Our gospel reading today consists of stories of Jesus’ disputes with the Pharisees. The stories are not as haphazard as they might at first appear. The Pharisees and the Sadducees were themselves struggling for their place in the socio-economic life of the nation. The Sadducees interpreted the Torah strictly but expected only priests to keep it entirely.
A can of soup – what is it food or drink – I say it is drink but my wife says it is food. It goes to show the difficulty we face in defining even physical things. If I say I love my family, what do I mean? If you say, I love my family do you mean the same as me? It is even more difficult to define non-physical things, things like love, which we can neither measure nor can we prove they exist in the same way that the can of soup exists.
Theology like any other ‘ology’ attempts to describe what is there, it doesn’t seek to invent, or to create, it only tries to use language to explore experience and share understanding. And like any other ‘ology’ it is always woefully inadequate. For what it tries to describe, what it seeks to communicate, are experiences that transcend language, that take it past breaking point. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
This morning’s Gospel reading was the beginning of the end of John’s farewell discourse by Jesus to his disciples, the long soliloquy preparing them for his death and for his glorification, and their future. In the speech Jesus deals with his relationship to God and his relationship to the disciples and their relationship to the world.
We celebrate the Ascension on Thursday, so it is logical that we hear some more of Jesus’s parting words to his disciples as written by John in the context of the last Supper. These words are very personal, they are words from a teacher to his pupils, from a master to his disciples, from a Lord to his people. At least that is how they begin.
The story of the Ethiopian eunuch meeting with Philip on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza is an extraordinary one. The story reveals a surprising amount of detail concerning the eunuch. It tells us that he is a man held in esteem, he has charge of his nation’s Treasury, but although he has servants, at least a driver for his carriage, he is himself still under authority.
