How you get there

• Acts 7:55-60
• 1 Peter 2:2-10
• John 14:1-14
• Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16

 “I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”

This is one of those gospel verses that seems to give Christians an exclusive privilege, like, I don’t know, the right to issue religious ultimatums.  It’s a passage often read at funeral services, to give hope to the grieving, so it’s strange when you hear, as I did not long ago, a preacher use it to harangue a crowd of mourners, warning them against being insufficiently convinced of the exclusive privilege of the Christian, and thus disqualified from joining their departed loved one in heaven.  And when you do hear something like that, it makes you wonder--what did the author of the Gospel had in mind? 

I took the opportunity this week to really dig into this scripture, more than I have before, and so I packed a little more Bible interpretation into my sermon today than usual—I hope you won’t mind.  I’m not going to cite verse numbers, but if you want to keep your lectionary insert handy, and refer to the gospel lesson once in a while as I’m preaching, I won’t be offended.  And I’m going to go back a little bit into the 13^th Chapter of John, so if you’re so inclined and want to pull one of those black bibles out of the pew rack, go head.  

Because the most important thing I think we can do with a scripture like this is to put it into context.  In the story of the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks these words after supper on the night before the day of preparation for the Passover, after he had washed his disciples’ feet, after his betrayer had left the table and gone out into the night, after he had predicted that Peter would deny him three times.  And Thomas, that tactless disciple, asks him a question about how and where to follow him, now that he was about to die.  

And our reading today begins with Jesus telling his disciples that it’s going to be okay—“do not let your hearts be troubled.”  It’s going to be okay because his death will not mean the end of their relationship.  And it will not mean that the knowledge of God that they have received through him will be lost.  In fact, that relationship, and that knowledge, are about to shift into a higher gear.  Because Jesus is going away, but he is going to the one he calls “my Father”, to be in an even more intimate and equal relationship with God.   

And this will change the way that the disciples relate to Jesus, but it also will be a change toward greater equality and intimacy.  He has already shown them this change, that very evening, by getting down on his knees and washing their feet.  And when he finished inaugurating their new relationship of intimacy and equality with him, he told them that this was now how they were to relate to each other: “Where I am going” he said “you cannot come.  I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you should love one another.”

I don’t think we can over-emphasize the importance of the connection between this commandment and the scripture we are talking about today.  Before Jesus promised to go and prepare a place for us in the house of his Father; before he promised to come back for us, he told us that we cannot come where he is going.  Because we still have work to do.  We have a commandment to obey.  That’s why when Philip follows up on Thomas’ question by saying, “Show us the Father, and we will be satisfied,” Jesus gets a little testy: “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?”  Because “No one comes to the Father except through me,” is not permission for us to be satisfied.  It is a reminder that we have seen all we need to see, in order to believe in Jesus and get to work.  We already know all we need to know, to keep his commandment, and love as he loves—that is how you come to the Father.

But don’t take my word for it; look at the Gospel, where Jesus goes on to talk about works.  “The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own, but The Father who dwells in me does his works.  Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves.”  It is the works of Jesus, even more than his words, that show us the Father in the Son.  And the greatest of his works is the one he is about to do as he speaks these words, which is the work of the cross.  

It is on the cross that Jesus manifests most clearly and unmistakably the love of the Father, love so great that he gave his only Son to an uncomprehending world, to the end that all who believe in him should have eternal life.  The way that leads to the Father is the way of the cross.  The truth that Jesus is, is the truth that Pilate scorned when he said, “What is truth?”  Eternal life is the life of the Good Shepherd, laid down for his sheep.  It is this kind of love that Jesus commands us to have for one another.  No one comes to the Father any other way. 

So now that we’ve seen the context of this saying, we understand.  Jesus has not given us an exclusive privilege, but an all-embracing responsibility.  Because it is our love that shows the way, the truth, and the life to those whom the Father loves in the world today: so that they might see his glory; so that they might believe that we were sent, as the Father sent the Son, and believing, have eternal life in his name.  Now for many in the world today these are just words, empty of any meaning.  But works—works they might just believe. 

“Very truly, I tell you,” says Jesus, “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.”  And we say to ourselves, “What?--You’ve got to be kidding!  Me…you…do the works of Jesus?  Do greater works than Jesus?  Greater than changing water into wine?  Greater than giving sight to a man born blind?  Greater than raising Lazarus from the dead?  Greater than dying on the cross?” 

I guess it all depends on what Jesus meant by greatness.  Is it the power to work miracles, or command armies? Is it charisma, or fame?  Or is Jesus talking about greatness of faith, greatness of hope, greatness of love?  Maybe we can do works greater than his because he, after all, was Jesus, and you and I are just you and me.  Jesus was the only-begotten Son, who shared his Father’s glory before the world was made; all we share are some old stories in an old book, and some bread and wine and water.  Jesus knew everything that was in the hearts of men and women.   All we know is that the rent is due on the first of the month, and that some people are just hard to love.  All that the Father has he gave to the Son.  All we got is our own modest gifts, precariously balanced against our deficits.    That, and the faith that Jesus is in the Father and will give us whatever we ask so that we can do our works. 

They may not be spectacular: raising an autistic child, or tending to a failing parent; planting a garden in waste ground, or organizing a rally for justice; surviving an addiction, perhaps, or a bereavement, and helping a neighbor to do the same; helping resettle a family of refugees from war.  Often they are works we didn’t choose, and we feel like Jesus at the wedding in Cana, when he said to his mother, “Woman, my hour is not is come.”  But it precisely because we do them out of love, in obedience to Christ, with no power but the strength that comes from God, in just the right measure at just the right time to get us a little further along the way—just because of this, these works manifest the very highest truth.  They are signs of the glory of Christ, and they point the way to the Father.

    

Conflict Redeemed

• Acts 2:14a,22-32
• 1 Peter 1:3-9
• John 20:19-31
• Psalm 16

As a pastor, one of the most critical parts of my job is to help people work through conflict.  Not that I’m always successful.  I am aware of relationships in our community where there is so much hurt and mistrust, and the conflicted parties are so deeply entrenched in their positions, that the most they can manage for each other is avoidance, and when needed, a chilly civility.   And there are questions that touch on our common life, where there are differences of opinion so pronounced, that we prefer not to talk about them.  We have to admit that it is a fact of life that, as the educator Parker Palmer once put it, “community is where you find the person you least want to live with,” and maybe the best we can hope for is to keep such conflicts from flaring into open hostility.  But the resurrection of Jesus offers a better hope than that. 

The story of Jesus is, after all, a story of conflict.  And at time of the Passover, the annual celebration of God’s decisive victory over the oppressors of the people, Jesus took the conflict to Jerusalem.  He brought his challenge to the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes, right into the heart of their stronghold—into the temple.  The gospels tell how as Jesus was teaching in the temple the ruling elite sent one representative after another to spar with him verbally, to try to back him down or trip him up--and how every time, their attacks blew back in their faces. 

Because Jesus turned each loaded question and devious insinuation into a subtle but devastating indictment of his opponents, of their cowardice, injustice and hypocrisy, their complicity with violence and idolatrous religion.  And with each of these encounters the crowd of on-lookers and their enthusiasm for Jesus and his teaching grew.  Until, fearing a total public relations disaster, no one dared ask him any more questions.

But the conflict didn’t end there.  Unable to take Jesus down publicly, the temple elite did what the powerful often do when they have lost their moral and political legitimacy.   They resorted to treachery and violence.   You know the story very well: how at supper Jesus told his disciples that one of them, his closest friends, would betray him to his death; how Judas Iscariot went out into the night, only to return later, leading the temple goons to the garden where Jesus used to go to pray; how he singled him out for them with a kiss.   You know how Jesus refused to fight, or to let his disciples fight for him, and how they scattered and fled as he was dragged away; how Peter followed, but when he was confronted, denied that he knew Jesus, not once, but three times.

You know this story so there’d really be no need to retell it if it were not for the fact that with the coming of Easter, that story so often disappears.  It is forgotten immediately, as if, in raising Jesus from the dead, God made the conflicts that led to his death irrelevant, or miraculously resolved them.   But such radical discontinuity between Holy Week and Easter is far from biblical.  Just look at Peter’s sermon in the Second Chapter of Acts.  It is a bold declaration that God has set Jesus of Nazareth free from the power of death, but it begins with an equally bold reminder to “you, my fellow Israelites,” that “you crucified this man, whom God attested to you with deeds of power, wonders, and signs, by the hands of those outside the law.” 

The Acts of the Apostles tells how the conflict that marked Jesus’ life and death doesn’t end with his rising from the dead, which itself only serves to prove that the conflict runs deeper, and its stakes are higher, than anyone previously thought.  In the resurrection, God’s Holy Spirit not only vindicates Jesus’ movement to renew Israel by a prophetic insurrection from below.  She also gives unprecedented power and universal scope to that movement, so that it breaks out across the world to challenge every “religion” that gives ideological cover to systems of exclusion and domination, and confronts the idols of the nations in the name of Israel’s God of creation, justice, healing and love.

But the Gospel of John tells us that before that can happen, the risen Christ has to reconcile his own community of disciples.  It is a traumatized community, not only because of the horrifying death of the teacher in whom they had placed such hope, but because the treachery of the ostensible leaders of their nation.  And one of their own inner circle aided and abetted that treachery, which they all passively acquiesced to out of fear.  That same fear still gripped them as they gathered for the evening meal on the first day of the week, and though one of them had not arrived, they locked the doors.  Who knows what premonitions of further betrayal haunted their minds as they thought of Thomas the Twin, out there somewhere as darkness fell on the city, doing who knows what, with who knows whom?

It is into the middle of this threatened little circle that the Lord came, bringing his peace.  He showed them the marks of betrayal on his body, and again said “Peace be with you.”  And they would need that peace when Thomas arrived.  We are used to thinking of Thomas as the one who doubted God, but it was not God whom Thomas doubted—it was his friends.  Maybe in the aftermath of seeing Jesus they were full of love and joy, and disbelief that they had ever doubted Thomas, but to him they seemed to be in the grip of a kind of group delusion.  Maybe he questioned why they would say that the Lord come to them when he was not there—what kind of game were they playing, and why didn’t it include him? 

My point is that we don’t know how Thomas’ doubt might have divided this already frail community, if the others had not received the Spirit of peace?  This peace is not simply an inner feeling.  It is an active power, the power to forgive.  The spiritual power of forgiveness, flowing from the crucified and risen Christ, is what breathed new life into the community of Jesus’ disciples, as it has ever since, again and again and again.  It is the power in which we are sent, as Jesus was sent, into inevitable conflict, to speak the word of God’s peace. 

It is also the power of discernment, because forgiveness can never be automatic.  It must be free, a decision given and received with eyes that see clearly the wounds that sin has made in the body of God.   But our standard of judgment must be Jesus himself: Jesus, who said “judge not, lest you be judged;” Jesus, who preferred agony on the cross to violence against those who misjudged him; Jesus, who sat down at supper with the one he knew would betray him and gave him bread and said, “this is my body, given for you.” 

Such forgiveness is hard to achieve, but simple to understand.  You just have to hold out your hand.  We are talking here about the difference between an open hand and a clenched fist.  The open hand is what Jesus presents to Thomas, when he shows himself at last, and Thomas understands that it is the hand of God.  This is a God who is not afraid of conflict, but lets us doubt, and disbelieve, and probe the painful places where the mere idea of God is not enough.  And if we don’t give up, but keep working through the conflict, a time comes when we find we are touching a living body. 

Our community is that body, a crucified body, risen out of conflict, bearing wounds.  And with that resurrection we were also given the Spirit of forgiveness, the power to make peace, to heal betrayal and come to trust each other again.  There is no more important work for us than to learn to use that gift.  Because it wasn’t given for our enjoyment, so we could congratulate ourselves on what a nice, warm, happy family we’ve become.  It was given to us as a mission; it is the Spirit in which we’ve been sent.