John 7.25-36. (June 14, 2015.)
I.
Jesus has sort of snuck into Jerusalem for the Sukkoth festival, avoiding arrest by the police who are looking for him. But after he is in the Temple for a few days, he does begin to teach and attract crowds. In his teaching he is saying the same kinds of challenging things that had already gotten him into trouble, in this case it’s mainly about the leaders’ interpretation of the Sabbath.
The people listening begin to realize that this is that guy from Galilee who is on the “most wanted” list, and yet here is he, opening teaching in the Temple. And they wonder if maybe the authorities aren’t arresting him because they know that he is the Messiah.
That doesn’t make any sense to me. I suspect the crowds are being cynical about the inaction of the police at this point. The real reason Jesus was not being handcuffed and led in a perp walk out of the Temple is probably that the authorities know that it might spark a riot for them to arrest anyone in the holy precincts of the Temple, let alone an intriguing and somewhat popular rabbi. And they make up that idea that the leaders aren’t arresting him because they know he is the Messiah just to taunt them. They know that the cops standing around the edges are just biding their time until they can get Jesus by himself to snag him.
On the other hand, the people themselves do not necessarily believe Jesus is the Messiah because, as usual, they are hung up on another tidbit of trivia. Last time it was Jesus lack of academic credentials. This time it is his hometown. Anything to avoid the issue. Anything to distract themselves from what Jesus is actually saying and doing.
Just like last time when Jesus had to proclaim that his knowledge comes not from books or teachers or schools or webinars, but from God, here too he has to say that he himself is sent by God. He comes from God.
It is as if he says, “You know where I am from, eh? I am from Nazareth, you say? And of course the Bible says on the one hand that the Messiah will come from Bethlehem or on the other hand that no one will know where the Messiah comes from.” (That’s in a fascinating book called 1 Enoch that was considered part of Scripture at the time, but didn’t make it into our Bible, probably on account of sheer weirdness.)
Jesus’ contemporaries see a man sitting in the Temple. This man has a history and a hometown, a birthplace, and, it is assumed, human parents. He is Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee, whose parents are Mary and Joseph the Carpenter. Everybody knows from biblical scholars on down, that there is no prediction in the Scriptures of a Messiah coming from Galilee. Ergo, this guy could not possibly be the Messiah.
It is interesting what Jesus does not say here. He does not say, “Well, few people know this but I was actually born in Bethlehem, as my mother can tell you. Here’s my birth certificate.” No. He doesn’t engage this argument at all, any more than he answered the people who questioned his education. He simply says, “Well, I came from God. If you knew God, you would know me.”
II.
It doesn’t matter where Jesus was literally born. What matters is where and from Whom he comes, and by Whom he is sent. In the same way, neither does it matter where each one of us was born, or who our parents were, or what nationality or family or tribe we come from. Our citizenship is in heaven, says Paul. Jesus is sent by God and he in turn sends us, his disciples, into the world with the same mission: to reveal and enact God’s saving love for the whole world.
Where we know ourselves, our true selves, to be “from” makes a big difference in how we live our lives and what our lives mean. We may limit ourselves to where we are literally from, and construct our identity on our history and traditions and commitments. By this reasoning I am from Bloomfield, the son of a Presbyterian minister. And knowing no more than this is enough to place me in a series of well-defined boxes and categories. If I define myself this way I truncate my horizons so thoroughly that I can see nothing beyond urban, northeastern New Jersey and the Calvinist theological tradition. There are way worse places to be, but I don’t necessarily live in either one of those places anymore.
But if we’re going to be real followers of Jesus, of the guy who said it doesn’t matter on which mountain you worship and it doesn’t matter what town you come from… the guy who is infamous for breaking down every wall and barrier and hierarchy separating people from each other and from God… then we have to stop defining ourselves by our own narrow categories. I have been to Bloomfield 3 times in the last 58 years.
I am not on a mission from Bloomfield; I am not even on a mission from Calvin! As disciples of Jesus Christ we are on a mission from God! And as Jesus well knows nothing gets more effectively in the way of a mission from God than these other places we are literally from, these other definitions and categories and labels and boxes and file folders. That’s why his mission may be described as kind of post-Jewish, and even that is too limiting.
The point is not to replace our idea of where we are from with some more accurate location, like replacing Nazareth with Bethlehem… but to bust out of all coordinates altogether. So it doesn’t matter whether you are from a Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, Calvinist, Lutheran, Methodist, or even Jewish or Buddhist or Islamic background. It doesn’t matter if you are literally “from” any of those places. Those are trivial accidents compared to where we are really from, which is God.
III.
By asserting where he is from, Jesus encourages us to reexamine where we are from as well. By whom are we sent here? The deeper question implied here is, “Who am I talking about when I say ‘I’?” The people think Jesus is talking about himself as a many from Nazareth. He’s not. His “I” is God speaking through him. The man from Nazareth exists as little more than a perfect channel or vessel for the God who is pouring into the world through him.
Now, the police understand the blasphemy laws and this statement by Jesus crosses the line, and they try to arrest him. But they are unable, probably because of the non-cooperation of the crowds, but the gospel just says it was because Jesus time had not yet come.
“Yet many in the crowd believed in him and were saying, ‘when the Messiah comes will he do more signs than this man has done?’” They arising and hearing about the signs, what we call miracles, the symbolic and supernatural actions that point beyond themselves and beyond this mortal agent to the God who is inspiring them. And they are coming to trust in him far more deeply than they could even trust a regular mortal human. They are still tallying up the number of signs, but in our condition sometimes we require a preponderance of evidence, a lot of instances and examples. Just one is not enough to break through our shells of cynicism and blindness.
This kind of talk about Jesus among the crowd scares the wits out of the Pharisees and the priests, and they again send the police in to arrest him. People are easy to control. You appeal to their fears, you stoke their anger, you intimate about their shame; you divide them from each other and make the suspicious; or you just plain inspire terror by acts of gruesome violence and cruelty. The leaders now how to control people. They know how to control people from places like Judea, Galilee, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt.
But they don’t know how to control people from God. That’s a different thing. People who know they are not from this world, who are citizens of a different commonwealth, who understand themselves to be in relationship with the Creator, who are working through repentance to become ever more perfect channels of God’s living Presence coming into the world? Those people are harder to control. It is harder if not impossible to get such people to be content as compliant, docile, cooperative profit centers. They’re not good producers. They’re not team players. They’re dangerous.
IV.
Jesus continues speaking. He starts talking about his departure, when his work here in mortal form is done and he will go back to where he came from, back to God. “You will search for me, but you will not find me, “ he says. “And where I am going you cannot come.”
The religious authorities interpret him literally, of course. They think he’s going into hiding to get away from them, maybe into exile, or even on a world-wide mission tour. They think he is talking about escaping.
But Jesus going “to him who sent” him does not mean that he is going somewhere remote and far away. To return to the Father means in a sense going everywhere. Instead of being a single drop, he will merge again with the ocean that is God. Instead being an objective, mortal, historical human being, he returns to his essential subjective, immortal, transhistorical being, dwelling in our hearts and minds, and in everything as God. And the reason his listeners can’t follow him is that they have no clue what he is talking about.
The “you” who cannot follow him are those who still know themselves to be from Bloomfield, or wherever; they still identify with their ego-centric selves, they still hold on to their individualism, they remain loyal to the traditions and habits and ideologies of this world. They don’t believe there is anything beyond this world, and you can’t go someplace you can’t imagine.
These people will search for him but they will not find him because first of all they are searching only to arrest him and secondly because they are looking in the wrong places. Because they are looking in “places” at all, places in this world. They’ll be looking in Bloomfield, Nazareth, Atlantic Highlands, Tinton Falls. But where Jesus is going is beyond place and time, and inclusive of all places and all times.
When he says “Where I am you cannot come,” he means that you, as a mortal, ego-driven, blind, sleepwalking, sinful, spiritually dead entity, cannot possibly enter into union with the great I Am, God, the Creator. You have to lose that you, you have to leave that you behind, then you discover the I Am flowing within and through you, the real you, the you way beneath and deep within and high above the you you think is you.
Then we discover that God finds us everywhere, and because God and we-in-God are everywhere, we do find God in Bloomfield, Nazareth, Atlantic Highlands, and Tinton Falls. So in Jesus Christ God is not just breaking down the walls we have built between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, as Paul says. He is also breaking down the walls between here and there, now and then, and you and me.
V.
This is not just mystical mumbo-jumbo. It is another way of saying what Paul says in Romans 8, that there is nothing that can ever separate us from the love of God being poured into the world in Jesus Christ.
Jesus is urging us and empowering us to move from being located and limited beings, defined by small stories and little places, confined within very short spans of time. In him, by trusting in him, believing in him, we emerge out of that set of boxes and find ourselves much larger, with hearts and minds that connect and integrate with and embrace in joy a whole wide creation. In Christ it is impossible to reduce something, let alone another human person, to an inanimate object, to be used, abused, dispensed with, exploited, judged, and wasted. For we come from and are destined for a place beyond all places, in union with all. And in him we realize that it is all holy and precious.
Discipleship means recognizing and affirming that, in and by Jesus Christ, the Word of God, we are one with all, interpenetrating and sharing together in a timeless dance of love. There is therefore now no such thing as fear for us, no such thing as bigotry or hatred, no such thing as exclusion or condemnation.
Instead, in Jesus Christ we are people of shalom and justice, healing and restoration, goodness and love, who know where we are from and where we are going.
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