Pruning.

John 15:1-17     (November 22, 2015)

I.

Jesus is delivering his final teachings to his disciples.  After promising them his peace and urging them to love each other, the Lord begins to employ the imagery of a grape-vine.  “I am the true vine and my Father is the vineyard keeper,” he says.

Israel is often portrayed in Scripture as a grape-vine.  In fact, on the facing of the Temple in Jerusalem there was carved a large and elaborate sculpture of a grape-vine, with a full bunch of grapes.  The people hearing this gospel would have immediately made the connection to this famous sculpture, and understood Jesus to be saying in a different way what he demonstrated back in chapter 2, which is that he is the Temple, he is the Way to God, he is the grape-vine, he is the true Israel of God.

Jesus presses on ahead with this language.  “[My Father] removes any of my branches that don’t bear fruit, and he trims any branch that produces fruit so that it will produce even more fruit.”  Last week we considered how the present crisis of shrinkage in the church is a matter God’s pruning away the dead and unproductive branches.  Here he makes a distinction between the dead branches that get lopped off, gathered up, and thrown in the fire, and the living but underproductive branches that are made more fruitful by being trimmed.

A vine-grower cannot afford to be sentimental about the branches; the point is the production of many, good, juicy, healthy grapes, which may then be made into wine.  He does not leave a dead branch on the vine because it was really healthy five years ago.  Neither does he leave a healthy branch if it is draining energy from an even healthier branch.  And sometimes cutting away a branch creates space for an even healthier branch to grow where one was cut away.

The criteria for being kept on the vine or cut off is always the production of fruit.  It would be easy and simple to equate this fruit production with the usual standards for the “successful church,” and say that it is about numbers: members, attendance, budget, square feet of a building, and so forth.

But we know from other parts of the Scriptures that this is not necessarily what “fruit” means.  “Fruit” more often has to do with the good, beneficial, and blessed actions of people.  When Jesus says elsewhere that people are known by their “fruit,” he means by their actions, what they do, the kind of effect they have on others and the world.  Good fruits are love, forgiveness, compassion, healing, acceptance, welcoming, and peace.  These show that the One to whom we are connected and from whom we receive our energy is the good God.  What we do, our “fruit,” matches the vine to whom we claim to belong.

Not to produce those kinds of actions means we are really getting our energy from some other source, or that we are receiving no energy at all and are effectively dead.

II.

This brings us to ask the question of what we are.  Are we — as individual disciples and/or as a gathering of disciples — a dead branch that produces no good fruit?  That is, are we so busy keeping ourselves in existence that we do not express or reflect God’s love into the world at all?  Have we totally dried up in empty habits?  Or are we branches that are healthy… but draining energy away from branches that actually produce fruit?  In other words, are we technically alive and thriving, sprouting leaves and basking in the sun, but not blooming in a way that will actually amount to a bunch of grapes?  Are we content and happy… but not really doing anything for others?  Would the resources we are using be more productive flowing to a different branch, one that does show signs of actually making grapes?

The way to assess the success of a grape-vine is in the quality and quantity of grapes it makes, so that wine can be produced, and many people served.  I have been thinking that instead of the usual numbers game used to evaluate the success of a church or a disciple, we would do better to use a different metric.  What if we measured how many lives we were touching by our own ministry?  What if we stopped worrying about how many people were actually attending and then joining our group, and placed our focus on how many individual lives were being touched and improved by the work we do?

I know churches with 500 members… that are barely having any positive impact in the world beyond themselves.  Their programs are for themselves; their focus is on getting people in; everyone is happy and busy.  But I wonder if churches like this aren’t putting out a lot of pretty leaves, but not actually making many grapes.  I also know churches with like 20 members… that are having an impact in hundreds or even thousands of lives in their community and in the world.  Their members spread the good news of God’s love in tangible and actual ways everywhere they go, and the church itself is known for reaching out in many ways to people.  It seems to me that this kind of church is in the grape production business big time.

The Lord then reminds us of where the energy flowing through the branch comes from.  “A branch can’t produce fruit by itself, but must remain in the vine.  Likewise you can’t produce fruit unless you remain in me.”  Disciples have to maintain in direct contact with Jesus Christ for it is from him that their energy and life flows.  If you try and make it on your own… you die. 

III. 

The question then becomes how do we stay in Christ.  This section has a lot of a term that is characteristic of this gospel.  The word is “remain.”  “Remain in me,” says Jesus, “And I will remain in you.”  Older translations use the word “abide.”  It means stay connected, hold on, keep together; like the way electricity flows through a wire the circuit has to remain complete.  If you unplug a lamp it won’t work.  Remain means stay plugged into Jesus.

Further on he says that this connection is about his words.  We saw this back in chapter 6 where Jesus finally made the connection that his words are Spirit and life.  He is the bread of life through his words.  So to remain in Jesus is to keep his words, his words in a sense are his continued presence.  And of course we remember and keep his words as they are recorded in Scripture.  If we are connected to his words we are connected to him.

We remain in him when his words remain in us.  I don’t think he is advising us to memorize the New Testament, not that that wouldn’t be a good thing.  But keeping his words has to mean obeying them.  It has to mean embodying them.  It has to mean doing them in your life with your hands and mouth and feet and heart and brain.  

If the Word by whom all things were created became flesh and dwelled among us in Jesus, then his words also in a sense become flesh in the lives of people by our actions in his name.  

That’s why our life together as a congregation is so focused on Jesus Christ and what he says and does.  That’s why the sermon is the centerpiece of our worship.  That’s why we offer and encourage attendance at Bible Study.  These are the places where we encounter the Word, which is the energy-source for our whole life.

By the Word and the Spirit, God creates, redeems, and sustains everything.  They are the media of God’s living Presence.  They are the energy, the sap, the juice that flows from the vine into the branches, keeping them alive, producing the fruit of active love.

“As the Father loved me, I too have loved you,” says Jesus.  “Remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.”  The connection must be maintained.  Nothing gets me more cranky than to go to a church function — a presbytery event, a session meeting, even some informal fellowship type things — and Jesus is not mentioned.  On the other hand, I remember hearing complaints about a church that their session didn’t meet often enough.  When I asked them why session only met like 4 times a year, the elders said they had trouble fitting a session meeting in because every night was taken up with so many small group Bible studies.  I let them be.  I’m not messing with that.  Especially when so many session meetings in many churches are more like interminable corporate board meetings all about property management.

IV.

Then the Lord mentions something that we often overlook.  He says, “I have said these things to you so that my joy will be in you and your joy will be complete.”  We forget the joy.  Love is not a morose duty that we grudgingly carry out.  It is something we want to do because it brings joy into people’s lives.  If church isn’t joyful it isn’t real.    

Joy is not the same thing as the empty addiction we often have to “fun.”  The difference between joy and fun is similar to the difference between hope and optimism.  Like hope, joy is in the heart, it wells up from within and infuses your whole being.  It is not a superficial distraction, a strategy to get us through the day.  Joy connects to our deepest knowledge that “all things work together for good,” as Paul says.  Because goodness, blessing, and love are the fundamental principles of creation.  And when we plug into that bedrock, that aquifer, that source code that sustains everything, we may rest in confidence and joy.

We may rest in such confidence and joy that we may love each other just as Christ has loved us, demonstrating the greatest possible love, which is to give up, hand over, lay down, surrender one’s life for one’s friends.  The text does not say “die.”  It says to give one’s life for, over, on behalf of, or because of another.  There is that fascinating Greek preposition hyper, usually translated as “for” but which literally means “over,” giving us an image of one person placing their body over another for protection, absorbing on their behalf whatever the threat was.

This of course is what Jesus does when he demonstrates maximum love by giving his life “for” us.  He places himself in harm’s way and absorbs like a lightning rod the world’s evil and violence, injustice and hatred, neutralizing it, bearing it away, deflecting it, so that we may live.  His blood acts like an inoculation within us or a shield over us, protecting us for life.

We participate in this by being Jesus’ friends and doing what he commands us to do.  Reshaping our lives in conformity to him, his words and actions, is how we become his friends and share in his love.  The Lord goes so far as to say that the disciples are not his servants but now lifted up to be with him as friends, relative equals, partners in his mission.  They can be this now because he is giving to them everything he has received from the Father.  This mission of serving as the mediator of God’s love means that eventually we have what Jesus has, because everything that he has has been communicated to us through him.  He is always the perfect conduit or channel of God’s love; God’s love flows through him without obstruction or diversion, or even a speed-bump.  He is the perfect window to God.  And him him so are we.

V.

This is the fruit he has appointed us to bear in the world.  What emerges from God in Jesus Christ… now emerges from him in us.  Our job is to get ourselves, our egos, our agendas, our philosophies and theologies, our fears and desires, out of the way so that we can also be clear windows through whom God’s love may shine.

We do that together.  That’s why Jesus’ first command is “love each other.”  He is speaking to the disciples as a body, a group.  We are to be a little engine of love for each other that overflows into the larger community.  Like the Trinity, in which God is an eternal dance of love that overflows into the creation.

His commandments give us the shape of the love we have for each other.  The point is not just that we have this closed society of mutual affection, but that we shine into the world with that love.  That in the end is what we have to give: an example and pattern of living together as a branch energized by our integration into the vine of Christ, so that the love God has for the world may flow from him through us and into a needy world.

+++++++             

Peace.

John 14.15-31   (November 15, 2015)

I.

I was talking to someone who teaches at Princeton Seminary last week.  She said she was close to retirement and when that day came she would probably not go to church at all.  She said — and I have heard this from others — that many retired pastors and church workers are so burned out by the time they retire that they have no interest in participating in a church anymore.  There is also this relatively newly reported statistic revealing a group which has been dubbed the “dones.”  These are people who were once very active in church life, but who at some point lose their energy and enthusiasm, and maybe even their faith, and give it up.  They declare themselves “done” with church.

All this is another indication that we live in a time when the church — at least the church as we know it, or knew it — is in trouble.  This news should not come as any kind of shock to us.  Some churches are doing better than others; but more and more churches, after decades of slowly hemorrhaging members and money, after going to part-time ministers, or merging, or yoking, are hitting the wall of viability and closing.  

For small churches this is an existential crisis.  But some 500 member churches used to be 1200 member churches, and some  1000 member churches only get 300 people to show up on an average Sunday.  This is also happening to churches across the theological and liturgical spectrum: conservative, progressive, Catholic, evangelical, traditional, liberal, whatever.

It has been going on for longer than the 34 years I have been in ministry.  So this environment of decline, shrinkage, and loss, has characterized my entire career.  It is somewhat discouraging.  On the denominational level, those years have been filled with fighting and blaming, at the expense of not doing much for local churches.  And on the level of local churches there has been a profound lack of imagination.

When a person is ordained in the Presbyterian Church we promise to serve with “energy, intelligence, imagination, and love.”  In many churches perhaps it is imagination that goes first, if there ever was much at all.  Many of us still cannot imagine a church any different from the one we knew as children, and we keep trying to do that kind of church better… and failing.  Then, after a while, maybe we began to lose intelligence, as trying to do the same thing over and over and expect different results doesn’t make us look very smart.  Then, as we age and as the years slide by, we lose our energy; people just give up and stay home.   Until some congregations are left with nothing except… love.  They are reduced to a small group of people who love each other and who love Jesus.

If they don’t have that… well, then they really are finished.

There is nothing inevitable about any of this.  Churches are in different places on this continuum, and they do, by the power of the Holy Spirit, turn around and revive.  But the bottom line for a gathering of disciples of Jesus Christ is always love.

II.

Interestingly enough, love is not actually the last gasp of a church; it is the beginning.  It is what Jesus talks about with his disciples here on the night before his death.  It is the one essential commandment.  If you have that, then energy, intelligence, and imagination are still possible.  Indeed, they are only possible if based on love, at least as far as his disciples are concerned

“If you love me,” he tells them, “You will keep my commandments.”

To love Jesus is not just to admire a historical figure.  It is to love God in the One whom God sends to reveal to us our true nature.  To love Jesus is to love ourselves — our real and true selves, not our blind, lame, ignorant, violent, fearful, old selves, not the selves that have been shaped by the world, the selves our egos tells us we are.  When Jesus elsewhere quotes Leviticus and commands us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, he means that in him we become our neighbors, we identify with and are united to everyone.  Loving our neighbors and loving ourselves is the same thing.

For the Lord, love is not just a feeling or a sentiment; it has to do with actions, and very specific actions at that: the keeping of his commandments.  And his commandments, especially in this gospel, also have to do with love.  “I give you a new commandment,” he says in chapter 13, “Love each other.  Just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other.  This is how everyone will know you are my disciples, when you love each other.”

He does not say that people will know his disciples by anything else.  Not even by their energy, intelligence, and imagination.  Not by their style of worship.  Not by their doctrine or theology.  Not by their liturgical practices or their ways of prayer or meditation.  Not by their personal morality.  Certainly not by their economic, social, or political philosophies.  Certainly not by their wealth or power or status or attractiveness or privilege or race or nation or any of the other categories we may think are essential.

He doesn’t even say they are known by their faith or our hope.  But by their love.  The author of this gospel is the same person who says in a letter that “God is love, and those who remain in love remain in God and God remains in them.”  To love is nothing less than to participate in God.  To love is to lose your small, narrow, blind, fearful self, and to realize your true, large, wide, enlightened, and fearless self, Christ-in-you.  To love is to realize that you are in everything God by the Word spoke into being.    

And the first place that happens is here, in the gathering of disciples, the community of faith.  When that happens, everything else follows.

III.  

Then the Lord immediately starts talking about how God will send the Holy Spirit to the disciples.  He says that the world can’t recognize the Spirit, but the disciples will know the Spirit who lives in them and with them.  The love that Jesus is requiring of his disciples is not possible by our own initiative in which we think according to the world’s values; it has to come from God.  It has to well up within us through the true humanity we share with Jesus. 

The Spirit is the way Jesus will continue to be present with the disciples.  Even after his death, he will continue to live in and with them by his Spirit.  And because he continues to live after death so they also will live, and be able to keep his commandments which is the indication of their love.  The Holy Spirit is the love of God as it is poured out upon and within the disciples; it is the Spirit that reveals to them Jesus’ continued Presence, and sustains the love they share for each other and for all.   

The disciple named Judas, whom we are assured is not the same as Judas Iscariot (who has departed to betray Jesus) asks about why he will reveal himself to them and not to the world.  It is a reasonable question, one that many have asked in every generation.  If Jesus is the Messiah, the Savior, the Redeemer, how come only those who trust in him know this?  Wouldn’t it be way more effective if everyone could see this truth?  Why doesn’t Jesus do something so public and objective that everyone could see it and therefore believe in and follow him?  Why doesn’t he reveal himself to the world?

Jesus doesn’t really answer the question.  His response is to keep talking about how important it is that his disciples, this little community who trust in him, keep his word.  He says that God himself, the Father, will come with him and together they will make their home with them.  They will become the Temple of God’s Presence.  They will become the place where people meet and encounter the living God.

So Jesus Christ  does reveal himself to the world.  He does it in the love shared among the disciples.  The world will see the disciples and thereby come to see him.  That is, the world will see in them the living Presence of God.  They will be the proof.

This is an incredibly high expectation he is placing on the church.  They are to be the living example, the visible manifestation, the actual Presence of God.  The world, that is, people still caught in the death-spiral of their own ego-centricity, are supposed to be able to look at the church and see something otherworldly.  They are supposed to see the love of God.

IV.   

This is why there is nothing more important than for the church to be the church.  There is nothing more important than for the church to gather together and discern God’s Word by the power of the Spirit, and live in obedience to Christ’s teachings, which are all about love.  

So, in this age of apparent decline, the one thing necessary that we have to hold on to, the one thing we have to cultivate and protect and nurture and encourage, is love.  For the church is not dying… it is being pruned.  It is losing many dead and dying branches, branches that maybe forgot their connection to the trunk and the root.  The church has had many, many members who were here for reasons other than love.  For 1500 years the church was a center of power and privilege, and people would hang out among us for lots of reasons.  We are being pruned.  And the branches that remain will be those who participate in the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ.  The ones who remain will be the ones who love each other.

And love does not require a lot of the institutional baggage we have imagined are essential to the church.  Love does not require a minister.  Love does not require a building.  Love does not require a minimum number of members to be viable.  Love does not require someone’s evaluation of what is sustainable.  For love we only need each other and God, in God’s Word and Spirit.

So in this very bad week, in which hundreds of people were murdered in Paris, and Kenya, and Beirut, and Baghdad, and hundreds more murdered in the normal wars we tolerate and even forget about, what is our job?  What is our response?

We know what the world wants.  The world, under the sway of the Evil One as it is, wants more violence.  Retribution, punishment, more drone strikes, boots-on-the-ground (which is really people on the ground), invasions, bombing.  The world can only think in terms of hatred, deterrence, threats, and force.  The world is shot through with darkness and fear, permeated by cycles of anger and brutality, thinking this will solve everything.  When, for 10,000 years, having tried this approach repeatedly and nearly exclusively, it has solved exactly nothing.

The Lord Jesus sends into this world, as he was himself sent by God, a community of people commissioned to keep his commandments and love each other.  Among his commandments is the one about “Love your enemies and bless those who curse you.”  

And if we complain that such a naive, unrealistic approach might lead to our deaths, he says, in effect, “So?  Haven’t I also showed you what death is about?  Haven’t I also showed you that death is powerless to separate you from me?  Haven’t I said that whoever lives and trusts in me will never really die?

V.

“Peace I leave with you,” he promises.  “My peace I give you.  I give to you not as the world gives.  Don’t be troubled or afraid.”  Jesus comes to bring peace, shalom.   Peace is just the globalized form of love.  Peace is what it looks like when God’s love spreads from soul to soul and starts to infect a whole society.

Our mission as a church is that of every church and congregation.  It is to witness to and exemplify and embody in our own lives and life together the love of God, and to shine that love into people’s lives.  It is to be in the world like salt, or light, or leaven, as an influence, a catalyst for goodness and compassion.  It is to be a welcoming, embracing, forgiving, and healing presence; it is to be people of joy and truth.  It is to break down barriers of mistrust and bigotry, and it is to minister to all who suffer, no matter who they are.

God is pruning us so that we will function in this way.  God needs the church to be the church, a living witness to Jesus Christ, the Word and love of God.

+++++++       

Room to Spare.

John 14:1-14 (November 8, 2015)

I.

The disciples are beginning to understand what’s going on.  Jesus has just said that Peter will deny him that very night.  With the odd departure of Judas right after Jesus washes all their feet, they are probably experiencing and expressing some anxiety right about now.

So Jesus has to reassure them.  “Don’t be troubled,” he says.  “Trust in God; trust also in me.”  Realize that things are going according to plan.  Being troubled, anxious, and fearful doesn’t help.  We see what we want to see in this existence, and if we choose to we can see the events of Jesus’ last day as a disaster, an atrocity, an ignominious defeat, a vicious assault that would inspire either our despair or retribution.

But if we trust in God and Jesus our eyes and minds may be opened to see within and beneath these horrific events to something else: the Human One and Son of God lifted up for the healing and life of the whole world.

Then Jesus says, “My Father’s house has room to spare.”  He has only mentioned his “Father’s house” once before, back in chapter 2, when he was causing a disturbance in the Temple.  “Don’t make my Father’s house a place of business,” he demanded.  It is possible that the disciples might at first have thought he was talking about the Temple here too.  Especially if they imagined he was about to incite the crowd to take over the Temple.

But at this point it becomes clear that he doesn’t mean the actual, physical, historical Temple building in Jerusalem.  He means himself and the new community he calls into being.  The other gospels make it clearer that he is talking about the “temple” of his body, and Paul says that Christ’s “body” refers to the church.  So when he says it has “room to spare” — the traditional language is “many mansions,” or “many dwelling places or rooms — he means to cure them of their fear of not having a place in him, in his new gathering.  

I remind you that we Christians have never cared about the Temple as a building.  When Jerusalem was under Christian control, from the 4th through like the 8th centuries, the Temple area was, well, let's just say it was not developed.   When the Muslims came they turned it into a great mosque, but we had no interest in the Temple because for us Jesus Christ is the Temple, and he is wherever two or three are gathered in his name.  Remember what he said in chapter 4 about how it doesn’t matter where people worship because now true worship happens in Spirit and truth.  It is not, and never has been, about real estate for followers of Jesus.

The important thing to remember here is that when we Christians talk about the Temple, we are referring to Jesus and the church, and even the body of each believer.  Together we are the portable and exploded Temple through whom the life of God is spread and poured across the Earth.

II.

The Lord tells the disciples that he is going ahead to prepare a place for them in his Father’s house, and that he will return to take them with him, and they know the way to the place he is going to.

Thomas is confused.  He insists that they don’t and even can’t know the way to wherever the Lord is going.  Thomas is assuming that the destination is somewhere else, somewhere far-off, somewhere difficult to get to.  He wants a map.  He wants a GPS.  

This gives Jesus the opportunity to make one of his most characteristic and central statements.  It expresses the core of our faith and summarizes what we believe.  “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he states.  We are beginning to get a sense of how Christ is everything.  He is the Word, he is the Lamb that takes away sin, he is the Good Shepherd, and the gate of the sheep-pen; he is the living water, the true bread, the resurrection and the life.  He is the Temple, the High Priest, and the offering.  He is the Human One, the Son of God, one with the Father and sent by the Father. 

The great prayer of St. Patrick ends with this confession: “Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ in breadth, Christ in length, Christ in height, Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me, Christ in the eye of every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.”  

It reminds me of that famous quote by the pacifist, A. J. Muste, who said, “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.”  There is no way to God as if God were some far-off destination.  In Jesus Christ, God is the way itself.  We cannot arrive at God by walking; God is in the walking itself.  God is both destination and journey; indeed, the destination is the journey, and the journey is the destination.

There is no way to Christ; Christ is himself the way.  To follow him is to be him.  To obey him is to participate in him.  To worship him is to become him.  Wherever you are, there he is.  He is the One who shares in and reveals our true humanity; he is the One Word through whom creation happens.  So he is already here with and within and among us.

He is the truth, which is to say that he is whatever is real.  When we find what is true in us and in our world, we find him.  Everything that is not him — that is, everything that does not testify to the goodness of God and all that God has made — is not real.  It is falsehood, projection, illusion, a product of human blindness and ignorance, fear and sinfulness.  It is the result of our belief in the lie that we are alone and at risk in a hostile world where goodness is scarce.

III.

So when Jesus continues by saying, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” he does not mean, as self-centered, self-righteous humans have often mistaken him to mean, that “only Christians go to heaven.”  Nothing could be farther from what the Lord is talking about here than to limit eternal life to those who give themselves a particular religious or institutional label.  No one cares less about religious or institutional labels than Jesus.  Labels are just ways we separate ourselves from the truth.  We prefer dealing with a label to having a relationship with a person.

What he does mean is that we come to God only through the realization, insight, and practice of who Jesus Christ is: the living Presence of God-with-us.  We come to God only by knowing and seeing that God is already here, embedded in the creation that God through the Word speaks into being.  Jesus Christ comes into the world not to draw attention to himself as an individual historical figure, but to be the revelation of God’s love and goodness, God’s healing, saving, joyful Presence everywhere.

Christ comes also to prevent us from imagining that our ego-centric, personality-driven selves are who we truly are.  It is one thing to just say that God is within us.  That is not true and the depths of idolatrous megalomania if it means we are identifying our sinful egos with God.  But Christ is saying that God is within us and I am what God looks like.  

So the spiritual life becomes a process of cutting away everything in us that is not God, as God is revealed in Jesus Christ.  Like Michelangelo making that statue of David by, as he said, chipping away every piece of marble that was not David, so we too come to our true humanity when we rid ourselves of everything in us that is not Christ.  That’s why Jesus says that if we know him we know the Father.  Jesus is what God looks like in human form.

That’s a big reason why we read the Bible, especially the gospels.  It’s not just for information.  We want to see the pattern of Christ so we can find and cultivate that within us.  We want to lose everything — every action, opinion, thought, word, hope, dream, or image — that does not fit into the picture of Jesus Christ.  Because he is the truth, which is to say, only he is real.

When he says that he is the life, he means that all this other stuff in us, the things we can’t imagine Jesus, as he is presented in the New Testament, ever doing or saying or thinking, are dead.  They are like an encrustation of lifeless, calcified, rotten, desiccated tissue, an exoskeleton, a hard shell that binds and restricts and limits us. 

IV.

So Philip pipes up.  “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”  I wonder how Jesus kept from banging his head on the table in frustration.  What has he just been saying?  What has be been saying and doing for three years?  “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been with you all this time?” Jesus asks in exasperation.  “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father!”   “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”  “The Father who dwells in me does his works.”

Then he provides the kicker.  “Whoever believes in me will do the works that I do.  They will do even greater works than these because I am going to the Father.  I will do whatever you ask for in my name, so that the Father can be glorified in the Son.  When you ask me for anything in my name, I will do it.”

The easiest way to interpret this is that it is just magic.  A super spell you can use to get whatever you want.  How cool is that?  How many 8-year-olds have heard this in church and then gone home to try it?  “In the name of Jesus I ask for a pony!”  “In the name of Jesus I ask that my team win this soccer game!”  And of course it doesn’t happen.  Because Jesus Christ is not a genie.  Sorry.

At this point the explanations of parents and pastors and Sunday School teachers all sounds like making rationalistic excuses about why Jesus can’t or won’t do what he says.  And it’s not always something trivial and childish.  Usually we resort to prayer in Jesus’ name for really important things, matters of life and death.  “In the name of Jesus I ask that our marriage not fall apart!”  “In the name of Jesus I ask that my child’s cancer be healed!”  When we don’t get the desired response then, we may lose our faith altogether.

When Jesus talks about believing in him, or trusting in him, this is not the same as when we have a similar conversation or relationship with anyone else.  Because when Jesus Christ asks you to trust in him, it is not as someone out there, but as someone in here.  It is the “in him” that is essential here.  He is the truly Human One with whom we share our basic humanness.  Through that shared humanness he is within us, he is part of us, he is us, and we are within him and therefore within God.  Praying in his name does not mean just throwing in a few extra words: “in Jesus’ name, amen”.  It means praying in and as him.  It means praying out of our essential identity with him and therefore in God.

Prayer is not a way to get what we, in our selfish egocentricity want.  It is a way to place ourselves at Christ’s disposal and participate in who he is and what he wants for us.  So when he says, “when you ask for anything in my name, I will do it,” what he means is, “when you ask for anything as me,” or “when I in you ask for anything,” or “when your will is attuned to God’s will so that your desires are God’s desires, you will be able to see that God has already done it.”

V.

Yesterday and I saw a post on Facebook from a Russian Orthodox priest, who quoted the Taoist sage Lao Tzu, of all people, when he said: “Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are.”  On one level that sounds like caving in to the world’s evil and refusing to better yourself.  One person commented that if everyone did that there would be no progress.  To which I responded that maybe progress is overrated.  

But on another level, the level that Jesus is on, it means that we need to get to the bottom of reality and know that God is in charge, and trust in this truth.  That’s what Jesus needs the disciples to hold onto, because the next 16 hours are going to be a very bumpy ride.  

It is not a matter of being content with a world tortured by violence, injustice, fear, lies, and threats.  Jesus does not rejoice in the ways of such a world.  Indeed, he takes on himself the consequences of human ignorance, weakness, carelessness, selfishness, and corruption.  He holds himself up as a lightning rod to absorb the world’s evil, and shows it to be empty and false.  For if you are firmly anchored in the truth, the shifting sands of feeble falsehood cannot ultimately harm you.

When we identify with the way, the truth, and the life, nothing can stop or hurt us.  Nothing can kill us.  Nothing can ever separate us from the love of God which is ours in Christ Jesus.  To trust in him is to trust in who you truly are.  To trust in him is to trust in God.

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Betrayal.

John 13:21-38 (November 1, 2015)

I.

After washing the feet of his disciples as an example of both loving service and priestly commissioning, Jesus sits back down, and they all go back to eating.  But the Lord becomes very distraught.  He knows that one of his disciples, one of the ones whose feet he has just washed, is about to go out and rat on him, informing the police where he is, so that he can be arrested.  And he knows which one will do this.

“I assure you, one of you will betray me,” he says.  The word used in the gospel which is translated as “betray” simply means “to give or hand over” something or someone.  Jesus is telling his disciples that one of them will hand him over, one of them will give him up to the authorities.  They have had to meet in secret, trusting each other to keep this in confidence; now Jesus said one will break this trust and reveal their secret, and turn him over to the police.   

Betrayal is one of the most destructive things we can experience.  In the Inferno, Dante puts traitors at the lowest level of Hell.  Treason, betrayal, is deserving of more severe punishment than just about any other crime.  Betrayal shatters our trust in each other. 

The other day I heard of a young woman whose “friends” bullied her by text-message after she and a boy-friend broke up.  She ended up killing herself.  Betrayal makes us feel like we can’t even trust anyone or the world itself.  It makes us feel like we can be turned against at any time.  Breaking a relationship by betraying a trust is one of the worst things a person can go through.

Jesus is basically saying that there is a mole among them, and that whatever plans they might have had for the future of this ministry were going to be wrecked.  Because for Jesus to be turned over to the police would almost certainly mean his death.  So his words generate confusion around the table as the disciples try to figure out who he is talking about.

The unnamed disciples who is closest to Jesus, both emotionally and at the table, leans over and asks Jesus who it is.  Jesus answers that it is the one to whom he is about to give a piece of bread, after dipping it in the bowl.  Then he dips the bread in the bowl, which probably contained olive oil and thyme, and reaches over to give it to… Judas.

It is almost as if Jesus has selected Judas for this task of betrayal.  We know that the devil was already working on Judas.  We already know as the disciples do not that Judas is the traitor.  But it is not until Jesus gives him this piece of bread that we are told that “Satan entered into him.”

How can Jesus be feeding Satan to anyone?  How can receiving something from Jesus, especially bread, after all we heard in chapter 6 about the bread of life, result in Judas’ being given up to Satan?

II.

The devil, or Satan, does not get much attention in this gospel.  This is the only place the word Satan is used; he is only called “the devil” three other times.  In one of these Jesus tells us that the devil “was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.  When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”  

So the devil — Satan — represents the opposite of the truth.  He is about lies, falsehood, illusion, emptiness, unreality, untruth.  The devil is the master of the unreal world that humans in our sinfulness have invented and projected and prosecuted upon each other, the world of violence, injustice, ignorance, hatred, shame, and darkness.  In other words, the world we grow up to imagine is the only one, the superstructure of lies that we have built and laid over the real world of God’s good and blessed creation, the world we know, that’s the world Satan is master of.

I am reminded of that scene in The Matrix where one of the crew becomes a traitor, he sells out Morpheus and his friends.  What he gets in return is to be inserted back into the matrix with no knowledge of what he has done or that he is living an illusion at all.  He doesn’t want to know the truth.  He will gladly sign his friends’ death warrants if he can be left in blissful ignorance.  The traitor wistfully wonders “why or why did I take the red pill?”  Taking the red pill in the film is what enables one to see the truth.

Judas has made the same decision.  Confronted with the truth which he sees in Jesus, he prefers to go back to living in the lies and falsehood of normal existence.  Lies are easier.  They are more convenient.  They are more profitable.  They are more popular.  They make more sense.  In a strange and paradoxical way, lies are more tangible than truth.  Lies are like money: they are mere pieces of paper that we have all agreed to believe are really worth something.  As long as we all continue to believe this, they are worth something.  But, like a placebo, once someone points out that it is only a piece of paper, the danger is that the whole illusory system will come crashing down.

Judas has seen the truth… and he doesn’t want to know about it.  Maybe he figured that this Jesus movement would have more conventional, tangible, realizable goals.  You know, overthrowing Rome, setting up a new government, redistributing wealth, reforming the priesthood, getting rid of the troublemakers… who knows?  

But Judas couldn’t handle the truth, to quote from another movie.  Almost overtime Judas’ name is mentioned in this gospel the sentence also includes the word “betray.”  It is like he reflexively had to hand Jesus over; something about who Jesus was didn’t stick to him, like the way our bodies reject some kind of invader.  He was too comfortable, too accustomed, too privileged, too accommodated to the world of lies.  Truth was too much for him to stomach.  He refused to see it.  

III.

Judas did not see Jesus as the profound truth of the unity of true humanity and God; he did not see Jesus as the Word of God; he did not see Jesus as the great I Am, or the Good Shepherd, or the Gate, or the Lamb of God, or any of these titles.  

Judas took Jesus literally.  That’s why he was so upset about  Mary and the wildly expensive ointment.  He took Jesus as only a man from Nazareth.  It was inappropriate to waste resources on this man from Nazareth; it was inappropriate for Jesus to accept such personal adulation.    

When Jesus hands him a piece of bread it is the last straw.  Judas cannot stomach it.  We’re not sure what he wants, but we know it isn’t Jesus.  Judas took the bread, but it doesn’t say that he ate it.  What entered into him was Satan.  He preferred lies.            

Jesus says, “Look, just go and do what you’re going to do.  Now.”  

Once Judas departs, as the chronically clueless disciples are still trying to figure out what is going on, to the point that they imagine Judas being given some special assignment by Jesus which is why he had to leave, the narrator briefly and flatly states, “It was night.”  

We already know that this is an evening meal.  So the narrator is not just giving us background information about the time of day.  This could have happened at lunchtime and the statement that “it was night” would be just as accurate.  

When the text tells us “it was night” it means that a great darkness, a time of blindness, fear, and evil, has fallen over the disciples, and the world.  It means the Light that was coming into the world is now in his final battle with the encroaching darkness.

“Night” refers to the time of our normal consciousness and our standard perceptions and reactions.  Night is the sleepwalking existence in which we all participate.  Night is the lie we live in when we reject the truth of the light.  Nicodemus came to Jesus at night in chapter 3, symbolizing his own blindness and ignorance.  Jesus has already said that night is a time when no one can work, a time when we are stumbling around in the darkness of uncertainty and despair. 

After Judas departs, amid the disciples’ confusion, Jesus sighs and says: “Now the Human One has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.”

So.  Jesus is glorified by being betrayed.  Jesus is glorified by being handed over.  When Judas went to the police and said, “I know where Jesus is! Follow me and I will lead you right to him!”  That’s when Jesus understands himself to be glorified.  God uses Judas’ evil act and turns it into something else.  God turns it into Jesus’ glory.

IV.

It is his glory because there is a sense in which “handing Jesus over” is the point.  If Jesus doesn’t get handed over, his movement remains a local, 1st century, Jewish thing.  Only PhD’s in Ancient Near Eastern History would know about it.  Judas handed Jesus over for the wrong reasons; just like Caiaphas prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, not knowing what he was really saying.  From the perspective of falsehood, the truth looks bizarre, crazy, disturbing, and threatening.  It must be stamped out, eradicated, killed, in the most gruesome and public way possible.

But the truth by definition cannot be stamped out.  It’s the only thing that’s real.  Attempting to stamp it out only reveals its true nature, and the true nature of the assault against it as pointless and empty.  Reality always wins in the end.  If we try to wipe it out… it is we who are revealed to be insubstantial, powerless, temporary, and empty. 

The truth that Jesus reveals is the unity of the Human One and God, the essential oneness of true humanity and true divinity, the integration of all things in the Word by which all things were created at the beginning.  We are not alone; we are not even separate from everything God has made, or even from God.  I forget who said that the glory of God is a fully realized human being, but that is what Jesus is saying.  It is who Jesus is. 

But now, Jesus has his own unique path to walk on our behalf.  “Little children,” he says, “I’m with you for a little while longer.  You will look for me — but, just as I told the Jews, I also tell you now — Where I’m going, you can't come.”  People still blinded in the ignorance of their normal minds cannot do what Jesus, the truly Human One and Son of God, is about to do.  We follow Jesus.  We take up our cross.  We die with him.  But we cannot decide to give up our lives for the life of the world.  Only he can do that.

What we can do is love each other, and embody with each other the one that God has for the word, and witness to that love, and proclaim it by sharing it with each other, and with the world.  For when we do that, we do become him, more and more.  This is Jesus’ new commandment that he gives to us:  “Love each other, “ he says.  “Just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other.  This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples, when you love each other.”

It is through love that we are conformed to the Lord.  It is through love that we realize our own true humanity.  This is not something we do by simply thinking about it or willing it.  God is love.  That is something that the gospel author will write in his first letter.  Love is the key.

V.

Peter thinks he wants to follow Jesus, to which Jesus responds, basically, “Trust me on this: you don’t want to follow me now….  But you will follow me later, I’m afraid.”  Peter is not ready.  He thinks he can die for Jesus… which is the problem.  It’s the other way around.  We don’t die for Jesus; he dies for us.

Jesus tells Peter that “Not only are you not ready to follow where I am going, you’re going to deny me three times before breakfast.”  

Peter’s denials, we will see, are strategies he undertakes to try and save Jesus.  But we don’t save Jesus; he saves us.

None of our ego-centric actions are helpful here.  None of our normal reasoning works.  Jesus is driving down a path now that makes no sense to us.  He is about to be lifted up in death, drawing to himself all people, bearing the brunt of our blind, broken, fearful, violent, and enslaved existence, and revealing the ultimate truth of God’s infinite love for the world.

We cannot help him.  All we can do is follow at a distance, and witness to this love.

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