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To Follow the Living Lord Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis April 13, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Jeremiah 23:23-32 John 6:35-50; 60-71
Because of what exactly did many of his disciples turn back and no longer follow him? At first glance it would seem that the many were offended by Jesus’ command to “eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood” if they wanted to have life in him. Controversy already had begun to swirl around the Lord’s Supper when the last editor of this gospel carefully inserted Jesus’ words about the supper right before the report that many disciples had turned back from following him. It is what the church continually does in order to separate the sheep from the goats. We quarrel over the issue at hand using Scripture to back up our foregone conclusion; then the righteous turn back who can no longer bear to be associated with the unrighteous. All the while Jesus waits to see if any who remain will still want to follow him after the debate subsides and the dust settles. But according to John no single issue had forced the many disciples to turn back. Rather the disciples that no longer followed him were offended at Jesus himself, at his claim to have come down from heaven to do God’s will. “This teaching is difficult,” they say. “Who can accept it?” In other words, Jesus’ teaching required a bit of critical thought on their part and involved a wrestling with the complexity of God’s will. Already certain in their own minds of God’s will, they were also absolutely certain Jesus was speaking and acting against God’s will. Absolutism, wrote theologian Paul Lehmann, “pays a very heavy price for its claims. The price is abstraction…” asserted over and against the incarnation. If God is in Christ, the many reasoned, if God’s will is being made known in him, then God’s will contradicts religion, contradicts our human certainties about the way it works between human beings and God. So each disciple that had been gathered by God to Jesus had to decide with the feet: either God was in Christ and to follow him was life; or Jesus was a liar and to follow him would be blasphemy. The latter claim seemed, to many disciples…in fact to the majority of disciples, the only plausible truth given both tradition and scripture. For how could the son of Joseph, whose father and mother they knew, countermand the will of God that, at Sinai, had been set in stone? How could he be the bread of heaven--be life-giving bread--while the manna their ancestors ate in the wilderness lead only to death? “How can the church have continuity,” asks theologian Ernst Kasemann, “if it gives [Jesus] a free hand? All the heretics put together cause less trouble on the earth than he does when, instead of remaining an icon, he comes to life and delivers us over to the fire that he came to light.” According to every thing the majority of disciples believed in, according to the God of whom their reading of Scripture made them certain, God could not be in Christ and be God. Because of this many of the disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. What, then, of those who stayed? “Do you also wish to go away?” Jesus asks as only love can ask, granting the beloved the absolute freedom to walk. “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life,” says Peter. Yet what sort of life is eternal life and what has it to do with mortal life? What is the life they would be given in him between birth and death? In the first place they would be given a life of faith rather than a life of certainty, certainty rather than doubt being the opposite of faith. To follow the living Lord is to let go of our presumed knowledge of God and God’s will that we have come to on our own. It is to begin as newborns with the God who comes to us in Jesus Christ. Central for John, not only in this story but throughout his gospel, is the new life we are given in Jesus, a life characterized by the freedom of God’s Spirit to go where God pleases and choose whom God wills. Jesus tells Nicodemus that God’s Spirit acts in freedom rather than in conformity to the precepts of religious experts like Nicodemus; tells him that he must be born of water and the Spirit if he is to have life. Likewise he tells the Samaritan woman at the well that no longer will people worship God on the mountain of tradition or at the temple in Jerusalem but “God is spirit and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.” Soon he will he declare that his true disciples are those who know the truth that sets them free. I am the truth, Jesus says in the face of death, the truth that sets you free. Such freedom is a foretaste of eternal life. So in the first place, those who did not wish to go away now turned to follow the living Lord whose truth set them free from the burden of being certain. But already in John’s fifth chapter the religious authorities are enraged. In response Jesus says to them, “Indeed, just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whomever he wishes.” This is the second thing about following a living Lord: the few who do not turn back necessarily will begin to keep the company Jesus wishes to keep. By and large in his lifetime, Jesus wished to give life to those condemned by the law and keep company with sinners. By and large I believe he wishes the same today. Turn back the page and we read that Jesus gives life to the son of a royal official, a gentile. On the Sabbath he heals a man who had been ill [read: excluded from the community] for thirty-eight years. Turn the page ahead and we read how he saved the woman caught in adultery from the stoning the Scriptures, to this day, say she deserved. As Scottish theologian and preacher John Baillie put it, “God makes my knowledge of [God] pass through my brother’s [my sister’s] need. It means…that only when I am in fellowship with [the many others on whom God in Christ has chosen to bestow life] does the knowledge of God come to me….” In other words, the majority of disciples who turned back and no longer followed him chose not to live in relation to the living God who has chosen to be known in the messy particularity of a diverse and sinful community. “Everyone who comes to me,” Jesus said to the many disciples who turned back, “I will never drive away….” Jesus says this because he believes those who have come to him have been sent to him by God. Christ’s church would do well to believe the same! Again writes Lehmann in this regard, “Our being at all, our being what we are, is our being in this community….It does not mean that there are no diversities in the fellowship. But it does mean that diversities…cannot be preferentially used to disrupt and destroy the fellowship. They are diversities designed to express the reality and the maturity of the fellowship. We are what we are, our humanity stands or falls by the ‘being what they are’ of all the members of the body in their [relationship to Jesus]. Always, as we all, on the same level, have received from the head our life, we are the church.” As I thought this week about the time in Jesus’ life when many disciples turned back and a few were left, I could not get out of my mind the departure of our near at hand brothers and sisters in Oreland Presbyterian Church from the part of the Body of Christ that is the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. Our being at all is our being in communion with them. Their contradiction to the conclusions I cannot help but draw on much that faces the church today is a necessary if harsh grace to me from God, a grace that keeps me uneasy with my own certainties. They are as much the company that Christ keeps as I am and you are. Sadly for them and for us, they cannot return this belief. Certainty dictates they must no longer go about with the likes of us; certainty trumps the faith that trusts in God’s mercy toward miserable and diverse sinners such as we are. Because of this, many of his disciples turned back. But for those who remained, the company Jesus kept would be a foretaste of eternal life. Then in the third place those who follow the living Lord are returned to Scripture and tradition as those who interpret both in light of the Word made flesh in Jesus Christ. The many disciples who turned back cited, as they turned, the words of Scripture over against the living Word of God in Jesus Christ. Of them just the day before Jesus had said “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” Scripture bears witness to the one Word of God who became flesh in the fullness of time: Scripture becomes God’s Word as it testifies to Jesus Christ. “But,” says Karl Barth (speaking a small word that carries an enormous consequence), “the Bible as such is not the one Word of God…. [Nor is]…the Church and its doctrine, instruction, worship and whole existence…the same as the one Word of God.” Jesus Christ alone, as the one Word of God, establishes the limits of “all other words, lights, revelations, prophecies…whether of the Bible, the Church or the world….” He stands no less over and against the church than he stands over and against every other thing we love more than we love God. The one Word of God, says John, is love: the love who gave the only Son in order that we may have life; the love who laid down his life for his friends. I know, says Jesus to the searchers of the scriptures who denied him, you do not have the love of God in you. For God’s love is the only light by which we may discern in the words of Scripture the Word God speaks to us today. When we receive word of that love through Scripture and Christ’s church, we have been given a foretaste of eternal life. To follow the living Lord, my friends, is to do business with the God who will not be bound by human certainties concerning God’s activity in the world, with the God who even now is gathering a diverse and sinful crowd to Christ’s side, with the God who is working still to make old things new. If we remain and do not turn back, Jesus puts the same question to us and especially to the elders and deacons of this church today that he put to the disciples long ago: Do you also wish to go away? Pray that like Simon Peter we do not turn back but are turned by God’s grace to follow him who alone has the words of eternal life. Thanks be to God! |