March 30, 2014

Lenten series by John Bluck

Part I

I keep meeting people whose life of faith is something akin to a hijack drama.

They started off happily enough, going to Sunday School or church with parents or  grandparents, enjoying the guidance of a savvy school chaplain or a good pastor. Then suddenly some catastrophe struck – the sudden loss of a parent or a sibling, a marriage collapse, unemployment, something that shatters their still fragile trust and understanding of God and how God works in the world.

That’s bad enough, but what’s worse is that these bruised and betrayed people never find a way back to the faith that nutured them , often as young people. And the blame focused theology that framed their thinking then, still frames them now, years later.

There is so little I or anyone else can say. You can urge them to start again. You can assure them the theology that shut them down was as shonky back then as it is now.

What these people missed out on was a decent preparation, a sound apprenticeship in believing, an orientation course that would open up minds and hearts to the possibilities and generosity of God. If you don’t get that grounding, then even if you come to faith later in life, even in a blinding flash, then the first disaster can still tip you over.

Such preparation is a privilege. I have huge admiration for people who  haven’t had it and still manage to keep believing and hoping and praying. The church tries to build such training through its rhythm of festivals and seasons. We’re in the middle of one such training time.

Lent is all about getting ready for the Christian passion or Passover and the events of Holy Week and Easter. We are getting ready to follow Jesus through Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday into Easter Eve and Easter Day. To cope with that journey we need to do some homework. That won’t guarantee we complete the journey or comprehend it, but we need to get our act together as best we can. The first disciples tried and mostly failed, even though they had the advantage of some team talks by their leader.

Maybe we can do better. We still have the speech notes of those talks. They’re called the Farewell Discourses, reassembled and recorded in three chapters of the Gospel of John. They are often quoted but usually out of context.

When you read them in the setting they were written for, these discourses become  very powerful and very intimate stuff.

Here is Jesus on the eve of his execution as a criminal, sharing a final meal with his closest friends, even as one of them betrays him and another is about to deny knowing him. It is a time of intense anxiety and fear. The incredible three years they had together are rapidly dissolving. Any one else would have walked away. But Jesus speaks directly into the face of all this personal disintegration and chaos. He talks to his friends with breathtaking intimacy and honesty. He draws them into the mystery of God treating them as privileged insiders. For all their failures and betrayals, however much they felt they had been hijacked by the violence that follows, that’s what the disciples were then. Insiders with the inside story.

And that’s what we are now. These discourses are our training manual, our road map for the journey that lies ahead of us. Over these two Sundays, we’ll listen to what it offers us as we revise, remember, rethink what we can expect of God; what we see in Jesus, what can we dare to trust from this discourse about how to live and how to  love.

Well there is some amazing stuff on offer.

What Jesus lays out here is the chemistry between the human and the divine. Up till now that’s been focused in his physical presence, his words and actions. You could see this evidence, record it, even taste  it when you broke bread with him. Now all that’s about to change. The relationship between human and divine is about to shift because Jesus is about to be taken away. “ I have come into the world and now I am leaving the world”.

Now it’s up to you. Because from here on out you are no longer simply human, you’re also agents of what is divine and holy. I no longer have to mediate for you with God, you can do it yourself, such is the love God has for you, the trust God has in you.

Jesus cements all this in one remarkable prayer which condenses this promise: “The glory  that you have given me I have given them so that they may be one, as we are one. I in them and you in me..”

In other words, the bond of love and trust that led us to see Jesus as the Son of God is now transferred and shared with his friends. We become caught up in an interdependence with God. Humanity and divinity are entwined like never before, in a depth of intimacy unknown before.

There is nothing in the Bible that explains just what form this intimacy might take, and religion has been scrambling for ever to do that by prescribing words and music in vain. For the intimacy comes like the wind and all we can do is wait for the signs of it coming and open ourselves to the gale.

Eileen Duggan wrote a poem about that:

When in still air the planets shake

Like springs about to flow

A wind from off Australia

Is gathering to blow

And I who have my signs of you

Am weatherwise in vain.

Oh you are gale and wet to me

But come, my wind and rain.

Descriptive language breaks down in attempting to explain what Jesus is offering here, so we have to resort  to poetry like that, and symbolism.

The first biblical metaphor is the vine and its branches. Familiar enough to talk of vineyards and Israel as God’s vineyard and God as the gardener. But here we have Jesus as the whole vine, the new Israel, in the same way that Paul sees him as the body. The source of life for all its limbs and branches. Both images  speak of eucharist, but the context here focuses on the inseparability of vine and branch, and the confidence that even after radical pruning the new life will flow again and new growth will follow.

And the next metaphor is the dwelling place. Jesus is the Way. He still provides a  unique access path into the heart of God. Western Christianity has traditionally chosen to paint that uniqueness as exclusivity, forgetting that in the same passage Jesus spends much more time talking about many dwelling places in God’s house. Not high places and low places, first and second best, but different places with room for all who come. The echo here is with the second letter to the Corinthians (Ch 5) – the promise of a house not made with human hands, and in the midst of our afflictions, we long to be clothed with this heavenly dwelling, prepared by God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. This about the inclusive nature of God, generous beyond all measure, who comes to us before we come to God.

The third image to express this entwining of the human and divine is consecration, the ritual reserved for the hereditary priests of the Temple. The word literally means to “make holy” and it was used as a metaphor of the relationship between Jesus and God. Now Jesus includes all his friends in this once elite and limited group,  reserved for only Israel’s most privilege and devout. So you and I, our piety unpolished, can  join the ranks of the sanctified,  echoed  again  in the first letter of Peter; that democratising, barrier breaking call to claim a space to stand in God’s dwelling place: “Come to him like living stones and let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, where all can offer gifts acceptable to God..”

All of this is made possible by the gift of the Spirit of God, described by Jesus as another Advocate to take over where he leaves off, doing the same work he did in Palestine, but now on a universal scale, forever. “This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him or knows him. You know him because he abides with you and he will be in you.” 

This indwelling Spirit of peace and love, no longer limited by geography or gender or language or culture, is known to us as a presence we can experience, but also as a capacity to see things we couldn’t see before. This Spirit does what Gladys Knight and Roberta Flack sing so beautifully about: “ I can see clearly now, the rain has gone..”  The ability to see God at work in the world, to find our way where there was confusion before, that is the gift this Spirit gives.

Just before this promise of Spirit is made to the disciples, Philip has been anxiously asking, ”Show us the way to God.” The Spirit answers that question, not by demanding answers from Jesus but directing attention to what we do and say as followers And we can dare to believe that, such is the depth of this indwelling Spirit in us, such is in us, the extent of this entwining of the human and the divine.

This is the extraordinary offer held out to us in these Farewell Discourses. What we need to do now (and we’ll do that next week) is explore just how we go about accepting the offer and what it might mean for our walk into Holy Week and Easter and beyond.