Risen Here and Now!

John 20:1-18.

The Resurrection of the Lord

March 27, 2016

I.

It is still dark when Mary comes to the tomb.  That little fact itself tells much of the story.  She represents us, still smothered in darkness, still sleepwalking through existence, still expecting the usual, logical, conventional things to happen.  “Walking to a tomb in darkness” is a pretty good, boiled-down metaphor for the several decades most of us get to spend on this planet.  

In our normal, personality-driven, ego-centric existence, this is what we call “life” amounts to.  We think we’re alive and free, growing, learning, making things, and so forth, but we are really more like sleepwalkers, stumbling aimlessly around, crashing into each other.  The picture of people today walking along the sidewalk with their noses buried down in their phones kind of sums up this rendition of human existence.  Each person consumed by a small bubble of self-referential attention, barely looking up to see where they really are or what is really going on.

Mary is taking our walk.  She is fraught with anxiety and grief, bitterly conscious of having lost her friend to what was basically a lynch-mob two days before.  We too are aware of past losses that color our time here, and future liabilities against which we have to provide.  

Yes, we do have joys, pleasures, accomplishments, and satisfactions in this life.  But here we are dealing with someone under extreme stress, in deep crisis.  Because of the terrible events of the previous Friday, Mary is in a destabilized, disoriented, even disintegrated  state.  It is in this condition that we are most open and most ready to receive and enter into something new.  It feels like our life is coming apart; but in reality it just may be about to come together in a new way.

The dead body of Jesus had been taken two nights before from the execution site to a nearby tomb by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, two establishment guys who secretly followed Jesus, and who must have figured it was the least they could do.  They had his body slathered with a paste of spices and wrapped in linen strips of cloth, which made it like a kind of mummy, or, more to my point, a cocoon or chrysalis.  And they sealed it up inside the tomb with a big rock. 

In the natural process called metamorphosis, a caterpillar surrounds itself with a chrysalis, and while inside basically comes apart and disintegrates.  Were we to open up a chrysalis, I am told that we would not find a caterpillar just sprouting wings, but a dissociated mess of goo.  The caterpillar is disassembled and then reassembled into the new thing it is encoded and designated to become: a butterfly.

My point is that it is with Jesus, wrapped up in death, and Mary in her distraught, anxious, stressed out, depressed, grief-stricken, utterly lost state, the ground is cleared for something new to happen.  When we are most disintegrated; when our old self has failed to hold together and, in effect, died; when the normal, usual, standard, familiar forms and habits of our existence completely come apart… that is when something new can start to be born.

II.

Mary sees that the stone at the mouth of the tomb has been removed.  This is the first departure from normalcy, the first inkling or hint that something new and different might be happening.  Something out of the ordinary.  Something that doesn’t completely compute.  Something that strikes us as odd or weird.  The normal rhythm and expected pattern has been broken.

We don’t always see these things.  Too often we only see what we expect to see, what we are prepared to see, what we have trained ourselves to see.  Something happens that doesn’t make any sense, and we don’t even let it register in our consciousness.  Or if it does, we try and cram it into our familiar patterns… which is what Mary does here.  She assumes that someone has stolen the body for some reason.  She assumes the worst.  On top of everything else, she is only prepared to see even worse things happening.  Under stress, in disintegration, this is our normal reaction.  It is a defense mechanism.  Assuming the worst means at least you won’t be disappointed after getting your hopes up… again.

That’s why she doesn’t actually look into the tomb; she doesn’t want it to be somehow even worse than she imagined.  Instead, she goes back and informs Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved, who then race to the tomb themselves.  When they get there they do go in and see the linen wrappings but no body.  Which makes no sense because the fabric had been plastered to the skin of the body and would not have been easily removed if someone wanted to remove it and why would even a grave robber want to do that?  So they shrug and go back home puzzled, although it does begin to dawn on the disciple whom Jesus loved that this might actually be a good thing.

This represents another response to an anomaly.  We just kind of file it away under “miscellaneous weird stuff” and go on with our lives.  Maybe we wait until the rational explanation presents itself.  But we certainly don’t stay with the tension, confusion, pain, fear, and anxiety.  It is not a comfortable place to be.

But Mary stays there, in tears.  It kind of reminds me of one of my favorite illustrative tools, those Magic Eye pictures, where if you stare at the shapes and colors long enough a 3-dimensional image resolves out of it.  But you have to have the patience to keep at it; you have to stay with it.  

This is what Mary does here.  She looks in the tomb again, and this time sees two angels that weren’t there before.  Or at least the men couldn’t see them.  But now she sees them, one at the head and the other at the foot, of where the body had been.  Is she reminded of the golden statues of two angels in the Holy of Holies, with the Mercy Seat, the place of reconciliation and atonement between them?  Does that help her understand what is happening?

III.

She turns around back to the garden and sees someone.  She is still trying to squeeze this experience into the normal hypothesis, which is that somebody stole the body.  But you can tell she is holding on to this with decreasing energy and conviction.  Then the man whom she does not yet recognize calls her by name.  “Mary,” he says.

That is when the whole superstructure of her consciousness falls away and she realizes what is going on.  This is Jesus, who has moved on to a new kind of life.  She stops trying to hold it together.  Something releases in her and she is able to perceive differently; now she sees clearly what before was only a confused mess.  The dissociated mush inside the chrysalis crystalizes into a new and unexpected form.

She turns and says to him, “Rabbouni!” which means “exalted and beloved teacher!”  And suddenly we have before us what we read about in Genesis 3: a man and a woman in a garden.  Then it was the beginning of humanity.  Now it is the beginning of new humanity, true humanity, realized humanity.

In some sense Mary represents us.  All these Marys in the gospels may perhaps be taken as different dimensions and different manifestations of the human response to God, from the hymn sung by Jesus’ mother in Luke before his birth, to her inspiring him to make the water into wine, to the anointing of his body at Bethany before his death, to the 3 Marys who watch him die on the cross, to now: Mary of Magdala, the first one to see him resurrected, the first one to preach the good news, the one whom the church has therefore named “the Apostle to the Apostles.”

It is she who carries the message to the other disciples so they will know what to look for and they will also be able to experience the risen Christ when he appears among them.

When Jesus tells her, “Do not hold on to me,” does it not mean that his visible, tangible form now is of diminishing importance, and that it is his ascended, spiritual presence with and within the disciples, and indeed within everything that God breathes into being at the beginning, that now becomes the way we know him?  It is by finding his voice, and his love, here and now, that we know his living presence.  

Jesus will continue to appear to the disciples for a while.  And after that he will stay with them in spirit, which is the way he remains with us even today.  Blended with the experience of Mary, the risen Christ is born anew in us as we discover, in our own true humanity which we share with him, our point of contact with divinity itself.  Our holy and joyful task is to gather in his name and seek together to perceive his presence, his love, and his words, giving us our life today.  It is to share in his body and blood, and so in a very literal way become him, become his body in the world, become his people.  

IV.

The message of Christ’s resurrection is emphatically not just about something that happened 2000 years ago.  It is profoundly and powerfully about something that happens now, in our hearts, in our world.  It is about our realization of God’s life and light infusing everything, and our participation in this blessing by our living each day according to the love, peace, and justice God gives us in Jesus Christ.

This is happening now!  When we proclaim that “Christ is risen!” we are not pointing backward in history.  The verb is present tense!  We are pointing to something happening within us, among us, and around us.  We are speaking of our own experience or hope; we are expressing our conviction that it doesn't have to be this way, in this world of tragedy and violence, indeed, it isn’t this way at all, not really.  

When we say “Christ is risen!” we are opening ourselves and each other to a new possibility: that our existence is not a long walk in the dark to a tomb.  We may now turn around, with our backs to the tomb, and find waiting there in the garden of creation a partner in life, one who awakens us to our true selves, calling us by name, and sending us into the world with his spirit, God’s Spirit.

When we say “Christ is risen!” we know we are empowered and charged with a mission to show the world by our words and actions that he is risen in us.  That life is triumphant in us.  That death has been defeated, and love wins.  That the living God continues to bring good out of evil and light into darkness; that God continues to banish our fear and transfigure even death into eternal life, for all.

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Giving Up the Spirit.

John 19:30

Good Friday

March 25, 2016

I.     

The final description of the Lord’s death on the cross shows his complete and utter submission to God.  “He bowed his head and gave up his spirit.”  

It is an acceptance of brokenness, and an embrace of the shattering death that exemplifies and fulfills his spiritual path.  The word here in the original Greek for spirit is the same as the word for breath: pneuma.  And we know that the actual cause of death when someone is crucified is often suffocation, as the victim’s energy is exhausted from trying to breathe with no support but the three nails attaching their body to pieces of wood.  The Lord is basically saying that he is finally out of breath, and gives his breath now back to his Father who is the One who breathed all things into being at the beginning. 

Everybody gives up their breath, eventually.  But not everyone is conscious that they are commending their breath, their spirit, into God’s hands.  Not everyone knows who has been the source of the oxygen they have been tapping into all their lives.  Not everyone is aware that this air they have been breathing has been an awesome and gracious gift from their Creator.  Indeed, few of us have had any realization at all that there even is a Creator.

This is because we all begin our life — and most of us continue through all our days — unconscious and utterly unaware of who we are, of our true nature, of our actual purpose.  We cut ourselves off from reality by building psychological walls and filters through which we see and react to our world.  And we fall into familiar patterns and behaviors that serve to reinforce our separation from God and others, and express our fear.  And we build a world based on these fears, a world of ignorance, alienation, enmity, and violence, expressed in the familiar list of sins, like greed, lust, gluttony, anger, envy, and so forth.  And we appoint leaders over ourselves in this world who come to dominate based on their mastery and perpetration and perpetuation of these sins.  

And these leaders are precisely the people who, with perfectly legal reasons, rationales, justifications, and cause, nailed Jesus to two pieces of wood and left him to suffocate to death in the first place.  Just as they have managed to hold on to power for thousands of years by similar acts of scapegoating terror against the weak and the innocent.

II.

So when Jesus breathes his last and gives up his spirit into God’s hands, he is affirming to the end the truth that God, the Creator, is the ultimate and final reality and source of life and breath, and that no matter how horrific and ghastly may be the machinations of worldly power in continuing to impose upon us a false vision, the truth remains unassailable and always present and waiting to receive his spirit, his breath, his life.  He is saying that these leaders can order soldiers to use brute force to cause his physical organism to cease its functioning, and do it in a way that maximizes the pain and humiliation involved, but what they can’t do is mitigate the truth of God’s love which holds us up forever.  Nothing in all creation can separate us from that, as the Apostle Paul will most eloquently state a few decades later.  In the end, Jesus’ spirit, Jesus’ breath, rests with God, his Father, the One into whose hands he commends himself.

And by doing this the Lord is revealing both the powerlessness and impotence of these counterfeit, self-appointed authorities, and at the same time showing us the way to be free of them, and free of the sin inner own hearts that spawned them.  We only have to die.  This is the example, this is the path, this is his message to his disciples.  It’s simple.  We just have to die.

He says, “If any want to be my followers let them deny themselves, and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).  “Very truly I tell you,” he says, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.  Those who live their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:24-25).

The book I read when I was 16, that turned me into an intentional follower of Jesus, was The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  In that book, Bonhoeffer pulls no punches.  “When Christ calls [someone],” he writes, “He bids [that person to] come and die.”

Those are not words that I have ever seen on a church message board to attract people driving by to attend worship.  “Come die with us!” sounds more like what a perverted and demonic suicide cult might say.  And yet the necessary fulcrum of the spiritual life is this commendation of our spirits, our breath, our life, to the Creator.  Following Jesus means dying with him.  It means commending our spirit into the hands of God.  

This basic truth is all over the New Testament.  “If we die with him, we will also live with him” (2 Timothy 2:11); “if we have been united with him in a death lie his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5).  The whole point of the rite of Baptism is this symbolic sharing in the death of Jesus, and rising to a participation in his resurrection life.  And this “death” of baptism, and the “rising” to new life, happens on this side of the death of our physical bodies.  

III.    

The spiritual life is not an easy, smooth, comfortable, convenient sailing into salvation, as if it were all downhill with the wind at our back.  Still less is it something Jesus did and we just sit back and watch, reaping the benefits at no cost to us, something that Bonhoeffer derisively calls “cheap grace.”  On the contrary, salvation requires nothing less than our death.  That is, it requires the immolation of our ego-centric, personality-driven, sinful self, the very self that we have come since we were very young to identify with our whole selves, the very self we think is all we are.  This is what must be surrendered, released, renounced, and relinquished.

Jesus’ giving up his spirit, must come to characterize our whole life.  Commending our spirit into God’s hands must become the conscious rhythm of our daily lives.  This is why we find inscribed above the entrance to one of the Christian monasteries on Mt. Athos the motto: “If you die before you die, then you won’t die when you die.”  Which means that if by a life of repentance we continually let go of our sinful, narrow, shallow, small-minded, fearful, and violent old selves, then the death of the body has no power over us but is itself a commendation into the hands of the God of love.  

His commending of his spirit into the Father’s hands is at once an affirmation of confidence in the truth of God’s ever-present love, and a categorical rejection of the other false powers and authorities, in our souls and projected into our world, that keep us in bondage to sin and death.  It is not an empty or theoretical statement, but something we prove in our actions.  For commending our life to God is to function in the world in a way exactly contrary to commending our life to any of the other goals, objectives, loyalties, allegiances, and powers.  Commending our life, our spirit, our breath to God, which is sharing in Jesus’ final words, means sharing in Jesus’ life of peace, justice, equality, inclusion, gentleness, and forgiveness.  It means a rejection of violence, hostility, fear, hatred, exclusion, and walls of division.

Because we know that death is not the end.  We know that when Jesus commends his spirit to his Father, it was towards his reemergence three days later in resurrection.  When Christ bid us come and die it is not to extinction and annihilation that he calls us.  Rather, the more we commend our spirit to God, the more God’s true life and presence and love may infuse us and shine in us and flow through us into our world.  The more we commend ourselves to God, the more we become ourselves “participants in the divine nature,” as Peter tells us.  The more what is false in us dies, the more what is true grows and multiplies.

So in a sense, the last words of Jesus on the cross, are the first words of our rebirth in the Spirit.  May we commend ourselves, our spirits, our souls, every breath we take, to the living God who is always bringing life, goodness, peace, blessing, and joy.

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Drinking the Cup.

John 18:1-11.

Palm/Passion Sunday

March 20, 2016

I.

Jesus finally gets arrested.  His hour has come.  He is placing himself into the hands of the authorities.  For the next 2 chapters we will follow the Lord through the legal system, from court to court, as he is subjected to the machinations of a corrupt system.  That system already knows what it is going to do.  All this traipsing between jurisdictions is mere window-dressing, a meaningless charade meant to convince people that this really is a fair and open process.

But it isn’t.  And it never is.  It never is because of the inherent corruption of power.  When some people are given power over others, it is always abused.  Always.

How do we respond to a world like this?  How do the weak respond to the predations of the strong?  How to we retain our freedom, responsibility, dignity, decency, and integrity?  How do we retain our faith, our hope, and our love, in the face of pervasive injustice?

This is a question that has colored Jesus’ entire ministry.  Jesus has been playing tag with the police since way back in chapter 2, when he upset the commercial status quo in the Temple.  Ever since then he has been known as a troublemaker, a subverter of the law, a religious extremist, a terrorist who wants to blow up the Temple, or whatever epithet they might have thrown at him to make people afraid of him.  They have had a file on him.  And that file has grown thicker and thicker.  They have shadowed him.  And they have developed an informant in his inner circle.

In Matthew, Jesus delivers the Sermon on the Mount, much of which is advice for poor people about how to survive being powerless.  Don’t fight back with violence.  Treat your oppressors with graciousness and love.  Above all do not respond in kind because then you will become like them and lose your soul.  He teaches mainly about spiritual survival.  His advice does not really have to do with how to stay alive and free physically.  Because the system will kill or incarcerate people at will without any particular reason.

Jesus has decided that it is now the right time.  This is the third Passover of his career.  On the first one he instigates that incident in the Temple, throwing out the merchants.  “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” he shouts.  On the second Passover he is up in Galilee where he very pointedly feeds 5,000 people on a hillside, without resorting to merchants or money.  Now it is the third Passover.  And Jesus is betrayed by one of his disciples, the one who was most involved and corrupted by… money.  The last time we heard from Judas, he was bitterly complaining about the waste of some expensive aromatic ointment of which he knew the precise market value: 300 denarii.  In the other gospels, Judas received 30 pieces of silver as payment for his betrayal.  He is always presented as the disciple most concerned with money.

II.

So Jesus is back in Jerusalem.  The authorities probably want to keep him away from the Temple at all costs, fearing his intentions.  

But they do not understand that the Temple-building has become irrelevant to Jesus.  He is himself the new Temple.  He is himself the place where reconciliation happens.  And because of who he is — the Word of God, who was in the beginning with God, through whom all things came into being and without whom not one thing came into being, and the Son of Man, the revelation of our true, shared, common humanity — he expands the Temple, the place of reconciliation, so it is no longer limited to one piece of real estate.  Now Jesus reveals that the true and actual Temple, the place where God dwells and people find God’s Presence, is the whole creation, and the human heart.  The Temple is no longer a stone building on a particular hill in Jerusalem.  The Temple is now within each one of us, and within everything.

Making this clear and real to people is what he is about to accomplish, and what he starts to accomplish now, as he and the remaining disciples make their way to this garden across the Kidron Valley, the steep canyon on the east side of Jerusalem.  They had been using the garden as their gathering place since they had come to the area a few days before.  Judas knows where it is.

Shortly after they arrive Judas also shows up — with 600 soldiers and some Temple police, showing that the religious and political authorities have collaborated from the beginning.  They are carrying torches and are heavily armed.  Jesus keeps the initiative for this whole encounter.  He is in charge.  First, he asks whom they are looking for, and they say, “Jesus of Nazareth.”

The Lord responds, “I Am he.”  In the Greek it’s just “I Am,” which is the Name of God received by Moses at the burning bush in Exodus.  This Name was forbidden to be spoken; Jesus has gotten himself in trouble over this before. 

The text then indicates that some of them apparently fall to the ground when Jesus says this.  It is an odd thing to happen.  Perhaps it is a reflex on the part of at least the Jewish members of the arresting party, to make a ritual prostration at the mention of the holy Name, kind of like the way a Catholic might make the sign of the cross.  

It would have reminded some of the way the priests in the Day of Atonement ritual fall down and make a prostration when the Name is spoken.  And the reconciliation of the Day of Atonement ritual is what Jesus is in the process of fulfilling.  But whatever reverence they have for the Name of God, it does not spill over into reverence for Jesus.

III.

They are looking for some guy from Galilee for whom they have an arrest warrant; Jesus indicates that the One whom they have found is God.  But even hearing God’s Name and responding accordingly doesn’t change the trajectory of these events.  Jesus is in charge and this is all part of his plan.  He doesn’t say “I Am” because he thinks that might get them to back off.  He’s not trying to pull rank or invoke his connections.  He says it to make clear what is going on.  They are arresting, and are about to put to death, God.  Part of them even knows this; but mainly the authorities and their representatives are sleepwalking through these events, just doing what they are told, following orders, and doing what they have always done.

Having given himself up, Jesus then insists that they release his supporters.  But Peter, not understanding what is really going on here any more than the soldiers and police do, draws his sword and assaults, of all people, the slave of the High Priest.  Not Judas, not any of the armed men, but the High Priest’s slave, and perhaps personal representative.  His name is Malchus and he may have been the official responsible for overseeing the arrest.

Peter cuts off the man’s right ear!  All four gospels have this detail.  In Matthew it gives Jesus a chance to make his famous statement about everybody who lives by the sword dies by the sword, and in Luke Jesus reconnects Malchus’ ear to his head.  Here, Jesus just barks at Peter, “Put your sword back into its sheath.  Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?”

Jesus realizes that these people are not to blame.  That have no idea what they are really doing.  Fighting them is pointless, as is all violence.  Falling into a sword-fight with these low-level lackeys would only play into the hands of the authorities.  They could then say that armed resistance to legitimate police only proves that Jesus really is a terrorist.  

Plus, Jesus knows there must be no doubt about what is happening.  Human beings are not in control of any part of this procedure; it is all about God’s will that the world be saved through Jesus.  Nobody else gets credit.  Nobody else gets blame.  The days of blaming and retribution are over.  When Peter imagines he is defending Jesus, he is really attacking him.  Which is why the Lord scolds Peter to lose the sword, perhaps reminding Peter than he is going to deny Jesus in just a couple of hours.

This is the only mention of a “cup” in this gospel.  “The cup” means Jesus has to do what he has to do.  For he is the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world, he gives his life for the life of the world.  He is the conflation and fulfillment of the Passover lamb whose blood saves the people from death, and the two goats of the Day of Atonement: one bears away the people’s sins and the other’s life becomes a blessing and a purification, restoring our relationship with the Creator.

IV.

During Passover the people of God would sing a set of Psalms, 113-118.  In the middle of that there is a line from Psalm 116, “I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the Name of the Lord.  Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones.”  This is the cup Jesus has to be talking about.  The cup of salvation, of healing, of redemption; this is the cup the Father has given him to drink.

The cup of salvation is never lifted and drunk from easily.  We know this.  No one experiences spiritual transformation without a struggle.  Indeed, from the perspective of our mortal, ego-centric, personality-driven, existence under the powers of this world, this cup is poison.  The cup of salvation can only be the cup of death to our former selves, our old selves.  

This is the Lord’s point which is so hard for us to hear.  We do not get to resurrection by means of a smooth cruise on calm water with the wind at our back.  In chapter 12, Jesus says, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit.  Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”  

The sin of the world, and of each individual in the world, does not get taken away as easily as deciding to take off your coat.  It gets scrubbed, scraped, chipped, burned, dissolved, cut, and blasted off.  A caterpillar in metamorphosis does not settle down in a cozy spa for a nice warm makeover.  It goes into a chrysalis where its old form is disintegrated and broken down.  Only then can it be reassembled in its new, true form, as a butterfly.

The cup of salvation has to it a poisonous element.  We don’t think about that when we come to the Table and dip a piece of bread in it.  We don’t think this is going to harm us or inconvenience us, let alone kill us.  But if we’re going to realize within us Christ’s life, it means that our old manner of existence has to go.  If we’re going to be the butterflies God intends, we have to figure out how to release our caterpillar delusions.

Christ is the “pioneer of our salvation” in the sense that he goes ahead of us, blazing the trail, demonstrating what has to happen to us, as people encrusted and infected with sin, which is to say, with the illusion of our separation from and enmity towards God and everything else, manifested in our greed, envy, gluttony, deceit, lust, and other destructive thought and behavior patterns.  In short, these have to be removed from us.  They do not survive.

The cup of salvation then has two effects: First, it kills.  And then it gives new life.  The new life does not happen unless first we in some sense die.

V.

This week, Jesus will show that it is a collision with the world and its powers that reveal the true extent of what in us we need to let go of.  Our changes are never just individual and interior; our life is social, political, and economic.  To be grounded in Christ will necessarily attract the wrath of the authorities.  

Change in us is always a matter of courage and faith.  Courage is necessary to take on the humiliation, pain, horror, and rejection that are involved.  Because when we go through these things it is impossible to see the goal on the other side.  But we do see Jesus Christ.  This is where faith comes in.  We trust in Jesus Christ who goes before us, who has promised that no matter what happens in the meantime, the purpose and goal of God with and within us will not be denied.  

Our redemption is not in doubt, because when we look at him, the truly Human One, the revelation of the essential humanity in which we all share, we realize that our salvation also is already here.  It is already within us.  We are indeed, already home.

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Oneness.

John 17

March 13, 2016

I.

After giving his disciples their final instructions and encouragement, the Lord Jesus offers a prayer to God.  It is often called his “High Priestly Prayer,” because it comes just before he offers himself as the atoning sacrifice to take away the sins of the world on the cross; and because it has three sections similar to the organization of the prayer the High Priest says on the Day of Atonement, as we have been reading in Leviticus 16.

He begins by saying that “the hour has come.”  It reminds me of what he says in Mark at the outset of his ministry: “the time is fulfilled.”  Here he means that the moment around which his life has been circling has now become clear; but there is also a sense in which his time was always here, and is always here.  In his ministry he reveals the living Presence of God with and within us all the time.  Now, in his death and resurrection, he will go from being a historical, mortal, separate individual person, and be realized in his essential nature as ever-present and everywhere.

This is the meaning of his looking up to heaven when he prays, raising his eyes to the sky.  It is not that he intends to go up and away, becoming absent and distant.  It is not as if he goes off to some other place.  But just as the sky, the atmosphere, the earth’s enveloping sphere of breath, extends all around us, so also he ascends back into union with all things that God has breathed into being.  He is about to return to his original nature as Light, and Light expands to fill everywhere.

Light is what the word “glory” is about.  It is as if he says to God, “Reveal the transcendent Light of your Son so that the Son may reveal your transcendent Light to all.”  Participation in this Light is to live forever because everything is made of and permeated by this Light.  God’s life, we learned back in chapter 1, is the light of all people.”

We receive and participate in eternal life through Jesus Christ because he is the One in whom the Light of God is focused and revealed.  He is sort of the condensation or the precipitation of this Light, taking the form of a human being.  He is the Word become “flesh.”  That is, he is the Light and breath and Word of God taking shape and form in matter and in a living body… and in this revealing what we all are.

Thus he is given ultimate and universal authority from the author of everything.  Jesus’ authority is not like the counterfeit authority that human leaders wield.  His authority comes from the One who made all things.  It is not a ministration of death, but of life… eternal life because it is the authority of the Creator who is always present, in whom the hour is always now.

Jesus shines into the world the Light of the Creator from the beginning by the work he did in healing and liberating people.  It is not just cognitive, theoretical, or verbal; it is expressed in particular kinds of actions, actions that bring healing, justice, and liberation into people’s lives. 

 

II.

The Lord then focuses in his prayer on the community he calls into being, the gathering of his disciples, his original circle, his church.  These are the people to whom Jesus makes God’s name, that is, God’s true nature and identity, known.  They keep God’s Word of love which Jesus has given them, and they realize that Jesus reflects and expresses God’s Presence, that he comes from God, and they trust in him.  By sharing in the love of God among themselves, they are united to  Jesus and to his Father.

Jesus’ community will be an extension of him, and therefore even an extension of God.  They will be in him “participants in the divine nature” and a continuation of and witness to God’s living Presence in the world.   “All mine are yours,” he prays, “and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.”  By that he means that the actions of his disciples in loving obedience to him actually serve to reveal him to the world.  They point to him.  People in the world see the presence of God in the love that Jesus’ disciples have for each other.

As Jesus is about to die, he prays that they have the protection of the Father.  This protection is not about their physical safety, as we might imagine.  It is a protection for their faith, that they not lose their trust in him, and that they stay together as one.  God does not protect us from suffering and violence; God does not keep us from deprivation and discomfort.  But God does preserve and strengthen our faith and our unity so that we do not fall away from our true nature, which would be infinitely worse than merely getting inconvenienced or even killed. 

He is leaving them in “the world,” in a situation still under the domination of human principalities and powers.  These powers hate him and will hate them because they are living witnesses to Christ’s Light and life, which reveals the emptiness and evil of these powers.  The disciples do not belong to the world, just as Jesus does not belong to the world.  But he is not taking them out of the world.  Rather, just as God sent the Son into the world, so the Son sends the disciples, the church, the new community gathered in his name, into the world.  The sending of the Son and of the church into the world was not for condemnation, but that the world might be saved from condemnation.

The one member who was about condemnation, Judas, bought condemnation for himself.  But Jesus loses none of the others.  They remain in Jesus’ love and joy, together.

The Lord finally asks God to make them holy, which means participating in the truth of God’s Word, Jesus, and his love.  Holiness here is being set apart… because they know they are not set apart.  It is this knowledge of the truth that sets them apart; but ironically the truth they know is the true nature of creation and humanity.  The truth they know is that we are all one, all of us.  And what sets the disciples apart is that only they know about this unity. 

III.  

Jesus then extends the prayer outward one more layer to include… us.  He prays for those who will come to trust in him because of the testimony of the disciples.  He prays for the second- and third-hand disciples, the disciples who will not have known him as a historical, mortal, individual.  He prays that they also share in this unity, and that there be no second-class disciples.

I think we have lost sight of how important unity is to Jesus.  In Galatians 3:28 we hear Paul talking about how there is in Christ no longer Jew or Greek slave or free, male and female.  Christ breaks down walls and shatters distinctions between people.  We are all equal and loved by God.  This is not to say that we lose our individuality in becoming identical clones, or something.  Paul talks elsewhere about how differently and wonderfully gifted we all are.  But the point is the elimination of pecking orders, classes, and castes.  Gone is any claim of superiority or subordination; gone is any determination of higher or lower value; gone is the establishment of people who are in and people who are out.

In Jesus Christ, God declares that all are in.  That is the message of grace, forgiveness, inclusion, and love we receive from Jesus and live out together in his beloved community, the church.

It is this witness of oneness, this living together without anyone being over anyone else, that proclaims Christ to the world and enables people still caught in the violence and alienation, the competition and enmity of the world to realize that God and this beautiful vision may be trusted.  It may be trusted because in the church it is enacted.  It is actual.  It is happening.

This oneness is the manifestation of God’s Light and life, which we have received; in it we are obedient to God’s Word; it is the proof that Christ sends us just as God send him.  It is the proof of God’s love and therefore God’s Presence in creation.  In short, we — the church, the disciples — are the proof.

He declares that our oneness in the church is a participation in Jesus’ oneness with the Father.  Christ is in us, God is in Christ.  All this is so the world may know the love of God.  

IV.

This oneness, this reconciliation, this atonement — “at-one-ment" — is what Jesus is about to accomplish in a few hours.  He is about to fulfill in himself the taking away of the world’s sin, which is to say its languishing in the illusion of separation from God and from each other.  When that sin, that alienation, that enmity, that opposition, is taken away he allows the truth of our union with and in God to emerge in our consciousness.  He reveals on the cross the overflowing love of God.  This is the love that overcomes and conquers the world.

The gathering of disciples which is sent into the world full of joy in the truth of God’s love, Light, and life… this is us.  This is our testimony.  That the- world-as-we-know-it is crippled in blindness, ignorance, paralysis, and fear.  But the real world, the creation breathed into being by the Creator’s Word, emerges in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.  By his death he blows a hole in the facade of falsehood and lies, and cracks the shell of our hardheartedness.  And through that crack the Light pours into our hearts, reviving our souls, and revealing our unity with each other, and, in him, in God.

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Plain Speaking.

John 16:23-33

March 6, 2016

I.

Jesus promises that the hour is coming when he will not be speaking to the disciples “in figures,” which is to say in parables and aphorisms that are not to be taken literally but require interpretation.  

The Lord understands that every word that has come from the his mouth and entered into the ears of people is necessarily subject to interpretation.  Words are uttered and heard in a human language, amidst a historical context, and heavily filtered through our background, experience, desires, attentiveness, and abilities.  Words are always misunderstood, we never understand perfectly in this existence what anyone says.  We can see this in the almost infinite different and even opposed interpretations of what Jesus says.  Heck, we have trouble understanding each other in normal conversation; I don’t even know what I really mean when I am talking to myself, for crying out loud.

Speaking as a person who communicates for a living and who owns a bizillion books, I have to admit that in the end and in the larger scheme of things human speech is only marginally more intelligible and reliable than dogs barking.  Everything we say is “in figures,” as Jesus says.  Everything we hear someone else say requires our brains to go into overdrive to interpret.  When I think I’m being a little too cynical about this, I just have to consider what it means when my wife utters the word, “fine.”  I assure you that the dictionary is not helpful. 

And Jesus acknowledges that everything he has said is “in figures,” that is, he is presenting images, stories, illustrations, metaphors, and all kinds of other verbal techniques to communicate, which requires extensive interpretation by the hearers to make any sense at all, and the hearers invariably get it wrong.  

He is frustrated by a religious regime that was getting increasingly literal in its dependence upon words written in ink on papyrus as the ultimate authority, as if the more securely we could permanently inscribe something the closer we are to God.  And then he watches the human authorities take these holy, supposedly permanent, eternal words dictated by God… and use them to do exactly the opposite of what God intended for them to accomplish.  Indeed, we now know that these same scholars who were imposing a literal reading of God’s holy words on others, were not only adopting self-serving interpretations, but if that didn’t get them to their desired goal, they started messing with the texts themselves.

Jesus knows that his own words will also be distorted, reframed, transcribed, translated, recontextualized, decontextualized, edited, and otherwise interpreted by people.  This is not necessarily the sinister conniving of his enemies, or even the well-intentioned interference of his friends, but simply because we are mortal, historical, subjective beings whose hearts and minds are contorted by massive filters conditioning the way we experience everything.

II.

Jesus says, “The hour is coming when I will… tell you plainly of the Father.”  Sometime soon, then, he will communicate the Father to them in a way that is not subject to interpretation, but directly.  “You will be plugged in to God; you will have no need of a mediator, you will not even need me, as some exterior hub or bridge, to intercede for you; you will ask God directly, in my name,” he says.

 

On that day the disciples will have a direct relationship with God.  “The Father loves you,” Jesus says, “because you have loved me.”  The direct linkage between the disciples and God will be the love of God revealed, fulfilled, and given to them in Jesus.  

When Jesus talks about the day or the hour — the time — that is coming, I do not believe he means some far-off future time.  For this whole discourse before his arrest, he talks about “a little while,” and this time that is coming.  He is talking about the time of the Spirit, when he will be, not just with the disciples as he is in his physical proximity as another individual person, but within them.  And this happens after his death, in his resurrection, in conjunction with his breathing the Spirit on them.

There is no story of the ascension in this gospel.  At the end of chapter 21, when the gospel concludes, the risen Jesus is still sitting on a beach with his disciples.  There is no story of Jesus ever “going away” again.  His going away happens in those three days after the crucifixion.  But when he comes back, he comes back to stay.  He remains present with and within them; he remains accessible to them.  He comes to abide in them and they in him, as he promises earlier.

Last week someone put on Facebook this remarkable quote from the great 20th century Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, which I reposted.  Barth says that a Christian is, “a person whom Jesus Christ has… conjoined with Himself.  In the power of the Holy Spirit… this person is in Christ and Christ is in them.”

In Jesus Christ, by the indwelling of his Spirit, God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.  He is the Truly Human One; we share humanity with him; he is our humanity itself.  In him, God is so close to us, so interior to us, that we are able to ask things of God directly.  Jesus insists that because of his presence within us, because of how thoroughly in him humanity and divinity are melded and interpenetrated and dissolved, we ask God directly.  Because in him God became human, now in him we humans are “participants in the divine nature.”  

So when we ask, as Jesus says elsewhere, we ask in the conviction and the trust that we have already received.  We are asking to be awakened to the reality of the truth that God has already given us everything.  

III.

But we do have to ask.  The spiritual life is this asking, this request for perception and vision, knowledge and awareness.  The word “prayer” means asking.  Often we reduce it to asking for things.  But what we are really asking for, and what this asking is, is a quality of openness.  For it is as if we are locked up in the clamshell of our own ego-centric conditioning, unable to see the truth.  We have this dense filter of our own experience that effectively prevents us from seeing what is really there.  And prayer is itself an openness, a receptivity, a welcoming, and a desire for new awareness.  Prayer is an expectation that something new is going to happen.  Prayer is an expansion of our imagination to embrace a different possibility.  

There is this scene in the movie, “Christine,” which is about a vintage Plymouth Fury with supernatural abilities, in which the car has been seriously vandalized and the owner is sitting there miserable with this wrecked hunk of metal.  He is still unaware of the car’s skills, but beginning to suspect that it is at least a little special, when he hears this metallic sound, and he looks to see that the engine has repaired itself.  So he finally says to the car, “Show me.”  And the car immediately and spectacularly restores itself to showroom quality.

Setting aside the fact that in the movie the car is evil, the prayer we offer to God is like this.  In prayer we are almost daring God to show us something beyond our standard imagination and regular perception.  We are asking God to show us the truth of what God can do.  We are asking God to show us who we truly are and what God has really placed within us.  We are asking God to show us a healed, redeemed, restored, and beautiful world beneath and beyond the smoking wreck we normally experience.  We are asking God to show us ourselves, our true selves.

And in that asking — and only in that openness and expectation and trust and hope and joy — we see.  We see differently.   

That asking is itself an expression of frustration and dissatisfaction with the world-as-we-know-it, the world as reconfigured by human principalities and powers, the world as distorted by human fear and violence.  Asking is itself a desire to see more and to see better than we can with our perceptions so twisted and blocked by our own subjectivity.  Asking itself says “This can’t be all; this can’t be right; there is a better world than this, and I want to see it.”

There used to be this popular bumper-sticker that said, “Question Authority.”  That’s what our asking, our prayer, inherently does.  It questions the facts and the interpretation of those facts that we are given by worldly authorities.  This asking is like when John says in one of his letters that we have to test the spirits to see if they are of God.  It means most of all questioning the authority of our own ego-centric perspective; questioning our own biases, prejudices, habits, expectations, and desires, the lens through we perceive everything.  

IV.

“Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete,” he says.  Live in the asking; live in this openness to the possibility that things are quite different from what we think.  Live in this expectation so fully that we respond not to what the world tells us but to what the Word tells us.  Live in the good and blessed creation according to the love of the One who breathes it into being.

This takes discipline and attention.  It takes a community, gathered around the Word, testing the spirits together, challenging each other and encouraging each other.  So that when we do fall back into our characteristic self-righteousness, and when we do fall back into familiar patterns that only reinforce a false perception, we catch ourselves and each other.  And we pull each other out of the spiral of fear and violence, and pull each other back onto the path of light and life.

The disciples are so impressed by what Jesus says here that they exclaim, “Yes, now you are speaking plainly, not in any figure of speech!”  Now we get it!  Now we know what you are talking about!

But they don’t, really.  I think they are trying to convince themselves that they understand.  Maybe they are trying to convince Jesus that he hasn’t just wasted a couple of hours talking to them. 

Jesus’ response is to throw cold water on their enthusiasm.  He knows that in a few hours they will all abandon him.  He knows that his trial and crucifixion are going to traumatize them.  It’s like he says, “No, you don’t get it.  Not yet.  But you will.”

So he just hopes that they live in his peace and trust him while they go through this.  Because he knows the ending.  He knows that even though they are still clueless now, in a few days, after he has come back, they will be equipped by God for ministry in his name.

And that is when they will be truly empowered, even to face the inevitable persecution they will receive from the world.  For now, he just urges them to take courage and trust in him.  For he has overcome, he has conquered, the world.  That is, the powers of the world are about to exhaust their violence upon him; yet he will emerge not just unscathed, but in this new form in which he will dwell within them.

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