Come and See.

John 11.17-37   (September 20, 2015)

I.

After waiting a couple of days before setting out, so that he knows his sick friend Lazarus will be dead, Jesus and his disciples hike back into Judea, where there is a warrant out for his arrest.  He goes straight for Bethany and the house where Lazarus had lived with his sisters, Martha and Mary.  He will find many people there consoling the family, even some of the Jewish authorities, which tells us that they were pretty well-connected in society.  Lazarus’ body has been in the tomb for four days.

When they hear that Jesus is on his way, Mary stays home while Martha goes out to meet him.  She is not pleased.  The first thing she does is scold him.  “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.”  Where were you?  What took you so long?  You could have made it in time had you hurried.

Then she adds, “Even now, I know that whatever you ask God, God will give you.”  As if to say, I hope you have something left in your bag of tricks for this because you owe me.  It sounds similar to what Jesus’ mother said way back in chapter two in Cana at the wedding where they ran out of wine and she looks at Jesus and says pointedly, “They have no wine….”  Hint, hint.

Jesus replies to Martha with the kind of thing that ministers say to grieving families.  “Your brother will rise again.”

Martha thinks he is just spouting doctrinal platitudes as a way of comforting her and putting her off.  She has none of it.  She says, in effect, yeah, yeah, yeah I went to Sunday School, I can quote doctrine too.  “I know he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.”  Big deal.  Who cares about that?  That is so far off in the future as to be meaningless.  She is not satisfied.  She doesn’t care about the end of time.  She cares about today, and her dead brother, and her grieving family.

And she’s right.  Jesus has come into the world to short-circuit these ideas that salvation and even resurrection are things we have to wait for until we die or the world ends, whatever comes first.  Jesus keeps saying “I am,” “I am;” he doesn’t put them off by talking about “someday,” or “in the future,” or “at the end of time.”  I am, is present tense.  It means now.

In Mark the first thing Jesus says is, “Now is the time.”  The gospel is not about yesterday or tomorrow, it is about today.  So Martha is fully justified in replying to Jesus, If you’re talking about the last day I don’t want to hear it.  After all, he’s the one from who she learned not to be content with vague promises about the future!

II.

So the Lord looks at Martha and says, that he doesn’t mean that Lazarus will rise on some far-off future and final day.  He means that he will rise now, today.  For, he states, “I am the resurrection and the life.  Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die.  Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.  Do you believe this?”

Now, he is saying this to someone in deep grief for her dead brother.  As far as she sees, her brother is dead.  He is as dead as a person can get.  His body is starting to rot, for heaven’s sake!   So when Jesus says, “Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die,” either he is being incredibly callous and cruel, saying in effect, And Lazarus, since he died, obviously didn’t make the cut; sorry… or he means something else.  It sounds contradictory and illogical: you will live even though you die, like you can be alive and dead at the same time, which is biologically impossible, at least for a human.

It reminds me of that slogan adorning the gate of a monastery on Mt. Athos: “If you die before you die then you won’t die when you die.”  Think about it.  There is more than one kind of death, and more than one kind of life.  Because we each have more than one self.  It is our shallow, blind-from-birth, lame, asleep, fearful, limited, ego-centric self, the self we grow up thinking is our only self, our total identity, that has to die so that our deep, true, original, awake, free, and real Self, our essence, the Self that shares humanity with Jesus Christ and participates in his I am, may be revealed and emerge.

Then there is the word “believe” which shows up three times in this exchange.  Belief is more than having a cognitive opinion about something.  I like to translate it as “trust,” which gets more to the idea of a wholehearted giving of yourself which is necessarily expressed in your actions.  So Jesus is not asking if she thinks it is a fact that everyone who lives and believes in him will never die; he is asking if she relies on this truth as the very foundation of her life.  Do you trust me so fully that you are convinced that even if your body gives out you have another, deeper Self that will live on?  Do you live your life with such freedom and grace, without the fear, anger, or shame that come from the assumption that you are bound for extinction?  Do you trust that I am in you, and I am in Lazarus, and that I am the resurrection — the uprising — and the life?

At this, Martha, who has just exhibited her own anger and fear, her own lack of faith or trust, her own failure to live in the present, the living now, snaps out of her snarky attitude and humbly lets that go, and proclaims who Jesus really is.  “Yes, Lord,” she states.  “I believe that you are the Christ, God’s Son, the one who is coming into the world.”

III.

It is interesting that she says he is the one who “is coming” into the world.  I mean, he’s standing right there.  Surely she could say that he “has come” into the world.  But no.  Even that would place Jesus and his coming in the past.  Jesus Christ is radically present.  He is always happening now.  He is always coming.  He is always on the way and emerging.

If we treat him like he is just a historical figure, someone from the past, even our past, concerning which we may analyze the data and make determinations and come to conclusions, or even cherish the memories, then we are not with him.  If we treat him like he is only someone we will meet in the future, we are not with him.  

Jesus demands responses now, and he delivers now.  Jesus is about what is happening now.  Jesus is happening now or he is not happening at all.  Your thinking about who Jesus was in the past, or who he will be in the future is immaterial and irrelevant.  It is a waste of time.

So, to the criticism from Martha that he delayed and took his sweet time showing up, Jesus responds basically, There is no time.  There is no delay.  There is no past and no future.  There is only now, the living present, and now is wherever I am.  I am now.  Therefore, the resurrection is now.  The life is now.  If you trust in me and live now, Jesus promises, I am with you.  

Christians have misunderstood and misused this passage a lot.  We think it means if you’re a Christian you’ll go to heaven when you die.  We think that all Jesus wants is that we have a certain opinion about him, or that we affirm certain doctrines about him.  Worse, we then infer that if we don’t give ourselves the label “Christian,” or if we don’t recite the right opinions and affirm the right doctrines, then we don’t have his life and therefore we’re going to hell.

All that is self-serving nonsense designed to cause us to miss the point.  All that is intended to turn what Jesus is talking about and doing into an institutional religion.  Institutional religions have no purpose other than to serve and prop up our blind, sleepwalking, lame, dead existence.  Institutional religions have leaders and connections and agendas that are heavily invested in the status quo and keeping people unaware of the truth of God’s love at work in the world.  Jesus is not about setting up an institutional religion, even though that is largely what we got.

No.  Jesus’ teaching and insight, exemplified here in his encounter with Martha, is that if you let go of the past, with all its anger, shame, remorse, pain, and interpreted memories, and if you let go of the future, with all its desire, fear, anxiety, and projection, and just focus on where you are now… that is, if you become present, and sense your body now, and realize your own I am, you will meet the one who is always coming into the world, with whom we share true being, humanity, and life.  You will meet Jesus Christ, who is God, within you.

IV.

So Martha goes home and tells her sister Mary that Jesus has arrived.  And Mary runs out to meet him so she can make the same accusation her sister made, which is that had he showed up sooner Lazarus might not have died.  Only she says it while on her knees before him.

Thinking that she is going to weep at Lazarus’ tomb, the mourners follow her to Jesus.  Jesus sees the outpouring of grief on the part of all these many people, and simply asks to be taken directly to the tomb.  Interestingly, the ones guiding him to the tomb use the same words that were used by disciples way back in chapter 1 when introducing people to Jesus.  “Come and see,” they say.

And we receive now the same invitation.  What we are to come and see is a tomb with a dead body in it.  We are among the witnesses to what is to happen.

As they are walking to the tomb, Jesus is overwhelmed to the point of tears himself.  These are tears of empathy with all these brokenhearted, grieving people.  The Lord is identifying with them as he identifies with all suffering and loss; he feels our pain and sorrow and he stands with us.

At the same time, his grief is not really for the loss of his friend (since he knows what he is about to do).  It is more for the fact that in our shallow existence we leave ourselves open to such anxiety and hurt.  We are like acorns in profound anguish because one of their own has been buried in the ground, and look!, their shell is cracking, to their horror.  Or we are like a gathering of caterpillars in terrible mourning because one of their own has committed suicide by wrapping herself up in a tight, hard chrysalis.  It is like when you take your dog in the car through the carwash and they clearly think it is the end of the world and they are passing into the belly of a giant monster.

Jesus is crying because we’re so pathetic and clueless, we don’t and can’t see the bigger picture, we don’t know who we really are, and we don’t have any idea about our true destiny.  All we see are people we love disappearing and their bodies decomposing into dust, not realizing at all that they have gone on to another kind of life.

But the bystanders merely think Jesus is crying because he will miss his friend Lazarus.  And, like the sisters, they wonder if he couldn’t have saved him had he arrived on time.  They think that keeping Lazarus from dying is the point, not imagining that Lazarus’ death is actually something bigger.

V.

Walking crying to a tomb is a fairly apt, if somewhat sad, summary of human existence.  I suspect that we do not let our old self go with glee or triumph.  There is a sense in which we grieve, even as we may know we are moving to something better and fuller.  I mean, what parent doesn’t miss their child, even if we know they have to grow up?  Our old selves are like booster rockets that have to be jettisoned; but we thank them and cherish them for serving their purpose.

I’ve been reading this book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.  I kid you not.  It’s a bestseller.  The author talks at once about being somewhat ruthless in getting rid of your old stuff.  She famously asks that we evaluate everything in our lives by whether it gives us joy when we touch it.  But the remarkable thing she does has to do with what we are letting go of.  She talks about expressing — and I mean verbally and out loud — appreciation and thanksgiving for each object that was a part of your life but is now being moved out.

I talk a lot about how the old self has to die and so forth.  But there is also a sense of gratitude for this identity that got you so far, and that even led you to know you had to lose it.  Just because we are crying doesn’t mean it should happen some other way.  You know that if you’ve ever been to a wedding.

Waking up is not easy.  It is not simple.  It does not reject the old so much as include and move beyond it.  It embraces the old, and then more.  The Lord does not take any short-cuts here.  He lets Lazarus go through the dark valley, even into the jaws of death.  Yet he knows this is not the end, but a passage opening into something new.

And in him, so do we.  So it’s okay to weep with him on the way.  For we trust in him, that he is the uprising, the resurrection, and the life, and that to die in him is to live forever.

+++++++

Jesus Waits.

John 11:1-16   (September 13, 2015)

I.

The Lord has gone across the Jordan River to the spot where the gospel began, where John was baptizing and where Jesus was himself baptized.  It is apparently out of the jurisdiction of the authorities who were harassing him and trying to arrest or even stone him in Jerusalem.

He and his disciples are camped in this rugged desert area; the topography is like Utah.  It is to just these kinds of places that the prophets of Israel retreat.  They go to the margins, the uncivilized places, the difficult and stressful environments.  They get away from both the distractions and the comforts of urban life, and they go to these areas where you have to be present in your body because things like food and water are daily if not hourly concerns.  It is not a vacation.  Most likely it is a period of intensive prayer and teaching.  At the end of chapter 10 we hear that many people make the trek out to be with him.  Jesus and his disciples stay out there for around three months.  

While there, they receive a message.  It is from two women who are close friends of Jesus.  They live in Bethany, which is about 2 miles east of Jerusalem, and their names are Martha and Mary.  They show up in all the gospels.  And, in case you don’t know which Mary she is, we are told that Mary will be the one who will anoint Jesus with perfume and wipe his feet with her hair, a particularly intimate act that happens in the next chapter.  By doing this she will prefigure both his death and his kingship, because it is like the anointing that would be done to a dead body or even to a king.  At the same time this act precipitates Judas’ decision to betray him. 

And the message they receive is, “Lord, the one whom you love is ill.”  The sisters are referring to their brother, Lazarus.  Lazarus is very sick.  He is in fact dying.

This is one of those places where we might put ourselves into the story.  The sisters don’t explicitly name their brother.  They simply refer to him as “the one whom you love,” and they assume Jesus will know who they are talking about.  That creates an opening in the text for us to understand that it could be about us as well.  For we also, each one of us, is “one whom Jesus loves,” and each of us is also “ill” in the sense of being in the state of spiritual sleep, living death, or blindness which constitutes normal human existence.  

We are supposed to identify with the sick people Jesus encounters and realize in our own souls the healing he brings into these lives.  We are supposed to learn from their responses both positively and negatively, how we might also respond to the Lord’s work in and among us.  Here we are to realize that the sick man, the one whom Jesus loves, is each one of us.  Because we have each contracted a “sickness unto death,” which is our addiction to an ego-centric, personality-driven way of existence characterized by fear, shame, and anger, and manifested in violence.

II.

Jesus’ words of hope are that “this illness isn’t fatal.  It’s for the glory of God so that God’s Son can be glorified through it.”  Neither is our “illness” ultimately fatal, or it doesn’t have to be anyway.  We have hope if we trust in Jesus Christ, which is what this gospel is about.

And we are reminded that “Jesus loved Martha, her sister, and Lazarus,” which is good to know because Jesus then does something very disturbing.  He stays where he is for two more days.  He does not drop everything and rush to Lazarus’ side.  He lets the illness take its course.  He lets Lazarus, as we say, “hit bottom.”  

This is a very difficult, or irresponsible, thing to do.  If you’ve ever had a family member which serious difficulties that they refuse to acknowledge, you know how hard it is to let them hit bottom.  That is often what has to happen before a person wakes up to the nature and seriousness of their own situation and can therefore change.  And hitting bottom is usually very, very traumatic and frightening.  Frankly, it can be fatal.

It feels irresponsible and unloving, and we have to use much discernment to tell the difference between allowing someone to reach the place where they can finally get some help, and just callously refusing to assist someone who could use it.  We need the advice and encouragement of our community for this.  It depends on the context, the history, and the circumstances, of course.  But this is a decision we can never make by ourselves.

When we’re talking about spiritual change, as in the change from addiction to the habits of our old self to the emergence and awakening of our deeper and higher true self, hitting bottom is in some sense necessary.  The symbol for it is baptism, which represents a dying and a rising.  When Jesus talks about taking up our cross and following him, he means letting go of our old self, letting our old self hit bottom, so we can be reborn “from above,” as Jesus put it back in chapter 3.

But if you’re the one going through this, like the child being lowered into a cool bath to reduce a dangerously high fever, it feels like you’re the victim of gratuitous violence, and you fight against it with all your might.  No one wants to hit bottom.  No one desires for their old self to die because it feels like your only self.  

One of the reasons they are out in the desert in the first place is because the wilderness is where we are closer to the bottom and therefore these questions of spiritual identity and life are more immediate.  That’s why people fast; that’s why Irish monks used to pray outdoors in all weather; that’s why we submit to strenuous spiritual disciples.  It is to get to the bottom of things, which in the end, is our physical, embodied nature.  Hitting bottom is not a matter of thinking or feeling something.  It is something that happens to and in your mortal body.

III.

So Jesus delays for two days.  The disciples apparently assume it is because he’s afraid of arrest.  But that’s not it.  It is because he has something bigger planned for Lazarus than merely healing his physical body.  He is waiting for Lazarus to hit the real bottom; he is waiting for Lazarus to die.  

When he is sure that this has happened, Jesus calls the disciples together and announces that they are going back to Judea.  The disciples remind Jesus that there is still a warrant out for his arrest in Judea.

The Lord then reflects about the difference between walking in the day and in the night.  In the daytime we can see where we are going.  He is the light of the world, and he is able to navigate the challenges and complexities of his environment.  This is in contract with those who walks at night, who can’t see where he is going, and therefore stumbles and crashes into things.  Interestingly, he refers to the light as something that is “in” people or not, like we bring with us our light and we create our own daytime or nighttime.  

On one level, Jesus is simply saying, “Trust me, I got this.  The clueless Temple police are in the dark.  They will not expect me to show up in Bethany.  Anyway, it’s not quite time yet.”  

On a deeper level he means that anyone who does trust in him does have that light within them enabling them to see clearly what is going in in their world.  

Jesus tells them that he wants to go back to Judea because, he says, “Our friend Lazarus is sleeping, but I am going in order to wake him up.”  The disciples make the mistake of taking him literally; they think he means Lazarus is having a nap.  So they don’t get it.  It is one of the many places in this gospel where I imagine Jesus sighing or rolling his eyes in frustration.  So he has to spell it out for them.  “Lazarus has died,” he bluntly states, and he could add, “You clueless numbskulls.”  

“For your sakes I am glad I wasn’t there so that you can believe.”  Which they apparently don’t because they keep interpreting his words literally, which is to say, nonsensically.  They do this as a defense mechanism to avoid doing what he says.  This is what most literal interpretations of Jesus are about.  Especially when taking him literally means doing something impossible, like being born again, or eating his body.

IV. 

While it is necessary for us to hit bottom in some actual way, hitting bottom is not the end.  We do not hit bottom and then stay there to rot in defeat and failure.  What we think of as hitting bottom is in fact the condition required for Jesus to show up and for new life to start happening. 

 

Jesus says that a grain of wheat has to “die” before it can sprout and become a plant that bears much fruit.  I like the image of an acorn that has to hit bottom by being buried in the soil, at which point it begins to become something new that was always encoded within it, that was always its true nature and destiny.  

Your little, limited, narrow, closed old self has to die as a condition of your larger, expansive, wide, and open new self to emerge.  You have to realize that your normal existence is actually killing you, that as long as you hang on to it you’re doomed, and that you have to use the experience of hitting bottom as an opportunity to get out of it.  You have to let it go.  Because there is life beyond the bottom.

The disciple Thomas gets it.  He hears Jesus announce that they are headed back to the dangerous territory of Judea, and all this talk of Lazarus dying, and he assumes that the time has come for Jesus to be lifted up for the salvation of the world.  And he’s right!  This is just before Passover.  And though we may have nine chapters to go, very little time will pass.  Jesus is in fact only a few weeks away from being crucified.

Thomas may be the only one who actually understands and reflects what Jesus has been talking about.  “If we have died with him in a death like his we shall surely be united with him in a resurrection like his,” is the way the Apostle Paul will put it.  Thomas is ready to die with Jesus.  He understands and embraces the true cost of discipleship.  Even if he may not quite yet understand what resurrection is about.

Following Jesus means, as Thomas points out, being ready to die with him.  Thomas is a disciple.  He has already presumably been baptized, which is that symbolic rebirth.  Which means that, unlike the grain of wheat or the acorn, our hitting bottom and letting go of our old selves is not usually something that is a one-time-only experience.  Yes we are only baptized once; but it is something we have to remember all the time, as we do every Sunday.  And we do that both at the beginning when we refill the font, but also at the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as we are continually refed and renourished by the Body and Blood of Christ. 

I mean, Paul says we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, because the fact is that we are constantly forgetting our new selves and sliding back into our old ego-centric habits.  Even the greatest saints of the church experienced moments of doubt and weakness, so hard is it for us to maintain our connection to who we truly are.  Luther said Christians are always at the same time saved and sinners.

V.

Which leaves us with the choice.  Shall we stay in the safe yet challenging place of retreat, where we can work out our souls and prepare for some future time when we engage in mission?  Shall we continue our community-building and listening to Jesus?  Shall we stay, in other words, in church?  Obviously, this is a necessary and good place; Jesus calls us to it… but he doesn’t call us to stay here forever.

Sooner or later we have to leave the classroom, or the circle of supporting friends, or the practice field, or the laboratory.  If we stay too long it becomes hiding, procrastinating, excuse-making.  If we are staying here out of fear or shame or a desire for predictability and comfort, we are here for the wrong reason.  Remember that Jesus begins his ministry in Mark with the words, “Now is the time!”

Or shall we go with Jesus back into hostile and dangerous territory, for the sake of bringing light to those who dwell in a land of deep darkness and even bringing life to the dead?  Shall we actually do Jesus’ mission of love, healing, welcoming, and forgivness, putting ourselves at risk?  Shall we be active witnesses to the new life that God has poured into our hearts?  Shall we, in effect, die with him, thereby becoming new people, the people we were originally created to be?

We have always to be doing both, I think.  Acting and reflecting; learning and implementing; listening and speaking.  For now, we are left with Jesus’ words of instruction to the disciples as they leave the zone of relative safety and embark for Judea.  “Let’s go.”

+++++++       

   

I and the Father Are One.

John 10:22-42.   (August 30, 2015)

I.

Jesus has apparently remained in or near Jerusalem for a couple of months, and it is now the Festival of the Dedication, or Hanukkah, which usually occurs in December.  Some of the leaders who are his opponents find and surround him as he is walking in Solomon’s Portico, a covered courtyard in the Temple complex.  And they start badgering him: “If you are the Christ, tell us plainly,” they demand.

They want Jesus in effect to sign at the bottom of a piece of paper with this particular theological proposition written on it.  They want him to say “I am the Christ.”  And they want this because they plan to use this claim against him.  Because everyone knew what the Christ was, and he wasn’t it.

Jesus doesn’t do that.  He says, “I have told you, but you don’t believe.”  Basically, he says they can’t even hear what he is saying unless they trust him.  Truth is known in relationship, not in some objective, cognitive assent to propositional formulas, formulas which can easily be manipulated by human authorities to mean whatever they want.  So no, Jesus is not going to sign on to their death warrant at this point.

He says, “You tell me who I am.  Look at what I am doing and decide for yourselves whether these are the works of God or not.”  The good news is never theoretical.  It is never a word game for academics.  It is always real in people’s lives.  It is always actions embodied.

But even then, he says, it’s not going to matter because they will interpret according to their own preconceived bias.  Indeed, this is what we all do inevitably.  We interpret our world subjectively based on our background, memories, desires, fears, perceptions, and limited information.  And if those qualities in us have not been transformed, that is, if we are not the Lord’s “sheep,” those who recognize his voice in their hearts, we’re not going to hear what Jesus is saying or see what he is doing.  We are only going to hear and see according to what we expect and desire to hear and see.

And we cannot truly hear what Jesus is saying or see what he is doing if we are not already in relationship with him.  We cannot read about him or even personally observe him, that is, we cannot approach him as an object of our analysis, judgment, evaluation, or disposal, we cannot stand over-against him and examine him… and have any true knowledge of him.  Or anything or anybody, for that matter.  In fact, we can’t know him unless he is in us and we in him.

In order to know who Jesus is, we have to let go of our definitions, our doctrines, our expectations, our wants and needs, our fears and our hopes, and trust him.  Like the man-born-blind trusted him by getting up and going to Siloam and washing his face for no other reason than because Jesus told him to do that.

II.

Jesus concludes his response by talking about how those who do follow him and trust in him will be his forever, and forever the possession of God.  “They will never die,” he says.  

This is a claim that Jesus makes repeatedly.  He said it in chapter 6 about eating his flesh and drinking his blood.  He will say it in chapter 11 before he raises Lazarus from death.  The assertion that those who trust in and belong to Jesus Christ will in some sense never die is part of our faith.

That doesn’t mean, obviously, that we continue on in these mortal bodies year after year, which would be a truly horrible prospect.  He means that if we, through him, find ourselves in tune with and embraced in the God of life, then even when our superficial individuality in these physical  bodies is over, what is most truly us flows and integrates back into God.  Living forever means we are restored to the Word, the energy by which the universe is made and holds together.

Then he finishes up by asserting, “I and the Father are one.”  He means that he is the doorway or the gate, the interface between humanity and God.  He is the place where true human and true God meet, where creation and Creator come together, and that we make our way from one to the other in and through him.

In other words, by sharing in his life of love, peace, and compassion, by living lives of forgiveness, welcome, and joy, by partaking together in his body and blood, he becomes us and we become him, and thereby become one with God.

Jesus does not say here, “I am the Christ,” flat out in those terms like his opponents want him to.  He says something not in a category that they can nail him on, that everyone supposedly understood.  He says, “I and the Father are one,” which opens up a whole new conversation and reality.  He is refusing to be put into the doctrinal boxes prepared for him by his opponents.

Here we have the culmination of the whole first half of the gospel.  From now on we will be moving towards and into the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  But this narrative will not make any sense unless we know without any doubt who Jesus is, which is that he is one with the Father.  He is God’s Word, God’s living Presence, God’s Wisdom and love; he is God.  He is the Good Shepherd, the Gate, the Son of Man, the Lamb of God, the Light of the World, the Bread from heaven, the Son of God, and the Christ, or Messiah.  

Where we most misunderstand Jesus is when we think he is only talking about himself as a historical figure.  In reality he comes not to be someone to affirm titles about, but someone whom we are called to worship, follow, and be.  Most importantly, we only understand who Jesus is inclusively; when we make him a means of excluding and condemning people, we have missed him altogether.

III.

For this affirmation, “I and the Father are one,” is not just about the relationship a man from Nazareth had with God 2000 years ago.  The problem in Christian history is that we almost always leave it at that.  We think it is enough to proclaim that Jesus and God were one.  We think it is sufficient to say the words, “Jesus was God.” 

Worse, we have engaged in the depraved and disgraceful work of thinking we are doing evangelism when we force, coerce, or even convince other people to verbally affirm the same proposition about Jesus.  This reduces the church to a society of individuals who all say the same words, that Jesus is God.  And that’s about all.  

But those words are just a theological proposition which may have nothing to do with us at all.  Recognizing the emptiness of this statement by itself, and confessing the abysmal way statements like this have been abused over the centuries, many Christians, with more or less sophisticated intellectual rationalizations, have decided not to affirm them.

 

But what they don’t get is that it is not the affirmation that is the problem; it is that we limit the affirmation exclusively to Jesus, when Jesus intends that this be something that we realize through him in ourselves and in everyone.  So where some suggest that Jesus really wasn’t God but just a good teacher, what the Lord is really saying is basically, “I am one with God and in me so are you.

The text doesn’t say: “Jesus and his Father were one.”  It remembers and reports Jesus himself saying “I and the Father are one.”  In the gospel of John in particular we find not so much third person descriptions of things Jesus did and said, as the first person testimony of Jesus himself.  If you have a red letter Bible you find in John page after page of mostly red words.  Jesus talks, and when we repeat what he says we are putting ourselves in his place and his words are coming out of our mouth.  

When I was in high school I had a friend named Jim.  Jim played the electric guitar and idolized Eric Clapton.  He learned to play, note-for-note every solo from every Cream album.  So that it was Clapton’s music but Jim was playing it.  (Setting aside, of course, the question of Clapton’s own divinity….)  

So here, these are Jesus’ words, “I and the Father are one;” and when we say them we are taking them on ourselves; they become our words.  They are no longer just something Jesus said about himself; now they are something we, through and in him, say about ourselves.

And everyone who reads these words, especially aloud, which is the way people would have experienced it for the first 1500 years it was around, identifies with him. 

IV.  

It’s like I suggested last week about the pronouns.  Who is the “I” here, when Jesus says, “I and the Father are one”?  The “I” is Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, the Human One, who takes on our flesh to share in our humanity.  He realizes true humanity, which means that his “I” is also our deepest and truest “I.”  So when he says “I and the Father are one,” there is a sense in which I can say that as well.  In my deepest and truest place, I share the same humanity that is one with God in Jesus Christ.  

So, in the first place, Christ reveals to us this truth about who we truly are as human beings, created in the image of God, with God’s breath breathed into us.  

The Lord defends himself here by quoting Psalm 82, where God says to the people, “I have said, ‘You are gods.’”  He goes on to point out that if the Bible calls those to whom God’s word came “gods,” how is it offensive for Jesus to call himself God’s Son?  

The principalities and powers that rule in our world are always trying to denigrate human nature and get us to forget the majesty, glory, and blessing of who we are originally created to be.  Jesus embodies a true humanity that is far beyond what we normally expect, and he invites us to share in this reality.

Secondly, the fact that it is Jesus Christ who speaks these words is what keeps us from identifying our own broken, sinful, limited, blind, enslaved selves with God, which is the liability and temptation of this kind of talk.  The “I” I think I am, my ego-centric, personality-driven self, is emphatically not God.  It is a degraded, crippled, obscured, and defiled representation of human nature, and to identify this version of me with God would be narcissistic, megalomaniacal mental and spiritual illness.  People making this assertion have wreaked untold havoc and mayhem in the world, and continue to do so. 

But there is within me a deeper and truer “I,” to which Christ awakens me and which is in fact he.  And Christ reveals its true character.   It is love: it emerges and blossoms forth in Jesus’ life, a life permeated by compassion, forgiveness, justice, non-violence, peace, purity of heart, poverty of spirit, healing and wholeness, welcoming and inclusion.   

We can not understand any of this unless we participate in it ourselves.  When it is reduced to a statement about Jesus, it becomes meaningless to us.  The point of Christianity is not to talk about Jesus Christ; it is to follow and become him.  It is to “participate in the divine nature” through him.  It is to see in him the realization of full and true humanity as the realization of full and true divinity.         

V.

This message, “I and the Father are one,” is so offensive to the leaders that they are ready to stone Jesus for blasphemy.  It doesn’t help when Jesus points out how the Bible calls the people “gods.”  Eventually, Jesus has to escape from Jerusalem and go across the Jordan to the wilderness where John used to baptize people.  

The leaders are clueless.  They just know that Jesus threatens to overturn their privilege like he overturned the tables of the merchants in the Temple.  Their privilege is dependent upon the people staying enslaved in guilt, fear, shame, blindness, and paralysis.  But Jesus is giving them something that could wreck everything.  He is waking them up to their own true nature.  He is giving them real sight.  He is showing them what they already have within them.

The great Roman Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, once said that “the Christian of the future will be a mystic or… not exist at all”.  What he means is that the days are coming to an end when Christianity will be just talking about Jesus; the days are coming and are now here when those who follow Jesus’ way of love will discover in him their own true humanity, and thereby their own participation in God, and live forever, just as he said.  And that forever life begins even now in the communities of love and healing he establishes by his Spirit.

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The Good Shepherd.

John 10:7-21.  (August 23, 2015)

I.

Jesus is kind of on a roll here, so he keeps on talking about the sheep, the sheep pen, the gate, and the shepherds.  It is becoming a marvelous metaphor for the people of God and their leaders, as well as the individual human soul and the inner influences we choose to follow.  The image and symbolism works on both levels.  

On one level, Jesus is talking about the corruption and selfishness of the Pharisees and other leaders in his society, and we may extend this to the political, economic, and religious leaders in our own context.  These issues are perennial; they come up in every society and every age.  

And at the same time, seen from a different point-of-view, he is also talking about the voices, influences, powers, in our own soul.  In this sense the sheep are thoughts, memories, feelings, hopes, desires, habits, and other aspects of our instinctual, emotional, and rational nature.  

So whether he is talking about the “sheep” in our heads, or the “sheep” in our communities, the message is the same.  Jesus is critical of self-centered leaders and voices whose leadership is not beneficial for the whole body, especially the weakest members.  He calls them thieves and outlaws, who are only out for themselves.  They distort and cripple the life of both soul and community.  They turn God’s intention of a beloved community of equals in mutual service, into a hierarchy of oppression in which wealth and power coagulate with the few at the top.

So when he says “I am the gate,” he means that he is the criteria, the filter, the lens sifting through and separating good influences from bad ones.  He means first of all that his life and teachings — which is to say compassion, forgiveness, healing, acceptance, justice, non-violence, humility, and love — are the qualities that we should both receive into our lives and express into our world.  Influences and leaders that exhibit other qualities will not make it through him as the gate.  A rapacious, self-centered, exclusive, retributive, condemning, and violent approach is not his and is therefore illegitimate.  That would be the way of the thieves and outlaws.

And on a deeper level he means that he, the I am, the integrated unity of true humanity — the Son of Man, the Human One — with true divinity — the Son of God, the Word and the Light that enlightens everyone — this convergence that he himself is, is the basic truth about our life; that if we go deep enough into our humanity we find him, and through him discover our union with the Creator.  

This is where he is going with this whole discourse in chapter 10.  He is aiming to bring people to the realization that they are “participants in the divine nature.”  He is opening hearts to the goal of Christian spirituality and human life itself, which is called “divinization,” or “becoming God.”  It is becoming real, or sharing in the true life that “I am” expresses.

II.

“I came so that they could have life,” he says.  But the thieves, these illegitimate leaders, enter “only to steal, kill, and destroy.”  

Jesus then shifts the metaphor.  Not only is he the gate, he is also at the same time the good shepherd.  And we can tell he is the good shepherd, distinguished from the hired hands, which is his term for the bad leaders who are only out for themselves, because he “lays down his life for the sheep.”  

“When the hired hand sees the wolf coming, he leaves the sheep and runs away.”  Perhaps the hired hand is reasoning that he can’t do any good for the flock if he is dead, so he saves himself first.  This is the way self-centered, self-righteous leaders think.  They have to be paid more than anyone, and they have to be protected from harm and liability.  “The wolf attacks the sheep and scatters them.  He’s only a hired hand and the sheep don’t matter to him.”  So he runs away and from a safe place calls out, “Hey, watch out for that wolf!”  Then, when the wolf is done eating a few of the sheep and leaves, the hired hand comes back to lead a workshop or something, probably about how to run faster than the other sheep.

But Jesus says the good shepherd gives up his life for the sheep.  He knows the sheep personally and loves them; indeed, his relationship to the sheep is an extension of his Father’s relationship to him.  He identifies with, lives with, and shares life with the sheep.  When the wolf comes, he puts himself between the wolf an the sheep, and even dies, letting the wolf devour him, so that the sheep may escape to safety.

Obviously, the Lord is alluding to his coming death on the cross where he attracts and absorbs the murderous injustice and unspeakable violence of the world, emerging on the third day to give his life to his disciples and through them to the whole world.  Giving up your life for your friends is what he will say is the ultimate act of love.  And Christians will follow him in this literally and repeatedly throughout history.  Indeed, this willingness to die for others is one of the indicators of true Christian faith.

So when Jesus goes on to talk about “other sheep that don’t belong to this sheep pen,” he means that it is not just Jewish disciples that are his friends to die for, it is everyone.  He is beginning to extend the ministry at least in anticipation, to Gentiles.  Non-believers.  The indifferent, and even enemies.  “They will listen to my voice,” he says, and there will be one flock, with one shepherd.”

The movement the Lord is inspiring is opening up.  He is the gate, and the gate is widening, yawning, broadening, spreading like open arms to embrace and receive and welcome the whole world.

III.

Jesus is not forming a closed, bounded, tightly defined, walled-off institution… even though that is what the church would largely become over the centuries.  He is declaring a church without walls and boundaries, without in-groups and outsiders, without Pharisaical standards and regulations, and most importantly, without… leaders.  His is the one voice forming one flock; he is the one Shepherd.  The closest thing we are to have to a leader would be a disciple who is a bit further along on the journey; someone who facilitates a gathering of disciples around the Word.  But it is the Word of God, Jesus Christ, who is our only Leader.

The Good Shepherd is the one who gives up his life.  Jesus even says that this is why God loves him: because he does give up his life so that he can take it up again.  And that giving up of his life began way back in the beginning, when he was the overflowing of God’s love emerging as the new creation.  And it continued when the Word overflowed and boiled over into the world finally becoming flesh to dwell among us full of grace and truth in Jesus Christ.  And his giving up of his life will be finally consummated and completed in the cross and the resurrection, when he is lifted up for the life of the world, and he leaves behind the Spirit, which he breathes on the disciples after his resurrection.

He gives his life for the sheep… he also gives his life to the sheep.  He gives them his body and blood as nourishment and thereby he becomes them and they become him.  He doesn’t just sacrifice himself so the sheep may survive.  No.  He also feeds the sheep with himself so that the sheep become him and follow him in giving their lives for others, and taking their lives up again in this new transfigured form.  

For in order to take on the new life, the ultimate and eternal life he gives, we have to give up our old lives.  We have to surrender this old life and even allow the powers of the world to kill us, to terminate and snuff this old life, so that we may descend beneath its limitations and boundaries, and connect with the deeper ocean of “I am” we share with Jesus and with everything.  This is what he means when he says elsewhere that we have to take up our cross and follow him.  This is what Bonhoeffer means when he says that discipleship means dying.

Here we have one of the most alarming and offensive things about following Jesus, because if we don’t see who he truly is — God-with-us — and if we don’t see that he calls us to our truest life in him, then Christian faith just sounds like a suicide cult.  

But Jesus here talks about giving up his life so that he can take it up again.  And the life we take up after having given it up is that life we never dared hope for, our true life, our deepest Self, our identification with him in our humanity by which we gain access to his, and our, divinity.

IV.

The leaders who are gaining at everyone else’s expense are false.  They are thieves and outlaws.  Their agenda is to steal, kill, and destroy.  The Good Shepherd doesn’t take from the sheep, he gives life to them.  He doesn’t profit from his work, he loses his life.  And by losing his life he takes it up again in a transfigured form.  And so do we.

I have realized in recent years how much of the Bible is all about the pronouns.  Who is the “I” that Jesus means here?  Of course, on the most obvious level he means himself, speaking 2000 years ago in Jerusalem.  But remember that his “I” is transferable and inclusive, as we saw with the man born blind who kind of caught it.

Maybe Jesus’ “I” is radically expansive and broadens, like the gate of the sheep pen, to embrace many.  Maybe when he says “I” he is including all of us to follow him; maybe he is including all people… but most tragically never realize he is within and with them.  Because we also receive new life when we lay down our old one.  This is what Paul means when he says that if we were baptized with him in a death like his we will surely live with him in a resurrection like his.

Maybe we who hear his words don’t really get them until we receive his mind and are able to identify with his “I;” maybe we find that when we give up our old, ego-centric, personality-driven “I,” the “I” we recover is that of Jesus Christ within us, the One with whom we share in true humanity, the One by whom we come to participate in God’s nature.

My point is how imperative it is that we give up our addictions and our loyalties and our habits of following the dictates of our old, fallen, limited, blind, lame, fearful, and narrow self.  We have to say no to the pompous and self-important, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing, self-centered, self-satisfied little dictator that is always appealing to our fear, hatred, shame, and anger.  Then we can also say no to the larger, pompous, self-important, et cetera, leaders and structures we have projected into power over us in our common life.  If we can ditch the judgmental, critical, condemning, threatening, soul-sucking Pharisees within our own soul, we will be able to free ourselves of the bad leaders we are enduring and suffering under in our society.

The narrator reports that “there was another division among the Jewish opposition because of Jesus’ words.”  Of course there was!  How could there not be?  Not only were the Pharisees and other leaders well aware that Jesus was attacking their authority, power, and gravy train, the smarter ones would have realized that his threat was even more potent because he was undermining the psychological, spiritual, and theological foundations of their whole regime.

V.

They are divided because he is saying things they are either unable to, or refuse to, understand.  So some conclude that he “has a demon and has lost his mind.”  But others rightly recognize that he doesn’t sound like people who have demons sound, which is usually incoherent  and violent bluster.  Plus, demons were known for bringing disease and paralysis.  The healing of the person born blind is a major problem.  Only God could do such a wonderful thing.

We find the proof of who Christ is in what he does.  This is not theory or some kind of word game.  The facts on the ground are that Jesus Christ heals, transforms, redeems, forgives, renews, and frees people.  I mean this actually happens; people’s lives are changed.  This is the incontrovertible raw data that proves his truth and Presence.  People can see who had been born blind.  

The church is supposed to be a factory for miracles, where lives are changed, where people are set free, where eyes are opened and the dead raised.  It is supposed to be a laboratory where souls are healed and made whole, and people realize who, and whose, they truly are.  It is where our old selves are shed like the skin of a snake, and our real, true, deeper Selves in Jesus Christ are revealed.  

And because we are no longer slaves to our inner demons, we no longer have to be subservient to destructive and fearful orders and regimes in the world.  

Jesus is presenting himself — true God and true humanity — as the antidote to the toxic mess we mistake for reality.  And he is giving us himself as an alternative.  And in following we become him, and in becoming him we overcome the darkness by the power of his light.  He is the light of the world; and because he is the Light of the world what he says in Matthew is also true: You are the Light of the world.

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