Ephesians 1: 3-14

Before the Foundation of the World

I want to tell you the truth about everything in the universe and then explain why that matters for your life together at All Saints and in Child’s Hill. I want you to imagine two great arches, one inside the other. The inner arch I’ll call, ‘The story we usually tell.’ The outer, larger, arch I’m going to call, ‘The more encompassing story.’
The story we usually tell goes like this. There’s a man and a woman in a garden. They eat an apple – and everything goes wrong from then on, like earthquakes, wars, and England not winning a men’s international football trophy in 60 years. God tries to fix it with Noah and frankly a bunch of complete animals. Then God gets serious with Abraham and Moses and a covenant. And to be fair, that lasts 39 books of the Bible, but somehow things remain sub-optimal. So God sends Jesus, God from God, light from light, and Jesus dies on the cross and all the bad stuff goes away. Which means when we die, we’ll be fine. God’s got this. That’s the inner arch.
Here’s the outer arch – the more encompassing story. It goes like this. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are totally absorbed by the most wondrous things we can imagine: utter adoration, complete belonging, sheer joy. And that perfect pattern of love for one another becomes effervescent: the Trinity finds itself wanting an other to share this joy, an other for the Trinity to be gloriously with. So the Trinity’s shaped to be with that other. And we call this the incarnation, which is God being so shaped as to be in relationship beyond the Trinity. And that triggers creation, because there needs to be a theatre in which God, the incarnate one, whom we call Jesus, meets that other. And because Jesus needs to belong, there’s an Israel out of which Jesus comes, as much as Jesus comes from God. And because creation is finite, and nothing in it lasts forever (whereas God does last forever), God prepares a time when the being-with-us that God embodies in Jesus will ultimately become a forever thing, and we and everyone else and the whole creation will be taken up into forever to be with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, which is what we call glory, or heaven. That’s the outer arch.
Now as soon as I describe the more encompassing story you can begin to see what’s wrong with the inner arch, the story we usually tell. I’m not talking right now about the history and the science, how the act of creation worked and whether there really was a fall. I’m looking at two main problems. The first is, if Jesus becoming incarnate is the most important thing about God, let alone the most important thing about humankind, isn’t it a bit of a problem that it only comes about by an unfortunate accident – that’s to say the fall, which was never supposed to happen? And while we’re about it, here’s the second problem: if Jesus came to fix all the things wrong with the world, earthquakes, wars and England’s footballing woes, how come those problems seem as much with us as ever 2000 years after he came?
I want to suggest that both of these flaws come down to the same problem, and it’s the main thing that distinguishes the story we tell from the more encompassing story. The inner arch is a story all about us. It only gets interesting when we come on the scene; what matters is our problem with the ways the world isn’t perfect; Jesus comes like a plumber we summoned to fix a pipe; and now we want our money back, because the pipe’s still leaking. Now this is what I want you to notice. When we turn to the outer arch, the more encompassing story we find a story that’s all about God. It begins with God having a great time. It ends with God having a great time. It still has Jesus in the center of the story: but Jesus doesn’t come to fix our problem. Jesus comes because that’s in what we might call the DNA of God – the effervescence of the Trinity that spills over into incarnation and creation. This is the key point: there was always going to be a Jesus, because there always has been a Jesus, from before the foundation of the world. Jesus doesn’t come like a plumber to fix our pipe: that would be to define God and the whole story by a deficit. Jesus comes because God wants to be with us. That’s to build the story around an asset – the greatest asset of all: God’s effervescent glory.
I want to draw your attention to something you might not have noticed, but turns up in today’s New Testament reading. Three times in the New Testament we hear the phrase ‘before the foundation of the world.’ We find it John chapter 17, First Peter and here in Ephesians 1. In each case it means the same thing. It means God chose to be incarnate in Jesus before there was any creation. In fact, it means that God’s intention to become incarnate in Jesus was the reason for creation. All of which sounds fine and dandy, until you realise what else it means, but doesn’t actually say. And that is, that Jesus couldn’t have come to fix the results of the fall – because God’s decision to become incarnate in Jesus was made before there ever was a fall. So all those theories that make out Jesus had to die to fix the problem of evil, sin and death – they miss the crucial revelation made three times in the New Testament itself that that wasn’t why Jesus came. Jesus came to be with us in time so that we could be with him forever.
I wonder if you remember the short introduction to the footwashing scene at the Last Supper in John’s gospel. Let me read you the whole sentence. ‘Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.’ He loved them to the end. That’s what happens on the cross. Jesus loves us to the end. The fact that Jesus didn’t come to die to fix the sin problem doesn’t make the cross less important. It makes it more important. Look at it this way. God creates the world to be with us in Christ. God prepares to bring the world finally to an end and to be with us forever. The whole story is about being with, beginning, middle and end. But here’s the crucial moment in the story. God becomes incarnate in Jesus and dwells among us. Jesus meets us in our fragility, our folly and our fecklessness. He is Immanuel, God with us. Then suddenly he’s surrounded, arrested, assaulted, condemned, crucified. Now’s the moment. If he escapes to the Father now – if he can’t hack it and because of physical pain or total humiliation or the unthinkability of death he gets swooped up by angels – he’s then detonated, demolished and discredited the whole story – the whole reason for creation, the whole destiny of eternity together, the whole purpose of the incarnation: if Jesus can’t stay on the cross, even in the face of being abandoned by the Father, the whole initiative to be with us now and always goes up in smoke.
The cross is the ultimate test of whether God is serious about us. And what it shows in the face of agony, desertion, abandonment and isolation, is that God is so serious about being with us that God is willing to jeopardise being with God. No more we doubt thee, glorious Lord of life – Jesus is so committed to being with us he endures separation from the Father. And the Father is so committed to Jesus being with us he endures not being with Jesus. And in the great mystery of being with, the Spirit remains with the Father and the Son. And two days later the Spirit reunites the Father with the Son and God with us in the resurrection.
Look at that. No fancy atonement theory that distorts God and goes against the true reason for creation and incarnation. No humancentric story that’s all about Jesus fixing our problem. Just God; just God being with us; just God being with us whatever happens; just God being with us into, through and beyond Jesus’ death and ours. Just God being with us forever. That’s the gospel. That’s the gospel like you never heard it before.
Now I promised I’d explain why all this matters for your life together at All Saints and in Child’s Hill. Everything you do is about being with. It’s about being with God; being with yourselves; being with one another; being with your neighbourhood; being with creation. What’s wrong with the world and with us are the things that inhibit our being with one another. You’ve just been through a significant loss in your community, and you’ve rediscovered that sometimes grief can make you more alive, more grateful, more aware of how precious it is to be with one another. Like every church in the country, you’re learning what it means to be with one another across theological, social, racial and political differences. But this is the point. When you’ve discovered that from before the foundation of the world God chose to be with us in Christ, and that our destiny is to be with God and one another in Christ forever, every single tiny gesture that enables us better to be with one another is pointing to the reason for the universe and the purpose of all things. That’s what it means to be All Saints. That’s what it means to be church. That’s what God intended from before the foundation of the world.

The Revd Dr Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields
Preached at the Feast of Dedication 2024