Easter 5A; John 14:1-14; St. Paul’s
Episcopal Church Smithfield, NC
5/10/2020 Jim Melnyk, “What is Essential”
Today’s lesson from John has
some of the most beautiful, consoling words one can find in the Bible. At the
same time, it has one of the most personally frustrating passages I’ve ever
experienced. What in the world do you do when that happens?
The easy thing would be to
talk about the beautiful, consoling words of John in the first part of the
lesson and ignore the frustrating, often misunderstood passages…easy to do, but
not faithful to the content of the lesson.
“Do not let your hearts be
troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me,” says Jesus. “I have prepared a
place for you – and where I go you can follow.” How often we’ve listened to
these words of comfort! They are offered as a consolation – as a promise of
God’s presence in our lives in and through the person of Jesus. “Be at peace –
I will be with you,” Jesus tells his disciples then – and tells us now,
generations later.
These opening verses of
consolation and the promise of a home with God are far from a sentimental,
emotional dream about life in some heavenly realm – they are meant as a
rallying cry for strength in the face of the cross back then, and in our
darkest moments today. And when the Jesus we meet in John’s gospel talks about
his Father’s house we’re getting part of John’s theology of the incarnation.
Jesus is talking about the mutual indwelling of God and Jesus – and our
invitation to dwell there with them – a reality we experience through the gift
of God’s abiding Spirit living within us now – not in some great by-and-by.
Yet in spite of those
promises we are not a world at peace, are we? We are not a people – for the
most part – who have learned how to take these words to heart. We, as a nation,
seem to be more anxious and sick than ever before – the pandemic
notwithstanding.
We’ve become a
self-prescribing, self-medicating people who always need more stuff – and not
because our hearts are at peace, I’m sure of that! Jesus says, “Do not let your
hearts be troubled,” yet that’s exactly what they are all too often – troubled.
Jesus can say, “Do not let
your hearts be troubled,” because he fervently believes in God’s presence in
his life and in the life of the world. There is no place where one can be where
the God of Jesus is not. According to13th century Islamic poet Rumi,
God says to us, “Are you looking for me? I’m in the next seat.” Rumi goes on to
say, “God is the breath inside the breath.” He could easily have had Jesus’
life in mind when he wrote those words – and this is the sense of God people
hunger for today.
A tradition among the Jewish
Hasidim says it another way. In the early 19th century a young boy,
who would later become a rabbi, has an encounter with a scholar in a nearby
town. The scholar says to the young boy, “I’ll give you a gold coin if you can
tell me where God lives!” The young boy responds, “And I’ll give you two gold coins
if you can tell me where God doesn’t live!”
Like Jesus, the young boy
fervently believes in God’s presence in his own life and in the world. And
unlike so many Christians today, the young boy has enough sense to understand
God isn’t so easily pinned down as the scholar would have him suppose – though
the more often quoted portion of today’s Gospel lesson has been used to say
otherwise. This leads us into the frustrating part of the passage.
The disciples, unable to
understand Jesus’ words of consolation, want more information. “Where are you
going and how can we follow? How can we know the way?”
Jesus responds, “I am the
way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through
me.” People tend to quote this verse, John 14:6, as if it were some sort of mantra
protecting God, Jesus, and the Christian faith. It’s as if we have somehow lost
or forgotten the integrity of Jesus and his ministry. It’s as if we somehow
think the promises of God – and the faith of generations – would become
meaningless if we don’t take that verse literally. It ignores 13 chapters of
John’s witness to Jesus by setting up Jesus and God as the in-clique to
everyone else’s deadly exclusion.
Throughout the early chapters
of John’s gospel Jesus goes to great lengths to point not to himself, but to
God. Jesus is the agent of God – the shalliach
of God – who acts for God, and with God’s authority. He always points away from
himself and toward God. Even the great “I Am” statements of Jesus in John’s
gospel end up pointing to the One who sends him into the world.
I suspect the only thing God,
Jesus, and our faith need to be saved from is a body of doctrine or thought
which limits the way in which God is capable of loving God’s creation. For all
our talk about God’s unconditional love, we take this particular verse from
John quite literally, and suddenly a vast number of Christians have no problems
with unconditional love having one very significant, exclusive, and dismissive
condition.
Marcus Borg writes, “The way
of Jesus is… not a set of beliefs about
Jesus. That we ever thought it was is strange… as if one entered new life by
believing certain things to be true,
or as if the only people who can be saved are those who know the word ‘Jesus.’ [It ends up sounding like being saved by
syllables.] Rather,” he goes on, “the way of Jesus is the way of death and
resurrection – the path of transition and transformation from an old way of
being to a new way of being.”[1] To
acknowledge Jesus as the way, the truth and the life is to acknowledge and
claim as our own the life and death of Jesus.
The way, the truth and the
life that is Jesus is the way of compassion, reconciliation, freedom and peace.
In other words, we experience Jesus as the way, the truth and the life when we follow
Jesus – not when we believe in Jesus, but when we follow Jesus - when we live as Jesus lived - not crossing our fingers when we get to the hard parts. Oneness with God comes as we live into the
fullness of God’s love. St. Paul reminds us, “So if anyone is in Christ, there
is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become
new!”[2] Jesus
summed it up in what we have come to call the Great Commandment: To love God
with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our
strength – and to love our neighbor as ourselves. In his farewell discourse
Jesus tells us, “Love one another as I have loved you.”[3]
The way of Jesus is the way
of the heart. Too many years ago to count I learned a valuable lesson in French
class that I too often forget. In the book, Le
Petit Prince – The Little Prince
– a young boy, searching for someone to be a friend, ends up in a conversation
with a fox. By the end of the chapter they become friends. As they prepare to
part company the fox shares a bit of wisdom with the little Prince: “Here’s my
secret,” the fox explains. “It is very simple. It is only with the heart that
one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”[4] I
didn’t understand it then, but I now see an amazing sacramental theology behind
those words – intended or not. It is not the signs themselves that matter, but rather,
it is the deep love and grace which those signs communicate to our hearts that
make the difference.
At its heart, our faith calls
to live in ways that make these hopes real for all. The world will still be a
trying and serious place, but when we open ourselves to the Spirit of God in
our lives we find ourselves at home in God. And though the world may seem to only
change one person at a time – it will change.
“Are you looking for me,”
asks God? “Are you looking for me? I’m any one of the people you see in your
Zoom feed this morning. I am in the people commenting this morning on Facebook
Live. I am in the people at the other end of your phone call. I am the person
for whom you wear a face mask these days – or from whom you faithfully remain
six feet away in the grocery store. I am in the people beside you in your home
this morning and in the people you long to see once again in the seat next to
you at St. Paul’s. Look for me with your heart.”
[2] 2
Corinthians 5:17
[3] John
13:34 (paraphrased)
[4] Antoine
de St. Exupéry, Le Petit Prince,
chapter XXI
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