|
And in Jesus Christ, his Only Son, Our Lord
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis October 9, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 32:24-30 John 4:1-12
"I believe in God, I think," said a young woman to me in relation to her wedding service not long ago, "but I don't know what to do with Jesus. So could we, like, leave Jesus out of it?" Before this most central article of the creed, we are Jacobs one and all, wrestling in the night with a stranger whose name we do not know, deceitful recipients of our Father's blind faith and misplaced blessing, weary with ourselves and our ill-gotten gain in a foreign land, turned toward home and trembling before our well-deserved deaths, restless and longing to believe in the God of Abraham and Isaac, the God who once spoke a disembodied promise to do us good, the God who may turn out to be our God too. Yet now a stranger has come to us unasked, has taken hold of us. "Let me go for the day is breaking," he says to us most night, but for some lame reason we are unwilling to let him go. "A believer," says Robert Jenson, "is one who has heard something of the gospel, something destiny-clueing about Jesus, and cannot any longer get away from what he has heard." We cannot get away from what we have heard, but oh do we struggle with the One whose Word was made flesh! What is it about Jesus that is so problematic, so annoying to the postmodern mind? Some would say it is not Jesus so much as all the things the church has tried to say about him, words that make our minds run the other way: God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father. Throw in God's only Son, conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary from the creed before us and the church has lost the part of a reasonable public whose starting point for truth is proof. The incarnation is inconceivable. The resurrection is ridiculous. Revelation which does not spring from our own bright ideas must be ruled out of order. We likely would have sided with Arius back in the days when the church fathers were figuring out what to do with Jesus. The doctrine of the Trinity was on the table--we rehearsed these details last Trinity Sunday. With Athanasius, you remember, Jesus could not be left out of the Godhead and salvation still assured. Likewise if God did not in Jesus assume our whole humanity-take everything upon him-then the separation between God and the creature remained. In Jesus, said Athanasius, we either had to do with God or with nothing much at all. According to Arius, on the other hand, we could believe Jesus to have been an extraordinary, even a one-of-a-kind human being. However Arius drew the line when it came to asserting Jesus' substantive kinship with God. "We know," he wrote, "there is one God, alone begotten, alone eternal, alone without beginning, alone true, along immortal." I believe in God, said Arius in effect, but for God to be God, we have to leave Jesus out of it. The irony, of course, is that it is Arius' notion of God which is entirely conceivable to the human mind. When pushed to talk about the God we think we believe in, leaving Jesus out of it, we can hold in our heads a kind of abstract notion of the Absolute. We can perhaps affirm "that God is" even though we are relegated to the silence of our minds to make up "who God is". At the least we may talk about a Principle, capital P, imprinted in the universe …or a Cosmic Unity underlying creation…or an Intelligence ordering all things. As regards "spirituality", we may tap in to a sort of free-floating Spirit connecting our inner being to some vaguely interested outer space…or we may hear the voice of God in the silence of our own souls…or we may find God lurking in the coincidences of our own experience. In any case, we can hold to our ideas about God…as long as we can leave Jesus out of it. And therein lies what is really problematic with Jesus! There are so many other gods we can easily hold in our heads--gods that make so much more sense, gods that fit our higher reason--if we leave Jesus out of it. We honestly do not know what to do with Jesus. We are not the first. Enter the woman at the well. Left to her own devices, the Samaritan woman most likely was not known for her theological acumen. In fact the Samaritans as a whole, though they may have gained a reputation for compassion on the road to Jericho, could not be said to be very clear about the One whom they thus served in stopping by the way. There are those who would contend the conversation reported in John's gospel between Jesus and this thirsty woman has nothing to do with her colorful sex life or her limited understanding of metaphor. Rather they would say the story has to do with her people's propensity for whoring after other gods. "Go, call your husband, and come here," Jesus commands. "I have no husband," the woman replies. "You are right in saying, 'I have no husband,'" says Jesus, "for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband; this you said truly." The point was not with whom she slept, but to whom she prayed. The Samaritans, you remember, were syncretists. They took their cues, theologically, from the culture around them rather than from the sovereignty of the One who had, in the wilderness, been revealed to them. Hence there was Succoth-benoth, probably known through the Mesopotamian settlers and roughly translated to be the "daughter of the star of justice and right,"; there was Nergal, the god of Kutu, deity of the underworld; there was Ashima, most likely worshipped as a goddess, the secondary wife of Yahu; and finally Adrammelech and Anammelech, two of the four great nature gods, who capriciously played with human lives: all of them gods to whom the Samaritans prayed. Then, added to these five, "they also feared the Lord." "You are right in saying, 'I have no husband,'" said Jesus, "for you have had five husbands (Succoth-benoth, Nergal, Ashima, Adrammelech, and Anammelech), and he whom you now have (the God of Israel) is not your husband; this you truly say." Mesopotamian cults, astrological configurations, eternally returning cycles of nature, such was the stuff from which the Samaritan gods were fashioned: all of them impersonal gods, detached deities at whose merciless whims the Samaritans bowed down. Even when the King of Assyria asked for a theologian to come and straighten them out, it did no good: "Every nation still made gods of its own, and put them in the shrines of the high places which the Samaritans had made….So they feared the Lord but also served their own gods….To this day their children and their children's children continue to do as their ancestors did," records the second book of Kings, ominously I might add. They did, that is, until centuries and centuries later, when one of their company--and a woman at that--stood before Him in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, even Jesus Christ. Clearly, she did not know what to do with Jesus; "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" He asked from her what she could not, of herself, give to him. The well from which she drew, the well of her ancestors, could keep a body going day by day. But a saving grace, a redemptive power, a hope against hope? None of these gods could thus sustain her. Still if she could just leave Jesus out of it, she likely could live the rest of her life skimming the surface of life's purpose and meaning…living off her godly abstractions…praying to Adrammelech or Anammelech that the well not go dry…turning to a new god when she hit rock bottom. What we know in the first place is that having to do with Jesus is having to do business with our own emptiness, with our unquenchable thirst for a truth which lasts, with our weariness in whoring after the gods who are powerless to save. Jacobs one and all! He reveals to us our deepest need even as he thrusts us assuredly on the grace of the Living God. But what we know in the second place is that having to do with Jesus is having to quit all other gods--another reason we would just like to leave Jesus out of it. Jesus must relieve this woman of her other gods before she can know him as the Christ, the revelation of the Living God. Hence this question from out of the blue concerning her husbands--her ba'als-- concerning those to whom she has turned to uphold her life thus far. "They are no ba'als," says Jesus. "Sir," says the woman, "I see that you are a prophet," referring not to the fact that he knew her sordid personal history but as if to say, "You seem to have become my critic." Could we just leave Jesus out of it? We may not be syncretists, but we are a people who live in a time that would critique the Christ by way of the culture's idols long before we would judge the general culture by way of Jesus Christ. Ask yourself what the lens is through which you read the Sunday Inquirer or New York Times…what the filter is through which you hear a Sunday sermon: patriotism, pacifism, feminism, capitalism, liberalism, conservatism? We listen for a Christ who confirms our previously held ideals (Jesus as revolutionary, as patriot, as feminist, as Marxist, as social conservative, as thoroughgoing liberal) and we would rather leave this critic, who questions the perspectives, who challenges the little gods we hold most dear, we would rather leave him out of it. But if he is, as Peter confessed, the Christ of God, then this story reveals to us a God whose claim is outrageously clear, whose identity is scandalously particular, whose grace and mercy are more powerful than we can bear to believe. For in him the abstractions are over; in him the distance is ended; in him all general ideas about a god are shown to the door; in him the God for whom we have searched in all the wrong places has sought us out at our variously dry wells or in the middle of any given night and has claimed us, by grace, to be God's own. To this woman's vague affirmation of faith in a savior on the way, there stands God's only Son, our Lord in the flesh saying, "I who speak to you am that One." "What could possibly be meant," asked the Scottish preacher and theologian John Baillie, "by saying that any reality of an impersonal kind could exercise over me such [a claim] as that? …I have never been able to see how any being that is not a person could possess a moral and spiritual claim over me. That is why, as Brunner says, 'it is so much more comfortable to have a pantheistic philosophy than to believe in [the] Lord God…." So much easier just to leave Jesus out of it than to believe on the only One in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, the God who could not be God without us because the name of the One with whom we wrestle until dawn is love. As the light breaks into our darkness, then, what these little stories are about is the God whose one and only name is Love. In Jesus Christ we know and are known by a God who has loved us to the end. I dare you to hang on to some Cosmic Principle when your wife is dying…or to be comforted by some Universal Intelligence in the depths of your own despair…or to be claimed for a purposeful life by an Ideal constructed in your head. We were made, you and I, to live in personal relationship, day by day, to the One who made us and redeems us and sustains us. How in the world do I know that? The only possible clue I have is Jesus. In him God's love, the love revealed in his life, death and resurrection, has come to us. So like the woman at the well, like Jacob at Peniel, like John Baillie who, himself had "no choice," he said, "but to set my feet upon the pilgrim's way," the only thing I know to do with Jesus is take off for the center of town, shouting Sunday after Sunday to this gathered crowd, "Come see him for your self," that you might say one day, "It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world." Who do you say that he is? May Peter's answer, by his grace, become our own, "The Christ of God!" Thanks be to God. Amen. |