In the May 8th issue of The New Yorker there is an article about a lawyer in Houston named Danalynn Recer. She has made a career of defending people in capital cases, and she’s been very successful in saving them from execution. She doesn’t do this by trying to prove their innocence—usually they are guilty of terrible crimes. Instead she focuses on that stage of the trial after a verdict has been reached and before sentencing, called “mitigation.” This is where the defense has the opportunity to try to convince the judge and the jury that the accused is a human being, and not, as the popular media would have it, “a monster.” Recer brings family members and acquaintances to the witness stand to tell the rest of the story of the defendants’ lives: childhoods of abandonment, deprivation and abuse, traumatic brain injury, lifelong struggles with addiction and madness; and the failed efforts they made to build normal lives, to hold down jobs, make friends, to go to church and better themselves.
The mitigation strategy sometimes works, because it only takes one juror to change a death sentence to one of life imprisonment—one juror who decides that the crime is not the whole truth of the defendant’s life. Recer is quoted in the article as saying, “People want us to apologize for the company we keep, but I don’t buy it. I don’t apologize for saying I love my clients in all their complexity. We insist on seeing their humanity, despite what they’ve done.” But that is what love does. The old saying that “love is blind” is another way of saying that love sees the whole truth. Love is the willingness to know the whole truth about another person, and to accept it. It means seeing that there is an ultimate value to that other life that we can’t know because it comes from God.
That’s not always easy. Some people couldn’t even love Jesus. They said he was a blasphemer and a rabble-rouser, and resolved to put him to death. And that death sentence was supposed to be the last word about his life. But they were wrong about him. They were wrong about his life and about his death. God raised him from the dead—that’s how wrong they were. They took him out of the world, but God raised him up and gave him back. The things he did, the things he said, even the wounds of his cross—his whole life came back to his disciples with more power, more meaning because of the death he had suffered, and then they new that their relationship with him was only beginning.
But that wasn’t easy to swallow either. It’s hard to love a crucified Messiah. Saul the Pharisee could not and he went after Jesus with a vengeance, hunting down his disciples and throwing them in jail, until the day when the risen Lord came to him and said, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” And then even Saul knew he’d been wrong about Jesus. He had been terribly wrong, and because Jesus came not only to convict him, but to forgive him and give him a peace he’d never known, Saul knew he’d also been wrong about God.
The story goes on to tell how Saul, now called Paul, was anointed with Holy Spirit and sent out to tell the whole world about his new relationship with God. This morning we hear how this led him to Athens. Now the ancient Athenians had kind of a split personality. On the one hand they thought of themselves as very reasonable people. They liked to find explanations for things and argue about them as if they knew what they were talking about. On the other hand, they were avid for religion--they explained the things they didn’t understand by making them into Gods. Destructive forces of nature, such as lightning and earthquakes and volcanoes, or irrational forces in the human psyche, like the intoxicating power of love or the madness of war—they would personify these as Gods as a way to make them less mysterious and terrifying.
But Paul comes to them and says, “The Gods you think you know are no Gods at all. I see that you have an altar to the ‘unknown God’. Well, I’m here to talk to you about that one. The God you don’t know is the real God, the only God there is.”
Now this might not have been all that surprising—Paul after all, was a Jew, and Jews had been telling pagan Greeks this sort of thing for years. Nor is it surprising that Paul quotes pagan philosophers and poets when he explains to the Athenians that this unknown God does not personify the forces of nature but created them. This God is not a being but is the ground and fact of being itself. He is not swayed or placated by human service but orders all things according to his own unfathomable plan and purpose. But Paul wasn’t the first Jewish teacher to use pagan philosophy in this way.
What was really new in Paul’s teaching, what was really weird and surprising was what he had to say next. “There is a man named Jesus”, said Paul, “who makes the will and purpose of the unknown God known. This fully-human person reveals that purpose as it is already working, and its final fulfillment is in him. And we know this because God raised him from the dead.”
According to Paul, and the whole New Testament, Jesus’ resurrection is God’s testimony that he is the human being in right relation to the true God. It means that the relation which he had to God in his life and in his death has a future—in fact, his relationship to God is the future, the plan and destiny of the whole universe. To know this, Paul says to the Athenians, is to repent. It is to want to change, and to be in that same relationship. And we can do this, or better to say, we can receive this gift. In today’s reading from the gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples that if we love him, we will know his resurrection. And in that knowing and loving the Spirit, the Spirit of right relation with the unknown God that comes through him, is with us an in us.
Jesus says, “on that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” To love Christ, the crucified and risen, is to be in that right relation with the unknown and unknowable God. It is to receive our own lives as a gift from one who created us and is near us, who knows us fully and still never fails to love us. Knowing Jesus means having faith that our lives have a meaning and a destiny which are in some way ultimate, even the mistakes we make, the losses we take, the deaths we die. To know Jesus is to love him, and to know him as redeeming us completely and forever from our own false judgments of ourselves.
But to love him, says John’s gospel, is to keep his commandments. It means to remember what he said, and to try to put it into practice: “Love your enemies.” “Forgive your brother not seven times, but seventy times seven.” “Do not repay evil with evil.” “Judge not, lest you be judged.” And supremely, “Love one another as I have loved you.” To love Jesus is to is know our brothers and sisters as also having ultimate value, as being children of the one he called Father. It is to be redeemed from our false judgments about everyone else, too. This is where we stop worshipping idols and start to know the unknown God.
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