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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