May 6, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Acts 13:15-16, 26-33 (34-39) Paul with a gesture began to speak
or Numbers 27:12-23 The ordination of Joshua
Psalm 100 Jubilate Deo
Revelation 7:9-17 These have come out of the great ordeal
John 10:22-30 It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the Temple
Paul begins his sermon "with a gesture", says Luke. A symbolic gesture no doubt. Like a good High Churchman, John the evangelist also loves symbolic language. In the story of the Last Supper he is giving us more than the minutes of the meeting when he noted at the departure of Judas: "And it was night." It was to be Jesus' dark night of the soul, the world's last night, a night of Peter's long knife, and the darkest hour of the cosmos. John used the word "night" to say a thousand things of gloom and distance, treachery and despair. So in today's gospel, "it was the feast of the Dedication at Jerusalem; it was winter, and Jesus was walking in the Temple, in the portico of Solomon." Every syllable of that sentence is heavy with symbol. The icy fingers of accusation point to Jesus in that winter of religion. The cool disdain of the domination system, the frost of Pharisaic attitude, the wintry wolves who howl for his destruction and the abandonment and scattering of his sheep, are all there in "it was winter."
"Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone."
Jesus because of this heavy weather had gone indoors, inside the porch of Solomon, to do his teaching. He encounters inside the Temple whose who challenged his identity: at the heart of the religious establishment the question was asked and answered. Solomon's porch was a great colonnade running along the east side of the Temple. . . it had probably been built thus because those rabbis who came regularly to teach there had found the wintry weather of Jerusalem in December to be a bit too cold for outdoor lectures. There was shelter from the colder months here in the portico. Jesus customarily came here, too, especially at holiday time, when there were many more people there. "It was the feast of the dedication," John tells us, and we know its other name is Hannukah. It was a fairly new feast at the time of Jesus--events of only 165 years before his birth were commemorated. So the things it celebrated were a shorter distance from Jesus' time than the American Revolutionary War is from ours. And a holiday very much like our Fourth of July. Although it is remembered at our Christmastime, in the Jewish month Chislev (November or December) and we have come to think of it as a kind of Jewish Christmas instead. It celebrated the re-dedication of the Temple after the Maccabean revolt when Jewish militants overthrew the Syrian occupation, and re-lit the Temple lamps. The army of Antiochus in 168 B.C.E. had provocatively defiled the Temple by slaughtering pigs in honor of Zeus on an altar erected over the Jewish altar of burnt offerings. Antiochus had burned the Torah, abolished the Sabbath, and outlawed Jewish holidays. The Maccabees, a family of ardent patriots, patriarch and five sons, began an armed struggle of guerrilla warfare which finally expelled the Syrians and purified the Temple, like Sandino outsting the Yanqui invaders.
It's best to remember this, because Hannukah has come down to us as a bald-mouth toothless feast, which no doubt will soon have its own Santa Claus and Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer, catalogs and websites. But it was the commemoration of a Revolution, a grass-roots uprising, a guerrilla revolt which had grabbed the wheel of history and moved it forward. And Jesus was there with his own fireworks, waving his little red flag on an inflammatory occasion. He was there to identify himself and to be seen in the Temple especially on that day, with his cadre of disciples, to relate themselves to the revolutionary hopes of the people. And then we can understand the question that comes: "How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Anointed One, level with us." The national holiday of Hannukah, when we celebrate revolutionary restoration, was the context for this confrontation. The government's very identity, the hope for a new Liberator, was the occasion: "Are you the winning candidate who will do for us what the Maccabees did then?" "Tell us plainly."
Now when theologians say "Tell us plainly" they mean something different from what plain poeple mean when they say "tell us plainly." Theologians, like politicians, have a different manner of plain speaking than most of us. Plainly in philosophical discussions is different from plainly in practical action. "I and the Father are one," Jesus says. Now that's six words (6) in John's gospel. That's Jesus identity according to the Fourth Gospel. By 451 A.D. (or, in the Christian Era) the Council of Chalcedon had expanded these six words, so that Jesus answered the fathers of the Council at greater length. "I am at once complete in Godhead and complete in humanhood, truly God and truly Human, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body, of one substance (that is, homoousious) with the Father as regards my Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with the rest of you as regards my humanhood, like you in all respects, apart from sin; as regards my Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages, but yet as regards my humanhood begotten for you and your liberation of Mary the Virgin, the Theotokos--God-bearer--at one and the same time Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the distinctions of natures being in no way annulled by the union," and so forth for page after page of fine print. The discussion began in Solomon's Porch that morning continued through the wars of the great heresies, across the battleground of centuries, with the Reformation coming along at the same time as the printing press to make it even more furious and extensive. The explosion of communications media in our time can do nothing but amplify and extend the size of the discussion in Solomon's Porch. So all the councils and confessions that have divided the human community for two millenia can find their font and origin here in Jesus'reply that wintry Hannukah in the portico. "I and the Father are One."
The poet John Oxenham wrote:
"They poisoned with their venom every mindBut let's look back again to that Winter's Tale. Jesus answered, "I told you and you do not believe." Definitions alone, thousands of pages of definitions of Who Jesus Is, alone, will not inspire belief. "I told you and you do not believe." Every Lord's day in Church we sing or say the definitions as we do the Nicene Creed. We know the catechism's answers to the questions posed in the narthex. "Begotten of his Father before all worlds," we sing. We are not, like those Hannukah questioners, being kept in suspense. We chant "True God from True God," or "Very God of Very God", depending upon which century we have chosen our Prayer Book from. "Who for us and for our salvation, for our liberation, for our own revolution, came down from heaven." Jesus' answer asks us not so much to fine tune our definitions or the musical settings we use for them, but to Look at Results. "Where's the beef?" "The works that I do bear witness to me." And, "The works that I do in my Father's Name, they bear witness to me."
They could wean from him with their subtle guile;--
He was a traitor to their ancient faiths--
A false Messiah, leading them astray.
He cast out devils with the Devil's help,--
He was a rebel against God and Rome,
And Rome would crush him with her heavy foot
And all who followed him."
It is simply this: Jesus' identity, the definition of Who Jesus Is for us, is bound up with our response to what he has done for us. Jesus makes the claim that his definition will grow out of his deeds, his theology out of his praxis. The relationship will write it. "My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me." The actual living out and acting out of the revolutionary witness, this is how the community's creed is arrived at. As a Marriage is defined not by the words in the statute or the language on the license, but by the relationship of the couple, so with Jesus-and-God, and Jesus-and-us. As Lovers are defined by the wordless witness of their passion and joy, so our relationship to Jesus is defined. "I know them," Jesus says. There is a kind of religion which will damn you if you have not got the right words yet about Jesus, and the right words about God, and the right words from the right Bible authorized by the right Church. This religion pulls your coat and asks, "Do you KNOW?" To have all the GNOSIS will make you a Gnostic, but not a Lover. Jesus says it is enough that He does the knowing, that his flock know him as relationship, not as information. Jesus is not More Information. Instead, the Church's faith is that Jesus is the kind of person that God is. That's what we meant when we wrote the Bible (and the Church after all wrote the Bible, not the other way around!) and had Jesus say: in it: "I and the Father are One."
I was in an Evanston hospital at the bedside of a young man dying of AIDS one morning back in 1986--he had toxoplasmosis, a brain infection, and had not many weeks left. He had been a Buddhist and he had been a Baptist, and he had a wife and two small children and he was asking questions about God. "Why is God so cruel to me? Why is God so cruel to my family." I spoke Jesus' words to him, 'I give you the life of the New Age, a New Era is coming. You shall never perish. No one will take away your hopes. No one can snatch you out of my hand.' It is in what Jesus does for you, not in what death attempts to do, that your relationship with God, with Life, is defined. "I and the Father are one," Jesus said, in our rescue mission to save you, each of you.
One evening not long afterwards I met young Sturdie Downs, then the new Anglican bishop of Nicaragua, who spoke at St Matthew's church in Evanston. The format for the evening was Question and Answer, and I thought of Jesus in the Temple on the Feast of Dedication. For the questions for Bishop Downs were about definitions, too. "Tell us plainly" they might have begun, and they were all theological questions: "Do you think that the Saninista government is communistic?" The answer to such a question (the only question gringos knew how to ask of the rest of the world) meant destruction or deliverance for Nicaraguans. Jesus answered them, "I told you, but you do not believe. Look at the works that I do in my Father's name." Bishop Downs, a Black man, a Costeņo from Corn Island, said, "Look at what the Revolution has been doing in Nicaragua. We are ending illiteracy, everyone is learning to read. Before the Revolution, the churches didn't try to get people to read. Now they are helping to get people to read. We are doing wonderful things in health care. Doctors and medicine are free for everyone. Before the revolution, medicine was only for the rich. We are ending infant mortality. We are feeding the people. There is less of everything because of the war that the northamericans are waging against us, but no one goes hungry." Jesus said, "the works that I do bear witness to me. But you do not believe, because you do not listen."
Three years after that evening at St Matthew's Evanston I got up off the Damascus road and flew to Nicaragua, and have ever since celebrated here the Hannukah of July 19, the anniversary of the Revolution of 1979, "hasta la victoria siempre." Jesus has always told us that his voice speaks in the praxis, not in the "isms" by which we throw nations into the dustbin of history. Jesus' is speaking today about Cuba, too--Maria Lopez Vigil has written her account, "Cuba--Neither Heaven Nor Hell", about the real in-our-time struggle of that heroic people against the Yanqui whom Tomas Borge rightly defined as "el enemigo de humanidad." (The State Department won't let him have a visa now.) Now Martha Cray, a nurse from Winnetka, comes back from Colombia with pleas that the U.S. end its new war in that country, disguised as a war on drugs.
Jesus'words are those of a messiah of mercy, a nurse practitioner, a Christ of compassion, a son of justice, a revolutionary redeemer. Healing, feeding, teaching--these are the Signs of the Change that Jesus brings in his personhood, in Who He Is, in the way he carries his God-ness in his Human-ness.
The promise of Easter raised Saul the prosecutor, who had lots of theology and law, into Paul the preacher, who liberated the good news itself from nationalism. In today's reading from Acts he goes to the middle of Turkey to tell fellow Jews about Jesus. The gospel starts travelling. In the Revelation that John tells of in the second reading, it has triumphed in a multitude without number, from every nation, all waving the same banners and posters--the palms of victory after the Great Ordeal. The end of hunger and thirst and homelessness are in that vision. And it is in the following of that Shepherd, to the Lamb in the midst of the throne, that we learn Who Jesus Is. Not in definitions, but in deeds.
Can we hear again, as we did last Sunday, the peroration from Albert Schweitzer's Quest for the Historical Jesus, on how to respond to the gospel?
"He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He come to those who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same words: 'Follow thou me!' And sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is."
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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