Every once in a while a preacher will get fussed at for being too political in the pulpit. For those days, John gave us chapter 10, Jesus straight up trash-talking the leaders of his day – religious leaders with plenty of political power. He’s outright name calling: bandits, thieves and wolves. Verses 19-20 suggest the Pharisees thought he meant them. Metaphors are fluid, of course, especially in Jesus’ stories. I expect hired hand offended them the most.
Shepherd was a biblical reference they would have chosen for themselves: like King David, benevolent caretakers of the Jewish masses. Not a few scholars believe the whole passage in verses 11-18 is a reference to wartime in Jerusalem in the early 70’s CE. When the Romans laid siege to Jerusalem, Pharisees abandoned the city and their flock in droves, claimed they went to this other village to get Judaism set up again. In that scenario the Romans are the wolves. John wrote in the 90’s, when times were tough for Christians. The same lineage of Pharisaical Jews still haunted and harassed them, trying to steal them back for their own flock, if you will. But there’s no century or continent that can’t claim the same. Church history would be a skinny book without the wolves and thieves and bandits, all disguised as shepherds, who turned out to be nothing more than hired hands, in the business of tending sheep for what they could get out of it for themselves. This time last week I was at the Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. You must go, and you must plan two days to see it. I absolutely believe that one’s receipt for visiting the MAAHC ought be one’s ticket for getting into the Holocaust Museum a few blocks away. The history of slavery in Europe and the Americas is a history of the Church’s complicity in the theft, murder, rape, forced migration and genocide of millions of human beings. Not the passive kind of turn-a-blind-eye complicity either, but the active armed, written-down, bought-and-sold partnership-with-the-empires-of-this-world complicity. For your extra credit reading, please look up The Doctrine of Discovery of 1493. It takes one trip to a museum to expose the great hypocrisy of my faith. I refuse to spend money at certain businesses for their social or political stances, and yet here I still am – repping for the most corrupt organization in the history of Western Civilization. On a good day, I’m 30% of the way out of church. Museum days, it’s more like 85. It is the rest of this text which pulls me back, the heart and gospel in this text. More than I am anything else, more than any other metaphor, the Pharisees are lambs. I am a lamb. For all the ways human beings have horrified one another in the name of God, God took it like a beating. Took it like a good parent takes it every time her child is hateful to his sibling. And instead of leaving us to our deservéd destinies – the natural consequences of our hatefulness and greed – instead, God chose to save us from that destiny: eternal, unending Death. For some community work I do, I have occasion to be in court. Last time, I was there with a kid whose life is blowing up – by no fault of her own. She’s young enough to still seem childlike but old enough to know she’s been betrayed, by the ones who were supposed to protect and keep her. The story isn’t finished. There might be redemption. But at court that day, the judge – a tall man in a black robe behind a very high bench – looked at the child and in his huge, deep voice, as factually as it is possible for words to be spoken, he said, “No matter what happens, I promise I am not going to let anything bad happen to you." The child whispered, “Thank you." While I – though composed on the outside – I melted into a puddle of tears on the inside. It was a puddle of relief, I decided later, relief for hearing that there are helpers, the hired hands. When we are trying our best to do what is right, we are not on our own. Because metaphors are fluid, hired hand doesn’t always have to be synonymous with thief and bandit and wolf. It might also mean disciple, the one charged with helping watch and love the sheep in a certain place and time, the one who knows full well about the gatekeeper just beyond the next hill who welcomes all – sheep, shepherds, and hired hands alike – into the everlasting safety and security of the fold. All of which might be well and good enough, were it not for the unfinished business I mentioned at the outset: the hills of history covered with the carcasses of sheep and lambs for whom the sentence “I promise nothing bad is going to happen to you” is a string of lies. Into certain rivers of Costa Rica there washes a kind of sand that is used to make a kind of tile that rich people use in their houses. The sand is extra fine, and technology is scarce in Costa Rica, which means it is extracted by teenage boys who dive to the river bottom with strainer buckets. They fill the buckets, swim up and hand them to men on the bank who dump them into carts attached to oxen which haul the sand to factories. In this same region of Costa Rica, grown men and women pick cantaloupe for $2 a day. But these boys earn $20 a day diving for sand. Care to guess why? Crocodiles. Really big ones. Because, in that economy the sand is more valuable than teenage boys. Boys like Andy and Tucker, only much skinnier, with very brown skin. Crocodiles would like you all more, would think you tastier. But we would never choose tile over you. See, the “anything bad” part of “I won’t let anything bad happen to you” has to be picked apart economically and socially and racially. To be eaten by a crocodile is bad for everyone except the crocodile. But what’s worse, it seems to me, what must be worse in the realm and heart and mind of God, is straight-faced telling a child that his life, his personhood, is worth less than a few buckets of sand, no matter if the person saying it owns the factory or lays that tile in her bathroom floor. The divine punishment our people deserve for centuries of abuse and terror and death rained down on the black and brown people of this world is incalculable. And yet, on the last day, we too go to the gate as lambs led by the Good Shepherd who loves us like a good father loves his newborn baby, when she still smells wet and lovely, years and years before she gets big and mouthy and tells him he never did a single thing to help her get into college. Instead of backhanding us into oblivion, this Good Shepherd takes us by the hand – or the hoof, I suppose – and walks us all the way home with Him. What would this world look like, do you suppose, friends, if we could find in ourselves the humility and the courage to believe that? Would you pray with me?
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Welcoming the incoming class on my very first day of seminary the president of our school, Dr. Roy Honeycutt, said, “Men and women, God neither requires nor expects you to put your brains in your pockets to study the Bible" – a word I had been waiting all my life to hear from someone like him. Someone in a pulpit, in a church, in a classroom.
Granted, “all my life” was not a fabulously long time at that point: 22 ½ years. I’d only been reading for about fifteen. Only been reading the Bible seriously for about nine. But still, your whole life is still your whole life, no matter your age. I could have cried with relief to hear, finally, what I hoped was true confirmed by someone Christian, Baptist, and smart – because of stories like Thomas, a story I hated all through high school and college, about which every sermon and Bible study drilled down what a second-rate disciple Thomas was: “Doubting Thomas”; don’t be like Thomas; yeah, Jesus loved him and indulged him but said, “Nobody really wants to be like you, Thomas” – when I secretly LOVED Thomas for being so straight-up true to himself; for not pretending to believe what he didn’t believe just to save face with the other disciples who clearly didn’t believe it any more than he did but were too chicken to say so out loud. Sometimes in those college Bible studies I said as much, always timidly, usually to be told I needed to pray more. Which I usually didn’t. Usually I got quiet and stayed quiet, until I couldn’t stand it any more. And just one sentence – “God wants your brain in the room when you are reading the Bible” – and everything changes. Along comes Thomas. So what questions come to these brains of ours? First of all, where is he? According to John all the other disciples are hiding behind locked doors for fear of the Jews. Why isn’t Thomas there too? Has he gone out for more beer or is he gone for good? Is he at the store or is he back in Galilee, wondering why he ever got mixed up with the likes of that Nazarene in the first place? I get the sense he’s estranged from his friends, given that they have to go find him to tell him Jesus has shown up. Second, why does Thomas get labeled as the doubter for demanding to see Jesus’ hands and sides, when the other disciples don’t get excited about Jesus either until they see those same scars (verse 20)? Nobody calls them doubters, and they need the same evidence in order to believe. Third, why does Thomas get labeled a doubter when the Greek word here translated as doubt in verse 27 – the word apistos – is almost never translated as doubt, but rather as unbelieve? All over the New Testament apistos is unbelieve, but to translate it thus here would make the sentence awkward. “Thomas, do not unbelieve, but believe." (In fact, Spell Check doesn’t like it either, so I had to override it when typing it.) But unbelief and doubt are not the same. Thomas has already clearly stated his unbelief, by his absence and by his own confession when pressed by the other disciples. Doubt is “I’m not sure”; unbelief is “Yeah. No. I’m done.” Which brings me to my fourth question about Thomas: why did he go back? Seeing your friend be tortured and die violently is traumatic; it causes neurological and psychological damage that profoundly affects responses and behavior. Such trauma that is deep and wide and lasting. I know that from pastoral care and counseling studies. I can bring that knowledge to this passage. All the disciples were traumatized. No wonder the doors are locked – that is an appropriate response to trauma! So is leaving the scene of trauma. What is not appropriate to trauma is pretending it didn’t happen. “We have seen the Lord!" the disciples say. If that means, turns out it was all just a bad dream, Thomas wants no part of it. He’s not putting his brain or memory or heart or his pain into his pocket, not for anyone. He won’t pretend that what happened didn’t happen. Not for his friends, not for the cause, not for Jesus himself will Thomas lie about what he knows to be the terrible, horrible, heart-stopping traumatic truth of the last two weeks. It was the church since then who took his self-protecting unbelief and dialed it down to doubt. Because it’s what we do. The pain and trauma we are trying to avoid is impossible to ignore if Thomas refuses to ignore his. Therefore, the interpretation becomes “Don’t be like Thomas.” Scholar Mary Hinkle Shore writes that Thomas won’t be shamed into believing nor shamed into keeping his unbelief to himself. Neither will he ignore what he knows, to believe something he does not know. In thirty years of ministry, I’ve known a thousand Thomases – ones who have walked away unwilling to ignore what they know, to believe something they don’t. They aren’t doubters. Doubters are believers more days than not. They are the folks expected not to see what they have seen; not to feel what they have felt; not to ask the questions pulling at their minds; to call it something less than evil or obscene; to pretend it didn’t happen or that it didn’t hurt, that it really wasn’t all that bad. People to whom it’s been suggested that if they’d just prayed more or believed better or not read so many books or asked so many questions, faith wouldn’t have been such a struggle for them. I’ve known a thousand Thomases. And hardly a handful who have come back. So why did he, our Thomas of the Bible, go back? I’ve three possible explanations, none exclusive of the others. One, his friends went and found him. Having met the Risen Christ, they do what people do: they tell. They find their friends and tell their friends and share this news because it cannot be kept secret – the same way we have to tell people we have a new puppy at our house. It’s just too much good news to keep to ourselves. There is something wrong with other people not knowing, especially our friends who are hurting, like they knew Thomas hurt. Secondly, maybe Thomas went back because part of him was still there anyway. He was AWOL, bodily away from where his heart and mind still were. When couples get divorced, it’s rarely all at once. They can be emotionally divorced long before papers are signed. They can also be legally divorced and never emotionally separated at all. At least in my experience, faith can be aggravating in that the very thing that makes me want to pull away also draws me back: the unknowableness of God. In John 6, a whole gaggle of Jesus’ disciples left him and Jesus asked the twelve, don’t you want to go with them? And Peter says, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life" – which is not exactly NO, is it? But rather, we would go, but there’s nowhere else to go. Like when I don’t want to drink water – but I will drink water, if water is all there is. If eternal life is what we are after, Jesus is all there is. What Peter doesn’t say in chapter 6, but is plainly in the mix of being a follower of Jesus, is: Yeah, we’re staying. Which isn’t to say some of your sayings aren’t completely incomprehensible while others are downright crazy. But all the same, we’re staying but by nothing else on this earth will we ever be better off. Only you have the words of eternal life. Of course, I’ve no idea why Thomas went back. I only know that when Jesus shows up a week later, Thomas is there too. Jesus goes to him, walks right up to all Thomas’ trauma and unbelief, raises up his shirt, opens up his hands and offers Thomas exactly what Thomas needs to trade in that trauma for faith in the God who keeps his promises to those with the community and the courage to give this life another look, another listen, another piece of our hearts and minds. Would you pray with me? Grace wins. Grace always wins. Even when it takes forever to see grace win, grace still wins. In the meantime, we live by faith, knowing that by his rising, grace has won. God chose to love and keep us, when God had every right and reason to give us up for good, to abandon us to ourselves and one another: we humans; we children; children who destroy what the Parent-God-Creator offered freely – and in the process destroy each other, destroy ourselves.
But rather than punish or abandon, which surely would have been easier, God absorbed the offense; surrendered the anger; stayed and loved, full of grace and mercy, for our weakness and our fear and for the cruelty we commit as a result. By God’s choice, God’s will, grace wins. Grace always wins. By grace, the world is set to rights. By grace, justice rules. By grace, death dies. Life wins. God reigns. Have you seen the movie Wonder Woman? Where she’s in the trenches in France with three seasoned soldiers: an American, an Irishman and an Indian? The shelling is constant. The soldiers explain stalemate to her. It’s gone on two years, they say. She’s horrified. Someone has to do something, she says. We can’t, they say. But she’s Wonderwoman, there to do what humanity cannot, and will not, do for itself. She climbs up and over the edge of stalemate, charging into the destruction, defeating the enemies, rescuing a village. The Christology starts breaking down fast, but for that one moment it shines. Humanity at war with itself for so long, we cannot conceive of how not to be. Jesus enters the trenches where everyone else is paralyzed with fear and also hopelessness. Jesus does for us what we humans cannot do for ourselves, and the backbone of death is broken, once and for all. Mary Magdalene doesn’t know it yet. She’s headed for the tomb, the graveyard. To do what, John doesn’t say. To grieve? To tend Jesus’ body? What we know for sure is that Mary Magdalene assumes he’s dead. She went to the cemetery, after all, not his house, his friends’ houses, the Temple. She went where dead people are and fully expected to find him there. For some the graveyard is a place to visit our dead, knowing full well the dead are no more there than they are anywhere. Yet, for some of us, the graveyard is a particular spot on the earth for marking their absence in all the rest of our lives, somewhere to go when we cannot be WHERE we most want to be – that is, with them. We know they aren’t there – and yet knowing their bodies were once there somehow makes the trip seem worthy. Still, none of us go expecting our loved ones to be waiting there for us, ready for conversation. Mary finds the grave is opened, the body stolen or moved. She fetches Peter and John. They see burial clothes, folded of course, because it’s Jesus. We’re meant to remember Lazarus waking up and walking out still all wrapped up. Jesus’ rising was intentional. He did his laundry, as I like to say. Mary saw none of that. Only that his body’s gone. His DEAD body. I personally can write a backstory to any situation in about 20 seconds. And the backstory I write is always the worst possible scenario. Being Mary, I’d have assumed the chief priests paid someone to steal and hide the body to cover up the whole thing so his followers couldn’t make a martyr of him. Peter and John go home; Mary stays; angels arrive. They ask why she’s crying. She explains her grave robber theory. And keeps crying. Now a man comes along. A gardener, she thinks. Whom are you looking for? He wants to know. A sensible question in a graveyard; markers can be hard to find. Except he’s not the gardener. Nothing ever means just one thing in the gospel of John, and we’ve heard this voice ask this question before, in chapter 1. Two disciples of John the Baptist peeled off to follow Jesus. He felt them behind him, turned and said, “What are you looking for?” The whole gospel starts over in chapter 20. Now we can read everything in the right light. The light of his resurrection, where nothing now means what it meant before. He’s not the groundskeeper. He’s the Creator of the universe, and he knows her name. From the graveyard, from the void, from the place beyond all hope, he calls her own name. “Mary,” Jesus says to her. “Rabbouni!" she replied, which means “My teacher!” I don’t know the words to do this story justice, I can no more preach this story than I can hit a mid-court shot blindfolded. Yet you still know what I’m aiming for. But in my mind’s hearing of the text, there is such a looooong silence between verses 16 and 17. The long silence of him letting her hug him and of him holding her. Until he has to peel her off him. “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘ I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” And she does. But I can’t imagine it was easy, being her first act of faith and all. Because I get wanting to hold on. I REALLY get seeing Jesus after thinking she’d never see him again, and the temptation to imagine all the horror and fear and grief of the last five days was just a nightmare, and now that Jesus was back everything could go back to the way it was before. Everything could just be great again, like it was in Galilee. All that sunshine and seashore. Picnics and open air revivals with hundreds of people following them. But all of life wasn’t Galilee, was it? Jesus wouldn’t let them stay in Galilee forever. He decided to go back to Jerusalem, where people were determined to kill him. And nothing any of them could do would stop him once he’d turned his face in that direction. All the world is not Galilee in springtime. Bullets and bombs and people living in trenches are just as real. The stalemate of war and disease and poverty that grinds people into hopelessness this side of the graveyard, where people are helpless against our own fear and weakness; where human beings destroy each other and ourselves, barely even trying. It’d be awesome to pretend all the world was Galilee. But Jesus tells her no, that she has to let him go again. Mary knows he’s risen, and now she’ll know he didn’t rise just for her. Go and tell my brothers too, he says. I am ascending to my Father and your Father, my God and your God. And so she let go of Jesus, again. And in some ways forever. The Jesus she had known so far; the one who walked and talked and was her teacher; the one who ate with them and preached to them; who healed the sick and fed the hungry and talked theology with women; who said God loved the poor and the prisoner and the foreigner; who said the Romans were to be treated as kindly as a neighbor – he was awesome and wonderful, and Mary left her life for him. But he was still just the Jesus she had known so far. Don’t hold on to who I was, Jesus tells her here. Who I was is not who I came to be. Or what I came to do for you. For everyone. Friends, all this Lenten season we’ve been holding back for this very moment. He is alive. Not “still” – but rather “again.” He was dead. Now he’s alive. But even death is under the command and direction of the Creator of the universe. The universe of death is contained within the universe of the Creator. Death takes its bidding from the Creator. Death is something smaller than, contained within, Life itself. I can’t explain it. I can only say it. And words are too small and too few to say it perfectly. What Mary learned first is this: death does not have the last word in this world, in the order of things, when what we were sure was a hopeless, lifeless, dead-in-the-grave, over-and-done-with, broken-for-good situation, God was all along, alive and watching over us, with our own names on the tip of God’s tongue, calling us to himself again and again and again, Easter after Easter after Easter, for as long as we need to muster the faith that it takes to know Him risen, alive, and with us right here, right now, and forever. Golgotha is the fourth act of John's five-act Passion of Christ, the crucifixion of Jesus. If the gospel doesn't hold here, friends, it doesn't hold and we have gathered for nothing. Maybe not nothing. We do good work in this life together, but we preach a lie. When I was a little girl in a white Protestant, middle America church, the worship calendar flipped from Palm Sunday to Easter; Jesus went from being a king to being an angel as easily as we went from coloring palm branches one Sunday to dying eggs the next.
The Catholic kids across the street had Good Friday. They went to mass but not school and weren't allowed to play outside. We never thought to ask why. As grownups we know too well why. If all the world were palm-trees-and-Easter-baskets-certain, what need of Christ would there be? Good Fridays are why Jesus came. If the gospel holds there, it holds everywhere, where the world gets as mean and ugly and wrong and violent as it gets anywhere. Imagine if we all wore our Good Friday selves on the outside like we wear our smiles. We bring our cleaned-up selves to church not because we are lying, but because we don't want to fall apart in public – partly so we don't bother others, partly because we don't want to be the nervous, crying heap we fear we might become if our Good Friday selves are given too much latitude. All of us walk around all the time, carrying hurts and griefs as carefully as eggs. Wayward children, abusive parents, shaky relationships; old hurts, old secrets, old lies; grief, shame, regret; fear, so much fear. I was a child back when church was all kings and angels. But even then people were breaking, bleeding, and dying. Because I didn’t know it didn't make it not so. To these, for these, terribly tender places in us, Jesus came, that they not overwhelm us, but also that they not torture us like a hundred pinpricks a day for all the days of our lives – by Golgotha, by walking into and surrendering to the very heart of human darkness. Can you see how Jesus goes where we most fear going in our own hearts and lives? the places and the parts of our minds and memories that poke and prick and pull at us? not just at our faith, but at our very sanity sometimes? our capacity to keep moving through time and space? If, IF ONLY, we could bring our most frightened, grieving, broken selves to the center of this story and focus fully on what Jesus wants to show us, I have the suspicion we would never again doubt that God is altogether good and loves us completely. Sad things would still be sad. But we'd never be afraid. And since we wouldn't be afraid, we'd hurt each other less. This palm-branch-waving crowd, they loved him when they thought he was a winner, riding on a donkey like a king who had just won the city, knowing full well no battle had been fought. They love him, until they hate him. And they hate him, because our Good Fridays aren’t always about our sorrow, right? They are also about our anger – and sometimes there's hardly a hair's difference between them – our capacity to take all the grief and hurt and fear and shame and regret inside ourselves, and hurl it at whatever target is closest, especially if we can find a bunch of other already angry people (mobs, people doing together what most will never do alone), sometimes for better – except then they aren't called mobs – so, mostly for worse. And now the mob has gotten what they screamed for: Jesus crucified; not dead; just nailed and lifted up. Death by crucifixion took a long time, days in some cases. It was designed as torture only, and it left people horribly crippled, so they lived but were marked as having been crucified. Often vultures came before death. Jesus spent only hours on the cross, enough to know something of what people go through on this earth, I suppose. The guilty and the innocent. Golgotha is Act 4 of John's five-act Passion Play. The urge to hurry up and flip the page simply makes us human. No one wants to sit with suffering, yet most people want to be sat with when our time comes – amen? To suffer is awful. To suffer alone is beyond the pale of God’s will for humanity, it appears. So if we can stop on this page and take in what Jesus has done for us, no matter what brave faces we put on to be with each other when our hearts are breaking, we will discover that he knows, because he chose to know. He willingly walked where we would never have gone had we had a choice, or where we ended up when we were too stupid or too stubborn or too weak to do different. I remember when my mama died and I was giant pregnant and that baby just kept turning and I knew she wanted out of me. And I thought, Isn't it strange how when your heart is broken the world just keeps on turning, as if nothing at all has changed? The world still has its business to attend to. Babies have to get born, no matter what; and that is a blessing, no doubt. But friends, if the gospel doesn't hold when everything inside us says, this world is over and done for me!, then the gospel cannot hold at all. And if we don't stop and know Jesus with us at the very worst, the faith we claim on sunny days is frail and full of holes and has no business making promises it can never keep. John's writing is beautiful. In addition to his Five Acts of The Passion, he numbers Seven Signs of Jesus' Kingdom. Do you remember them? I didn't preach them all, this time around:
Pilate was no hero. What he did, he did in fear and anger and revenge. But when he wrote and hung that sign, the truth was told all the same. Jesus was King, Messiah, the Ruler, the Savior, the Redeemer of the very people who rejected him. The biblical people, as we called them last week. We know that following Act 5 of Jesus' Passion, many of them came 'round again and found themselves believers! In those same fickle people, the church first found our feet. Pilate wrote it in three languages, so that ALL people might read and know it. It hangs there still in every language read today, for every heart in the midst of breaking, for each and every one of us to decide as we pass by, to slow down enough to stop and look and take it in and know that we are not and never will be alone – in any sorrow this world, this life, might impose on us. God is with us in the darkness and the suffering and the fear. We are not and never shall be alone, in this world nor the next. Would you pray with me? When preserving one's personal power and privilege is presumed necessary, and when trying NOT to do the worst wrong thing is one's moral boundary, one is likely to find oneself in the same, impossible predicament where Pontius Pilate found himself in John, chapter 19: The most powerful man in Israel, more afraid than ever, John says in verse 8. Afraid to flex that power to do what he knew was the right, the just! thing to do.
Pilate knows Jesus is innocent, doesn't he? Three times he goes back to the crowd waiting outside his headquarters, saying, I can find no case against him. And every time, these opponents of Jesus – these biblical people, along with the mob that has assembled – shout him down, screaming for Jesus' execution. The last time, the biblical people up the charge, claiming Jesus called himself Son of God – a title reserved for Caesar. They dare Pilate to choose Jesus over Caesar, exposing for all the world to see whom they themselves had already chosen. I really want you to get this, friends; I really want you to see what is happening here. Biblical people, lovers of God and God's word, are begging the oppressors of their own country; they are putting their hope and trust in the war-mongering, slave-keeping leadership of this world, while God's own self – beaten, bloody and bruised – stands to the side, the breathing embodiment of truth; of life; of grace; of peace; of hope. Pilate, of course, is not free to act. He is stuck. Terribly stuck. Jesus tells him so in verses 9-11. Where are you from? Pilate wants to know. We already know. John told us with his opening sentences. Jesus is from God. At first Jesus doesn't answer Pilate. Pilate pontificates about his personal power, "I can release you or crucify you." Maybe he can, but he doesn't. He's paralyzed to do either the right or the wrong thing. Jesus does answer then, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore the ones who handed me over to you are guilty of a greater sin.” There's a tinge of grace there, almost as if Jesus acknowledges the impossible position Pilate's in. To do the right thing – that is, release Jesus – may well ignite the very chaos he's trying to prevent. So he starts out by doing lesser wrong things than crucify him. But sadly, the flogging (remember, that's 39 lashes with bone- or metal-tipped whips) and public humiliation don't satisfy this crowd's bloodlust. And so the great handing off of Jesus, begun so many hours ago, is now completed. Judas handed Jesus off to the biblical people who handed him off to Pilate who now hands him off to the executioners – not one of them having the slightest inkling that Jesus goes only when and where HE chooses, that they are each and every one agents of their own choices, but also players in a drama set in motion by the will of God for their own eternal benefit. And ours. How many Bible studies have I attended in which we whipped ol' Pilate good? Or these Pharisees and Sadducees? Which, by the way, is why I'm not calling them Jews today – but rather, biblical people. Because if we are anyone in the text, we are them: people more confident than most that we know what God thinks and wants in this world. But there were lots of players. There is Judas. Maybe he was just a thief. Or maybe he was a disciple who thought he could help the movement by rescuing it from a leader who insisted on working against the system when they might have worked better with it. Who was too trusting of powerful people when they offered to help him and who got burned for it. There were the soldiers who did the dirty work of executioners. So easy to say we'd never do that, except that we expect soldiers to do terrible things on our behalf ALL the time – until we find out after the fact how terrible they were, and claim they should somehow have been more honorable or moral or braver than any of us has ever been required to be. Read The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien. Then there is the mob, the ones yelling for Jesus' death. My mom used to say that my dad could go to a ball game between two teams he'd never heard of, and five minutes in he'd be a diehard fan of one of them. People will literally get into a line without knowing what the line is for. This happened to us when our family went to Paris a few years ago. We were going to a museum on the subway when the train began to fill up with more and more African people all dressed up. We got so curious that when they all got off at the same stop, we did too. We forgot about the museum and spent the whole afternoon at the West African Bastille Day Street Festival. In the best and worst sense of the word, we are tribal creatures; we hunger to be part of a group, sometimes ANY group. We care more about belonging than we care about the mission of the group. Sometimes we belong to one group simply to stake our opposition to another. This crowd screaming for Jesus' crucifixion is all the scarier for being made up of people who have no idea who Jesus is, who have no opinion about his guilt or innocence, and who will not remember this afternoon a year later. We're most obviously like these biblical people than all the others, of course – not for being so mad at Jesus, but for thinking ourselves the religious ones; claiming the high ground of biblical faith and the call to love others as God loves us; burdened by the injustice of the world; dedicated to its correction; and wishing it were just as easy as all that. Because, brokenhearted as we are about all the sadness and injustice everywhere, knowing the truth and being able to do anything about it is (and this is as theological as I know how to put it) A Big, Fat Mess, so long as Jesus hasn't risen from the dead. OR, so long as those who claim to be his own don't believe he has. Because honestly, what is the functional difference? If Jesus didn't rise, which he hadn't when Pilate was turning himself inside out and this mob was screaming its head off, the gospel wasn't yet in play. So they couldn't think or act outside the confines of their privilege. Because outside that privilege, they had no hope! The truth can't set you free, if the only truth you know is what this world dishes up! Jesus risen from the dead is the truth that sets us free – free from everything besides that Truth itself. How, how, HOW is it possible, friends, that a worldly man like Pilate got talked out of the truth by biblical people? Biblical people are supposed to be sensitizing this world to the ways of God – by our words and our deeds, PREACHING to this world the justice and goodness and grace and hope of God. In my experimental psychology lab job in college, I put rats in mazes and timed how long it took them to learn certain patterns. But before I could do that my professor, Dr. Haggbloom, had to take me through desensitization therapy so I could handle the rats – because rats are gross and creepy. Desensitization happens through repeated exposure to the object of one's revulsion. In the case of lab rats, the exposure was measured and progressively more intense in a very short time. I was handling rats within two hours of being terrified of them. Pilate got over crucifying an innocent man in the course of a morning. The more the crowd screamed at him, the more guilty Jesus sounded. The more beaten, bloody and bruised Jesus got, the more guilty Jesus looked – never mind that the crowd and Pilate were causing the very degradation convincing them of his guilt. Pilate, the biblical people, and this unthinking mob commit themselves to continuous injustice to justify the injustice required to maintain the power and privilege they believe they need in order to be safe and well in the world. The dog believes his tail is chasing him – and he doesn't know how to make it stop. Nothing ever means just one thing in John. All we can see and hear is never all that's going on. Our text ends with Jesus beaten, bloody and bruised, handed over one more time from the politician to the military death squad. And the power in the scene lies in the least obvious location. But everyone has their part to play, including us. And our part is not to say what we would have done had we been there then. But rather: here and now, how shall we live these days by faith in the whole gospel, fearless and alive, sure of nothing more than that we are sure we have nothing left to lose that we cannot do without – crazy as that sounds out loud. Because he rose, we will too. Will you pray with me? Jesus called his disciples to follow him – just, not right here in John 18 and 19. Here, he told them to go away and stay away. This long journey from the garden to Caiaphas' house; and from Caiaphas’ house to Pilate's headquarters; and from Pilate’s headquarters to Golgotha – here and here and here – Jesus goes alone.
It was the Passover Day of Preparation: the day the animals, the lambs, were sacrificed. Sacrificed in remembrance of God's passing over whatever houses in Egypt had lamb’s blood on the doorways during the purge of the firstborn sons. Just as only the most perfect lambs qualified for the sacrifice, only Jesus can do what must be done here, on behalf of humanity, once and for all. Pilate was the local Roman magistrate. He ruled on behalf of the Emperor, deciding what would be tolerated in his appointed corner of the Roman Empire. Pilate was NOT Jesus’ enemy. Jesus' enemies were the Jewish leaders of Israel, who had what power they had by the benevolence of Rome. They wanted him dead and his movement crushed because they believed he (and it) threatened their religious power. They were angling for a criminal conviction, specifically for sedition – attempting to usurp the Emperor. So they bring Jesus in front of Pilate. A country rabbi from Nazareth, leading a band of fishermen, acting to overthrow Caesar. Yeah, I'm not seeing it, Pilate thinks. And so Pilate says, "Why don’t y’all judge him by your own laws?" Their answer? And our law doesn’t permit us to have someone put to death. They are lying, of course. How do we know that? Because we've read their law, all the different reasons for and ways by which they COULD, in fact, put people to death – usually by stoning – blasphemy being the most obvious in Jesus' case. Leviticus 24:16 says, One who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death; the whole congregation shall stone the blasphemer. Aliens as well as citizens, when they blaspheme the Name, shall be put to death. Every time Jesus said his name was "I AM," they had grounds to stone him for blasphemy. It’s the text that allows them to stone Stephen in Acts, chapter 7. But they didn’t want blasphemy. They wanted sedition. Sedition was bigger. And crucifixion was more horrible and humiliating. It was originally designed for torture, not execution. Then later someone figured out that if people hung long enough, they’d die. Only the Romans were allowed to crucify people. By the time of John's writing, the crucifixion was firmly associated with Jesus' words from chapter 3: And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life – the takeaway being that Jesus HAD to die by crucifixion. I don’t know what I think about that; it feels a bit put-on to me. What rings true is that the leadership of organized religion used its political capital to manipulate a situation and preserve its own power and privilege. Yes, technically Romans killed him. But Jesus’ own religious community engineered and steamrolled his execution to completion. That they were Jewish is neither here nor there. That they existed to welcome people into the people of God – to be a light unto nations was the specific instruction to Abraham – and used their power to exclude and silence and crush whatever threatened the scrap of power and privilege they had: that was the here or there, if you will. Sedition against Rome was the charge they sought. Sedition against themselves was the charge they felt. And I would offer, here is territory that, Jesus made plain from the beginning, God’s people had no business being. The people of God take our clues about where we belong by where Jesus of Nazareth invited us to follow, by showing us the signs he did for FREE – water to wine, healing blind people, raising dead people (interestingly, the very signs which landed Jesus in front of Pilate, for suggesting to masses of people that not everything they’d been told of God is all there is to know of God). Jesus is death to idolized religious tradition. Are you a king? Pilate wants to know. “Who's asking?" Jesus asks back. Not me, says Pilate, it's your own people calling you a criminal. What did you do? “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” So you are a king? I'm not a big Pilate fan, but I can see how he'd be confused at this point. “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Right there, do you hear what I hear? Because I hear Jesus, ever so subtly, inviting Pilate to listen. Listen to the sound of my voice. Calling him to think of kings and kingdoms in a whole new way. As far as we know, Pilate didn't take the bait. But with his last question “What is truth?” John's gospel – and in turn, I think, THE gospel – asks the same question of us. What is truth? It is the ETERNAL question, of course: what is ultimately true in this world? What ultimately matters? But it is also the INTERNAL question: what, ultimately, is true in my own heart, mind, soul, spirit, life? Because the answer to that question drives every thought, word and deed, done and left undone, for all the minutes, hours and days of our lives – and our life together as the church. Eternally and INternally, John chapter 18 says, It's time to tell the truth about the truth: Is the truth we claim also the truth we live and breathe? “What is truth” Jesus’ opponents know. The world is a shaky structure organized by the law of force – meaning that power, whose other name is security, is maintained by whoever is most heavily armed and deeply funded. Rome was the most powerful Empire the world had ever known until that time. They ruled the world by the biggest, most well-funded, militarized force the world had ever known. Jewish Temple leadership made themselves useful to people like Pilate. For their efforts their religious traditions survived, and they themselves, in many ways, thrived. That Passover celebrations could be held is a perfect example. Jesus came along and, in spite of his repeated invitations to the contrary, Jewish Temple leadership failed to conceive of him outside the world as they knew it. Great big Roman Empire; little tiny Israel inside of that; their personal stake of religious organization and rule inside of that. Jesus sounds and smells like a threat to that world. And yes, technically, they can take him out. But Rome can crush him and crush his movement. If the world as we know it is the only world of which we can conceive AND the only world we want, at best Jesus will make no sense to us, as he made no sense to Pilate. At worst, Jesus might sound like a threat – dangerous; entirely likely to upset our personal stakes in the world as we know it. But if we CAN hear his voice – in John's gospel, for example – and we are willing to imagine kingdom as Jesus speaks of it, we will discover internally, the word truth doesn't mean what we thought it meant after all. Kingdom, as Jesus spoke of it in this chapter and elsewhere in John, is both plural and singular. It is his and ours of heaven and earth; it's here and now and someplace we've never been yet. It has no armies, no weapons, no money. The citizens of that kingdom never worry, never judge, never fear and always trust. They give to every beggar. They are content with what they have, never pining for what they lack. They win by losing, receive by giving, get rich by going broke, stay safe by letting go, get ahead by staying back, break free by submitting, and live by dying. Everything right in the kingdom of God is pure nonsense to this world. A total clown show is how the Apostle Paul describes it in 1 Corinthians 4. Jesus might as well speak whale to Pilate, or any of us, if we aren’t willing to go ahead and swallow His explanation of truth. For that, we have to listen to His voice. Twenty-five times, the word truth comes up in the gospel of John, compared to once in Matthew and three times each in Mark and Luke. "Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelled among us, full of grace and truth." "You shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free." "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Lots more, all of them amounting to the fact that Jesus himself is the truth. There is a part of me that doesn’t want to be here, doing this. I want to be a professor, who writes papers and gives lectures that make sense. But I’m not. I’m a preacher. I don’t have any axioms to prove. The only truth I’ve to discuss is embodied in Christ Jesus. And we can understand our lives, in fact understand all things, in the context of this world and its notions of kingdom and truth. Or we can understand our lives in the context of the gospel. The difference is the difference between memory and screwdriver. One has no bearing on the other. They are dissimilar. To know truth, we listen to his voice, and keep listening. He has much to say on truth: to have faith to believe without understanding; to walk by faith instead of by always understanding; to go ahead and expect to have an amazing life because Jesus promised it, even when we can't imagine how such a thing could possibly be true. What is truth? Depends on whether you put faith in the light of this world or see this world in the light of faith in Jesus Christ. It's truth time, here in chapter 18, when everything everywhere is only dark and terrible. Jesus is doing what only Jesus can, having told his followers to wait and to trust him. Would you pray with me? This sermon isn’t going to end comfortably, because the text doesn’t – and because this is Lent, and nothing can be resolved until and unless Jesus has Risen. Unless Jesus has risen, the only hope available in this world is for the strongest. Unless Jesus has risen, the law of justice has a chance, and we ought not forego it. But the law of justice has many enemies, armed and well-funded. So until and unless Jesus has risen, finally, there is nothing we can do. This nothingness is what Peter struggles against in chapter 18 of John. This is the negative I mean, when I say “finding faith in the negative”: in the absence, the emptiness, the silence, the powerlessness, the withoutness. Regarding words, if your friend or colleague hears you talking about your church and says, "Oh, where do you go to church?" and you say, "I am a member of University Baptist Church," do you leave it there, to rest upon the bed of whatever cultural references your friend or colleague has for the word Baptist? Or do you feel the slightest urge to say just a little more, to justify exactly your association with the word Baptist? If I say “Black Lives Matter,” all of you know I mean more than what the three words black + lives + matter each mean on their own. Black Lives Matter is loaded with explicit cultural references about which people have strong and profoundly different feelings and opinions. My Greek professor used to say words don't have meanings, they have usages. Words mean what they mean, depending on who is talking – and hearing. And in the gospel of John, no word EVER means just one thing. In John 18, in the dark of night Judas leads an entourage of Jesus' enemies to arrest Him – the high priest, Pharisees, Temple police and a detachment of soldiers, John reports – all of them armed and carrying torches and lanterns, as if Jesus would be hard to find and difficult to capture. Lanterns and torches to find the Light of the World; swords and clubs to capture the Prince of Peace. "Whom are you looking for?" Jesus asks. "Jesus of Nazareth," they say. "I AM," Jesus answers. And they all fall down. Because those aren't just two plain old words pulled out of thin air that don't mean anything but I and AM. "I AM" is the name God uses in Genesis the first time God introduces God's self to God's enemies. Remember? When Moses is shaking in his boots about talking to the Pharaoh and asks, who should I say sent me here? God says, tell them "I AM" sent you. "Whom are you looking for?" "Jesus of Nazareth." "I AM." Can you imagine anything more offensive Jesus might have said? And He planned it. He wanted to say it. It was a set-up. Twice He asked “Whom are you looking for?" so twice He can say, I AM! – although John says it three times, which is hugely interesting. Then Jesus has them let His friends go. “You have me, let them go." Turns out Peter is also armed. He draws his sword and slices off the ear of the high priest's servant. First of all, gross. Second, don’t you know a whole bunch more swords came out really fast at that point? Suddenly, though not surprisingly, Jesus is in charge. "Everybody just calm down." He tells Peter to put his sword away. "Am I not to drink the cup the Father has given me?" More metaphor and innuendo. Jesus isn't talking about drinking anything, is He? The cup is His mission to die and rise, to destroy the power of the law of force. Violence will only hinder His mission. (Why this verse doesn't end the discussion of bringing guns to church to protect ourselves is beyond me. But it doesn't. Anyway...) Peter half obeys. He puts away the sword but doesn't go with the other disciples when Jesus dismisses them. He and the other disciple (who is assumed to be John) follow the entourage to the high priest's house. Peter stands outside while Jesus is questioned and beaten inside. Three times Peter is asked by strangers, Are you not one of his friends? Three times, Peter answers, "I am not." Jesus says "I Am." Peter says, "I Am Not." And we are, for the most part, raised to believe that no greater sin can ever be committed by a believer. If asked, we must say we belong to Him – no matter who is asking; no matter the circumstance; no matter the danger. Peter will be forgiven in a few chapters and become the rock, the foundation of the church. And yet, that same church has held fast to this notion of his great failure here in chapter 18. About these three "I AM NOTs" – You've heard of the flight or fight response, I'm sure. We are wired with it (by we I mean ALL animals). In extreme danger we evaluate our survival chances and make a quick choice – fight or fly. This moment in the garden is a fight or flight moment. Other disciples were glad to fly, but Peter decided to fight. See, if it weren't the Bible, he'd be a hero – right? Aragorn... Legolas... what did Gandalf say in the mines of Moria? Fly, you fools! In other stories Peter would have been the bravest of them all, willing to lay down his life for his friend Jesus. Where would he have gotten that idea??? Still, we have carved out this one scene and marked Peter as the coward we would never be. But even when Jesus shut him down, Peter doesn't retreat. He may be stubborn and disobedient, but I don’t think he’s a coward. That doesn't fit the text or what else we know of Peter. So even when Jesus tells him go , he stays. John brings Peter into the courtyard. Pretend you don’t know this story. Pretend it is a Netflix original. What are Peter and John up to? They are spies, right? They are looking for a chance to DO something to help their friend and their cause, right? Do good spies out themselves to the enemy? "Hey, are you a spy?" “Absolutely!" Of course they don't! Good spies lie. He who spieth, lieth. No good thing will come from Peter telling them who he is or what he is doing there. Could it be he lies for the greater good of rescuing Jesus? We know what Jesus was up to, but Peter didn’t. In this moment, Jesus had NOT risen from the dead. Peter is living and acting and trying to be faithful in the negative. Do you understand what I mean? In the absence of what he needs to be fully faithful. He's doing the best he can with what he knows in the moment. It's what we DON'T know that will ruin us, if we cannot make peace with not knowing it. Peter is acting on what he knows. But he knows too little to be acting at all. He isn't even supposed to be in this courtyard. Jesus told His disciples to go. Peter stayed. I AM, is supposed to be here. I AM NOT, isn't. Are you with me? This is the world where only the law of force can DO anything. Peter can do nothing – which is precisely what Peter is meant to do: nothing. Faith in that moment consisted of doing nothing. If Jesus hasn’t risen, there is nothing to be done. “I AM NOT” is the truest thing Peter could possibly say. Though when he says it, he does not know the truth he speaks. As I was thinking about all this on Thursday, Luke Gillespie wandered in and we talked for an hour. He was hugely helpful with this sermon. He was raised in Japan, you know, and he reminded me of how we westerners are so awkward with the idea and experience of nothingness, of silence and emptiness and space. I'd already been thinking to use this title, Finding Faith in the Negative, because Peter is trying to follow Jesus and he REALLY, REALLY wants to DO something. He is ready to DIE to improve or change the situation, should it come to that. But Jesus has told him "NO" and "GO AWAY" and neither of those feel remotely faithful to him, so he just sort of shuffles along behind, not understanding and not giving up either. And I wonder if the Western church’s own cultural discomfort with the idea of this nothingness is what drove us to latch on to Peter’s verbal denials as the singular evidence of his betrayal of Jesus and to comfort ourselves with the notion that as long as we never do exactly THAT, we are mostly okay. But with all due respect to the martyrs everywhere who, in the moment they were asked, died rather than lied (the $3 seminary word is apostacized) I also beg to differ on the meaning of the text itself. I think it safe to say that on any given day, more of us than not deny our association with Jesus Christ in one way or another. The fact that there is no gun to my head or knife at my throat does not relieve me of the duty to claim Him. If I am His, I ought to act like it and talk like it – all the time, amen? Amen. More to the point, in John 18 Peter does not know Jesus Risen. In John 21 he does, and is forgiven. It's a very strange scene there. The betrayal is mentioned, but mostly Jesus keeps saying feed my lambs, which makes it tricky to link back up with this. What if Jesus is forgiving Peter for not knowing what he could not know? for not doing what he wasn't called to do in the first place? for failing to keep faith in the negative space when the only act of faith possible is to trust and sit and not act? If we were Japanese, that would NOT feel like doing nothing. If we could find it in ourselves to trust Jesus, doing nothing where nothing can be done would come to us as faith. Even here, in Chapter 18, the passion of Jesus is in motion. Peter has everything he needs of Jesus, but he doesn't know it. We DO know it. We ONLY know Jesus Risen. And think how hard it is for us to trust, on ordinary days! But even more on days when our world is blowing up, like Peter's is blowing up in John 18? When our text ends, a new day has dawned for Peter. He doesn’t even know how much worse it’s going to get. Another day in which he will have to try and find faith in the empty, the absent, the silent, the waiting spaces of existence. Would you pray with me? Preachers as ordinary as I am are planning funerals for fourteen-year-olds. So I thought, join them. Treat this service, this scripture, in light of the week their town and our country are having. How are we doing, as a people? As a country? Overwhelmed with hopelessness? “Overwhelmed with hopelessness” doesn't really preach that well. I doodled a few pages before remembering no new words are required. We preach the same sermon at every funeral – for 94-year-olds and for 14-year-olds: Jesus died and rose again, once and for all people, of every time and place. Knowing full well how we can be when we are at our worst, the same words hold – “Jesus died and rose” – for the hopelessness that overwhelms us now. So that from within all this sadness and horror, we have this one quiet, powerful, everlasting, deeper-than-deep promise of God: those children fell straight and gently into the loving arms of Jesus. None of which relieves us, who call ourselves God's people, of our collective duty, our shared responsibility, to follow Jesus where and as he leads, to follow his mandate of radical hospitality to welcome and include the people on whom the rest of the world has given up. How does a 19-year-old boy get so lost in an ordinary American town that killing seems a reasonable thing to do? What if someone had made the effort to love him well? What if a church had loved him well? People like us – people not in the very midst of the crisis and where the pain is terrible but not personal – can take this moment to pull the camera back for a wider view. Kids die every day of human greed and violence. They are shot and sold and starved like animals, usually for money. Usually so somebody somewhere can get a little bit richer. And by that same wide lens, there we are as well – waking up each day to call ourselves God's own. Christian. Gathering to call ourselves the church. Each new day a brand new day to take one person's – one congregation's – measure of responsibility for tending the brokenness that leads to the evil, that results in the horror, of weeks like these this side of Heaven. And however hopeless we feel, friends: We. Are. Not. However hopeless a situation appears: It. Is. Not. Because God is at work. In our text today, we've come to Jesus' last sign in the gospel of John. His point of no return, if you will. He raises Lazarus from the dead, and his enemies commit to his assassination. At the end of John, chapter 11, the Passion of Christ is in motion. Lazarus was Mary and Martha's brother. We know these three were a household. Maybe it was just the three of them, or maybe they also had spouses or kids. Households can end up in all kinds of arrangements. We know Mary, Martha and Lazarus were Jesus' chosen family, if you will. Theirs was the house to which he retreated. They were the people with whom he could chill out – be off the clock for a while. We also know that their house was the last place Jesus got any rest, or was treated with any gentleness, any real human kindness, before his arrest, torture and crucifixion. So it makes sense to me that, when Lazarus was so sick he might die, Mary and Martha sent for Jesus right away. Assumed he'd drop whatever to get there. Everything they know of him bolsters this assumption. "We've seen him do more for people he loves less. Of course he will come." This is faith. Utter confidence in what God will do. Of course he'll come. Except he didn't. Readers of the text get a special view, a split screen of sorts: Mary and Martha in one frame planning their brother's funeral; Jesus sketching out his plan for the human race in the other. We get a theological window Mary and Martha do not. Jesus isn't ignoring them – he has a plan! He has a good reason for not answering their prayers. “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Blah, blah, blah, like Charlie Brown's teacher talking. Nothing anyone wants to hear when their brother is dying. When they are terrified. When they know God could good and well fix this, if God wanted to. They don't want a theological window – they want their brother. They want this horror not to be happening. Grief will do that to a person: make us ask for the unreasonable, the irrational. Grief is like severe sleep deprivation. After a while nothing makes any sense, but you're too tired to care anyway, so . . . whatever. Finally Jesus does arrive. Lazarus has been dead four days. Four days is a long time to be dead in a desert climate where embalming is not a thing. My golden retriever once had a pet squirrel carcass that he played with in our backyard every day for more than a week. When I called him to come inside he'd hurry up and rebury it. Once the dog started smelling like the carcass I made Ben (my son) watch where Cody hid it, to get rid of it once and for all. He carried it to the creek and tossed it in. Cody then had a wet pet squirrel carcass – which Ben then tracked down and told no one what he did with it. John wants us to know that Lazarus is really and truly, all the way, nasty dead. Buried in a tomb, John says. Don't think “roomy cave." Think MRI machine. I have to have MRI's of my brain every few years. They put an IV in my arm, earplugs in my ears, a white washcloth over my eyes; they bolt my head to a very skinny table, then slide me into a tube barely bigger than the table and me. Then, hilariously, they tell me to stay perfectly still – which is harder than you would think, because I start twitching. I wonder if Lazarus started twitching when he heard Jesus' voice. I wonder if Jesus sounded close up, like a voice in his head, or far away like the radiologist. I wonder if Lazarus was afraid. I wonder if he smelled terrible to himself. I wonder if it was hard to crawl out with his arms and legs still bound up in linen. And folks thought Jesus rubbing spit mud on a blind man was something. The very people seeing Lazarus wiggling out of that hole are themselves struggling – to believe. Then Jesus says Unbind him. Only about a hundred sermons in those two words in which Jesus does the heavy lifting – resurrection! – then calls his people to do the rest: bring the reborn person home again and nurse him back to strength, back to community, back to hope, back to faith. But let's back up, back to when Jesus finally shows up in Bethany. Shows his face to Mary and Martha – his best friends, remember – who cannot imagine why he is so phenomenally late. I want to offer Mary and Martha as two ways faith gets humanly embodied at times of overwhelming hopelessness. The difference between the two ways of faith are nuanced, and yet profound in their functional difference. Each determines the course of life for the believer, the course of life together for a community – and the quality of life for those touched by such a community. Only one, however, leads from life to life to more life. And thus, only one is gospel faith. One way of faith – what I'm calling If-Only faith – is embodied by both Mary and Martha. If only you had been here, Lord, our brother wouldn't have died. ❖ Faith rooted in the idea (where did we get this idea?) that what God had done for others God will do for us. God made a blind man see; could he not have healed their brother? ❖ Faith that assumes that what we have seen and heard is all there is to see and hear – of God, of God's mercy and goodness and generosity and grace, that what we haven't seen ourselves God can't or will not do. ❖ Faith that flows inevitably to disappointment when God does not respond in the way that we expect, and so we assume God has not responded at all. Is that what it means to make God in our image? To confine God to the limits of imagination? If we cannot think it, God cannot do it. The sisters have never known that a four-day-old dead body could rise. If only you had been here, they lament, because they haven’t the faith to pray anything else. They cannot get outside of their own heads and hearts. When Mary gets to Jesus, she says the same: If only you had been here, Lord; if only you would do for us what you did for others; don't you love us, Lord? How come for them and not for us, Lord? Martha has a second sentence though, and that other, gospel kind of, faith: Even-Now faith. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him." She tacks on even now, this nuanced, altogether other kind of faith. I can't imagine Martha knew what she was asking. Had Jesus asked her what she wanted, I expect she might have said, "Not this. I want this not to be happening." She's the one who questions opening the grave, for how bad it was going to smell. She believes in the future resurrection of the dead. She believes he is the Messiah. And still, she doesn't see this coming. She fetches Mary. They go through the conversation again. Jesus cried – another twenty sermons in that verse. One little tiny one here: he is about to watch a crowd of people see a dead man walking for the first time in history and it not change them a lick. That’s worth crying over. He cried. He prayed. Then he yelled, “Lazarus, wake up and come out of the grave!" I picture it like a grown man being born from the side of a hill. Only there's no midwife to help pull him out. I picture it taking awhile, with lots of scratching and grunting and dust, while a crowd of people gets more and more twitchy and nervous, trying to make sense of what they are looking at. If she'd known what Jesus was about to do, Martha would have torn the rock away herself. But I don't think she did. I don’t think she knew what she was saying when she said, “even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him." Those were just the only words she had for what she couldn't see but suspected in her heart of hearts, because of having been so near him for months and months and months. That knowing him germinated in her the sense, the faith, that more was going on here than could be seen and heard, and that he could be trusted even now, even in the darkest, scariest, saddest moments. Moments for which she had no words, just the urge to ask and trust that she didn't have to know precisely what God might do to believe that God cared about them, about what was happening to them, and that God would do what God deemed best. Friends, this is not a story of resuscitation. Lazarus didn't stop breathing for a few seconds. This is a four-day-old corpse. Of course his opponents didn't believe for a second Jesus really did it. They believed he had convinced others he'd done it. Which made him all the more dangerous to the order of things. What if death has no sting? What if the threat of death has no power over the people whose bodies the Empire needs to control? Curing blindness is one thing. This, however, is positively intolerable. Resurrection is not good news all around, friends. Folks who don't fear death, for whom the threat of death contains no sting, really muck up the wheels of economic imperialism, not to mention social, political and religious control of the masses. Currency loses its value really quickly. This Mary is the same one who will dump out an entire jar of expensive perfume (a working person's wages for a whole year – $35-$100K, by today’s measure) to anoint Jesus for his burial. Even-Now faith includes all the same grief and anguish, of course. Martha was as heartbroken as Mary. But she was not hopeless. She was not overwhelmed in the face of the unknown, because knowing Jesus was enough. His nearness, her history with him, his love for her gave her cause enough to say some words of faith she herself did not quite understand: Even now I know. Have any of you a story of receiving from the Lord what you'd have never known to ask for? Solutions and resolutions to situations that, had they turned out as YOU hoped, would have turned out far worse than what God chose to do? Amen? Anybody ever screwed a situation up or made it even worse, because you couldn’t leave well enough alone; could not keep your mouth closed? your hands to yourself? Amen? As an “extremely helpful person” myself, it can be a hard lesson – this even now strain of faith. All it really asks of us is patience – waiting to see what God will do in situations where we can do nothing. Discernment matters, of course, and courage. And humility. And patience. But overwhelming hopelessness is for folks who don't know better, who don't believe better, who imagine God can't do something we never saw God do yet. Is that who Jesus taught us to be? Is that who Jesus has called us to be? I think not. Friends, if the people of the living Christ give in to overwhelming hopelessness, this world is done for. No wonder the Lord weeps. But we are not them. We are Christ's own people and church. Death itself is what's done for – along with the heavy lifting there. We've only to live out this life in hope and courage. I'll end with this prayer by Thomas Merton. He sums up Even-Now faith pretty well. I expect you've heard it. You are now going to hear it again. Let’s pray. "My Lord God, I have no idea where I'm going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust you always; though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death, I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone." Amen. The eyes of justice don't need to squint. When we act out of grace and mercy and the assurance of God’s unconditional love for every human being, we never have to narrow our focus down to the minutiae of a situation in order to convince ourselves of what is right. Biblical Justice is big, and it flows with grace. Biblical Justice declares that the human creature is God's best and favorite feature of creation, destined for full relationship with the creator God; that human creature is a designation without margin, if you will. One is fully human by being born human, by divine design – a design impossible to undo and unjust to redefine. Humans do not define one another as more or less human, as though some perfect human prototype exists somewhere by which all the others can be measured. Heaven knows humans have done our best to the contrary. Every little tribe in every little corner of every era of human history has had its prototype, with categories organized from closest to the furthest from it. The anthropologists and social scientists can tell you all about it. As can any black kid in America. In Jesus' time and place, a well-born, healthy Jewish man lived fairly close to the prototype – closer still if he had some money and all sons. Healthy sons, that is. For a son born blind he'd take a hit, since the disfigurement indicated moral failing somewhere in their family. Were he religious, the man might have heard the prophecy about Messiah which said, “He will bring sight to the blind." And he might have thought it was only about eye-balls that didn't work. But not until the time and place of Jesus would he have discovered “he will bring sight to the blind” was as much – if not more – about people's hearts and minds. Hearts and minds so blinded to God's intention for the human creature, they lived in near constant darkness – darkness that had them creeping through life like a blind man on his hands and knees feeling for the edge of the world. Remember, in John's gospel seeing is theological activity. In chapter 9 two people can see. One of them has eyeballs that do not work. The other, Jesus, I assume had 20/20 vision. Only these two are able to see precisely what is happening and to name it. Fearlessly, without squinting to squeeze out the part of the view that doesn't fit with their deeply held, very organized, and profoundly comforting View. Of. Everything. Of the rest, who can say what they could see? “It’s why I came,” Jesus says in verse 39: to sort out those who can see from those who can't. He calls it a matter of judgment or justice, and what they see or don't see in moments like this man's healing is that very justice at work, in real time – whether the unseeing or the squinting onlookers believe it. Or not. Jesus sees the man. The disciples see Jesus see him. But what they choose to see is a talking point, a theological proof, if you will. Jesus won't be baited. He insists that the man is a man, a human being in whom God's activity is visible. He spits – a picture of creation reenacted in real time, the clay of the ground and mouth of God. Add water from the place called “Sent." Jesus is the Sent One; remember, nothing ever means just one thing in John. The man born blind can see. Now the neighbors are rubbing their eyes. And squinting. To admit this is the man they've always known requires they shut out so much else they've always known. I think it IS him. Nah, he just looks like that other guy. While the only one not squinting just repeats, "It's me." They nearly torture him to confess something other than the truth, lest they have to change their hearts and minds. Anything but that. But the truth is stubborn to the core. "The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, 'Go to Siloam and wash.' Then I went and washed and received my sight." John stubbornly calls him the man who had formerly been blind, rather than the man given his sight. Everyone can only see what they NEED to see to keep the world as they know and need it intact. Because, think about it: if this guy CAN see, after all those years of NOT seeing, because a country preacher spit in his eyes and said some words, then the whole world is pretty much up for grabs, right? Is it not so sad that not a single person is happy for this guy? They don't have a party; they have a meeting. An emergency meeting. They haul the poor man before the Pharisees – maybe they can get to the bottom of this; figure out if this is ACTUALLY the blind man they used to see or if he really ever was blind in the first place. Look how much effort is going into NOT seeing, how hard everyone is squinting in order NOT to see what the Lord is doing. The Pharisees’ first concern is Sabbath rules: God would never heal someone on the Sabbath – what an audacious contortion of faith!; and, a sinner – meaning Jesus – could never perform such signs!, which is hilarious given that they themselves cannot perform such signs. But again, the contortions they are going through NOT to see are audacious. They ask the blind man himself, What do you think of him? "Oh, he is a prophet." The Pharisees now call in his parents, through whom we learn that anyone who confessed Jesus as Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. Keep in mind, this is not like church membership. More like being run out of town. Exiled. The Pharisees give the parents the opportunity to say their son was never blind in the first place. Is it any wonder people think religious people are idiots? Jewish leadership is literally willing to believe he could see all along, rather than consider changing their minds in the light of new information or, as we call it in church, “new revelation.” To their credit, the parents at least tell the truth about his identity and birth. He is ours. He was born blind. But they won't celebrate his healing. It's the most heartbreaking thing I've seen in all my years of ministry: people are more afraid of their religion's approval than they are of losing their own child. As if Jesus calls us to make such choices. With one last-ditch effort, the Pharisees try to get the man born blind to change his story. "Give glory to God!" they say. "Everyone knows that man is a sinner." See how they don't ask him to give up his sight, just his version of the truth? Agree with us so nobody has to change, they beg him. He won't. I love his answer. “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciple?" Naturally they are enraged and attempt to pull rank, claiming Moses as their leader. This guy is practically a comedian. "Now here is an astonishing thing. You don't know where he comes from and yet he opened my eyes! We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing." At which point they gave up and drove him out. Jesus found the man and asked if he believed in the Messiah. Who is he? The man wants to know. “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he." “Lord, I believe." And he worshipped him. Who sinned? is the first and last question asked by people who cannot see what God is doing in the world. Who sinned? is the language of a religion rooted in guilt, a religious system that assigns theological statuses to different groups of people based on this religiously-defined guilt that is graded by some measure other than the belovedness of the human to the Creator. So that those assigned statuses take on religious power that becomes so profoundly embedded in our way of thinking, feeling, breathing, they can seem to us as true and real as anything else in this world. As true and real as breathing, even. They become equated with moral right and wrong. I expect to some of those around this man, it felt deeply, morally wrong that a stranger could come to town and upset the order of things as Jesus did when he healed this man. Maybe as if Jesus himself were some kind of criminal, to cause such stressful upheaval of ordinary life. So stressful that it actually seemed easier to believe the man had never been blind in the first place, absurd as it sounds to us so far from that place and time. As if we aren't tempted toward the same. Tempted to pretend we can't see what the eyes of our hearts tell us is absolutely true. As if figuring out who’s at fault in any particular moment isn’t our own way of avoiding our own personal upheaval or the really hard church and community work we don't want to do. Amen? Two recent examples: Hurricane Katrina and Ferguson, Missouri. Like when my kids were young and I spent half my breath saying, "I do not care whose fault it is, I want you to clean it up." What I was really saying was, "I do not want to clean that up!" But when Jesus sees the blind man, he doesn't fuss – he gets busy. He works. He does the will of God. Prefacing it with a tiny little sermon: We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. Nothing in John ever means just one thing. Night is coming is a plain reference to his death, as well as a broader reference to any place where Jesus isn't. Nicodemus tried to follow Jesus in the dark and failed. The woman at the well found him in the day and led others to him. No one can see in the dark. Only the man born blind is willing to say what he knows to be true about Jesus: that I was blind and now I see. For everyone else it's just too risky, so all they can do is squint. What does the world know best about the church? What she hates, who she hates; what she condemns, who she condemns; what is right, who is right; what is wrong, who is wrong. It's too bad they don't think, "Wow, all those church people ever do is celebrate and have a good time." What are we so afraid of? What are we trying so hard not to see? Or are we just too busy trying to figure whose fault the world's troubles are – so that we don't have to change; so that we don’t risk any losses; so that we don’t have to work any harder than we already are, and we don't have to do the work to which God has called us? What if John is speaking to the church as Jesus spoke to his disciples? Though they might not have named it so, a man forced to beg for his bread because he is blind is an injustice – particularly in a neighborhood full of people who profess to love the Lord. If those of you professing to love said Lord are asking, Who is at fault for this situation? then Jesus has a word for you: You are asking the wrong question. You are squinting and hoping for someone to blame. Open your eyes and see what God can do. You live and breathe in the presence of the living Christ. Choose to see that. See that, and you'll see there isn't anything in this whole wide world to be afraid of. Whatever is going on here may or may not be your fault, but it's not yours to fix all by yourself. God isn't that crazy! Look! Look and you'll see what God is doing. And then, get to work, working while the sun shines. I do love that! “Working while the sun shines” – let it be our prayer. Let it be the word of the Lord, for today. Amen. How come, in chapter 1 of John, when Nathaniel is so amazed that Jesus knew him before he met him, nobody assumes Nathaniel had a sordid sexual past? But when Photene says, "Come see the man who told me everything I ever did," Christian history assumed she was a prostitute? Oh yes, “Photene." Some Christian traditions have a name for her: Photene. It means “bright as the sun” or “enlightened one” – a name NOT based on the notion that she was a bad girl of the Bible. Which I knew had to be a book title – so I amazoned it. In fact it’s a three-book series: Bad Girls of the Bible; Really Bad Girls of the Bible; and Slightly Bad Girls of the Bible. “Photene” is NOT based on her “bad girl” status, but rather on the rapid-fire, historically informed, theologically rich discourse that she and Jesus maintain over several paragraphs. Woman at the Well is how I've always known her, her entire personhood summed up in a verse-and-a-half: five marriages and currently living with someone – a character sketch that requires us to believe that Jesus slut-shamed a woman to make no particular point. It's not as if he called her to repentance. He drops it as soon as he says it. I don't like the sound of the sentence any more than you: Jesus slut-shamed someone. Know a better way to say it? How about don't say it? Nope. Sorry. Actually, not sorry. If we grow up blaming her, believing she was such a bad girl, we can at least admit that Jesus is the one who brought it up. The fact is, we don't know anything but the barest information, nothing of the why and the how – the parts of any story that explain a person’s life and history. I assume Jesus knew everything there was to know. And he didn't blame her. He didn't judge her. All the moral innuendo has been injected into the story by the church since. And if this is the sliver of text chosen to build her character, why does the assumption have to be scandalous? Why can't it be tragic? Alternatively, we COULD go with the abundance of other verses in the text. This is Jesus' longest recorded conversation in the gospel. This is his first self-revelation as The Christ. Everyone else up to this point – including the official disciples – have only been given signs. She gets the straight-up truth. "I can see you are a prophet," she says. Remember that nothing ever means just one thing in John. Seeing is always a theological activity. Seeing is believing. Seeing is faith. Seeing only happens in the light. Unlike Nicodemus, Photene meets Jesus in the daytime – the brightest time of day, high noon. She was as ready to meet him as any disciple anywhere so far. No wonder Jesus HAS to go through Samaria. Samaria was part of Israel, a region between Galilee to the north and Judea to the south. Judeans and Galileans traveling back and forth generally went around, not through, Samaria, intentionally avoiding contact with the people there. Why? Racism. Segregation, plain and simple. Judeans and Galileans believed themselves better Jews than Samaritans, to the point they didn't really consider them Jews at all. Remember all those years – 700, 600, 500, 400 years before – when one group after another invaded and occupied Israel? Jews from Israel and Judah were both carted off into exile in Egypt and Babylon? But most Samaritans stayed put and were occupied by the foreigners – Assyrians especially, who took them as slaves and wives. They maintained Jewish faith and practice as best they could, for generations. Then King Cyrus of Persia, in the 5th century BCE, began allowing exiles to go back. A few did, the ones who had not intermarried with Babylonians. They intended to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem. Jews in Samaria assumed they'd be integrated back into Jewish religious life. They assumed wrong. (Please know that I know I am skipping enormous swaths of Bible text and history.) Jerusalem was a wasteland. They might have welcomed the help. They didn't. "Y'all are nasty people," they told the Samaritans. "We don’t want anything to do with you." And were still treating them that way 400 years later, into the time of Jesus. We know Jews did business in Samaria and vice versa. The story of the Good Samaritan tells us that. Money rarely respects racial segregation, since it's all green! Amen? Socio-political, but mostly religious, history drove the racism and segregation between Judean-Galilean and Samaritan Jews in Jesus' time. I would offer that this same religious history drove Jesus through Samaria instead of around it; that Jesus went through Samaria out of theological necessity; that he could not and can not be the Savior of the world, nor even the Savior of Israel, without tending to this profound injustice called Samaria. Israel proper can ignore it, pretend that it is in the past, that they have much greater concerns these 400 years later. But so long as they have neighbors who still know themselves marginalized, disenfranchised and dismissed from their own faith and country, Jesus will not go along. Samaria. As I read her now I realize that is her name. John has embodied and given voice to all of Samaria in the woman at the well. I have this notion of Jesus taking his disciples on a field trip, and likewise John his church – a local tour past their own people's history of apathy and injustice. Only it isn't ancient history, because we carry our history within us. It is here in all our relationships. They cannot escape it, pretend it is over and done. Not on Jesus' watch. On Jesus’ watch these modern Galilean men will not ignore or deny the damage done to their southern neighbors, damage that affects them in the here and now of their life together as believers in the same God and citizens of the same country. 400-year-old damage is not history, when modern neighbors cannot walk through each other's neighborhoods. Therefore Jesus had to go through Samaria. His disciples’ utter shock at seeing Jesus speaking with a woman is telling of their own deeply embedded bias, their prejudice. Not necessarily the kind one is proud of. Sometimes we are shocked by our own prejudice, aren't we? They have no language at all for what they are seeing. Seeing is theological activity, remember. Feeling the anxiety of having no language, they decide to eat instead – and try to get Jesus to eat with them. I'm sympathetic to this idea. Eating has often been my go-to plan in such situations. But Jesus refuses. That is the thing about Jesus: he never does what we think he should do, only what HE wants. Going where HE wants. Talking to whomever HE wants. Paying no attention to the rules everyone else is trying to follow. Jesus seems to have his own set ideas about everything: politics, society, economics, gender and religion. His disciples fall silent and have a picnic, which is not the escape they wish it was. Because when they stand up again, they'll be in a crowd of Samaritan brothers and sisters in Christ – which is going to make it really, really awkward to keep walking around Samaria, having seen what they've seen, knowing what they know now. While Samaria, for her part, is all in. Compare her to Nicodemus for a minute. He came to Jesus in the night, but she meets him in the day. He just sort of faded out when Jesus started talking, but she keeps up with him as well as any rabbi would. I told you Nicodemus lapped the Sons of Thunder (Peter, James and John), but that took three years. Samaria lapped Nicodemus in three hours! Became a preacher and led a village to the Lord! Three hours, and a lifetime of heartache, prayer and faith – faith that starts out as suspicion that the world as she'd been told it was could not possibly be all that God intended for God's people and for her. Suspicious faith that can get really hard to keep carrying, when everyone around you acts like you might be crazy and you end up lonelier than you'd like to be. But not so lonely you can give up hope for the greater part that you can almost taste in one prayer out of a hundred. Something I don't get: if Jesus was so progressive on gender matters, how come he didn't just get his own water? And why didn't Samaria just get him some water without being so sassy? “Give me a drink," he said. She said, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" These two lines are charged with each person's awareness of his privilege. He is inviting her to join him in that world-view she has only suspected might be true, for God knows how long. And she takes to it like a duck to water. Likewise, John invites the church to Jesus' view – of everything, including the past. As per the gospel, friends, we know where Jesus is headed: the cross, the grave, the skies. He didn’t ask the disciples’ input on that plan. Sometimes we forget he also chose the route, including Samaria: the events, history, traumas, injustice that we've tried to convince ourselves are over and done, that have nothing to do with us, that have no force in our lives or our life together today – our personal lives, our community life, our national life. He would not let his first disciples keep pretending, nor does he call his church to pretend either. In this new day, as we face the meaning of biblical justice, may we also find the courage to face the truth of our past and do our best, with God's merciful help, to make it right. Would you pray with me? |
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