What God Is Really Like (June 8, 2025)
Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104:24-34, 35b; Romans 8:14-17; John 14:6-17
I will ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, for it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, because he abides with you, and is in you.
For the last several weeks of the Easter season we have been taking our gospel readings from the very long section of John’s gospel describing what Jesus said and did at the Last Supper. John breezes over the famous part of the Last Supper, the part we know in Da Vinci’s painting, where Jesus hands over the bread to the disciples as his body, where Jesus shares his lifeblood with his disciples and commands them to continue to do this in his memory. John dwells a bit longer on Jesus washing the feet of his disciples as a final lesson in the glory of service and love for one another.
And then John reports to us how Jesus explains to his disciples that he is doing these things to reveal to us what God is really like. It is not simply that his way leads to truth and life for us in this world, which it does. But his way of love and service are mirrors of God’s way, God’s truth, and God’s life. This is the way that leads to the Father of all, the transcendent God at the source of all that is, beyond all change and death and decay, the One beyond all comprehension. Jesus says that he does only what the Father does, that he and the Father are one, and so if we know the way and the truth and the life of Jesus, we know the way and the truth and the life of God. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”
And then, we are told, the apostle Philip interrupts Jesus. Look, Jesus, he says. This is all very well and good, but what we really want is to know God. Just show us the Father, and that’ll be enough for us. Could you please just do that? And you can just see Jesus responding [with a face-palm, then starting to speak but going silent].
Philip, you have missed the whole point of these last three years. Everything that I have done, everything that I have said, everything that we have experienced together, has been showing you the Father. Has been showing you who God is and what God is like. That God is compassion and mercy and healing and forgiveness and freedom and abundance and light and love. There is nothing more to God beyond what you have seen and heard from me. No other hidden mystery in God than this love with which I have loved you.
And now, Jesus continues, that my earthly human life is coming to an end, this is no cause for you to be sad, as if the revelation of who God really is and what God is really like is coming to an end. No. In a way, the revelation of who God really is and what God is really like is only just beginning. Because when I have returned to the Father, the Father will send the Spirit to you, and you – all of you -- will become my body in the world enlivened by that Spirit. And you can go to places that I, the one human being Jesus, could never have gone in my one lifetime. You will endure in centuries that I, the one human being Jesus, could not have lived long enough to teach. And in those places and times you will do the works that I do, and indeed even greater works than these. And more and more people will come to know who God is and what God is like.
You will be going into a world that does not know that God is compassion and mercy and healing and forgiveness and freedom and abundance and light and love. You will continue to live in a world that does not practice compassion but judgment and condemnation , a world that assumes that God does the same. You will continue to live in a world that practices not mercy but power and dominance; that practices not healing and forgiveness but retribution and punishment; that does not confer freedom but captivity; that is ruled by scarcity and not abundance; that does not spread light and love but rewards self-aggrandizing deeds done in the dark. This world will not receive the Spirit because it neither sees nor know him – but you will receive the Spirit because you do know him. Because I have showed you what God is really like and now you know what to look for. Now you are ready for the Spirit to abide in you and to be in you. And now the kingdoms of this world will begin to be transformed into the kingdom of God.
And when the Spirit begins to dwell in the disciples of Jesus, the first thing people notice – according to our text today from the Acts of the Apostles – the first thing people notice is that, no matter who they are or where they come from, it is as if they are being spoken to in their native language, in their mother tongue, in a way that feels completely normal and natural to them. Even Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, and all the rest – all of them recognize the good news as something closer to their hearts than anything they have ever heard before. As if they were all really, deep down, children of the one God – which of course they are. And so when they hear the good news that God really is compassion and mercy and healing and forgiveness and freedom and abundance and light and love, they feel that this knowledge is part of their own deepest memory and truth and identity – even Parthians and Medes and Elamites. Even you and me.
As Paul says to the Romans, when the Spirit is praying within us, speaking to the Father, it is revealing to us that we are God’s beloved children, inheritors of the kingdom of God along with Christ, if we allow ourselves and our lives to be shaped by the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus. Because Jesus showed us who God really is and what God is really like, and therefore who we really are – all of us, even the Parthians and the Medes and the Elamites among us.
Pentecost is the day that Parthians and Medes and Elamites heard the news of who God is and what God is like, and that news made them feel not like strangers having to learn someone else’s tongue to understand some weird, secret knowledge given only to an elect few – but like the beloved children of God they were always created to be. This news astonished and delighted them, this news that God is compassion and mercy and healing and forgiveness and freedom and abundance and light and love.
And there are still so, so many people longing to hear this news. To feel, perhaps for the first time, that they are not exiles but beloved children of God – the joy of a Pride weekend, the relief of experiencing forgiveness, the hope that comes from receiving an unexpected gift of compassion or love, the freedom that comes from no longer feeling alone with a burden too heavy to carry.
Jesus says that the whole purpose of his life and ministry was to show human beings who God is and what God is like, so that we might know who we are – beloved children of the One who is nothing if not compassion and mercy and healing and forgiveness and freedom and abundance and light and love. And the Holy Spirit comes to us not only so that we can hear and know this news, but that we might share it as well and so get to participate ourselves in the work of Jesus and in the very life of God. That is what being church is all about. Even if we are Parthians or Medes or Elamites. Doing what Jesus did and even more in the power of the Holy Spirit. Come, Holy Spirit, come.