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Sermon given at General Theological Seminary

Tuesday in Lent V
♦ March 15, 2016 ♦

I arrived in New York City on Friday from Chicago. Like many Chicagoans, I watched in dismay as the Trump rally, scheduled to be held a few neighborhoods west of my apartment, descended into violence—yet more evidence of the bloody effects of the polarizing rhetoric that is poisoning our body politic.

So I find a sermon on these readings a challenging one to preach. What we are experiencing in our political culture, especially in these last days before Holy Week, makes it more and more difficult for me to sympathize with the troublesome polarities of John’s gospel, polarities equally shadowed by the promise of violence.

Jesus mosaicThere is so much in John’s gospel to love: Jesus washing his disciples feet, Jesus at home in Bethany, Jesus defending the woman taken in adultery, Jesus speaking to the Samaritan woman as an equal, Jesus weeping at Lazarus’ tomb, Mary of Bethany extravagantly anointing him, Mary of Magdala yearning to embrace him in the resurrection dawn. This is the intimacy of the Jesus circle that all of us here so much yearn to share, an intimacy that we will try in our awkward way to emulate when we gather next week to wash each other’s feet in his memory. There is so much in John’s Jesus to love.

But there is also much not to love. The episode we just heard ends, we are told, with many Jews believing in him. But this is the same Jesus who, just moments later, will denounce those same new believers as children of the devil, all but inciting them to riot:

“Then Jesus said to the Jews that believed in him…why do you not understand what I say? It is because you do not accept my word. You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires.”

It’s one of the ugliest episodes in the entire New Testament, Jesus ruthlessly goading his once sympathetic hearers, sowing landmines into the holy ground on which these new followers long have staked their lives—there in the very center of the Temple—calling them liars, insulting them, infuriating them so much that “they picked up stones to throw at him.”

I know, I know. I’ve been to seminary. I’ve read Ray Brown. I know that John’s gospel is a many-layered thing, that there is more than one story unfolding here. There is the story of Jesus the redeemer, Jesus the healer, Jesus whose every work of love—beginning at Cana and ending in the cross—is a sign of God’s reign breaking in among us. This is the Jesus I have preached for 30 years, the Jesus at the center of this glorious reredos, the Jesus under whose benevolent gaze you and I have been trained for the Lord’s service, Jesus the Good Shepherd for whom this chapel is named.

And then there’s the other Jesus, a Jesus more problematic to embrace. He is the Jesus revered by the branch of the Jesus movement that gathered around that mysterious beloved disciple—the Jesus movement that felt itself under siege perhaps 60 years after the events it recounts here, fighting to secure its identity over against an emergent and resurgent Pharisaical movement that promised new hope to the followers of Moses and the lovers of Torah. This branch of the Jesus movement, at once so generous, so spiritually grounded, so not of this world, is also shadowed by its own toxic polarities. It is exclusionary in its very inclusiveness, like the Passion gospel we are forced to read every Good Friday, the Passion gospel that so clearly places blame on the very Jews whom Jesus loved. “If the world hates you,” John’s Jesus will tell his friends, “be aware that it hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own.” (John 15:18-19)

So where does this leave us, for better and for worse the inheritors of this gospel, lovers of this Jesus but also very much embedded in this world, called by this very gospel to be bridge builders and peacemakers in polarized times, yet to be in the world but not of it.

“They said to him, ‘Who are you?’”

“Jesus, who are you?” It’s the question at the heart of this evening’s reading. It’s the question at the center of all four gospels, not just this one. It’s the question we ask of Jesus all our lives, especially in times of stress, if we are honest with ourselves.

“Who are you, Jesus?” That’s the question our parishioners ask, when they are being honest with us, especially in these increasingly violent and troubled days.

“Who are you, Jesus?” That’s the question the world asks. And let’s be clear. For many who live in what this John’s gospel can so dismissively call the world, once they witness the hateful behavior of many Christians, in this country and elsewhere, who claim to act in Jesus’ name, the answer is all but self-evident. If this is who Jesus is, if this Jesus is anything like his nasty followers, we are better off without him.

There’s a lot at stake here. Who are you, Jesus? The answer to that question is not just what’s at stake in John’s gospel. The answer to that question is also what’s at stake in our common life today, as Christians and as citizens, in these dark election days more than ever.

Let’s think this through for a moment. Go back to the gospel passage we have just heard. What exactly was it that Jesus said that, for the moment at least, moved his listeners to join him, so that “as he was saying these things, many believed in him?”

Listen to it again:

“So Jesus said, ‘When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am he.’”

“As he was saying these things, many believed in him.” I like to think that those who heard him utter these cryptic words recognized more readily than we might the allusion to the book of Numbers, to the story that we also heard at this service, the story of the brazen snake lifted up in the wilderness, not as a sign of a poisonous death but as a sign of a reconciled God, a sign of healing and new life. Perhaps they had heard Jesus say pretty much the same thing earlier in this gospel, when he had made the reference clear: “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.” (John 3:14)

The Jesus at the heart of this gospel is not the Jesus who divides, but the Jesus who heals.

So really, I suggest as Christians, as lovers of Jesus, we need to turn around the central question. For those of us who follow Jesus, who seek entrance to the inner circle, who seek to follow Jesus the friend of Lazarus, the friend of Mary, the friend of the beloved disciple, to join the intimate circle of friends gathered in the upper room this Holy Week, the question we need to ask is this: Not who are you? But who are we?

We will all need to ponder that question in the next several days, as we gather at our various altars in our feeble attempts to lift high the cross in Holy Week. We will read this gospel in a time when it will be tempting to divide believers from unbelievers, and to hide ourselves in the cross’ shadow. We will read this gospel while we will witness fellow Christians wield the cross as a kind of weapon of righteousness, yielding to every xenophobic impulse. Facing such religious disarray, it will be tempting to draw in the wagons, to take shelter in a churchy passivity, to hide ourselves in a beloved community that turns out to be beloved only of ourselves.

But in Christ we are more than that. In the coming days, may we be bold enough to raise the cross in the wilderness of our public life, not as a symbol of division but as a vehicle of reconciliation; as an antidote to toxic hatreds that are poisoning public speech; as a sign that we are baptized to a ministry of reconciliation and not of retribution—baptized to a ministry of healing, and perhaps most important in these mendacious days, baptized to a ministry of truth-telling.

In the end, that’s the only Jesus movement worth joining.