Whose Glory?

John 7.14-24.  (June 7, 2015.)

I.

It is the middle of the Sukkoth festival, probably about 4 days in.  Jesus, who has come to Jerusalem inconspicuously, decides to go public by sitting down to teach in the Temple.  By this time we know that he is himself the true and ultimate Temple, the place where God and humanity meet, the place where sins are taken away and life restored to the world.  So from within the old Temple, the new Temple begins to take his place.  He will be the real Temple, where these things are actually accomplished, not just pointed to in ceremonials.

As he is speaking, the people start debating about peripheral trivialities.  They are wondering about Jesus educational credentials.  Jesus does not have a bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution, nor does he have a Master of Divinity degree from a school approved by the Association of Theological Schools.  This means he is unqualified to be ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA), by the way.  Whether or not Jesus would have passed the ordination exams is an open question.  I doubt it.  Neither had he studied with any of the established reputable rabbis of his day, or graduated from any of their rabbinic schools, as far as we know.

Therefore, the question arises as to why the people should listen to him at all, since he has no academic credentials and basically claims to have received everything he is teaching directly from God.  I know how well that would go over in any presbytery, but fortunately Jesus doesn’t bother with trying to gain acceptance from any religious institution.

I am not going to say we are wrong to have standards and procedures, since I have seen some pretty inept and even mentally ill people come through our system and attempt to be ordained.  But I am saying that we could be more attentive to the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit, and a little less slavishly obedient to the demands of professionalism, much of which appears to me to be about making sure there are always enough jobs for people with PhDs.  But that’s just me.  Apparently.

Jesus responds by basically saying, “no, I don’t have a diploma or the imprimatur of some respected rabbi.  What I teach does come directly from the One who sent me, namely God.  And if you want to verify this then the way to do it is not to call my references, of which there aren’t any, but to resolve to do the will of God.  The truth cannot be evaluated from outside, objectively, impartially, in some theoretical, unbiased manner.  It can only be recognized by being lived, that is, in a completely subjective, partial, biased, and committed manner.”  The Kingdom of God, he says in Luke, is not to be found over there or over here, that is, outside of you; it is within you.  We have to live in it to understand it.  We have to be doing it to get it.  We don’t learn to swim by reading books about swimming; we dive into the water.  If we want to know if what Jesus is saying is true we have to test it with our life.

II.

One of the criteria for this is: Whose glory are we seeking?  Are we seeking our own glory?  Or are we about devoting ourselves to getting out of the way so God’s glory can shine through us?  Who benefits?  Who gets the credit?  Who gets the appreciation?  “Those who speak on their own seek their own glory,” says Jesus.  They get the big salaries and the grandiose titles, which is the way we measure glory today.  They get the fame and the recognition, the adulation, the celebrity-status.  It is all about them.

The whole point of Jesus’ mission is self-emptying so that people who look at Jesus don’t see this guy from Nazareth, but God.  God shines in and  through him so completely that his followers realize that he is invisible and the One they have come to know in him is God.  Jesus’ whole mission is to become a nobody, and therefore the perfect conduit, channel, medium, vessel of God.  God fills him so powerfully that he is God, the living embodiment and incarnation of God, the Word of God who became flesh to dwell among us.  He is the full expression of the One who sent him.

He is calling his disciples to the same kind of life.  Eternal life is not an extension into the future of our mortal existence, which would be a living hell.  It is losing yourself in God, it is being swallowed up, overwhelmed, taken over, dissolved into God.  It is becoming God, as the early church affirmed.  Eternal life is losing your little, limited, narrow identity and being made one with God’s infinite identity.  We do not honor the great saints of the church because they were such good people; we honor them to the degree that their humanity was fulfilled in becoming transparent to God.  They do their best to be anonymous and inconspicuous.

The Lord goes on to say that this is the whole point of the Law.  It was to get people resonating with God’s will and setting aside their own will.  But Jesus notes that the religious leaders have turned it into an extension of their power and their glory.  “None of you actually keeps the Law,” he charges.  “None of you are becoming nothing so God can be everything in you.  None of you are setting aside your own will so God’s will may be done in you.  Instead of following God you’re actually trying to use God’s Law to kill me, or at least to shut God out of your life.

The people respond that he must be possessed by a paranoid spirit because no one is trying to kill him, as far as they could see.  But the world itself, as it has been engineered by the leaders and wealthy and powerful and successful to keep people asleep and enslaved, unaware of God and unaware of their own blessings and destiny, unaware of their own true nature, is lethal to the truth.  Their systems and regimes are designed to eliminate any liberating awareness of God.  Killing God is the point of civilization.

III.

Then the Lord illustrates his point by talking about his last venture to Jerusalem, and its consequences.  Back in chapter 5, he heals a lame man on the Sabbath and instructs him to carry his mat, for which he and the man came very close to being arrested.  It’s like, no good deed goes unpunished in this system.  This action, combined with the disturbance he had caused in the Temple a year and a half before, throwing out the merchants, made Jesus a person-of-interest for the authorities.  He is considered so dangerous and threatening to the status quo, that Jesus can’t travel openly in Judea without being liable to arrest.   

He uses the example of circumcision.  It was permitted to circumcise on the Sabbath.  But his point is that if you could do that, why would the logic not extend to healing the whole body of a person on the Sabbath?  

The Sabbath laws are about redeeming society from the economic injustice of the market.  One day in seven had to be devoted to God.  It was a day to undo the damage done to creation during the other 6.  When we get to the Sabbath years and finally the Jubilee, we see that the point is recovering the blessing and wholeness with which the world was created by restricting and limiting economic activity.  Sabbath was about shutting down the market for a day and reaffirming that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.”  That’s what the Hebrew Scriptures mean by not doing any “work” on the Sabbath.  It is not about physical inactivity, but economic justice.

When Jesus heals a person he is exactly in line with what the Sabbath is really for: to bring back into alignment and balance and wholeness that which had been kicked out of equilibrium.  In this case it is a person’s body; with the Sabbath it was the whole society.  Sabbath is a witness to the fullness and integrity, the health and well-being that God intends for creation.  Healing is the whole point of Sabbath, and these leaders have reduced it merely to forbidden “work!”

Finally, Jesus exclaims, “You think I’m breaking the Law by doing precisely what the Law intends?  Seriously?  Think about it!  Do not judge by appearances.  Do not judge by what these experts and leaders are telling you.  Look at the case for yourself!  Judge with right judgment, that is, with justice!  You tell me if healing is prohibited ‘work,’ or an example of the blessing for which the Sabbath was given!”

IV.

You see, the Sabbath is also in time what Jesus is in life: a place that has been emptied of our ego-centric, personality-driven agendas and illusions and institutions, and left open for God to shine through.  It is a time of blessed emptiness so we can be free of the slavery of the market and the empire and the rules and regulations of the leaders, and be present and open to the Creator.

The Sabbath is a time to give God the glory; but the leaders had made it into a glorification of their own power and control.  That’s why it is easy to mistake Jesus for a prophet who comes to reform the Sabbath practices of Israel.  The Sabbath is a gateway into God’s life, it is the place where God’s life opens into human community.  Jesus restores the Sabbath so that it functions as a time from which God’s love and justice pour into all the other days and commitments of our lives.  It’s a time of healing and lifting up the excluded and turning our attention again to the Creator and Sustainer of all.

And for acting and talking like this, of course, the authorities want to kill Jesus, like they have already throttled and nailed down the Sabbath.  Because nothing is more threatening to the powers-that-be than time or people who are not in their control.  Nothing is more dangerous to them than the idea that there could be Something bigger than their system and regime.

So, from this teaching in the Temple we understand that true spiritual life, eternal life, happens when we follow Jesus’ example, and the example of the Sabbath, and become empty and clear and open vessels that God then fills.  For God abhors a vacuum.  And once we are able to shove out of our consciousness and our polity and our time all the extraneous garbage, clutter, stuff, and furniture that we have filled it with, all the values and habits and fears and ideologies and addictions and desires and allegiances, all the things we are carefully taught to cherish and to hate, all the authorities we have vomited into power over us… once we have cut and scrubbed and swept and scraped all that falsehood and projection away, then the light of God and the breath of God and the Word of God expand to fill up that space.

We need to open up spaces and times for this, so we can say with the Lord that what we do is not ours, it is not our initiative or our idea, it is not something springing from our imagination or intellect, but comes from the One who sent us.  We need to be clear channels, transparent windows through which the Lord may shine, by seeking not our own glory, wealth, power, fame, pleasure, or will.  Rather, we need to become less and less, as we seek only and always the glory of the Creator.

This is the great paradox of faith.  The less we become the more we become.  The less concerned we are about ourselves, our institutions, our traditions, our possessions, our religion, the more space opens up in us for God to fill.  The less we are obsessed with the myriad distracting details the piling up of which constitutes what we take for our life, the more we make space within and among us for the infinite mystery of eternal life.

V.

Jesus says, “Those who seek the glory of the One who sent them are true, and there is nothing false in them.”  Seeking to serve and belong to God alone in itself will cause what is false in us to evaporate.  But it means letting go.  It means letting go of our fear.  It means letting go of our expectations and desires.  And it means letting go of our memories and nostalgia.

Faith means this stepping into what appears to be nothing, risking everything, and finding, perhaps even to our surprise, that Something wonderful will hold us and fill us, guide us and guard us, restore, renew, and heal us.  It means finding joy and fullness in precisely those places that seem so empty.

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