I’ve
been leading a class for the past six weeks or so on a book called the Wisdom Jesus. It puts forward an image of Jesus as a
teacher of the way of inner transformation that leads to higher consciousness. A lot of people have responded very
positively to this book, and the attendance at these classes has been the
highest of any I’ve done at St. John’s. We’re now in part 3, which presents
contemporary approaches to ancient wisdom practices—some things you can
actually do to follow in the way that Jesus taught. And we’ve been spending a good part of each
class doing these practices—not just talking, for instance, about Centering
Prayer meditation, but practicing a twenty minute period of silent meditation
together, and then having a conversation about our experience.
Last
Sunday we did a form of Lectio Divina, a traditional way of slowly and
sensitively digesting the scriptures.
And through the week as I was preparing to teach the class, I came back
a few times to the problem of which scripture to pick for us to read. I thought in passing about some personal
favorites, but I didn’t have a lot of time to spend on making this decision, so,
finally, I decided the best thing would be to just go to the Lectionary Page
and write down the chapter and verse numbers of the Gospel lesson for the
following Sunday, and read that.
So
that’s what we did. We sat and meditated
for a few minutes and then a volunteer read aloud the same verses from John
that I just read to you this morning. Now
keep in mind, this group has been buzzing with enthusiasm for weeks about a
portrait of a Jesus who is not exclusive, one who teaches a wisdom that is
quite compatible with that of other traditions.
This is a Jesus who does not appeal to an external, dogmatic authority,
but to our own inner capacity to recognize the truth. But here we have one of those Gospel passages
that seems, on the surface at least, to defy every attempt to make it
universal. So I have to admit I was a
little nervous about how this was going to go.
As
it turned out, I need not have worried.
As we listened to the reading a first and then a second time, we did hit
the uncomfortable verses. And we could
have seized up, and forgotten to listen to the rest of the reading because we
were stuck, back arguing with verse 18.
But we stayed with it. We stayed
still and kept breathing, and trying to hear what the passage might be trying
to tell us. And when we started sharing
what we’d found, it turned out there was a lot.
There was a lot in this passage that spoke to people’s hearts, that
stirred their love and their longing for God.
So it is in that spirit of the faith that if we keep working, and look
deeper, we will find there is more to these texts than at first meets the eye,
I want to circle back now and take another look at the things about this
reading that are hard to hear and hard to understand.
After
all, Jesus himself introduces this saying by telling us it will be a tough one
to swallow. He does this when he brings up the serpent in the wilderness. As we heard in the reading from Numbers, Moses
makes a bronze serpent as a kind of medicine that heals by making you look at
the thing you are most afraid to see. And
Jesus says things in this passage that we don’t want to look at, things that
might turn and bite us with a poisonous sting.
First he gives this incredible that about the grace of God, who loved the
world so much, and who sent his Son not to judge the world but to save it. But then he starts to talk about
condemnation. “Those who believe in him
are not condemned,” it says, “but those who do not believe are condemned
already.” I quoted this passage at a
talk I gave last fall, at an interfaith panel on peace and nonviolence, in
order to illustrate a paradox that has been at the heart of the Christian
religion throughout its history, and when I read those words, the Muslim Imam
who was also on the panel winced and shook his head.
Now
some might say, “who cares?” To them
this passage is simple to understand: our religion has the right beliefs, and
everyone else’s has the wrong ones. We
will be saved, they will be condemned, and its just too bad for them. But a brief look back at our history tells us
all we need to know about the poisonous snakes that lie along that path—wars of
conquest and wars of religion, witch trials and inquisitions, pogroms, and
genocides. In a world of religious
pluralism, especially in a place like California, where Jews and Christians,
Muslims and Hindus, and Buddhists and Sikhs, Neo-pagans and Atheists all live
side-by-side, this interpretation has lost its credibility—especially for the
young, who have no memory of life in an ethnically and religiously homogenous
community, and no desire to go back there.
Because
it’s no longer credible to say that the Christian church is in sole possession
of the truth, even about religion. We
know too much about the world’s other faiths to continue to pretend that they
are all false and misleading paths that take people to hell. Even if their practices and doctrines seem
alien to us, we can’t ignore the evidence of their saints. People hear the Dalai Lama say “my religion
is kindness” and they compare it with the self-righteous sectarian contempt
preached in so many churches every Sunday.
Needless to say, it's not a favorable comparison. So if we believe that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, who
came into the world not to condemn it, but that the world might be saved
through him (and I take my stand on the position that the world needs, more
than ever, people who believe this), we have to start see how that might be
true exactly because it doesn’t
require that everyone convert to Christianity.
That
means having a different kind of faith, one that is broader than we’ve had
before, but also deeper. It means having
an imagination of what God is doing in the world in Christ that is no longer
limited to what happens in churches, or with people who profess the Christian
faith. And it means embracing a new
kind of Christian discipleship, one that is less defined by our belonging within
the rigid boundaries an exclusive social group, where people think and act and
look more or less the same. It means
being less concerned with believing the right things, and more with doing what
Christ is asking of us to help him save the world.
I
think that’s actually more in line with what the Gospel means by “believing,”
anyway. The Greek word that our Bibles
translate as “believing in” Jesus doesn’t just mean “accepting as true certain
ideas about him.” It means to put our
trust in him, to trust him enough to let him change the way we live. Believing in Jesus means following his lead,
doing the things he said to do. And today’s
text emphasizes that point very strongly.
“The light has come into the world,” it says—not into the church, you
notice, or into the hearts of Christians—“and the people loved darkness rather
than light because their deeds were evil.” “But those who do what is true, come to the light (they come out into the world),
so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” The
truth, says the Gospel, the truth that really matters, is not something that
you think, or something that you say, it’s something that you do.
No comments:
Post a Comment