Easter VII                                             Dr. Dale B. Martin

Ascension Sunday                                Procession & Solemn Mass

Acts 1:(1-7) 8-14                                  May 4, 2008

1 Peter 4:12-19

John 17:1-11

 

Jesus talks funny in the Gospel of John. “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your son so that the son may glorify you, as you gave to him authority over all flesh, in order that everything you gave to him he may give to them, eternal life….I glorified you on the earth, completing the work which you gave to me in order that I might do it. And now, glorify me, father, in your presence with the glory which I had in your presence before the cosmos was. I have manifested your name to the human beings whom you gave to me from the cosmos. They were yours, and you gave them to me and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything which you gave to me I have given to them.” It goes on like that for pages.

 

In the space of just a few lines, some form of the Greek word “glory” or “glorify” is used six times. In the eleven verses of John read this morning, some form of the word “give” occurs eleven times. This is the way Jesus talks in the Fourth Gospel, using the same words over and over for pages: You gave to me, I gave to them, now give to them, as you gave to me, they will give to you, we'll give to them eternal life. Jesus repeats himself, and his speech style loops around on itself time and again.

 

Have you ever noticed that Jesus doesn't talk this way in the first three Gospels? Jesus sounds rather alike in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. He speaks in concise, punchy sayings that he usually neglects to explain. “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” “The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” He tells short, pithy parables whose point is usually left up to the listener to figure out. Moreover, the subject of most of Jesus' sayings in the first three Gospels is the kingdom of God, the imminent inbreaking of the revolution and justice expected in the coming regime change brought about by God.

 

In the Fourth Gospel, by contrast, Jesus goes on and on with elaborate speeches and prayers, repeating the same words and dualisms of words over and over, elaborating puzzles and metaphors until they almost become worn out, though they are still never completely clear, at least not to the listeners within the story. And the topic about which Jesus talks so much in the Gospel of John is not so much the coming kingdom of God. The topic is, rather, himself. “I am the way, the truth, the life.” “I am the good shepherd.” And the most surprising of all, “I am the I am,” thus making himself the same as the God who revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush. Many Christians prefer to listen to the Jesus of the Gospel of John, precisely because that Jesus sounds so much more “Christian” than the Jesus of the other Gospels. He sounds like a walking and talking Nicene Creed.

 

The style of Jesus' speech in the Gospel of John may be even a bit aggravating to some of us. But its looping around on itself, its repetitions, have the effect of emphasizing over and over some particular point or another. So what is the particular point the author of the Fourth Gospel is emphasizing in John 7:1-11? It comes down to the last few words: “that they may be one as we are one.” The passage first emphasizes, by its several repetitions, the unity of Jesus with the Father: You glorified; I glorified; you gave; I gave; you started; I accomplished. The passage then ends with a prayer for the unity of the disciples: that they may be one, as we are one.

 

The account from the Acts of the Apostles read this morning also emphasizes the unity of the disciples: “All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together….” Acts goes on in chapters 2 and 4 to portray the early church as completely united, worshipping together in the Temple and even sharing their goods and living out of a common fund. In Acts, the prayer of Jesus in John is answered, and the disciples are one with one another and with Jesus and the Father.

 

But back to the way Jesus talks in the Gospels: the early Church Fathers noticed the radical difference in the speech styles between the Jesus of the other Gospels and that of the Fourth Gospel, and they tried to explain it in various ways. The first Gospels, they suggested, just gave the surface of the story: Jesus' bare actions and words. The Apostle John, they said, came later and felt that the first Gospels, while good in themselves, needed a supplemental account that would better bring out the greater depth and spiritual meaning of Jesus and his words. So John wrote his Gospel to supplement the others with a deeper, and thus more verbose, version of Jesus. The early church worked hard to bring out of the diversity of the different Gospels a unity of the four-fold Gospel Canon. They insisted that in spite of the differences, there was truly one gospel in four forms.

 

As you might expect, we historians—skeptics that we are—doubt the historical accuracy of much of this. We don't believe, for one thing, that the Fourth Gospel was actually written by the apostle John as a supplement to the first three Gospels. We don't believe the historical Jesus spoke the way John's Jesus speaks. We don't even really accept as historical the idyllic picture of the early church as portrayed in Acts. We assume things in history were messier than they are presented by these authors.

 

But of course, none of our doubts touches faith. What is, after all, the truth of scripture? The truth of scripture does not depend on the correspondence of its account to what would be conjured by a historian. The truth of scripture does not even depend on the correspondence of its account to what actually happened. The truth of scripture is not the “history” in any case, but the meaning of the text as given to us by the Holy Spirit. The Bible is true and scripture when its texts are read in faith and by the leading of the Holy Spirit. This is true not just as a statement about scripture, but also as a statement about the nature of faith more generally.

 

Faith is not believing ridiculous things that everyone knows are not true. Faith is not simply believing that something happened in the past that most of us would find incredible. Faith is more complicated than mere belief. Faith, properly understood, refers to a way of being in the world and in your skin. Faith is the ability to live in the world as if the world had meaning even if we cannot prove that it does. Faith is the ability to live as if love is the energy that drives the cosmos, even when love seems distant or impotent. Faith is the experience of trusting a force more powerful, loving, and intimate than anything we can imagine.

 

Faith is not just belief or even trust. Faith also works. Faith also enables. Faith enables us to love those we don't even like. Faith enables us to attempt, over and over again, to live our lives as if we were good people, even when we doubt that we are.

 

Do not confuse this view of faith with mere optimism—a character trait some people possess that just inclines them to “be positive.” In our country, optimism is entirely overrated. It is a virtual necessity for any of our politicians, to the extent that they all seem cynical in their protestations of their “optimism.” I'm not sure “optimism”—in spite of our politicians—is something we can instill by an act of will, or get rid of by a dose of realism.

 

You know the old story of the couple who had twin girls, one a dour child to whom you couldn't pass the right thing, and the other a sunny disposition always seeing only the bright side of life. The parents worried that both extremes were unhealthy, so they devised an experiment to attempt some modification in both girls' dispositions. Both girls had asked for a pony for Christmas. On Christmas morning, the girls went outside to find two things. On one side, for the pessimist, was a cute little pony with a pink ribbon in its flowing mane. On the other side, for little miss sunshine, was a pile of manure. The first girl went up to her pony and said, “Well, I guess I'll be busy feeding and cleaning up after it.” The parents sighed and looked at the other girl, who was squealing with delight digging in the pile of manure. “What are you doing, honey?” they asked. She said, “With all this poop, there's got to be a pony under here somewhere!”

 

That's optimism, not faith.

 

But back to our Gospel and Jesus' prayer for Christian unity. We have trouble finding a united church in our world. Christians are not only divided from those of other religions. Christians seem hopelessly divided among ourselves. This summer, the Anglican bishops of the world will gather again, as they do every ten years, for the Lambeth conference in England. At least some of those bishops will be working hard to kick us American Episcopalians out of the church. Many Anglicans would prefer to see the church divided than to allow the ordination of women or homosexual people to the priesthood or the episcopacy. It doesn't look like we are all one.

 

But the body of Christ is one and includes all the saints in all the world, past, present, and future. We confess to believe in the communion of all the saints and the body of Christ, even though we cannot point to its complete and full form in society. Our belief in the united body of Christ is not susceptible to secular, empirical proof or disproof. The absence of the empirical unity of the church must not cause us to lose our faith in its real unity. We have faith in the united body of Christ even when we cannot see it, even when we cannot delineate its form. The body of Christ is real even if we cannot completely see it or delineate it. Jesus prayed that we may be one. We are, by the mercy and grace of God.