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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