Time to put on the old Gospel reading glasses again. Maybe you don’t remember them, so I’ll refresh your memory They're multi-focal, kind of like these, but instead of varying strength of vision, they vary in their interpretive focus. We need ‘em because the gospels were written almost 2,000 years ago, under very different circumstances from those in which we live. In first-century Palestine, the world was viewed very differently from today. Even though people breathed like we do, loved like we do and died like we do, the interpretation of these human invariants, as theologian Raimon Panikkar calls them, the way they'd were viewed, is very different from today. And this isn’t just a temporal, historical phenomenon: human invariants like death and reasoning and breathing and sleeping are interpreted very differently in different cultures. This is why people in South America, for instance, read the gospels very differently from how we do. In fact, it’s a form of cultural imperialism that we assume that everybody thinks alike, for instance, when from culture to culture, it just isn’t so.
Anyway. Today we're going to explore our little slice of John
using three interpretive strengths, even though we know that the
gospel reading glasses are continuously variable, like these, because there are
a great many perspectives, east and west, north and south, 13th
century England and 17th century China, from which they have been
read over the millennia. But we’ll stick to just three, cause that can be
confusing enough.
The first perspective, or context, is within the storyline within which
Jesus spoke these words: the city of Jerusalem in about the year 30.
Jesus is speaking to his disciples in the upper room just days before he is to
die on the cross. And as you probably noticed, the passage is actually a
continuation of the vine metaphor we explored last week. Remember?
Jesus is the vine and we—individuals, congregations—are the branches, and we
are thus connected to Jesus, and each other, and supported and nourished
through Jesus . . . and through each other. But in our passage, he
introduces a new topic; up until now, the topic has been connection and through
it, fruit. We are to abide in Jesus—tap into that connection, use it—and
in that manner we will produce fruit, and that to the glory of God.
But now he talks of love (and could he be implying that that’s what
travels through the stem and branches, that’s what nourishes us in
our endeavor to produce fruit?). He says “As God has loved me, so I love
you; abide in my love.” And the thing is, the Greek we translate as “as” (kathos) can mean
“in the same way,” like “In the same way as God loved me . . .” or it can mean because, as in
“because God has loved me, so I have loved you.” Jesus can love us precisely because
the divine first loved him. And we are to abide in that love, just as we are to
abide in Jesus. In fact, we can say, I think, that we can love
because Christ has loved us, and that further, abiding
in Jesus is identical to abiding in his love.
And right here, he says the first strange thing: “I have said these
things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete,”
and my first question is: how can he talk about joy at a time like this?
They’re in the upper room, he has just told them he was leaving, and in just a
few short days he would be brutally nailed to a tree. Where is the joy in
that?
And further, what would the disciples think when he said that? They might
not have believed he was going to be killed, but they sure knew he was leaving
. . . Thomas had even questioned him about it. You say that we know where
you’re going, but we don’t even know the way. They
were upset, missing him already . . . how
could he speak of joy?
Fast forward some sixty or seventy years . . . A man we know as John
sits down to write for his congregation; one day it will be called a gospel,
but for now it's just a book, or a letter. His congregation has grown
increasingly anxious: persecution has increased of late, not primarily from the
Romans, for whom Christianity is still illegal, but from their fellow Jews.
Only recently, wording had been added to the synagogue liturgy that discouraged
them from participating in worship. They had never imagined they might
not be welcome in their own faith; as far as they are concerned, they are still
good Jews, albeit Jews who declare Jesus Messiah. Now, it is becoming
increasingly clear that remaining a sect within Rabbinic Judaism will not be in
the cards, and they are feeling increasingly isolated and ostracized.
To try to explain who Jesus was, and why he was deserving of their
worship, John writes of Jesus’ ministry: changing the water into wine.
Offering a woman living water. Raising a man from the dead. All of
these acts are read aloud in John’s congregations, either by John himself or a
follower, and when they reach the description of the last supper, they lean
forward on the crude benches and strain to see and hear the reader in the dim
firelight, and when he speaks of keeping his commandments and abiding in his
love, how do they experience
it? Do they feel a little less alone, do they feel comforted by that
love, by that joy—Christ’s
love, Christ’s
joy—even in the face of the growing estrangement? Do they begin to experience that
joy, even when their religious family is rejecting them?
Nineteen hundred years later, we’re at the end of the Christian era,
the end of Christian influence, Christian hegemony in
Western society. Starting in 313, when Constantine legalized the faith,
Christianity became increasingly complex, increasingly rule-bound. With
the rise of the orthodoxy, what you believed—how orthodox it was, how much it
adhered to accepted doctrine—became more important than that you believed.
The Reformation complicated things, making possible a whole passel of sects—we
call them denominations—each with their own set of rules
and regulations. Wars were fought: Catholics against Protestants.
Protestants versus other
Protestants. And they’re still being fought, in the name of the
Prince of Peace.
Every couple of years or so, Hanover Seminary does a survey of American
churches. In the one they did several years back, they asked one basic
question: is your church growing, staying the same or in decline? Then
they asked a bunch of simple, yes or no questions about the style of worship,
what they did during worship, and the like. The results were interesting:
in general, churches with contemporary worship were holding there own or
growing. One question asked whether they used drums in the
service; churches that answered “yes” were generally growing. But do you
know what the question with the best correlation with thriving churches was?
Do you experience joy in worship. Do you experience joy. Churches
that answered “yes” to this one question were almost all doing well.
Congregations that experienced Christ’s joy in them, whose joy was complete,
were thriving, they’d managed to overcome the oppressive, rule-clogged,
do-this-but-whatever-you-do-don’t-do-that culture of
modern Christian practice. And I have to ask: do you feel joy when
you come to worship?
Well. Let’s press on. After wishing the disciples his joy,
Jesus repeats the commandment he’d given them earlier in the evening: “This is
my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Once
again, he tightens the association with the abundant Christian life with love,
specifically loving one another within the Christian community. Love is
the glue that holds the whole enterprise together, and if they love one
another, they will abide in that love, and their joy will be complete.
And to elaborate his point, he uses himself and his upcoming crucifixion as an
example: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for
one’s friends.”
Notice that he introduces another word here: friend. And what
stuns the disciples there in the semi-dark, is that Jesus develops this notion
and names them his
friend!
“I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what
the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known
to you everything that I have heard from God.” And in the culture of the day, a
friend is an exalted status, it’s not a word that’s bandied about. In
Greek, it is philos,
and carries the weight of equality, not hierarchy; it is much more than an
acquaintance, it connotes a beloved, honored status. And the disciples in
the upper room that evening gape in wonder: they had followed Jesus as servant
to master, it is the rule in these matters, and to be called friend . . .
Jesus is redefining their relationship, doing away with the old model of master
and servant, sage to acolyte . . . he calls them friend . . .
A status that John’s congregation remembered with joy and gratitude
sixty years later. As the separation from their earthly friends, grew
wider and wider, as their status as second-class citizens increased along with
the specter of rising persecution, they were comforted and encouraged . . .
they may be increasingly outcasts, outsiders in their own land, within their
own religion, but to Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, they were friends.
And now today, the word has lost much if its weight . . . It is used
casually in the media, by newscasters and entertainers, who do not know their
listeners from Adam’s off ox. We use it casually, we sing “what a friend
we have in Jesus” without understanding the power of the lyrics, the absolutely
special relationship that it implies. For our teacher and sage, our
savior and advocate, our joy and comfort, has called us friend.
And it is the final sign of the incarnation, the immanence of our Christ, that
he has become not a Lord, not a master, not a holy dictator, but an equal, a
beloved, a friend.
Brothers and sisters, friends, ours can
be a dour faith, it can be one of rules, one of strictures and structures and
hierarchy. Preachers like me emphasize the service we do in Jesus’ name, that
we are the hands and feet of Christ on Earth, that we are to feed the hungry,
clothe the naked, and heal the sick. And it’s true: these are our tasks.
But in doing so, we often forget the other side of the coin, we forget that we
are not just called to work, that we’re not just called to serve, but we are
called so that Christ’s joy in us will be complete. We have been called intimate, we have
been called companion,
we have been called friend. And
what a friend we have in Jesus. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment