Something to Dance About!

Lent 4B; Num. 21:4-9; John. 3:14-21 

St. Paul’s Smithfield, NC 3/15/2015

Jim Melnyk: “Something to Dance About!”

Author Isabel Anders recounts “an Hasidic tale about a famous rabbi who was on his way to teach at a village that was very interested in his ideas. This was going to be a very big event, and each Jew in the community made great preparations, pondering what issues he or she might ask the wise man about.

The rabbi finally arrived and, after the initial welcome, he was taken into a large room where people gathered to ask their questions. There was tremendous anticipation and excitement all around.

The rabbi walked silently around the room and then began to hum an Hasidic tune. Before long, everyone started humming along with his soft voice. As people became comfortable with his song, the rabbi started to dance. He danced everywhere in the room – and, one by one, every person danced with him. Soon everyone in the whole community was dancing wildly all together. Each person’s soul was healed by the dance, and everyone experienced a personal transformation.

Later in the night, the rabbi gradually slowed the dance and eventually brought it to a stop. He looked into each person’s eyes, one by one, and said gently, ‘I trust that I have answered all of your questions’” (Synthesis, 3/15/2015).

Anders tells us that story as we move past the mid-way point in Lent.  Our lessons make a shift to a focus on the Passion of Jesus.  The cross seems to beckon us forward, and like people passing a terrible car wreck on the side of the road, we resist looking at its reality too squarely in the face because the tragedy of it is painful – and the call to follow the One who was crucified challenges us in ways we would rather not experience.  We have heard Jesus’ call to take up our cross and follow, and the reality of Good Friday will make that a difficult choice for us to make.  We need to take a moment, Anders tells us, and “catch our breaths in order to focus ourselves again toward the coming Passion – we need assurances of that sort” (ibid).

And so we have what has become an iconic passage from John’s Gospel as our lesson today. Now, John 3:16 is a beautiful, promising, hope-filled verse for sure.  In fact I recall reading somewhere about a woman who said this verse was so important in her household growing up that she could recite the verse before she ever knew her ABCs. 

The wonder and promise of God’s incredible love for us can be life-changing – and I believe this is the message Jesus is trying to impart to us.  It can also become – has also become in many Christian communities –  a litmus test by which it is decided who is in, and who is out, in the kingdom of God – I’m not quite sure that that’s what Jesus had in mind when he first spoke those words.

If you recall, we’ve mentioned a good bit lately about how early Christianity was first called The Way – and that the Way Jesus teaches is an all-encompassing, grace-filled, self-giving love that calls us into relationship with the God of all creation.  “No one shows greater love than this, to give up one’s life for one’s friends,” he tells us later in this same gospel (15:13).  Jesus brings to mind the manner and meaning of his death when he equates his being lifted up – his crucifixion – with God’s saving work by way of the bronze serpent in the wilderness.  As the serpent was lifted for all to see and be saved, so the Christ of God will be lifted up on behalf of the whole world.

 We have also spoken about the ancient understanding of the word we translate as “believe.”  To believe is not about ascribing to a set of doctrines or a list of required thoughts, rather, to believe is to set one’s heart – to place one’s loyalty – to give oneself fully to the idea or the person in question – in this instance, the life and teaching – the Way of Jesus.

In essence, Jesus is saying, “all who set their heart on my way – all who set their hearts on the all-encompassing, grace-filled, self-giving love of God” will have eternal life.  So perhaps that lets us off the hook of thinking that only those who are Christians – or Christians with a specific check list marked off – are beloved of God.  Many who do not follow Jesus still encompass the love and grace that he proclaims and brings.  Do you recall the passage from Mark’s gospel where John – possibly the author of today’s gospel – says to Jesus, “‘Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.’ But Jesus said, ‘Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us’” (Mark 9:38-40).

So perhaps we can see the wide-open grace of God proclaimed by Jesus in John’s gospel – the grace that will in just a couple of chapters have him speaking to a Samaritan woman – a woman who is among the first to recognize Jesus as the Christ of God in that gospel, and call others to come and see (John 4). 

We begin, then, to see John 3:16 in broader depth – we begin to see that what it means to follow Jesus and to believe in Jesus is more than voicing a religious principle or doctrine.  We begin to see that following Jesus is about joining him on the way to the cross and beyond to new life, and we begin to see once again that belief in Jesus means giving ourselves fully to God as a response of our hearts and the courage of our wills.  But what, then, does Jesus mean by the phrase “eternal life?”

Biblical scholar N.T. Wright tells us the common thought about eternal life as a “promise of a timeless heavenly bliss” is not what the first century listeners and readers of John’s Gospel would have understood.  Wright tells us that one aspect of Jewish understanding divided time into two periods or eons: the “Present age” – ha-olam hazeh, and the “Age to come” – ha-olam ha-ba.  According to Wright, “The ‘age to come,’ many ancient Jews believed, would arrive one day to bring God’s justice, peace, and healing to the world as it groaned and toiled within the ‘present age’” (Synthesis, 3/15/2015).  We hear that thought echoed in Paul’s letter to the Church in Rome: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; ²³and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:22-23).

Wright goes on to say that for ancient Jews, of whom we must count Jesus, by the way, “God’s great future purpose [in the ‘age to come’] was not to rescue people out of the world, but to rescue the world itself, people included, from its present state of corruption and decay” – a state I am willing to bet Wright sees just as real today as in the time of Jesus.

And so N.T. Wright translates the famous verse ending with “shall not perish but share in the life of God’s new age” – that is, share in the age to come (op. cit.).  Wright concludes his remarks by pointing out how much our mistranslations of this verse tend to put everything in the life and teachings of Jesus into a “supposed invitation to ‘go to heaven’ rather than the present challenge of the kingdom coming on earth as [it is] in heaven” (ibid).

So, what in the world does all this theological talk mean for us in practical terms?  Why get so caught up in redefining – or reinterpreting – words like “Way,” “believe,” and “eternal life?” 

Well, one answer is that it can help us see that God is so much bigger – so much more all encompassing – so much more giving, forgiving and loving – than many of us have been taught to believe from the time we were knee-high to a grasshopper.

Another answer is that understanding the difference between the “age to come” which is another way of saying the inbreaking of the kingdom of God, over and against some sort of a promised bliss in the great by-and-by, holds us to a higher standard of being as followers of Jesus.  Instead of seeing the suffering of this world – the brokenness of this world – the injustices of this world – as things to be addressed by God in some distant, heavenly, future, we come to understand that God calls us, as those who follow Jesus along the Way, to stand in the breach on behalf of our sisters and brothers and speak a word of redemption – speak a word of reconciliation – speak a word of justice, peace, and healing “to a world as it [groans and toils within] the ‘present age.’”

Jesus didn’t give us John 3:16 as a set of magic words to insulate us from the world and all its mess – Jesus gave us John 3:16 because as he says in the following verse, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (3:17). And that, my friends, is certainly something to dance about! (Anders)  Amen.