Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C
May 12, 2019
Revelation 7:9-17 He will guide them to springs of the water of life.
John 10:22-30 It was winter.
O God of eternal life, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
During Eastertide, our lectionary offers no lessons from the First Testament. The effect, I think, is to overemphasize a break between Jesus’ followers and Jesus’ religious identity and tradition. Instead, we have passages from the Acts of the Apostles’ romantic accounts of the beginnings of Christianity, written toward the end of the first century about “the good old days.” (Always be suspicious when you hear about good old days, because they’ve never been good for everybody.) Today it’s Peter raising Dorcas from the dead with a line that is almost exactly the same as what Jesus said to raise Jairus’ daughter from the dead. Jesus reportedly said, “talitha cum” which means arise or wake up, come alive! Here Peter says, “tabitha anasteythi” which means arise or wake up, come alive!. In other words, Peter was ministering just like Jesus.
During Eastertide, we have passages from the Revelation to John the Divine, the apocalyptic vision transmitted by an angel of the Lord to one who was in exile. The Revelation is about how, in the end, God is going to set everything right that the Roman empire is getting completely wrong. And during Eastertide, we have stories about resurrection appearances – except we have run out of those, and now we’re back in the middle of the Gospel of John, on the Portico of Solomon, in the winter during the Feast of the Dedication – in other words, Happy Hanukkah! What I want to point out is that all three of these readings reveal a devotion to Jesus that is still completely integrated with, and true to, first century Judaism.
The Portico of Solomon was a meeting place where people discussed scripture before and after worship. It was the Bible Study area at the Temple in Jerusalem. Solomon, of course, is associated with Wisdom, and wisdom is always what’s needed most when studying ancient writings. The view from the portico was of the Kidron Valley, a place of palace gardens and of tombs – an early version of Mount Auburn Cemetery comes to my mind. And it’s the valley of last judgment in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. The springs in this valley were the primary water supply for Jerusalem[1] — in other words, the springs of the water of life. Just beyond the little valley is the Mount of Olives. You probably know that Hanukkah is the celebration of liberation from the Syrian King Antiochus who had desecrated the temple. When Judas Maccabeus and his brothers reclaimed and rededicated the temple a miracle of abundance occurred. So that’s what they might have been talking about in Bible Study that day: the bad guys tried to wipe us out, God was faithful and we were saved. We are free, so let’s celebrate!
But the folks who surrounded Jesus in John’s story were not in a celebratory mood. The verses just before this say that people were divided about whether or not Jesus was possessed by a demon – whether or not he was crazy. The question these people ask, literally translated, is “how long are you taking away our life?” It’s an idiom that in modern Greek means, “how long will you irritate us?” “How long are you going to drain the energy right out of our heels?” The gathering word is more like encircling or surrounding – it’s more confrontational in its sense. This is not a story of a gathering of people with a sincere desire to get a question resolved; it’s more menacing. Indeed, what happens next in the story is that enraged people took up stones to throw at Jesus, the argument continued a bit more and Jesus escaped to the desert.
The thing is that this may be pure fantasy – this exact scene may never have happened. More plausibly, it might have happened that Jesus’ followers (after his death) were accused of being crazy and driving others crazy and making folks mad enough to kill them. Think Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers. Think Oscar Romero. Think of anyone trying to get oppressed people to arise, or wake up, or come alive!
Here’s what I think is going on in this story. There is a debate going on about identity that goes something like this: “Just who do you think you are, Jesus, the savior of the world?” And the response from Jesus is, “I’ve told you that the work I do testifies to my relationship with God but you aren’t getting it. Actions speak louder than words. If you were following along, you would get it because my actions would be speaking to you. But you’re not following – you’re not watching what I do. For the folks who are following along, my work gives them a sense of timelessness, of Oneness with the universe without beginning or ending – a sense of deep peace that no-one can take away. It’s amazing. I’m doing God’s work.”
Now I know that this stuff is so incredibly loaded and hard to hear, so bear with me a minute. Think about an archaeological dig. We’ve got to carefully remove the weight of the Christological controversies of the second, third and fourth centuries and the load of Trinitarian doctrine that developed out of those controversies. And before we even get to that, we’ve got to dig through the layers of our own knowledge of exclusive, hurtful and even deadly forms of Christianity through the umpteen centuries since then and through to today. It takes many bulldozers. (I am only one, but I am in good company.)
Jesus is not saying that these people cannot be his followers. He is not saying that they should be his followers or that they can’t or don’t have a chance to experience timeless oneness with the universe because they aren’t his followers. He’s just saying that the reason they don’t get what he’s talking about is that they’re not his followers. Jesus is saying that his followers have something that can’t be taken away – an experience of One-ness that transcends chronological time – a fullness of life. He is not saying that he and God are one nature or essence or person. Jesus is saying that in and through his actions, his behavior, he’s completely united with God.
One of my bulldozing colleagues, Barbara Brown Taylor has written,
“When people wanted [Jesus] to tell them what God’s realm was like, he told them stories about their own lives. When people wanted him to tell them God’s truth about something, he asked them what they thought. With all kinds of opportunities to tell people what to think, he told [and showed] them what to do instead. Wash feet. Give your stuff away. Share your food. Favor reprobates. Pray for those who are out to get you.” [2]
It is maddening isn’t it? And it’s one thing to imagine it in church and quite another to put it into practice in real life. And real life is what Jesus means when he’s talking about eternal life. The Church may have promised some never-never land kind of heaven, but I’m quite sure Jesus never did. Jesus’ actions, his behaviors, were answering the question, “is there life before death?”
What does it take for any of us to hear Jesus’ voice and follow Jesus’ lead to answer that question for people who just don’t have much experience of life before death? What do we need in order to string together many acts of kindness without keeping score or developing and nursing a grudge? What do we need in order to: “Wash feet. Give our stuff away. Share our food. Favor reprobates. Pray for those who are out to get us.” Visit with those who are lonely. Care for those who are suffering. What do we need to move from a mind-set of grievance to a mind-set of forgiveness?[3] What do we need to practice love that is stronger than death?
I imagine that the answers are different from person to person and from congregation to congregation. The answers in this congregation about what it might take for any of us to hear Jesus’ voice include employing those bulldozers that I mentioned earlier, some better translations, and heaps of compassion and the benefit of the doubt when it comes to whatever Jesus might have said and whatever else his followers reported that he said. And even when we get through all of that, I can tell you from personal experience, it’s often still very hard to hear. In my head, my difficulty hearing usually has something to do with fear. I don’t know about the voices in your head that make Jesus’ voice hard to hear. Maybe they’re voices of fear or resentment or indifference, or sorrow or despair, or anger, or feelings of superiority, or feelings of inadequacy. It’s not coincidental that the central command in the Hebrew Bible is “listen for the Holy One!”
The answers in this congregation about what it might take for any of us to follow Jesus’ lead in helping people experience life before death include regular involvement with a brave and generous community, plenty of encouragement, support, and forgiveness, and large doses of beautiful music to recharge our batteries, to restore our souls, to wake up, to rise up, to come alive! It is our way of getting a hand to help us, as Peter gave to Dorcas. Many of us need to experience beauty in here so that we can go back out there ready to wash those feet, give more stuff away, share our food, favor reprobates, pray for those who are out to get us (and there are people out to get us), to visit people who won’t want us to leave, to provide some tender loving care to people who are hurting (even if they’ve brought the hurt on themselves), to do justice and to love mercy with friends and strangers – especially strangers, remembering that the gracious, merciful and compassionate Holy One is always in our midst.
Some of you might remember Emmanuelite Joe Bishop, a retired Presbyterian minister, who, when I arrived eleven years ago had just turned ninety. (He died last year just a few days shy of his 100th birthday). He was in church most Sundays back then, traveling from his home in southern Rhode Island. I offered to visit him there, and he countered that we should meet halfway, which was Providence. After chatting about all kinds of interesting things, I wanted to ask him what advice he had for me as I started out, because of his lifetime of service and ministry in the church. He had two things to tell me. The first, he said, was that he wanted me to know that the Risen Lord is real. He said, he had worked many years of ministering without really knowing that. He wanted me to know it. The second, he said, as he took both of my hands and leaned across the table, looking deeply into my eyes was, “Be Pam.”
I wish I could do that with each one of you this morning. One by one, I would hold both your hands, look into your eyes, and invite you by name, and insist that you be yourself when you do the works of compassion and mercy and just distribution of resources and peace that indicate that you are following Jesus. Arise. Wake up. Come alive to be who and Whose you are.