christ.

But of course Paul did have an encounter with the Spirit - later. And that in a way is the point of our text. His encounter with Christ was an exception - given to him “as one born out of due time”. He recognises that this is not how it is for the Corinthians he is writing to. But they do have the experience of the Spirit: both Paul’s letters and the Acts make clear that in the earliest church, powerful experiences of the presence of the Holy Spirit within them were the expected accompaniment of conversion and baptism.

Paul is not saying that his experience of the risen Christ is how it should be for the Corinthians. It was given to him for a set purpose - to consecrate him as an apostle. But it isn’t what they should be looking for. We are indeed post Easter, and post Pentecost. God has not gone back to being a heavenly vision.

Is, then, the presence of God to be sought in the feelings of fire and wind of Pentecost, perhaps even in speaking in tongues? Paul did not think so, as we know from other parts of his letters. That would be to forget, to undo, the advance in understanding that occurs from Isaiah to Peter. It would be lose our grasp on the Trinitarian sermon, which is beginning to wriggle out and take shape inside this one. Isaiah saw God the Father, high and lifted up; Peter talked with God the Son, standing on the beach. The Corinthians had experienced God the Holy Spirit - as the living, vital force within themselves, leading them to patience, to kindness, to long-suffering, to love. They had learned to recognise those fruits of the Spirit in their fellow Christians - even though those fellow Christians were, as they still tend to be to-day, fallible and prone to backsliding.

When did you last see God? The lesson of my Trinitarian sermon is that it is not so long ago. The Quakers have a phrase for it: there is “that of God” in every person. When did you last search your own heart? When did you last look with Christian love on your neighbour? That is when you saw God.

But there is a corollary. God did not reveal himself to Isaiah, or to Peter, or to Paul, just to make them feel good. He revealed himself because he had a job for them each to do. If God is to be seen in our neighbour - then maybe our neighbour has a job for us to do. And maybe it is God’s work.