Imitation.

John 5:19-47.   (March 22, 2015)

I.

Jesus continues talking to the religious authorities.  They originally came after him for the crime of telling someone whom he had healed to carry his mat when he arose after 38 years of sickness.  Now they are really apoplectic that he is identifying himself with God by calling God his Father.  Jesus proceeds to start explaining the complicated and sometimes paradoxical relationship between the Father and himself, the Son.

Often passages like this one get filed under “abstract theology” and forgotten, as if the Son’s relationship to the Father may be interesting for dogmaticians, but really has no bearing on us.  But because God is Jesus’ Father, and Jesus is the Son of Man and the truly Human One, the Word who became flesh, God is also our Father.  It is something that Jesus tells his disciples is the very basis for prayer.

Through Jesus Christ, the Word of God, God is our Father.  He is the life of God coming into the world by making the world.  And therefore everything that Jesus says about this relationship with the Father also applies to us, and ultimately to every human being.  Unfortunately, almost all of us are dead or asleep in the sinful bondage to our own egos, and we are locked in a society engineered to keep us in fear, anger and shame.  So it is emphatically not true that we are in our current condition conscious that we are Christs.  Christ comes to reveal our true nature deep within us, from which we are characteristically alienated.  But remember that the very word “Christian” means “little Christs.”  

Jesus starts off by telling them that the Son can’t do anything on his own, by himself.  But only in so far as he is seeing, reflecting, and expressing what the Father is doing.  “Whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise.”  The will of the Son is shaped and informed by the will of the Father.  The Son is the perfect vessel, conduit, medium for the Father.  The Son embodies in human form, in a particular time and place, the will of the Father.  

By saying this Jesus means that even he, the Word of God by whom all things were created, is not independent of God; rather he is the vehicle of God’s self-expression.  He is trying to avoid the common misconception that God’s will conforms to our own.   

There is a huge difference between being subject to God and being subject to our own impulses, reason, and emotions.  They are in fact opposites.  If you want to be answerable only to God the Father, then you have to seek in all things to imitate Jesus Christ the Son, who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life for the life of the world.  Therefore, being subject to God alone does not make you more powerful by the world’s standards.  On the contrary, it means emptying yourself as God self-empties in becoming human in Jesus.

II.  

This is what it means to “honor the Son.”  We only get to God through the humility, openness, and perfect obedience of the Son.  And not as inert spectators.  But it is when we are actively imitating, in our own behavior, his compassion, non-violence, inclusion, justice, healing, and equality, that we are imitating the Father whom he reveals.  Anyone who imagines they are obeying God when they are doing violence, depredation, injustice, theft, or adultery — that is, things Jesus would never do — isn’t reflecting or expressing God’s will at all.

Jesus makes the point that the Father raises the dead.  God is not a killer like those who wield power in human affairs; on the contrary, God draws people in the other direction, from death to life.  On God’s behalf, Jesus is sent into the world to wake people up.  He comes to inspire an uprising.  He comes to shake people out of the complacency of blindness and death, and to see them become alive to God in God’s creation.  

As we will see in chapter 11 with Lazarus, he means he will literally bring people from death to life; but he also and more importantly means figuratively, spiritually, and metaphorically raising to new and fuller life people who are mired in a darkened existence of sleepwalking or a kind of living death.  That is, all of us.  He calls on people to rise against structures, policies, and leaders which enforce the ideologies of death and oppression among us.  

When the church is called to raise the dead, it does not mean going down to the cemetery and trying to pray the dead bodies back to life.  Rather, it means waking people up and bringing them now to a new life that makes them see that what they thought was life before was really not fully and truly living at all.  

This is what he means when he says, “Whoever hears my word and trusts in the One who sent me… has passed from death into life.”  The time is now here, says Jesus, “when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and live.”  The spiritually dead are all around us.  They are us.  And we awaken by hearing his word, which is to say, the Word resonating throughout the creation God spoke into being.  The Christian tradition has always held that God’s Word is expressed in two ways: in the creation God spoke into being and in Scripture, a product of God inspiration of human writers.  

But faith is not an exercise in observation or entertainment.  It is participatory.  We don't just take it all in.  Jesus talks about hearing and trusting, or believing.  So we show we have heard and are awake by changing our lives so that in the decisions we make we are trusting in God, the God whose Word we hear in these different ways, and not in our own reason, feelings, or instincts.

But the power of death in us, our self-interested, ego-centric, personality-driven approach to existence is so pervasive that we can still think we are hearing and believing in God, while we do unspeakable evil.  For this reason God sends the Son into the world.  Jesus Christ the touchstone, the criterion, the test, that standard against which we are judged.  He is as it were the round hole that accepts only round pegs.  And our job is to look at the Son when he is lifted up on the cross in the ultimate act of love, and see our lives shaped in conformity to him.

The spiritual life is about sanding chipping, dissolving, scraping or otherwise removing our sharp edges, so that we do come into conformity with him.  That is what enables one to pass from death to life.  We are able to slide through a Jesus-shaped round hole.  Like Michelangelo who quipped that in making his great statue of David he simply took a block of marble and chipped away everything that wasn’t David, so also the spiritual life means chipping away everything in us that isn’t truly human, everything that isn’t the Image of God, everything that isn’t Jesus Christ.

III.

All who are in their graves, that is all who exist in this living death state, will hear his voice.  And every person will rise up.  Some will rise up in life.  Others will rise up only to subsequently crash and burn in judgment and condemnation.  The choice is between life on the one hand and judgment and condemnation on the other.  What we receive is what we do.  If our lives are about delivering judgment and condemnation to others, then that’s what we get.  If our lives are about acceptance, forgiveness, patience, and welcoming, as is the life of Jesus Christ, then we rise into our true humanity and God’s realm.

Jesus Christ, the Word of God, is the only true judge in the sense that he is the pattern and model of our true humanity, and he is therefore the One we have to conform to and imitate.

This brings up the obvious question, “Why him?”  He himself recognizes that it is not enough just to take his word for it.  This is something Christians don’t quite understand.  We accept Jesus and the Bible as our authority, and we seem to assume that that settles it.  But our time is like Jesus’ and the apostles’ time in that for an increasing number of people that doesn’t settle it.  Like it or not, it’s just a fact, that when we appeal to Scripture it does not necessarily impress.  

Jesus knows this.  “If I testify about myself my testimony isn’t true,” he says.  “Don’t just listen to my words; I could be crazy,” he says.  The Bible says it takes at least two witnesses to verify something.  So Jesus says, “Well, John testified to me.  Some of you believed him.”  Some of John’s disciples were still around when this gospel was being written.  But of course, that might not have convinced many since John was dead.  Dead witnesses are not as good.

So then Jesus mentions another witness that isn’t a person subject to death.  It is his works.  The things he is doing.  Even Nicodemus noted that no one could do the kinds of things he is doing unless he were from God.  We know this was a significant argument people understood at the time.  What he was doing was so obviously good — healing people, raising the dead, casting out demons, even purifying the Temple, and supplying wine at a wedding — that he had to be from God.  His opponents had a very difficult case to make in claiming that there were demonic and evil actions.

In our day, Jesus’ works are testified to by his disciples.  Not his works back then, but the effect he has on people today.  People experience him and his healing power now.  Some of us in this room know from their own direct experience of the healing power of Jesus Christ.

If that’s not good enough, Jesus says God the Father testifies to him… but people who don’t recognize the Son also don’t hear the Father’s voice, so no wonder they’re so clueless.

Then he says the Bible witnesses to him… but unfortunately only people who have God’s love in their hearts can see this, because of course the Bible is all about God’s love.  It is people who don’t think that the Bible is about God’s love but insist that it is about just about everything else — exclusion, patriotism, judgment, maintaining the rules, institutions, authorities, traditions… people think it’s about history or even science, for heavens’ sake!  They are the ones who often have trouble finding Jesus in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Jesus is God’s love; if you look for love in the Bible, you will find Jesus Christ.  If you look for that other stuff, not so much.

IV.

It is in the end about love.  We heard in chapter 3 those famous words that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.  To trust in the Son of God is to live forever.  It is to see the truth, to know what is actually real.  It is to perceive that the love of God is at the heart of all things, and Jesus embodies that love.  Jesus does not testify for himself; it is the love of God that pours through him into the world that testifies on his behalf.  That is what finally demonstrates that Jesus is who he says he is.

It’s like Jesus says, look: What good is it anyway if we collect a thousand witnesses, if they are all blind?  If they all see things in exactly the same way?  If none of them has the capacity to see what is real?  Jesus says elsewhere that if a blind person tries to lead a blind person they will both fall into a ditch together.  People accept glory and praise from each other, we recognize people who come in their own name, because we do not perceive there is any other reality.  

But it is not the number of witnesses that is important.  Truth is not a democracy; we cannot change the laws of nature or God by majority vote.  

If we want to have any kind of knowledge of the truth we have to have the love of God in us.  Jesus says that this is why his opponents don’t get it.  They don't have the love of God in them.  They have in them judgment and condemnation.  They are hassling him over a sabbath violation, and disregarding the fact that he just healed someone.  It’s all about fear and control for them.

They have in their blindness even reduced Moses to a mere giver of regulations and rules, a fashioner of a written law code.  But Jesus says that if we had the love of God in us we would see that even Moses is sent into the world to accomplish Gods love.  Through him God liberates and saves and frees the people; through him God gives them a just and good way to live together in equality and peace; through him God delivers them to a land of prosperity, fighting for them against the powers of oppression and exploitation.

It is as if Jesus says to these authorities: “If you’re so badly informed about Moses, it is no surprise that you have no idea what I am about.  If you think the Bible is all about threats and guilt and punishment and coercion and retribution, if you use it as a weapon to maintain your own power and tradition, then it is clear that God’s love, the love which I embody, is unintelligible and utterly invisible to you.”

But if we are able to accept Jesus’ testimony, and find God’s love in us — and God’s love is in all of us.  It was encoded in the very Word by which all things were made at the beginning, when God created the universe as an overflowing of God’s immeasurable love.  It’s already there.  The voice of the Son of God resonates with that love and awakens it, and we rise up in it.

V.

In the end, the only witness whose testimony matters is that of ourselves.  Jesus says we are to be his witnesses.  And we testify, not of abstractions of theology, but of what we have found to be real, reliable, true, and accurate; we refer to what we have found to work in our lives.  In the end it comes down to “I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.”  We once were dead and now we are alive.  We once were crippled by fear, and now we are liberated to love.  

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