This homily was delivered by the author of this post on Sunday June 2, 2019 at Christ Episcopal Church, Yankton , South Dakota
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As you, Father, are
in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may have confidence that you have sent me. John17:21
Throughout
this Easter season and for the next two Sundays, our Gospel readings have been
and will be taken from the Gospel of John, and so on this Seventh and last
Sunday of Easter, I am prompted to say a few thing related to this important
Gospel and its relevance to who we are as Christians.
The
Gospel of John is unique amongst the four gospels of the New Testament in that
it is more a work of theology than a linear telling of Jesus’ life and ministry. The
Gospel of John introduces us to a particular branch of Christian theology,
called Christology – the study of Christ. Most
of us have been taught that the title of Christ is synonymous with the Messiah,
but the author or authors of John take this title to a much higher level, to
the cosmic level and makes the bold claim that the Christ is a force, is the
creative word of God that brings creation into being. The
major difference between the Gospel of the John and the synoptic gospels of
Matthew, Mark, and Luke is a matter of perspective; on how Jesus is presented and
revealed as the Christ.
The
synoptic Gospels mark as the beginning of Jesus living into his being the Christ
at his baptism in the Jordan where God declares Jesus to be his Son. In
the Gospel of John, Christ is presented as the very Word of God by which all of
creation came into being and is that which becomes incarnate in the person of
Jesus, being one with God and one with us. As
a result of these two divergent perspectives, one can say there are two
distinct models by which to understand our journey with God through Christ
Jesus. There
is a linear side of living into Christ since our baptism and there is a cosmic
side, one that says we’ve always been and always will be in communion with God
in Christ.
The Gospel of John is believed to have been written some sixty to seventy years after Jesus’ resurrection and some thirty to forty years after the Fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, and the disappearance of the Church at Jerusalem; a time in which both Christians and Jews found themselves without a geographic and spiritual center of their related religions. By the time the Gospel of John was written, the followers of Jesus who knew him when he walked on the earth, his disciples had passed away along with their disciples. What remained were the communities or congregations they had founded.
The
Gospel of John was most likely written for the communities that claimed Jesus’
disciple, John, as their founder. Scholars
believe that the communities founded by John were largely communities of
Christian Jews who primarily were settled in modern day Lebanon and Israel. It is likely that some
of them had witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem and the disappearance of
both the temple and the church in Jerusalem. It
was a time when Christianity began to emerge as religion in its own right and they
had questions, the foremost of which was, “Who is this Jesus we are following,
and how do we deal with a growing sense of doubt being stirred amongst our
community’s members and those outside of our community?
The
unique way that the writers of John answer these questions is to put the
questions of John’s community in the
voice of the people Jesus encounters that
are found only in the Gospel of John; such as, during the night time visit from
a member of the Jewish ruling council, the Sanhedrin, Nicodemus, a Samaritan
women at a well, a crippled healed on the Sabbath by the Pool of Bethesda, a young blind man whose veracity at being blind
and then being healed is questioned by Jewish authorities, and the
heart-wrenching questions by Jesus’ own disciples during a discussion around an evening meal – hinting
of the Last Supper – pondering what it means when Jesus begins talking about
what will happen to them when Jesus is no longer in their midst.
Another
unique aspect of John is the way such questions are answered. In
the Gospel of John, Jesus is presented as the self-revealing Christ, who speaks
of himself for himself and answers these questions by himself. The
Gospel of John is also a narrative cast in the context of the two great
sacraments we know as Holy Baptism and Holy Communion. Water,
bread, wine and light play significant roles in the Gospel of John as the signs
and symbols of these two sacraments: “Whoever
drinks of the water that I shall give, it shall be a well-spring that never
dries up” “I am the Bread of Life” “I am the Vine and you are the branches” “I am the light of the world.”
Who
is Jesus Christ and where is the risen Christ to be found remain active
question for us today.
In
the Gospel of John, finding the risen Christ is in the experience of
sacramental living – being bound with Father through Jesus, the Christ, like a
grape vine to its branches.We
find the risen Christ in the primal waters of baptism. We find the risen Christ in the light that
breaks through the darkness. We find the
risen Christ in the bread broken and spread throughout the world. We find risen
Christ in those who shepherd us along life’s path or as a gateway that ushers
us into a new adventure. We find the risen Christ
in the truth revealed along the way as we live into being one with God through
Christ Jesus.
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With
this Sunday, we come to the close of the Easter season Easter
is one of the longest seasons of the church year, lasting fifty days, yet it
seems to fly by as so many other events and happenings fill our lives during
this time of year. Let’s
face it. Easter has lost its disturbing edge.
I say disturbing because if you read the gospel accounts of this event, it’s easy to overlook the initial reaction when the empty tomb is first encountered. The earliest gospel account of this event is recorded in Mark and in its oldest manuscripts, the gospel ends by describing the initial response of the women who first discovered the empty tomb like this: “And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.”[1] That’s how the earliest gospel account of this event ends without further explanation or comment, leaving one with so many unanswered questions as if to prompt one to find this reportedly risen Jesus.
The
resurrection turned upside down everything we humans thought we knew about the
world, everything we believed about the world, everything we thought we knew
about God and everything we believed about God up until that moment. To
this day, the resurrection of Jesus defies belief itself, and so it should, because the resurrection does not require
belief. It requires faith.
Belief
and believe are an interesting choice of words found in the translations of the
original Greek text. The
problem with the word believe used in translations of the New Testament from
the original Greek texts is that word being translated as believe is actually a
verb form of the Greek word for faith. For
example, faith, like hope and love, is used to great effect in the letters of
Paul because each of those words is a verb in Greek. We
understand hope and love as a verb, but we don’t have a verb form for faith in
English. Faith
is defined in the New Testament itself as “… the
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”[2] Or as Paul wrote to the Corinthians “We walk
by faith not by sight.”[3] We walk in confidence and trust, in spite of
what we may see, what we believe, or what we think we know.
You may be wondering why after centuries of translating faith as
belief it matters.
It matters because we live in world that is increasingly polarized
by the variety of beliefs we entertain, especially the beliefs that cause us to
doubt. We believe all sorts of things about our neighbors, our
government, our nation, our humanity, and God; and more often than not, we do
so at the expense of having faith in our neighbor, faith in our government, in our
nation, faith in humanity, and faith in God.
The antidote to doubt is not belief. The antidote to doubt is faith. Belief requires a sense of certitude that faith does not. There is nothing certain about faith, about hope, or about love
except that to live without them makes life a living hell. Ultimately,
Christ is not found in things we believe to be true, but rather Christ is found
when Christ is actively sought by living life as an act of faith, by living
life as an act of hope and by living life as an act of love.
So
I invite you to change “believe” to having faith, to trust, or to be confident when reading John or
any of the New Testament scriptures and see the difference it makes in
understanding what you are reading. In
fact after this homily, you’ll have an opportunity to check this out when
we say the apostle’s Creed. The first
two words of each of its three articles begins with I believe. I’m
not asking you to change the wording when we say it, but after saying it the way its written, I
invite you to silently say the beginning of that creed as “I have faith in God
the Father," "I have faith in Jesus Christ," "I have faith in the Holy Spirit" and
see if it feels differently and takes on a new meaning.
To
bring new meanings into our lives and into the life of this church, let us live
and walk by faith, live and walk with hope,
and live and walk the way of love in unity with God through the Christ.
Amen
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Until next time, stay faithful.
Norm
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