Skip to main content

I Know Nothing!

1 John 4.7-12

If only all people of religious faith could take to heart 1 John chapter 4 verse 8: ‘The unloving know nothing of God, for God is love.’

So often people of faith come across to the rest of the world, that is to uncommitted people, to agnostics and atheists, as angry, impatient, self-righteous, hyper-critical of others, unpleasant, even hateful. And when religious people come across like that - whether it’s you and I, or other people in the media and so on - it gives entirely the wrong impression of God, for God is love. Everyone who loves is a child of God - that is someone made in God’s image, whether they realise it or not. But the unloving know nothing of God.

In an episode of the famous television comedy Fawlty Towers Manuel the Waiter is told by the proprietor of the hotel, Basil Fawlty, that if anyone asks him about a little secret flutter Basil has had on the horses Manuel is to say, ‘I know nothing.’

Unfortunately one of the guests is in on the secret, too. He is a long-standing elderly resident called The Major. Cornered by Sybil, his ferocious wife, who suspects that he has been gambling again, Basil is forced to ask the Major to hide his winnings in his jacket pocket. But later, of course, when Sybil has gone, the Major can’t remember being given the money and refuses to hand it over.

‘Tell him,’ Basil says to Manuel. ‘Tell him that the money is mine, that it’s the money I won on the horses.’ But, just as he was instructed, Manuel will only say, ‘I know nothing.’

Well, a great many religious people are likely the clueless Manuel. When it comes to God’s love we know nothing. In fact, the God we love becomes - if we’re not careful - a figment of our own imaginations. We conjure up the God we want to believe in, a God who approves of us and disapproves of people who are different from us.

Of course, God has never been seen by anyone, so it’s an understandable mistake. But the true nature of God is revealed by Jesus’ death on the cross. His sacrificial death, which he willingly entered into out of love for us - even before we began to love him back - shows us what God is really like. And if God has thus loved us,we also must love one another if we want God to dwell in us, and if we want his love to be made perfect in our lives as it was in Jesus.

John comes to these conclusions because - even since writing the Gospel - he has had the misfortune to minister to a divided church where people who claimed to be closer to God than everyone else were sowing hatred and mistrust instead of love. People like that, says John, know nothing of God.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I don't believe in an interventionist God

Matthew 28.1-10, 1 Corinthians 15.1-11 I like Nick Cave’s song because of its audacious first line: ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’. What an unlikely way to begin a love song! He once explained that he wrote the song while sitting at the back of an Anglican church where he had gone with his wife Susie, who presumably does believe in an interventionist God - at least that’s what the song says. Actually Cave has always been very interested in religion. Sometimes he calls himself a Christian, sometimes he doesn’t, depending on how the mood takes him. He once said, ‘I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it.’ But his lyrics often include religious themes and he has also said that any true love song is a song for God. So maybe it’s no coincidence that he began this song in such an unlikely way, although he says the inspiration came to him during the sermon. The vicar was droning on about something when the first line of the song just popped into his ...
14 comments
Read more

Luther and Loyola

James 1:17-27 Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 Within Christianity there has always been a tension between two poles. At one end of the spectrum stands Martin Luther, who said that Christian faith is about trusting in God to put us right - or make us righteous - through the saving death of Jesus. Luther came to this conclusion when he was a professor of New Testament studies in a little town in Germany called Wittenberg. One year he decided to teach his students about Paul’s letter to the Romans and that’s when it suddenly dawned upon him that Christian faith is all about trust. At the other end of the spectrum , stands someone like Ignatius Loyola the founder of the Society of Jesus. He spent a lot of his later life in crisis, first struggling to overcome severe wounds that he had suffered when he was a soldier and then during two short periods locked up in a cell by the Spanish Inquisition. He came to believe that the Christian life is a similar sort of struggle, a lifelon...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sharing the Good News With People of Other Faiths

Together with other local Christians, clergy and lay people, I find myself – from time to time – giving thought to how we share our Christian faith with people from other religious backgrounds. It is a ticklish issue, because converting from one faith to another is a huge decision to make and it may not be appropriate for everyone. Becoming a Christian is always a life changing event, but for someone from another faith background it can sometimes cause immense dislocation and hardship, including estrangement from family members and friends who cannot accept their decision. It may even cut a person off from their entire cultural heritage, so it is not something that we can expect people to enter into lightly or thoughtlessly. Nor is it likely to be easy for them to make a gradual progression or pilgrimage to Christian faith. At some point they may have to choose whether or not to make a radical break with their past, unless they decide to be secret or closet believers. And they may deci...
2 comments
Read more