Who Is Me?

John 12.44-50   (October 18, 2015)

I.

After his anointing by Mary in Bethany — an act that recognizes both his coming death and his kingship, an act that basically polishes and lubricates him as the go-between and the unity between God and our true humanity, an act that recognizes that if we participate in his true humanity, in his connectedness to the Earth, we through him realize and participate in God’s nature — Jesus enters the city of Jerusalem.  He is welcomed by people who have heard of his raising of Lazarus.  He is approached by some visitors to the city from far away.  And now he knows that his time has finally come.  

At this point the character of the gospel changes.  If you have a red-letter Bible you will notice that for the next 8 or so chapters, Jesus does a lot of talking.  Time gets compressed.  Where earlier in the gospel something would happen, then 6 months would go by, and something else would happen, and the first 11 chapters cover about 3 years, now it takes nearly half the book to cover less than a week.

In verse 44, Jesus cries aloud, “Whoever believes in me doesn’t believe in me but in the One who sent me!  Whoever sees me sees the One who sent me!”  And once again we are led to reflect on the pronouns.  When he says “whoever believes in me doesn’t believe in me,” it doesn’t make any sense until we realize what he means by “me.”  And he means by “me” at least three different things.  

First, by “me” he means the Christ, the anointed One, the Word of God, the truly Human One or “Son of Man,” who is also the Son of God.  He is the One in whom true humanity and true divinity come together.  The second “me” is Jesus of Nazareth, the  historical figure, a preacher, healer, and exorcist who lived in a certain time and place.  Jesus is truly human which means he is material flesh and blood living in space and time, like all of us.  But that’s not all he is.

It is important that we affirm both of these meanings of “me” when Jesus uses them.  That’s why he does not clarify what he means, but simply leaves us hanging with the ambiguity and the paradox of “whoever believes in me doesn’t believe in me,” and allows us to figure it out, or more creatively, to live in the tension and the contradiction.  

There are many ways we could go with this.  But for now I am suggesting that he means that if we trust in him then we are not trusting in him as just a historical person, but we are trusting in God who sent him.  When we see him we see God.  If we see him and all we see is the rugged yet gentle holy man from Galilee, we are missing the rest of who he really is.

But if we see him and in and through him we see the living Presence of the Creator of all things, in and by whom all things were spoken into being, then we are seeing One who is worthy of our trust.

II.

This drives us to another, deeper, more personal and interior understanding of “me.”  Because if we just reduce Jesus to a theological category or a doctrinal formula that is just as inaccurate, inadequate, and incomplete as reducing him to a historical personage.  Jesus Christ is not “out there” as a figure from the remote past, and neither is he “out there” as a theological principle we may affirm or deny or otherwise fiddle with.

For when he says “me” and when we read “me” he is identifying with us, each one of us and all of us, in our subjectivity and our very souls.  He is identifying with, and expressing his living Presence within, every soul that understands itself to be a “me.”  

To say that he is God, and that in him we see God, or that he is the incarnation of God who sent him, does not mean he exists essentially apart and distant from us.  It means he is everywhere and therefore within us.  He is within the Creation that he himself spoke into being and which therefore resonates and vibrates with his voice.  God’s voiceprint is in every rock and tree, every bird and fish, every insect and mammal, and every human being.  For we are all made of stuff God breathed into being at the beginning.  The whole universe is a precipitation of God’s Word, who becomes — not “enters” but “becomes” — flesh to dwell among us full of grace and truth in Jesus Christ, the Light who shines in the darkness but whom the darkness could not overcome.

Christ comes into the world to reveal the Word of God as the connecting thread, the golden cord, the common pattern bringing together, integrating, joining, holding, uniting, and sustaining everything.  He shows us that by realizing our true humanity in him we at the same time participate in the God who is the Source and Goal and Ground of everything.  To live in this consciousness is to walk according to the Light.  

So he goes on.  “I have come as a light into the world so that everyone who believes in me won’t live in darkness.”  So if we place our wholehearted trust in this truth that he reveals, the whole world lights up for us, and we see what is truly there.  The world is not a fearsome, terrifying, unstable, insecure, capricious, arbitrary enigma.  It is not something dark, threatening, and unknowable.  It is not something that we have to react to in fear, shame, and anger, leading to the selfish violence of sins like gluttony, lust, greed, envy, and so forth.  

Rather, trusting in him means we don’t live in that darkness but in the Light of his Presence, seeing the world as a place of love, peace, and justice, and living that way.  Eventually, you observe people still living in the the darkness of paranoia, hatred, and rage, and they seem like Zombies.

III.

The Lord continues.  He says that if people hear his words and don’t keep them, he doesn’t judge them.  “I didn’t come to judge the world but to save it,” he says, repeating John 3:17 almost verbatim.  He comes to save by being the Light and revealing to us our true nature and the true nature of God’s creation.  But sometimes people feel judged and condemned by someone who is simply telling and doing the truth.

It is like when I read something so well-written that it puts to shame anything I could ever hope to write.  Or when I hear a Miles Davis solo and realize that his playing is so far beyond my ability that it is discouraging.  In the presence of real beauty, real wisdom, real goodness, and real blessing, it is easy for us to feel judged by comparison.  It is easy for us to sense how far we fall short of such accomplishment, and feel judged, even condemned, for our little, halting, broken offering.

Judgment and condemnation is not Jesus’ purpose.  Even if in the face of his love we may feel completely inadequate.  His coming is not to make us feel incompetent and worthless, although that may be one of the effects.  

It is in fact just the opposite.  Jesus wants us to know that we actually may, and deep down do, participate in what he shows to us.  It is not that we have lost the Image of God in us, with which we were created; it is that this Image has been covered up, obscured, buried, and soiled.  His goodness is not to overwhelm us and shame us with what we don’t have; it is to reveal who we truly are and what we really already have inside of us, if we would but find it, clean it off, and let it shine.

So when he talks about “whoever rejects” him, he means whoever rejects their own true nature, whoever rejects their own real self, who ever rejects who they really are.  For that’s who he is.  That is what he has come to show us and give back to us.  We may think he’s showing off how much better he is than we are; in truth he is holding up a mirror, a special mirror that somehow filters out all in us that is sinful, broken, distorted, defiled, blind, and wrong, and reflecting back to us what remains, which is… him: true humanity united in him to God. 

But if this message doesn’t sink in.  If we don’t receive his words of blessing and assurance.  If we don’t realize his healing, and how he washes us and purifies us of our ignorance, and reveals our true nature, then we will experience judgment.  We will be judged at the last day by his words.  His words say we are blessed and good.  When we reject them we are accepting and affirming that evil and curse are our nature.  When we look in that mysterious mirror and refuse to believe that the face reflected therein is indeed ours, then we shove away our only lifeline.  

IV.

I sometimes repeat the story of a long woman I once knew who suffered from anorexia.  After she got down to like 70 pounds of little more than skin and bone she was hospitalized.  But when the nurse held a mirror up to her, she asserted that the person she saw was too fat.

Sometimes we hold on so tightly to our own self-image that we would rather die than accept the truth about who we are.  

Jesus comes into the world to show us true humanity as blessed, beautiful, good, true, and light.  He has to remind us that he isn’t making this up and appealing to our wishful thinking.  He isn’t feeding us delusion or buttering us up with lies so he can get something from us.  He has no self-serving agenda in just telling us what we might want to hear.

That’s why he goes on to say, “I don’t speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me regarding what I should speak and say.”  As if to say this is not the opinion of a preacher from Nazareth; this is God talking.  The good news comes from the ultimate authority.  It comes from the Creator and the word is, as some have expressed it, “I don’t make no junk!”  There is nothing worthless or purposeless or meaningless, let alone evil and bad, in God’s creation.  Everything here has to resonate and vibrate with the One who spoke it into being.

People lose sight of that and in their ignorance and blindness twist this or that aspect of God’s good creation into something false and broken, deadly and poisonous.  Christian philosophers have always had to remind us that evil technically doesn’t exist.  It’s a lie.  But it’s a very powerful and harmful and lethal lie that derives its power from the human imagination and is expressed in human actions.  It has nothing to do with God’s commandments and God’s will.

Jesus says as much when he talks about how he knows that God’s commandment is eternal life.  God is about life.  Following God’s will bring us to life.  We were made for life, and not even just this brief mortal existence, but eternal life.  We were made to live forever.

But we’re caught in a trap of our own making in which we become convinced that this is all there is.  And we develop institutions that feed this lie in our hearts, and feed on our fear, our shame, and our anger, and that constantly project a false picture of who we are and where we are going.  And those institutions and their leaders depend on our ignorance and paranoia to keep them on top.  

So Jesus, as someone enabling people to see the truth, as someone who empowers crippled souls, as someone who even restores life to the dead, is a problem for them.  Because if people start imagining who they really are, the leaders’ cushy gig, getting rich on other peoples’ work, is over.

V.

After chapter 12 the stage is set.  Jesus now has to pour as much wisdom into his disciples’ ears as he can.  He has only a few days to give them the wisdom, the knowledge, the insight, the information even, that they will need to interpret his imminent death and resurrection, and be able to move forward without him present in this way as another person.  Then he will be present to them always in Spirit, a form that needs discernment and interpretation in and through a community.

And that’s why all this is here in this gospel.  So that we may hear it and get an understanding together of who Jesus is, so that we may be able to distinguish his voice from the voices of our own egos and leaders, and be able to tell what serves life and goodness and blessing and beauty.  So that we may find in our own hearts our own true nature in him.

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