MEETING JESUS the WAY, TRUTH, LIFE
Notes from www.billbrucewords.com
Earth Sunday, 5th of Easter, April 20, 2008
Text: John 14:1-7
The answer, of course, is 42. So says Douglas Adams in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This answer to ‘life, the universe, and everything’ was provided by the Deep Thought computer after 7.5 million years of calculation. Of course, Deep Thought added a caveat, that the question may not have been clear. Douglas Adams proposed that the ultimate Question and the ultimate Answer could not exist in the same universe, without destroying that universe.
Crossan says ‘sometimes you don’t just want to have the right answer to the wrong question’. Whenever people gaily proclaim ‘Jesus is the answer’, I respond with ‘What was the question?’ The minister’s children’s story asks the children: ‘What’s brown, and furry, and runs round in the park?’ No answer. ‘OK, boys and girls, what’s brown and furry, runs in the park, has a big tail, and stores nuts for the winter?’ Finally, a tentative response: ‘I know the answer is supposed to be Jesus, but it sure sounds like a squirrel to me!
In a recent ‘Zits’ cartoon, the teenager and his mother have this after school exchange:
What is there to eat?
Fine, thanks, I had a pretty good day
Can I take the car tonight?
Not so bad, though my arthritis is acting up a bit.
Why aren’t you answering my questions?
I’m answering the ones you should be asking!
So what are the questions you bring to church, to worship, to the faith, or in prayer? What are the answers you expect to get? We began this Easter season acknowledging that we could do and be anything, that we are tempted to try to do and to be everything, in the end, we will do and be something. Who and whose are we becoming, with what company? How does our childhood and childish faith address our mortality as we age and begin ‘cramming for our finals’ or ‘preparing for our graduation? And what about all that lies between childhood and old age?
We began this Easter season with stories of 3 resurrection appearances, tales of disciples ‘meeting Jesus again for the first time’ after the crucifixion. Mary, then Thomas, then Cleopas couldn’t recognize their Jesus at first. Clearly this was not a walking corpse of the body of the guy they’d known, or a guy or ghost with a dinner plate behind his head or a halo over it. Mostly, the tales are about the disciples’ experiences, and what they needed: Mary had to slow down and stop blaming, Thomas got to keep doubting, but not fearing, and Cleopas needed social conversation and a meal together, before they ‘got it’, or ‘recognized him’.
Last week we began 3 three lessons from John’s gospel, each including an ‘I am’ statement attributed to Jesus. The other gospels have Jesus saying ‘the reign of God is near, get ready’, or else ‘the kingdom of heaven will be like this’. John’s version of Jesus sounds a lot different, pretty abstract, and a bit pompous. So who and what do you expect to meet, and what questions to you bring, seeking what answers? The answer, of course, is 42.
John’s not my favourite gospel. I call this part ‘the longest after-dinner speech in the bible’, and Jesus’ discourse seems to go round and round in circles. The argument is polarized into ‘us and them’, ‘light and dark’ – and worse, the name for the ‘others’ is ‘the Jews’. We read ‘the Jews as ‘the religious’, to get a better sense of what it might have meant to John and that community. However, even when a book in the bible is harder work, or not my favourite, I try to listen and make sense of what message there is for me – just as we listen to other voices in our church.
Most of you haven’t read John through. More likely, you hear this clip at a funeral, out of context and usually in King James diction from 1611: ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid… In my Father’s house are many mansions…’ We lock into a childhood vision of some spiritual heaven, in the sweet bye-and-bye, where everybody gets their own luxury home, and lives happily ever after. You may not believe in that naïve magical worldview the rest of the time, but it serves well as we weep and mourn at a funeral.
I suggested that if you really want a John text about bereavement, John 11 is better: Martha says to Jesus, ‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died’. She figures even now he could fix it. Jesus says ‘don’t you believe he will be raised?’ Martha says dismissively, with us, ‘Sure, sure, I know he will be raise in the last day.’ But fix it now! Jesus says ‘I am the resurrection, and the life… one who lives and believes will never die!’
Today’s lesson is not necessarily, and certainly not only, about bereavement, or hopes of heaven or threats of the alternative. John’s Jesus says ‘do not let your hearts be troubled.’ What troubles your heart? What makes you anxious or afraid? Is it only, or usually, or even often, your fears of what will happen to you after you die? Is the answer ‘lots of room’ good enough? Jesus is the answer. What was the question? Maybe the answer is 42!
For every time that use of the gospel makes somebody happy at a funeral, there are several other times when it actually adds to our fears. If you believe, you live and never die. If you don’t believe, you die and go to hell. If you do it my way, and accept my truth, and live my life, you’ll get a mansion – if not, go to hell. These are exclusive, coercive claims, ‘my way or else’, or ‘we’re right, and all the others are wrong.’ It sounds like spiritualized bread for today, and pie in the sky when you die. It sounds like stuff here and now doesn’t matter, except to use instrumentally as a ticket to heaven.
If the only way we can read John’s gospel – or understand our faith – is exclusive and coercive and dismissive of our environment today as something we pass through and use and leave, then let’s quit and become Unitarians or Bahai. Surely we don’t want to condemn the 40% of our neighbours in Thornhill who celebrated their Passover seder last night, and doom them to hell! Surely we don’t want to justify environmental depradation in the name of spiritual heaven! Most of us reject a simple reading of Jesus the way, truth, and life, as the only way to the Father.
So I gave it my best shot, to revoke John, and give you some hints how to do it yourselves. Many of you assured me afterwards that you just figured everybody gets a mansion in heaven, regardless of creed or action. Somebody suggested that ‘the way’ was really a Taoist sense of a way of being or spiritual attitude. Another figured that Jesus’ ‘way, truth and life’ was so big that anybody could fit inside it. Most of you seem to adopt a ‘moralistic theistic deism’ (see this blog from December 24 2006 for more on that). I admit I was better at taking things apart today, at ‘unlearning’, than at proposing one alternate solution for you all.
John’s community, 60 years after Jesus, was certainly facing mortality, and the last people who were around during Jesus’ life were dying. If people were being troubled, or anxious, or afraid, then the metaphysics of life after death may have been part of their problem, as it is for us. However, there was, and is, more stuff going on John says Jesus said ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’. Did Jesus actually say those words out loud? I don’t think so. I don’t know. However, I think that the phrase captures something true about what Jesus revealed to us, not simply through his message or actions, but overall by his ‘person and work’.
One major competing movement to John’s was Gnosticism. Variations of the mystery religions of secret knowledge that made sense of existence like secret decoder ring were very popular, and sound very much like John, or more like John than like the other gospels in our bible. However, imagine what a Gnostic John would have made his Jesus say:
I know the way
I know the truth
I know the life
A Gnostic Jesus has a secret knowledge, or gnosis, and promises that you could learn it too, if you had the right teachers, who knew the ‘real’ message of Jesus. That can appeal to our culture now, with our fetish for expertise, with scientism not science, trusting MBAs and economists with running our markets, relieved that somebody is in charge who knows the secrets. That’s part of what Gretta Vosper and Barrie Wilson claim to know, the ‘real’ message of Jesus. Gretta’s Jesus was ‘radical’, and Barrie’s was ‘orthodox’.
Why do we run out to buy the latest book, and claim the new gurus? Is it because we can’t spell ‘charlatan’? No, people are troubled, anxious, and afraid. We don’t know. We know we don’t know. We hope that some expert does know. We trust that they’ll have what Jacuqes Ellul calls the technique or technology, the trick to manipulate the world, to deal with what makes us troubled, anxious, and afraid. Sometimes we can seek security in slogans, but only until another interprets them differently. Then we’re back to being troubled, anxious, and afraid.
The other major competing alternative movement to John’s was the synagogue Judaism that was being developed out of the Pharasaic movement at the same time. The Jerusalem temple had been destroyed in 70AD, and the Sadduccees and priests were no longer a factor. Development of oral torah, of mishnah and developing Talmudic wisdom, and the adoption of the rituals of kasrut or kosher for a post-temple time, focused on right practice. This Jewish Jesus would say:
I follow the way
I follow the truth
I follow the life
An orthodox rabbinic Jesus would be a role model, showing how to practice. We would just have to ask ‘what would Jesus do?’ And if we really followed as he had followed, we would live lives of circumcision. (I saw some of you guys wince and cringe at the prospect!) Jesus surely lived and died in the same communities from which post-temple Judaism was developed as a sibling and peer – and competitor and opposition – for John’s community. When John’s gospel was written, it was a viable option to just focus on religious practice. It still is.
So Jesus was just trying to be a good Jew – and now, so is Barrie Wilson. Absolutely, if orthodox practice makes sense to you, Judaism is a far better option than this United Church. Gretta Vosper’s attempt to vaguely ‘be good with or without god’ is less plausible – but also far less demanding. But if we focus on behavior, on right practice, acting like good people, we will focus on visible, justiciable moral actions, and we will risk moralism, usually getting around to sex and family on the right wing, and ‘political correctness’ on the left.
So I asked you again, what is it that makes you troubled, or anxious, or afraid? When do you worry that you’re not doing it right, and that everybody can tell? Are you wearing the right clothes, laughing at the right jokes, trying the right diets? What makes you troubled, or anxious, or afraid? When do you feel judged, weighed in the balance and found wanting, an imposter? That’s when we flock to certainties, habits, rituals, ‘the way we do things here’.
For me, the great ‘I am’ statements in John are about incarnation, the paradox of being both human and divine, mortal and everlasting, flesh and spirit, immanent and transcendent, in but not of the world. The great ‘I am’ defies and derides the excessive claims of knowing or behaving. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us. Did Jesus ever say any of the ‘I am’ statements? I doubt it. Do they tell the truth about what Jesus reveals to us? I believe it!
When John’s Jesus says ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ today, it’s the answer 42 instead of the alternatives of ‘I know the way’ or ‘I follow the way’ which were alternative versions of Jesus. When John’s Jesus says ‘No one comes to the Father except through me’, that’s instead of the alternatives of reaching the divine mystery through secret knowledge, or reducing the paradox of incarnation to behaviours alone. You won’t get it, the ‘I am’, trying to know or do the right thing. You’ll get it if you can accept the grace that affirms ‘I am’, and loves you and your worldly environment and connects it to ultimate things.
Have you seen Stephen Colbert’s bestseller: I Am America (and you can too)? That concept captures some of the grace and humour of what I was trying to provoke and invite today. Colbert presents a persona of a well-intentioned, poorly informed, high status idiot – satirizing the culture and politics around him. It’s only funny if you can imagine something beyond him. Of course, I don’t get it – but I recognize the shape of his ideas.
John’s gospel presents Martha and Thomas as foils to Jesus, getting it wrong so John’s Jesus can restate it for them. It’s ironic if we adopt Martha’s error in John 11, or Thomas’ confusion in John 14, as the faith we teach to our children. At its best, this is harmless comforting platitudes to be intoned at funerals. At its worst, it is exclusive, coercive sectarian threats of hell and promises of heaven. It justifies the accusation that our movement is bigoted and justifies instrumental technological use and abuse of the environment, pending a spiritual heaven.
What makes your hearts troubled, anxious, and afraid? ‘I know the way’ and ‘I follow the way’ just makes it worse. ‘I am the way’ promises something far less and far more. Not just right ideas and idealism, nor only right actions and good habits. The answer, of course, is still 42.
What word did God have for your hearts this time?
May you have ears to hear. Amen.
Notes from www.billbrucewords.com
Earth Sunday, 5th of Easter, April 20, 2008
Text: John 14:1-7
The answer, of course, is 42. So says Douglas Adams in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This answer to ‘life, the universe, and everything’ was provided by the Deep Thought computer after 7.5 million years of calculation. Of course, Deep Thought added a caveat, that the question may not have been clear. Douglas Adams proposed that the ultimate Question and the ultimate Answer could not exist in the same universe, without destroying that universe.
Crossan says ‘sometimes you don’t just want to have the right answer to the wrong question’. Whenever people gaily proclaim ‘Jesus is the answer’, I respond with ‘What was the question?’ The minister’s children’s story asks the children: ‘What’s brown, and furry, and runs round in the park?’ No answer. ‘OK, boys and girls, what’s brown and furry, runs in the park, has a big tail, and stores nuts for the winter?’ Finally, a tentative response: ‘I know the answer is supposed to be Jesus, but it sure sounds like a squirrel to me!
In a recent ‘Zits’ cartoon, the teenager and his mother have this after school exchange:
What is there to eat?
Fine, thanks, I had a pretty good day
Can I take the car tonight?
Not so bad, though my arthritis is acting up a bit.
Why aren’t you answering my questions?
I’m answering the ones you should be asking!
So what are the questions you bring to church, to worship, to the faith, or in prayer? What are the answers you expect to get? We began this Easter season acknowledging that we could do and be anything, that we are tempted to try to do and to be everything, in the end, we will do and be something. Who and whose are we becoming, with what company? How does our childhood and childish faith address our mortality as we age and begin ‘cramming for our finals’ or ‘preparing for our graduation? And what about all that lies between childhood and old age?
We began this Easter season with stories of 3 resurrection appearances, tales of disciples ‘meeting Jesus again for the first time’ after the crucifixion. Mary, then Thomas, then Cleopas couldn’t recognize their Jesus at first. Clearly this was not a walking corpse of the body of the guy they’d known, or a guy or ghost with a dinner plate behind his head or a halo over it. Mostly, the tales are about the disciples’ experiences, and what they needed: Mary had to slow down and stop blaming, Thomas got to keep doubting, but not fearing, and Cleopas needed social conversation and a meal together, before they ‘got it’, or ‘recognized him’.
Last week we began 3 three lessons from John’s gospel, each including an ‘I am’ statement attributed to Jesus. The other gospels have Jesus saying ‘the reign of God is near, get ready’, or else ‘the kingdom of heaven will be like this’. John’s version of Jesus sounds a lot different, pretty abstract, and a bit pompous. So who and what do you expect to meet, and what questions to you bring, seeking what answers? The answer, of course, is 42.
John’s not my favourite gospel. I call this part ‘the longest after-dinner speech in the bible’, and Jesus’ discourse seems to go round and round in circles. The argument is polarized into ‘us and them’, ‘light and dark’ – and worse, the name for the ‘others’ is ‘the Jews’. We read ‘the Jews as ‘the religious’, to get a better sense of what it might have meant to John and that community. However, even when a book in the bible is harder work, or not my favourite, I try to listen and make sense of what message there is for me – just as we listen to other voices in our church.
Most of you haven’t read John through. More likely, you hear this clip at a funeral, out of context and usually in King James diction from 1611: ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid… In my Father’s house are many mansions…’ We lock into a childhood vision of some spiritual heaven, in the sweet bye-and-bye, where everybody gets their own luxury home, and lives happily ever after. You may not believe in that naïve magical worldview the rest of the time, but it serves well as we weep and mourn at a funeral.
I suggested that if you really want a John text about bereavement, John 11 is better: Martha says to Jesus, ‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died’. She figures even now he could fix it. Jesus says ‘don’t you believe he will be raised?’ Martha says dismissively, with us, ‘Sure, sure, I know he will be raise in the last day.’ But fix it now! Jesus says ‘I am the resurrection, and the life… one who lives and believes will never die!’
Today’s lesson is not necessarily, and certainly not only, about bereavement, or hopes of heaven or threats of the alternative. John’s Jesus says ‘do not let your hearts be troubled.’ What troubles your heart? What makes you anxious or afraid? Is it only, or usually, or even often, your fears of what will happen to you after you die? Is the answer ‘lots of room’ good enough? Jesus is the answer. What was the question? Maybe the answer is 42!
For every time that use of the gospel makes somebody happy at a funeral, there are several other times when it actually adds to our fears. If you believe, you live and never die. If you don’t believe, you die and go to hell. If you do it my way, and accept my truth, and live my life, you’ll get a mansion – if not, go to hell. These are exclusive, coercive claims, ‘my way or else’, or ‘we’re right, and all the others are wrong.’ It sounds like spiritualized bread for today, and pie in the sky when you die. It sounds like stuff here and now doesn’t matter, except to use instrumentally as a ticket to heaven.
If the only way we can read John’s gospel – or understand our faith – is exclusive and coercive and dismissive of our environment today as something we pass through and use and leave, then let’s quit and become Unitarians or Bahai. Surely we don’t want to condemn the 40% of our neighbours in Thornhill who celebrated their Passover seder last night, and doom them to hell! Surely we don’t want to justify environmental depradation in the name of spiritual heaven! Most of us reject a simple reading of Jesus the way, truth, and life, as the only way to the Father.
So I gave it my best shot, to revoke John, and give you some hints how to do it yourselves. Many of you assured me afterwards that you just figured everybody gets a mansion in heaven, regardless of creed or action. Somebody suggested that ‘the way’ was really a Taoist sense of a way of being or spiritual attitude. Another figured that Jesus’ ‘way, truth and life’ was so big that anybody could fit inside it. Most of you seem to adopt a ‘moralistic theistic deism’ (see this blog from December 24 2006 for more on that). I admit I was better at taking things apart today, at ‘unlearning’, than at proposing one alternate solution for you all.
John’s community, 60 years after Jesus, was certainly facing mortality, and the last people who were around during Jesus’ life were dying. If people were being troubled, or anxious, or afraid, then the metaphysics of life after death may have been part of their problem, as it is for us. However, there was, and is, more stuff going on John says Jesus said ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’. Did Jesus actually say those words out loud? I don’t think so. I don’t know. However, I think that the phrase captures something true about what Jesus revealed to us, not simply through his message or actions, but overall by his ‘person and work’.
One major competing movement to John’s was Gnosticism. Variations of the mystery religions of secret knowledge that made sense of existence like secret decoder ring were very popular, and sound very much like John, or more like John than like the other gospels in our bible. However, imagine what a Gnostic John would have made his Jesus say:
I know the way
I know the truth
I know the life
A Gnostic Jesus has a secret knowledge, or gnosis, and promises that you could learn it too, if you had the right teachers, who knew the ‘real’ message of Jesus. That can appeal to our culture now, with our fetish for expertise, with scientism not science, trusting MBAs and economists with running our markets, relieved that somebody is in charge who knows the secrets. That’s part of what Gretta Vosper and Barrie Wilson claim to know, the ‘real’ message of Jesus. Gretta’s Jesus was ‘radical’, and Barrie’s was ‘orthodox’.
Why do we run out to buy the latest book, and claim the new gurus? Is it because we can’t spell ‘charlatan’? No, people are troubled, anxious, and afraid. We don’t know. We know we don’t know. We hope that some expert does know. We trust that they’ll have what Jacuqes Ellul calls the technique or technology, the trick to manipulate the world, to deal with what makes us troubled, anxious, and afraid. Sometimes we can seek security in slogans, but only until another interprets them differently. Then we’re back to being troubled, anxious, and afraid.
The other major competing alternative movement to John’s was the synagogue Judaism that was being developed out of the Pharasaic movement at the same time. The Jerusalem temple had been destroyed in 70AD, and the Sadduccees and priests were no longer a factor. Development of oral torah, of mishnah and developing Talmudic wisdom, and the adoption of the rituals of kasrut or kosher for a post-temple time, focused on right practice. This Jewish Jesus would say:
I follow the way
I follow the truth
I follow the life
An orthodox rabbinic Jesus would be a role model, showing how to practice. We would just have to ask ‘what would Jesus do?’ And if we really followed as he had followed, we would live lives of circumcision. (I saw some of you guys wince and cringe at the prospect!) Jesus surely lived and died in the same communities from which post-temple Judaism was developed as a sibling and peer – and competitor and opposition – for John’s community. When John’s gospel was written, it was a viable option to just focus on religious practice. It still is.
So Jesus was just trying to be a good Jew – and now, so is Barrie Wilson. Absolutely, if orthodox practice makes sense to you, Judaism is a far better option than this United Church. Gretta Vosper’s attempt to vaguely ‘be good with or without god’ is less plausible – but also far less demanding. But if we focus on behavior, on right practice, acting like good people, we will focus on visible, justiciable moral actions, and we will risk moralism, usually getting around to sex and family on the right wing, and ‘political correctness’ on the left.
So I asked you again, what is it that makes you troubled, or anxious, or afraid? When do you worry that you’re not doing it right, and that everybody can tell? Are you wearing the right clothes, laughing at the right jokes, trying the right diets? What makes you troubled, or anxious, or afraid? When do you feel judged, weighed in the balance and found wanting, an imposter? That’s when we flock to certainties, habits, rituals, ‘the way we do things here’.
For me, the great ‘I am’ statements in John are about incarnation, the paradox of being both human and divine, mortal and everlasting, flesh and spirit, immanent and transcendent, in but not of the world. The great ‘I am’ defies and derides the excessive claims of knowing or behaving. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us. Did Jesus ever say any of the ‘I am’ statements? I doubt it. Do they tell the truth about what Jesus reveals to us? I believe it!
When John’s Jesus says ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ today, it’s the answer 42 instead of the alternatives of ‘I know the way’ or ‘I follow the way’ which were alternative versions of Jesus. When John’s Jesus says ‘No one comes to the Father except through me’, that’s instead of the alternatives of reaching the divine mystery through secret knowledge, or reducing the paradox of incarnation to behaviours alone. You won’t get it, the ‘I am’, trying to know or do the right thing. You’ll get it if you can accept the grace that affirms ‘I am’, and loves you and your worldly environment and connects it to ultimate things.
Have you seen Stephen Colbert’s bestseller: I Am America (and you can too)? That concept captures some of the grace and humour of what I was trying to provoke and invite today. Colbert presents a persona of a well-intentioned, poorly informed, high status idiot – satirizing the culture and politics around him. It’s only funny if you can imagine something beyond him. Of course, I don’t get it – but I recognize the shape of his ideas.
John’s gospel presents Martha and Thomas as foils to Jesus, getting it wrong so John’s Jesus can restate it for them. It’s ironic if we adopt Martha’s error in John 11, or Thomas’ confusion in John 14, as the faith we teach to our children. At its best, this is harmless comforting platitudes to be intoned at funerals. At its worst, it is exclusive, coercive sectarian threats of hell and promises of heaven. It justifies the accusation that our movement is bigoted and justifies instrumental technological use and abuse of the environment, pending a spiritual heaven.
What makes your hearts troubled, anxious, and afraid? ‘I know the way’ and ‘I follow the way’ just makes it worse. ‘I am the way’ promises something far less and far more. Not just right ideas and idealism, nor only right actions and good habits. The answer, of course, is still 42.
What word did God have for your hearts this time?
May you have ears to hear. Amen.
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