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The God Who Wills Us to Live Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 1, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 7:10-17 John 4:43-54
The writer of the Gospel of John was not terribly taken with the miraculous. Whereas almost half of Mark’s gospel has to do with Jesus’ miracles, John includes only seven. Moreover the way John treats the seven he does include leads us to a very different understanding of the meaning of miracles in Jesus’ ministry and of the presence of Christ to our faith. According to Raymond Brown, the other gospels pay attention to the “marvelous aspect of the miracles and the enthusiasm they produce—the crowd pressing around Jesus with their sick and pleading for help; the awe at the sight of the miracle; the excited reports of what has been done, passing from town to town.” When we get to John, it as though all the color has been drained from the stories. The events are “told with discretion and detailed descriptions of the marvelous are avoided.” That could be said of the story before us today, a story about the second of Jesus’ signs, a story that is completely absent from the church’s designated readings for Sunday morning. Jesus speaks; the man believes; the child lives. Matthew and Luke give us similar accounts but with much more detail and a greater sense of drama. Yet even in stark relief, the miracle is miraculous enough to raise the expectations of any here who may presently be praying for the same. Perhaps it is a son or a daughter, a sister or a mother, a brother or uncle or father or friend who is at the point of death--if not literally at the point of death, then a friend or family member whose spirit or spark or spunk has run out. You have come this morning from a bedside, a kitchen table, a hospital room, a therapist’s office because you are powerless to create life where there is only darkness or death; and you have come because you want to believe Jesus just might be more present here than he has been in your heart or home of late. To put it bluntly, you have come to beg him for help even though you are not convinced your prayer will affect the natural course of an illness or a disease or a depression. You have come to beg Jesus to go from this place to the place where you do your living and your dying that he might give life to the one your love has failed to help. In the story before us, Jesus responds to such a plea--specifically to the entreaties of the royal official whose son lay ill in Capernaum--with what sounds like distain: “Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe.” Lost in translation is the fact that the “you” in Jesus’ response is plural: “Unless you people see signs and wonders….” His ire is directed toward the Galileans who had welcomed him to their territory only because they had been in Jerusalem during the Passover festival and had seen his signs. I also take Jesus’ words to be a disclaimer put before that ancient crowd and this post-modern congregation, an attempt to anticipate the misunderstanding that is going to occur in response to his second sign. Likewise human misunderstanding had to be in the mind of John as he sat down to write his gospel. Ought he to leave Jesus’ miracles out of the gospel completely to guard against our later misinterpretation of their meaning? But if he were to omit the miracles, his readers would miss the God in Christ who was made known in turning water to wine, calling a child from death to life, healing a lame man on the Sabbath, feeding five thousand, walking at night on the water, making a blind man to see and raising a dead man to life. Something of who God is toward us would be missed if we did not have these stories. Yet something of God’s presence with us is also misunderstood because of these stories. In an effort to counter the confounding nature of the miraculous, says Raymond Brown, John coins two unremarkable words. Jesus speaks of miracles in this gospel as works. John has in mind the works of God begun in the beginning by God’s Word. He is saying, “When you witness the works of Jesus, see in those works the work of God who created out of nothing and is still making all things new.” But more than that, behold God with us in the breath returned to lifeless clay, the sight restored with mud, the palsied limbs made strong, the multitude fed from the earth, the waters of chaos stilled, the curse of the garden lifted for a moment: “Whatever the Father does,” Jesus says in words which follows this work and the work of healing on the Sabbath, “the Son does likewise.” The import of Jesus’ works, according to John, had nothing to do with a wonder worker prolonging finite human existence. Rather the work of Jesus was a foretaste of the gift of eternal life, of life lived in relation to the Word that was in the beginning and was with God and was God. [“In the beginning was the note,” wrote Leonard Bernstein, “and the note was with God, and whosoever can reach for that note, reach high, and bring it back to us on earth.”] The second word used by John and by his characters for what the other gospel writers call miracles is sign. Technically defined, signs point to something beyond themselves while still participating in the reality of that to which they point. The signs in John’s gospel pointed people to eternal life—life with God--and also participated in the reality of God’s presence here and now. John’s characters are led by Jesus’ signs to life… eternal life…which is another name for God. From God’s perspective, then, the miracles were the continuing work of creation while, from a human point of view, God’s presence was both palpable and promised in the signs Jesus performed. Either way, God and God’s healing power had come near. “Fine,” you say still waiting for a word with the power to bring life out of death here and now. “I understand the subtleties. Nevertheless, give me a sign! Heal my child, cure my best friend, strengthen my failing father, restore the sight of my mother.” John’s careful choice of words has not kept us from expecting Jesus to be a miracle worker nor has it silenced our longing for God to act counter to the laws of nature. I think this is because we cannot help ourselves in two senses: we are helpless before the ravages of death and having exhausted all other resources, our only hope is now him who is the help of the helpless. So the nobleman refuses to be deterred by Jesus’ disclaimer. “Sir,” he says “come down before my boy dies.” He is pleading as we plead except with the advantage, we think, of Jesus’ real presence. “Go; your son will live,” Jesus says, doing the work of his father with a word, the work of the God who wills us to live. The nobleman believes and turns toward home. The child lives, his life, for John, being not a miracle but “a sign of eternal life that Jesus will give after the resurrection.” But did the nobleman have the advantage in getting Jesus’ help, Jesus being really present? John thinks otherwise. That is why, in this gospel, Jesus’ works come to an end at the beginning of his passion and death. After the resurrection, says John, there is no need for these signs because Christ’s living presence is given to the community of faith by another sign. The advantage, he implies, goes to those who know the presence of the risen Christ. So as the miracles were signs of God’s presence in the life of the earthly Jesus, says Brown, the sacraments are “to be understood as the signs of the presence of Christ in the church.” “What is affirmed [at the font and around the table],” says Reformed theological Michael Welker, “is a sacramental presence in which God uses the realities of this world to convey the realities of the new creation: bread for this life becomes the bread of eternal life.” Christ’s risen presence is met as at this table in bread broken and a cup shared. Here we taste life reconciled with God and one another. It is as much a miracle as the healing of the nobleman’s son! You who have come this morning from a bedside, a kitchen table, a hospital room, a therapist’s office because you are powerless to call forth life where there is only death; you who have come because you want to believe Jesus just might be more present here than he has been in your heart or home of late, so to his table come all ye who labor and are heavy laden because he is here, alive, among us. “Take. Eat. My body,” he says, “for you.” The supper he has prepared is a sign that as together we break bread, we are made one in him and he made one with us, a sign of the gift of eternal life. Do not let your wish for the miraculous obscure the life given us as we are given to one another; do not forget his real presence accompanying you as you turn toward home in love. I do not often tell stories from out of my own life. But on this Sunday when we elect new officers in the hope that they will lead us to follow the living Lord who alone can heal what is broken within us and between us, I am reminded of a young woman many years ago who was in the end days of living with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Her conservative Christian friends in the community had encouraged her to pray for a miracle and, when a miracle was not forthcoming, had suggested her faith might be the problem. I assure you, it was not! They also managed to alienate her from the faith of her church, though not her people. As death drew near, she sent word to the church that she wanted to be anointed with oil, a request my colleague brought to the session. Though anointing with oil was not a sacrament in the Presbyterian Church, he explained that it was an act of the early church warranted by Scripture and invited the session to be present. Almost every elder took the day off work to join the circle that filled her living room. I imagine these many years hence that the Scripture reading was from James: “Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up.” Then with the same reservations John had, reservations heightened by the theological orientation of her friends, my colleague said, “Greylin, you understand that this is not a miracle…that I am not a miracle-worker…that the oil I am about to put on your head will not heal you of this disease.” She blinked once which meant, “Yes.” Then he made the sign of the cross with oil borrowed from the Episcopalians and we prayed. When through our tears we each opened our eyes, we watched her mouth the words, “I am healed.” The miracle, we all understood by her witness, was the miracle of reconciliation that is a foretaste of eternal life. It is for that miracle I pray in the hours and days and weeks before us, trusting that the God who in Christ invites us to this table has already answered our prayers. Amen. |