Even When it is Night
John 14.1-14
A sermon preached by Dave Shull
as the second in a three-part series, Trusting
God
University Congregational United
One
of the biggest reasons it’s hard to trust God is because there’s so much
suffering in our world. Bad things happen.
And because a part of us believes that a loving, powerful God should
surround us with some kind of force-field that protects us from suffering, the
fact that we do suffer means it’s hard to trust God.
For
us to trust God, we believe God has to be a God of power. A God of power could end our personal
suffering, and end the wars and famines and diseases and pollution that ravage
our world. That’s what it means to have
power. Powerful people, powerful
institutions, powerful nations get things done.
They make things happen. They
make us feel safe.
And
yet how do Christians talk about a God of power when Jesus ended up on the cross? How do Christians talk about a God of power
when Jesus didn’t spend his time doing what powerful people should do? He didn’t network with other powerful people,
or strategize about building his political base, or have three-martini lunches
with the movers and shakers in
I’d
like to explore these questions using the text, ‘I myself am the Way – I am
Truth, and I am Life. No one comes to
Abba God but through me’ (John 14.6).
The way this text has traditionally been interpreted buys into our
culture’s understanding of power. A
different way of interpreting it invites us to imagine how power is present in
the God who was crucified. This alternative
reading invites us to imagine how we can trust God even in our times of
suffering, how we can trust God even when it is night.
In
John’s Gospel, Jesus says, ‘I myself am the Way – I am Truth, and I am
Life. No one comes to Abba God but
through me’ (John 14.6).
For
the past 2000 years, Christians have used passages like this to exert power
over others. We’ve used them to frighten
people into believing. We’ve used them
to justify cruelty toward non-Christians.
We have heard these words of Jesus, and their absoluteness gives us
permission, in his name, to make equally absolute pronouncements about what is
and what is not God’s will.
Three
items from the news this week reflect ways Christians have sought to exert
power by making absolute pronouncements about God’s will.
On
Tuesday, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was named Pope
Benedict XVI. I pray God’s Spirit will
lead Pope Benedict to imagine afresh how to be faithful to the God who looks at
all Her children and names them, Chosen and marked by my love, pride of my
life (Mark 1.11, The Message translation). I pray this knowing that for the past 25
years, Pope Benedict has used his power to silence free-thinking Catholic
scholars and promote sexual ethics that deny basic human rights to women and
sexual minorities and that deprive AIDS prevention efforts from promoting
condom use as a means of saving lives.
On
Wednesday, I learned that two Christian organizations had christened today Justice
Sunday. These organizations are
calling on Christians across the country to pressure our senators to support
judges whose appointments the Democrats have threatened to filibuster. The heads of these organizations believe too
many judges are making decisions that, in their words, ‘insult
Christians’. As an example, the Rev.
James Dobson cites Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy sided with a recent majority ruling
that said executing people who committed their crimes as juveniles is
unconstitutional. Rev. Dobson is
absolutely certain that sparing such people from execution insults Christians –
and insults God.
And
on Friday, word came out that Pastor Ken Hutcherson
of the
These
three news items illustrate ways Christians are trying to make absolute
pronouncements about God’s will. They
illustrate ways Christians are unquestioningly cultivating and unquestioningly
using power as our culture exercises power.
But
there’s another way to understand this morning’s Gospel reading. And it has nothing to do with Jesus making an
absolute pronouncement about being the only way to God. Most scholars think the community that wrote
John’s Gospel was made up of Jews who had been expelled from the synagogue
because they believed Jesus was the Messiah.
Jesus Christ had shown this community of Jews a God they had never known
before. In Jesus, John’s community met
the God Jesus called ‘Abba’ – Daddy.
Perhaps for the first time, this community experienced God as an
intimate, merciful being. For them,
Jesus was the Way, the Truth, and the Life, that made
real the face of God Jesus knew as Abba.
Notice what this passage doesn’t
say. Jesus doesn’t say, ‘No one
comes to God but through me.’
That would be the kind of absolute pronouncement that has led Christians
to use this text as a weapon of power.
Jesus doesn’t say, ‘No one comes to God but by me.’ Instead, he says, ‘No one comes to Abba God’
– or, in the traditional translation, ‘No one comes to the Father’ –
‘but through me’. Jesus isn’t saying he
is the only way to God. Instead, John’s
community is saying, We never knew this Abba God before, but now we have
come to know Abba through Jesus! ‘I
am the Way, I am Truth, and I am Life, no one comes to Abba God but through me’
is no longer an absolute pronouncement of religious exclusion. Instead, it is a song of praise by an early
community of Jews whose life had been radically changed by Jesus giving them a
relationship with Abba. And it is an
evangelical call! Knowing this face of
God has transformed John’s community.
And they invite others who want to know this intimate God to join them
in following the one who is for them Way, Truth, and Life. (This understanding of John 14.1-14 is based
on the writings of Gail O’Day, “The Gospel of John,” The
New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, Abingdon Press, pp. 743-45).
This
alternative understanding of our Gospel reading invites us to see God’s
relationship to power in a totally different way than the traditional reading
does. No longer used as a powerful
threat of eternal damnation for all who do not see Jesus as the Messiah, this
text invites people to follow Jesus as the way to come into relationship with
this intimate Abba God. It’s an
invitation.
But
there’s a catch. If we choose to follow
Jesus as his disciple, if we choose to walk with Jesus on the Way toward Abba
God, we end up at the foot of the cross.
Because
when he walked this earth, Jesus always, always, always ended up with the
people who had none of the trappings of power.
Jesus always ended up where it seemed God was most absent. And by being in those places where it seemed
God was most absent, Jesus was saying, This is where God has been all along.
You
see what this does to our human understanding of power, and how a powerful God
should act? A God powerful by society’s
standards never would have ended up on the cross. A God who uses power like we understand power
wouldn’t have submitted to torture and public humiliation. A God who views power like we do wouldn’t
have left it up to 11 cowardly disciples and a traitor to tell the story of the
way God broke into history as Jesus Christ and turned the world upside-down.
And
God-made-flesh turns our world upside-down because his life and death and
resurrection proclaim God’s power is found in the places of despair,
starvation, loneliness, fear, violence, and death. That’s where God’s power lies. And so we who would know this intimate Abba
God must follow Jesus, walking with him along the Way. We must follow Jesus on the Way that goes
into the heart of suffering. And we stay
there. We build relationships with these
people who will not advance our social standing or put us in contact with the
movers and shakers of society. We follow
Jesus to the places of suffering because that is what disciples of this odd
savior do. We go where God is – and God
is in the TB clinics and refugee camps and cancer wards and prisons and mental
hospitals; God is in the places of loneliness and poverty and despair and
fear. And somehow that is where God’s
power is made known.
I
don’t understand how this happens. And I
don’t understand how a God who created the heavens and the earth, a God who
became flesh, a God who broke through the other side of the tomb to declare not
even death can destroy such a Love – I don’t understand how the God who has
demonstrated this kind of power now shows power in the places where creatures
have no power. But as followers of the
Jesus whose Way ended on the cross, I know that we who are his disciples must
go to the places of powerlessness and violence.
Even though it is night. Because
that is where we find the God whose power lies in weakness, whose victory over
life came through death, whose truth is scorned as folly by the powerful in our
world.
One
of the biggest reasons it’s hard to trust God is because there’s so much
suffering in our world. Bad things
happen. And because a part of us
believes that a loving, powerful God should surround us with some kind of force
field that protects us from suffering, the fact that we do suffer means it’s
hard to trust God.
For me, trusting God
means radically changing the way I understand what it means to talk about a God
of power. Because the God Jesus makes
real is a God who shows up in those very places it seems God is most absent –
the places where people have no material wealth and no political influence,
places that are not on the agendas of policymakers and CNN.
The God Jesus makes real
shows up in the grief of poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson. When he was in college, Tennyson’s closest
friend suddenly died. Tennyson’s grief
was overwhelming. God stayed with Tennyson
in this night-time period in his life.
Almost 20 years later, Tennyson wrote his best-known poem as a way to
address his overpowering grief. The poem
is a testimony to the power of friendship.
And it is a song of faith in Jesus Christ, who comes to places of
powerlessness and profound suffering, and stays with us there. Until we see the face of Abba God, and know
ourselves embraced by the weak power – by the powerful weakness – of the
suffering God.
Stanzas from Tennyson’s
poem have been used to create the hymn, “Incarnate God, Immortal Love.” In honor of all who dwell in the night-time
places of their lives, let us stand and sing all verses together of Hymn #414:
Incarnate
God, immortal Love,
whom we, that have not seen your
face,
by
faith, and faith alone, embrace,
believing where we cannot prove:
You
will not leave us in the dust;
you gave us life, we know not why.
We
trust we were not made to die,
for you have made us, you are just.
In
you meet human and divine,
the highest, holiest union known.
until our wills with yours combine.
Our
little systems have their day,
they have their day and cease to be;
they
are but fleeting certainty,
and you, O Christ, are more than
they.
We
have but faith; we cannot know,
for knowledge is of things proved
true;
and
yet we trust it comes from you,
a sign of promise; let it grow.
Let
knowledge grow from more to more,
but more of reverence in us dwell;
that
mind and soul, according well,
may make one music
as before.