Something to do with Jesus

Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

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.

Loving what gets left behind

My maternal grandmother died in 1985, and my grandpa remarried a few years later, at almost eighty years of age.  I liked my new step-grandmother right away, and over the years became very fond of her.  When I went back to college to finish up my Bachelor’s Degree so I could go to seminary, it was she and my grandpa footed the bill for my tuition.  So a few years later, after she and my grandpa had died, I was faced with a little dilemma.

It began when I took up regular practice of praying the daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer.   I would get to the point at the end of the service where one adds personal prayers, including prayers for the dead.  I would pray for my deceased grandparents on my father’s side. And when it came to my mother’s parents, Gertrude and Frank, I would naturally pray for them together, as they were together for the first 20 years of my life, as they were together for over fifty years of marriage.  But I would always think of my Step-grandma Mary Beth at the same time, but it didn’t feel right to mention her in the same breath as them, and it didn’t feel right not to.   It was a long time before my heart was completely settled on this point.  Strange as it sounds, it felt disloyal not to give Gertrude her pride of place, as my Grandma and as Frank’s wife.  But I also didn’t want to make Mary Beth a second-class citizen in my prayers.

This problem I had about how to pray for my Grandfather’s wives, says something about how I understood love.  I think most human beings start out as with the idea that there is only so much love to go around.  I can only love this person more by loving that person less.  And the same goes for those who love me.  If they love someone else more, there is that much less love available for me.  This is a very natural way for us to think about love, because of our experience as small children who were completely dependent for our very survival on our parents’ love.  And our parents were limited.  They only had so much to give.  We were attuned to every ebb and flow of their attention and affection, and when it was directed elsewhere, to their work, or to each other, or, God forbid, to our brothers and sisters, we couldn’t help but feel that there was less for us. 

We grow and enter adolescence and develop more resilience and a capacity to love ourselves, but we still need a lot of love and reassurance from the outside.  And that’s also about the time that it starts to really sink in for us that our parents are going to die, that there is going to come a day when there is nobody left in the world who is obliged to love us.  And so a powerful new need awakens, the desire to find someone in the world with whom we can create a new bond to take the place of the one we had with our father and mother, to have someone in the world who will love us and make life’s journey with us all the way to the end.  Along with that yearning for a mate comes the equally powerful desire to have offspring, so that when we leave this world, someone will remain behind to remember us, someone who will keep the names and the values, the physical features and the stories that we pass on to them alive.

Now this is obviously a simplistic and incomplete description of human development, but I think it helps us see ordinary human love, family love, as a way of coming to grips with and even overcoming death.  And that is a beautiful thing.  Once when I was a still a bachelor I was walking through the Mission District in San Francisco at rush hour and saw an older Chinese man coming down the sidewalk, with a lined face and gray hair, but a body that was still lean and tall and strong.  He was dressed in tradesman’s coveralls and in his arms he held a girl of three or four years of age.  He was carrying her diagonally across his body facing out, with one arm under her arm and around her chest, and the other hand under the crook of her knee, so her other leg swung free.  She was laughing and wriggling as he swung her from side to side, and on his face was a smile of pure joy.  The sight of them struck deep into my heart, and I understood, in a way I never had before what it means to play with your granddaughter and know that your love will live on in her long after you’re gone.

The Sadducees of the Gospels believed that this kind of love is enough.  They came from the upper classes, people who were prosperous and well-fed and had large families, and for them the hope that they would live on in their children and their children’s children and their children’s children’s children was enough.  If they thought of resurrection from the dead, they supposed it would have to be a kind of family reunion, where you picked up where you left off with your relationships on the other side of the grave.  They were also conservative people, who upheld a traditional interpretation of the laws of Moses, so they thought a lot about cases, and real-world practical implications.  When they argued against the resurrection, it was because of the legal problems it would create, problems like the case of the woman who married the seven brothers.  Better to be satisfied, they said, to love those who will love you in return, and let life take its course, and give death its due.

But Jesus doesn’t think about cases.  Jesus thinks about that woman who was married to the seven brothers, who watched each one of them die, and never did have a child.  And Jesus question about her resurrection is not “whose wife will she be?”  Jesus’ question is what is her hope?  It’s the same question he asks about widow of Nain, following the body of her only son out of town to the burying ground.  It’s the question he asks about all the mothers and fathers whose children are stricken with hunger, or mental illness, or disability or disease, and about the ones who could have given a child a loving home but were never blessed to have one, and the ones whose marriages were broken by death, or addiction, or divorce.  It’s the question he asks about all the mothers and fathers who sent sons off to war, who never returned, or who came back broken.  What is their hope?  What is their legacy? 

And for an answer Jesus also looks to Moses, but not to Moses the author of laws.  Jesus looks to Moses, the man who came face to face with the living God, who turned aside from tending his father-in-laws flock to behold a bush that burned but was not consumed.  Jesus felt the anguish, and the loneliness, and the hopelessness of those who had no answer to death, and he thought of Moses who heard the voice from the burning bush that said, “I am.  I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and I am your God.  And I have heard the affliction of my people.  Their cry has come to me and I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the bondage in which they are oppressed.”

It’s not that there is anything wrong with ordinary human love, with the love of husband and wife, and parent and child, and grandparent and grandchild.  But it doesn’t always work out the way we want it to, and anyway, even when it is enough for us, it is not enough for God.  It is not enough for God that we should love and die, and vanish like smoke.  God has more to give us than that.  In Jesus Christ God has given us the life that doesn’t need to find a work-around for death.  In Christ we are children of a parent whose love is not limited, who does not love the childless widow any less than the woman whose house is filled with grandchildren.  Christ is the bearer of the gift of that love and that life because it came to him first, and because he will be there to enjoy it with us at the last, and the gift is called resurrection.