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John's Jesus Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 2, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 32:22-31 John 2:23-3:21
Living Water, Bread of Life, Vine, the Good Shepherd, Light of the world. Throughout his gospel, John casts about for words to speak of God even though words cannot contain the mystery that is God’s Word made flesh. He tells us stories we have never heard before: the woman at the well, Nicodemus by night, the wedding at Cana, the man crippled at the Pool of Bethesda, the woman caught in adultery, Lazarus raised, and a politician asking in words which have echoed down the centuries, "What is truth?" Then there are signs, as John calls them, deftly woven into the fabric of his narrative, causing some to believe and others to plot Jesus’ death; and discourses as densely theological as are Jesus’ disputes with various adversaries in which all involved, including the disciples, are left in the dark. Dark and light, in fact, predominate in this gospel and in the story at hand. You could argue that though Nicodemus came to John’s Jesus “by night” and so in the dark, he was coming to him in the hour that the Pharisees, the teachers of Israel, did their best thinking. It was rabbinic custom to stay up late into the night and study the law. Having heard of Jesus’ mighty acts, Nicodemus had already determined that Jesus was a teacher from whom he could learn something. Jesus could be of use to him in his religious pilgrimage. “Rabbi,” says Nicodemus, addressing Jesus as a colleague, “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God.” Mostly that is how we begin with John’s Jesus too, coming to him as a teacher from whom we can learn something useful: a new interpretation of the rules we are to follow in order to be good, a clue to life’s meaning and purpose, a spiritual practice that will draw us closer to God. Yet to tell the truth, mostly we come to him to seek confirmation, as we say at the end of Maundy Thursday, for the darkness we have preferred to his light. In other words, we come to him with little expectation of being changed. “But Jesus on his part,” writes John in a sentence that dismisses any claim on ours to possess God’s truth “Jesus would not entrust himself to them for he himself knew what was in everyone.” He knew and knows the darkness in which we dwell, the darkness we mistake for light, the darkness we peddle to the world in his name, the darkness we freely choose. In fact the first word John’s Jesus has for Nicodemus says as much: “No one can see…” he says. It is pitch dark, in other words, if you seek truth or goodness or God without him. This is a hard pill to swallow in our pluralistic, whatever works for you world. The Light that has come into the world, says Jesus, has come from outside the world, from above. It shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. It is by this light that we may glimpse our humanity and behold God’s majesty in the same person. John’s Jesus is that person and that light. In him the darkness is, for one bright shining moment, dispelled, says John, and we see everything in the light of God’s love. What we see, according to John, are those made invisible by our darkness: the woman at the well or the one caught in adultery, the hungry crowds, the lepers kept at a distance from proper religious society, the sick whom none will carry into healing waters, the dead bound by their grave clothes. In chapter after chapter of this gospel, Jesus invites us to see as God sees…and to be changed…to be delivered from the darkness we have chosen…for the sake of a whole new life. It would be as if, Jesus said to Nicodemus, we had been born again from above. “How?” asks Nicodemus. The question is not a question of truth but of technique. “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” Tell me, practically, what I must do to be born from above. It is what we want from the church, the preacher, the teacher in his stead: tell me how to live…give me three things that will get me through the week…talk to us plainly about the good and the evil so that I can assure myself of my goodness. And as though Jesus really meant to answer Nicodemus literally but just forgot, religion rushes in to tell us exactly how to be born again: believe this, do that, behave just so. The church, like Nicodemus, has come to Jesus to adjudicate the finer points of the law in order that she might condemn the world in his name and save her own. Yet Nicodemus’ question begs our real question, the question not of our living but of our dying. Jesus knows what is in everyone, says John, and so answers the question Nicodemus does not ask, the question we are too fearful to ask, the question of our life with God not now but at the hour of our death. Here the literal language of Nicodemus (“Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”) misses the mystery of God entering speech, of God’s Word-become-flesh standing before him in the dark. Jesus answers Nicodemus’ question with words that place the known up against the mystery, leaving our minds teased, once again, by the truth only a metaphor can tell. Suddenly we are Jacob wresting until dawn with a stranger who will neither bless us nor tell us his name. Water, flesh, wind, we hear Jesus say in response. These are the things of the world we know in the way human beings know things. But if we were to find ourselves accompanied by God in the world—if we were to see as only One can see who has seen God—then it would be as though we had opened our eyes for the first time and our ears and our minds and our hearts to inhabit the world God so loved: it would be as though we had been born anew. The point is that with John’s Jesus we do find ourselves with God in the world! And while he speaks words whose plain meaning we grasp, in his flesh those same words grasp us and turn us toward the mystery of God with us. Were we not only to listen but to follow, Jesus says, the Spirit would take us where it willed…and we would, no doubt, be changed! But like Nicodemus we are wed to the questions that begin with “how” lest things get out of our control: “How can these things be?” Nicodemus asks…“be true?” we add smartly. “Are you a teacher of Israel,” he says to Nicodemus, “and yet you do not understand these things?” I take this to mean that the law and the prophets, the scriptures Nicodemus knew inside out, reveal the same truth made known in the incarnation. What more can God say? Apparently, according to John, there is nothing more to say, for suddenly the conversation comes to an end. Our babbling [to translate precisely from the Greek] falls silent. Here in the dark we may only listen with Nicodemus until, by God’s gracious initiative, the light should dawn in our hearts. God loved the world in this way, John’s Jesus goes on to say: God gave the only Son—take your son, your only son, your beloved, Nicodemus hears remembering Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac with no substitute in sight--that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Can you trust him, here, in the dark? Confessed Luther to his flock in 1526, “But as I believe God and be born anew, I close my eyes and grope not and let the soul’s being wholly perish and exclaim, Ah, God, in thy hand standeth my soul. Thou hast preserved it in my life, and I have never known where Thou hast set it, therefore will I likewise not know what Thou wilt do with it now and henceforth, of this alone am I sure, it standeth in thy hand. Thou wilt surely help it.” But as I believe God and be born anew, I close my eyes: believing in the dark. Close your eyes, grope not and let your soul’s being wholly perish. It is precisely what we cannot do. We cannot, of ourselves, put our lives and our death in God’s hand and believe. “And so not a Christian do I see,” Luther concludes. “Nor can I myself say, ‘This hour or in that place shall I become a Christian. In short, ‘tis not within sight or time or place, ‘tis beyond grasp or feeling….Yea, ‘tis nought if thou quiz thy five senses thereon or take counsel with thy reason and wisdom. But thou must set aside sense and reason and consider ‘tis somewhat other that maketh a Christian, whereof thou hearest no more than a breath and rustle. And thou hearest the voice, follow it and have faith in it, so shalt thou be born anew.” The last time Nicodemus appears in John’s gospel, he is at the foot of the cross. “Nicodemus,” John reminds us, “who had first come to Jesus by night,” now comes to Jesus before night had fallen on the Jewish Day of Preparation. John says nothing of his sense or reason or belief; only that he and Joseph of Arimathea, two fearful disciples under cover, bury Jesus’ body. On the second level of the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence (I have mentioned this before), the sight of Michelangelo’s Pieta moved me to set aside sense and reason as I beheld the perfectly chiseled figure of Nicodemus in old age holding the dead body of Christ. His face is the face of Michelangelo, the Pieta the artist’s gravestone. I stand and stare at the eyes of an old man whose death is not far off, the eyes of a man who dwells now in the valley of the shadow. And yet I look again and see in these eyes only trust as he holds by the strength of his hand in life, the one in whose hand his own soul will be kept from falling in death. Michelangelo is reported to have said from his deathbed, “I regret that I have not done enough for the salvation of my soul and that I am dying just as I am beginning to learn….” Learn, says John’ s Jesus, only this: that God so loved the world, that God loved the world in this way, that whosoever trusts himself, trusts herself to that love will not perish without God but wake to God who is eternal life. But as I believe God and be born anew, I close my eyes and grope not and let the soul’s being wholly perish and exclaim, Ah, God, in thy hand standeth my soul. Thanks be to God. Amen. |