Simple Suffering

Text: John 9:1-41

A common way to interpret the Gospel of John is to consider it to have two parts. In this view, the first part is called the book of signs and the second part the book of glory. The first part contains seven stories, which we might call miracle stories. For example, the first of these is the changing of water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana. Each of these stories is described by John as a sign. They point to something. What they point to is the glory of God embodied in the person of Jesus Christ. We are supposed to pay attention, like the famous smart dog, to the thing pointed to more than the finger pointing to it.

However, this makes some pretty amazing stories—and long and detailed ones like today’s—some pretty amazing stories into things a little boring and contrived. These stories are not just about random miraculous deeds. All but one of them have to do with healing someone or feeding someone, or many someones. This is not a coincidence. The story itself tells us a something important about Jesus and the world he proclaimed.

The episode today about the blind man and his cure is simple on the face of it. A man is blind. Jesus heals him. That is sign enough, if that is all you are looking for. But of course, as in real lives of real people, things get complicated. Everyone brings their own expectations and baggage, powerful people exercise power, and as sometimes happens, people get hurt.

The political core of the story is, as it often is with Jesus, about what is OK to do on the Sabbath, which is protected by the third commandment. The day is holy because it reminds us of both God’s work in creation and freedom from captivity.

Jesus cannot be from God, the Pharisees claim, because he healed someone on the Sabbath when it was not dire—he could have waited but did not. Jesus does this a lot, elsewhere saying famously (and a little unfairly) that the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.

Jesus heals the blind man on the Sabbath. To our Protestant thinking, there is nothing wrong with this. What’s the problem? If a person suffers, you relieve the suffering. But as the story shows, acts of compassion are rarely without consequences. The Pharisees are upset by the behavior of Jesus, which undermines useful and God-given rules for people trying to live together. The parents are fearful (and, it turns out, rightly so) of what all this weirdness means for their son and for themselves in their own community. The man himself is amazed and pleased at first, but his life is irrevocably changed.

Helping someone—relieving suffering—is a choice we make. Is it always harmless to chose to be compassionate? How do we decide? In the face of the anger and sadness which this act caused, how did Jesus decide to help the blind man to see?

He could have ignored him. There are always plenty of reasons to pass people by. Their suffering could be from birth, as the blind man’s was. Who sinned, the disciples ask, this man or his parents? They had no doubt the man was blind for a reason, and none either that his blindness was permanent. Perhaps people who suffer are to blame, perhaps their upbringing is. Their culture, their genes, their circumstances. Their character. Do they deserve to be helped? Helping people might be fruitless, it might create ungrateful dependency, it might aggravate things. It might be inconvenient at the moment.

But for Jesus, healing is always timely. The demands of suffering are always urgent. Jesus tells his disciples: “We must work the works of the one who sent me while it is day.” No dawdling. No waiting for approval or to get ducks lined up.

Though not in a gospel known for ethical teaching, this story gives us four interconnected ethical guidelines for Christian behavior.

First, present suffering always trumps hypothetical future benefits or dangers. Arguments about the imagined dangers of healing a man on the Sabbath are outweighed by the actual benefits of his seeing for the first time. Even if the dangers are likely, that is not enough to deny healing when it is possible. Or on the flip side to justify causing suffering. We do not know the future, and to allow or to cause suffering for the sake of an imagined future is hubris and arrogance. We can learn from the past, we try to prepare for the future, but in the moment we are called only to relieve or prevent suffering.

Second, and as a corollary, compassion always trumps form. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong paperwork is not sufficient to deny healing. Procedures, taboos, and expectations are helpful, but they are not compelling.

Third, knowledge is not a prerequisite for helping others. We do not have to know how someone came to be hurting. We do not have to know whether he or she sinned or not. Or will continue to sin or not. We do not need to know the consequences of our compassion. “The one thing I do know,” says the man, is that “I was blind, now I see.” How did this happen, the Pharisees ask? “We do not know how it is that he sees,” say the parents, “but now he does.”

And fourth, underlying the other three: suffering is simple and complete. It is not complicated, subject to equivocation and argument. It is not good to suffer. There is no redeeming virtue. There is no meaning to it. There is no need to explain it (except to know how better to heal it). The man’s blindness in itself is sufficient to call on Jesus to heal him. “As Jesus walked along,” it says, “he saw a man.” That is all it took. To relieve suffering, no questions asked, is one way to love our neighbor as ourselves.

The disciples in John call Jesus rabbi, meaning teacher. But he does not so much explain God’s work as reveal it. In this story, it matters not how God works but that God does.

What Jesus calls himself—in the very next verses in John—he calls himself the good shepherd. Jesus is a pastor (which means shepherd). He is not a theologian. He is not an ethicist, either. He comes to heal the suffering world. To save the world, as John puts it. Not to debate about saving it.

Shepherds, like the one in today’s psalm, know the sheep, make sure they have food and water, a safe place, a place to rest, a trustworthy guide. To be fearless, to be undistracted, and to love the sheep first of all.

The Lord is this, our shepherd. May the Lord’s goodness and mercy pursue us all our days.

No Tent

Text: John 4:5-42
Other texts: Exodus 17:1-7

It is common to refer to people new to the habit of going to church as “seekers.” Some churches have special worship for seekers, different from worship for others, which I guess they could call “finders.”

There are a couple of problems with this. First, it divides people into groups based on some notion of spiritual progress, as if such a thing existed. And second and more important, it implies that God can be found in particular places, through particular means, and through particular efforts on our part.

It is hard for us to get over the idea that as far as God and we are concerned, we are the agents. We see ourselves as world-crafters, coming up with visions and implementing them, creating something from nothing. Being made in the image of God, we imagine that we are the same as God. That is a bit of a stretch. It is only God who creates something from nothing.

It is fine to demand things of God, to argue with God, and to complain to God. There is a lot of all those things in the Bible, including the passage we just heard about the Israelites whining in the wilderness. But that does not mean that we are the bosses. We have neither the authority nor the responsibility.

Even when we acknowledge that we are not the same as God, we think that it is our actions that lead us closer to God. Our work—to say it in a Lutheran way. Including the work of seeking God. As if to find God, we have to go looking for God. And that if we do not seek—and especially that if we do not do it right—we will not find.

We are driven to these thoughts because we miss God. We are afraid of God’s absence. Or we grieve that God is far away.

The Israelites ask: Is the Lord with us or not? It is a common question in times of trouble. Where is God when people are dying of famine, or plague, or drought? Where is God when people are exiled, or enslaved, or suffer humiliating defeats? Where is God when violence takes innocent lives, where is God when someone near to us is suffering?

Sometimes we think that this is God’s problem. That God is unaccountably and unfairly absent. But we just as often think that God is missing because we did not act in the right way or look in the right places. We are all too willing to blame ourselves.

We think there is a special way to God. That God lives in the Temple, for example, and that people must go there to meet God. Or that God is in the churches, where we have come together especially to be close to God. Or that God is present in a more intense way in a spiritual retreat, or in prayer, or when we are contemplating scripture.

We think there is a special path on which we must walk. We wonder whether we are abandoned and not favored by God because we have not found that path. Or perhaps that we are on some path that looks pretty good, but wonder whether we are tragically mistaken. We are doing stuff that seems right, but who knows whether it really is?

When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well, she wonders whether God is more on mount Gerizim in Samaria or more in Jerusalem in Judea. Neither one, Jesus answers. Not meaning that God will not be in those places, but that there are no places which are the exclusive abode of God.

When Jesus answers the woman about on which mountain is God’s favorite house, and after telling her neither one, he then adds one more thing: that the Father seeks the worshippers.

The seeker is God, not us. It is God’s search that matters, not ours. God’s longing for us, God’s work.

The woman at the well does not come to Jesus, Jesus comes to her. She does not discover him, he discovers her. The story of Jesus in the Gospels mostly follows this pattern. Some people come to Jesus to be healed, but many others are healed because Jesus finds them, suffering. Jesus tells parables about sheep that are lost and searched for and coins that are lost and searched for, the searcher, we gather, being God. Jesus approaches the first disciples and calls to them: Come and see.

Before God was in the Temple in Jerusalem, God was with the people as they wandered through the desert. God, like them, was a nomad, and God’s presence lived in a tabernacle or tent. God’s word was near because it was among the people.

But as the people settled the land and built permanent structures, God, like the institutions that tended to the people, seemed to settle in (so to speak) and people began coming to God’s house in Jerusalem. In the Gospel of John, in the prolog in which it says in English “and the word dwelt among us,” the phrase John uses here—and only here in all the Gospels—means God lived among them in a tabernacle. Back to the tents among the wandering people.

But for the Israelites and for us, God is not in one place and absent from others. Neither Temple nor tent nor church. God is not revealed in one program, or one kind of piety. There is not one path to God that we must carefully tread. A colleague wrote that our job is not to find the path to God, but rather to walk the paths where God is most likely to come find us. But even that is less than graceful. It does not matter on what path you walk, God will come to find you anyway. There is nowhere that God is not. You have searched me and know me, it says in Psalm 139, you have searched out my path and are familiar with all my ways.

For Lutherans, the official definition of the church is a place in which the Gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered. All the rest, while nice and helpful, is not necessary. And for Luther, the essence of the Gospel and the sacraments is a word of promise.

There are lots of implications of that promising word, but one is that no matter where we are or what we have done, or are doing, or contemplate doing, God will come find us. The church is a place that is special not because it is especially holy and filled with the spirit of God more than other places are. It is special place because in the church we say that promise over and over again.

People of the Cross

Text: John 3:1-17

We are people of the cross. A church, a faith, of the cross. This is a tale of three crosses.

The first cross is a crucifix. Jesus on the cross. A physical, embodied, suffering human.

Jesus comes to this world to be human. Where, perhaps, God experiences what it means to be human. We are created by God, yet—could it be?—as much a mystery to God as God is to humans.

Jesus comes to suffer. But not only to suffer. I imagine he laughs with his friends (he certainly tells jokes). He loves to eat and drink. He is often the life of the party. He hangs with all sorts of people.

But he comes, in the end, to suffer. Either part of the plan, or an inevitable consequence of his mission—hard to say. All people suffer—and that is surely not part of the plan, though it, too, often comes with the mission. But sometimes suffering just comes for no reason at all.

Jesus sees what we see. In the passage just preceding the one we heard today, it says “Jesus … knew all people; … he knew what was in everyone.” He learns what we know. To experience regrets, make hard decisions (some of which have no good end), to lose one’s sense of self, to witness despair. We get confused by the wickedness of others, and surprised by wickedness of our own. We get frustrated by our inability to help others because we lack skill, resolve, or resource.

The cross is a sign of failure. In the same way that war is a failure. Executing others is a failure. Slavery is a failure, imprisonment. All are signs of a failure to discover, to imagine, a way of being that reconciles conflict, failure to see humanity equal to our own in other people, failure to figure out how to love all as we love those nearest to us. The cross is just one example of—and stands for—all the desperate last choices that we end up making.

There is nothing good about crucifixion. There is nothing good about war. There is nothing good about poisoning someone to death, or electrocuting him. There is nothing good about enslaving someone. There is nothing good about denying the needs of others. They are all dark failures of our souls.

The cross is failure for Jesus, too. Jesus did not eagerly seek his own death on the cross. Jesus despises death. Jesus did not seek death, but he was willing to go to his death. He was willing to live a fearless life that predictably would lead to his execution. Jesus came to persuade, teach, show, lead the world to another way of living. But that did not happen because of the hard and frightened hearts of humans. Death on the cross, as my colleague John ... says—that was Plan B. Such things are always plan B.

The second cross is an empty cross. Like the one behind the altar. Christ is no longer there. Christ is risen.

We are people of the Resurrection. Death is not the end of life. What we think of the end turns out to be open-ended. What we absolutely know about life and death turns out to be inadequate.

This cross brings hope and new life in the face of discouraging experiences. Even in the darkness we see light. The crucifixion of Jesus turns out to not be the end of the story. God is able to extract the good from evil, to mine the good from the ore of fearful errors that we keep making.

Nicodemus comes stealing out of the darkness. In a very strange conversation—each person seemingly speaking past one another—Jesus tells Nicodemus that no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.

The word, as you probably know, means “from above” and also “again” and “anew.” Some Bibles, like ours, translate it “born from above.” Others translate it “born again.” It is like the phrase musicians use when they say “take it from the top,” also meaning again and anew.

In these meanings—theological or musical—the point is that we get to start over within familiar boundaries. Jesus is not talking about a some fantastic place totally unlike the one in which we live, but about this place here, only different. Take it from the top.

We are not condemned by our traditions or habits of heart to repeat old patterns. Just because we cannot think of another way to have the world run does not mean that there is no such way.

Neither are we condemned by our sins, by our fears, our regrets, our pain. Jesus’ words to Nicodemus are comforting, not condemning. There is another way to be, he says to Nicodemus. God brings it.

No one can see the kingdom, Jesus says, unless they are born anew. Open your eyes. Can you see it? Each day starts fresh. Each day we are forgiven. Each hour is new; each moment. It is eternal life—meaning abundant, blessed life, here and now—constantly renewed.

The Wednesday evening worship during Lent closes with this prayer: “What has been done, has been done. What has not been done, has not been done.” Neither forgetting or denying the past, yet we escape from the power over us of regrets and disappointments. Our sorrows will not rule us.

The third cross is made in gesture. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. We are people of the Trinity.

Nicodemus comes to meet Jesus. He sees the power of God. He hears Jesus promise the gift of eternal life. He is invited to receive that gift—to receive new life—from the Holy Spirit.

We can lean on the trinitarian God, who created us and the elaborate, amazing, and difficult world; who knows intimately our sorrows and joys; and who leads us forward each moment into new blessings. The trinity is a multipurpose vehicle that carries us from death to life, from darkness to light, from crucifixion to resurrection.

The Gospel of John famously sees two ways of being, described mostly as two communities, two peoples. There is the community of darkness and the community of light. We are born first into the community of darkness. The one from whence Nicodemus comes, and which is the community of suffering. But we can come into the community of light. An encounter with Jesus (Nicodemus here, a woman at a Samaritan well next week), is (or can be) a transforming experience. We enter (or are born again, born anew) into the community of the light. We are freed from the captivity of the past (you will never be thirsty, Jesus tells the woman) and enter into abundant life. We become people of Christ.

Precise Bliss

Text: Matthew 4:1-11
Other texts: Genesis 3:1-7

The Gospels are not exactly history. They are a different form of writing, a different genre. They tell a truth, but the order of presentation and the rules of evidence are not the same as a modern history might be. What is left in or left out has a particular purpose. Which is to reveal God in the person and life of Jesus Christ. Every passage in the Bible was a choice made by the original compilers, and a choice repeated century after century by copyists.

So for every one of these passages, we have to ask: why is this here at all? why is it here in this particular place? and—since this is a story in the Bible and therefore about God—what does this passage tell us about God? We should always ask these questions, and especially so when the events in the passage are otherwise unobserved, when there are no witnesses.

As in today’s passage. Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where he, alone, fasts and meets the devil. This story also appears in variations in Mark and Luke. Evidently the early Christians felt it was important to them. Some tale that circulated among them, some story that told them about Jesus.

Jesus is tempted, our Bible says. In English, the word implies something alluring, some captivating force that tries to seduce upright persons into performing questionable deeds. But these offers by the devil? what is so tempting about them? Is Jesus so hungry for food, security, and power that he finds them appealing?

Rather than tempted, Jesus is tested—the word also means examined. The identity of Jesus is at stake here more than his character. He is being offered a choice. There are two ways of life ahead of him. More about that choice in a moment.

Jesus may not find the offers of the devil tempting, but we would. These things are exaggerated versions of things every creature needs. Food to sustain us, a place to be safe from peril, some control over the forces and structures that affect us. These are human needs. No human being can live without them. If we lack them, our lives are at risk from starvation, danger, and oppression. What the devil offers Jesus is to be free from the conditions of humanity. To be not human. To have instead the power of gods.

This is at the heart of the offer made to the man and woman in the garden. You will be like God, the serpent says, knowing good and evil. This is not primarily an offer for moral wisdom and judgment. It is not a corruption of sweet innocence that leads somehow to divine abilities.

It is instead an offer of power. The appeal of the knowledge of good and evil is the power it gives to see distinctions and to differentiate between consequences. The power to influence the future more predictably and to plan more confidently. It is the power behind politics at its best, behind childrearing, behind inculcation of social values.

But it is also the power behind life-and-death judgments that we feel justified making, the hubris that we can tell what is good and what is evil, and the arrogance to control the lives of others or to take them on the basis of only human knowledge. The power we have been given in the garden is always much less than we think, and more destructive. Even though knowing good and evil, we have not become gods. The serpent lies. Even having succumbed to its temptation, we remain human.

It is not in us to escape our humanity, even with serpentine assistance. The point of this garden story near the beginning of creation is not that we once were perfect, but are no longer. We never have been perfect. We are flesh and blood, with all that messiness and organic-ness. Creatures each of whom is semi-organized and tremendously complicated. We are particular biological beings of the earth and its current conditions of temperature, light, and pressure. Humans. The point of the story of the garden is that we grieve the gap between what we are and what we fantasize it is possible to be.

Stone will not turn into bread. We will not be able to fly off steeples. None of us will be wise and strong enough to rule one harmonious world. Sorrow is sad and pain is painful. It is not helpful for us—it did not help the man and the woman in the garden—to be tempted by contrary promises.

Yet the world is very good. That is what God declares in the first chapter of Genesis. Pain and sorrow are our condition, but they do not spoil life. They are part of it, as limiting but not more so than our inability to fly unaided and make bread from stones. That we can jump and walk and make bread from wheat is not a disability, but a gift. A particular bliss. It is a gift of God to humans: that joy is better than power.

The word for devil is a verbal noun that means literally to throw over or throw across. Thus the devil is a misleader, a diverter. The devil is a distractor. The job of the devil in the story in Matthew is to distract Jesus from his mission, his nature, and his love. And the job of the devil is to distract us in the same way. To turn our attention to what we do not have and to make us wish that we were gods, having infinite resource, pleasure, and power.

Jesus in the Gospels is tested throughout his life by one singular temptation. Shall he give up his ministry? Shall he back off from his humanity? Shall he claim his divine power? He is tested here in the desert, and again with Peter in whom Jesus hears the voice of Satan, and again on the cross when he is taunted to save himself.

Jesus is led into the wilderness by the Spirit as the first event in his ministry. There he meets the devil, who offers Jesus this choice. Which Jesus must make before he begins his work here. The choice is not to turn stone into bread, or not.

The choice is to be human, or not. To maintain solidarity with people he serves, or not.

The story is here to show us that Jesus made an intentional and willing choice. Jesus chose solidarity with us. The rest is history.

Credibility

Text: Matthew 17:1-9

We have to ask ourselves: is this story credible?

Even for Peter, it is too much. Even for Peter—Peter, the most enthusiastic, observant, faithful disciple of Jesus—Peter, the disciple who just identified Jesus as the Messiah—even for Peter it is overwhelming and weird.

The presence of Elijah and Moses (who are long dead or at least lone gone from this earth), the bright overshadowing clouds, the voice (we figure it is God speaking), the strange transformation of Jesus into a being who shines like the sun. Peter’s response about the dwellings is strange but understandable because he is nonplussed. Is there any right response to what he has just witnessed?

This story appears in pretty much the same form in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, a sign to us that the early followers of Jesus thought it to be pretty important. Even so, it seems like a glitch or interruption in the fairly smooth narrative of the Gospels. In Matthew (and the other two, more or less) the story appears in the physical middle of the book. And it appears in the middle of the plot, too. It is a hinge: before this event, we have been learning about Jesus, his teachings, and his ministry. Soon after it, the story begins to head slowly and inevitably toward the crucifixion. Because of its position between ministry and passion, the lectionary serves us up this story every year on the last day of Epiphany, just before Lent. It is on the cusp.

Still, it is hard at first to see what this story adds to the Gospels. We already know that Jesus is the son of God, the Messiah, beloved by God. The disciples know it, too. Peter had already declared that Jesus is “the Christ, the son of the living God.” And Jesus had already said that he came to fulfill the law in the tradition of the prophets, represented in the story by Elijah and Moses. In other words, the story is not evidence. It does not prove anything new about the nature of Jesus to us or to the disciples.

It does, though, give us information.

Essential information, evidently, or it would not be repeated in each Gospel. It tells us a lot about the complex and unequal relationship between God, Jesus, and us. And it reminds us about the nature of divinity. The telling of the story itself is so important that we have to tell it the same way over and over again every year.

Jesus is transfigured, the reading says, a rare word these days. It is an unfortunate translation because the word in the text is the basis of the word “metamorphosis.” Which means changed in form. Jesus is changed somehow, but it is not like the old Jesus is replaced by a new one. Rather, it is the same Jesus who is revealed in a new light. Something that was always the essence of Jesus is visible when it was hidden before, or at least was understated or un-emphasized.

The story reminds us rationalists that there is more going on with Jesus. He is more than a wise prophet, teacher, and good friend. For all my talk last week about following Jesus, he is more than a good leader. There is something about him that draws people to him, something powered by the spirit of God and detected by everyone. It is mysterious. Ineffable, as theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel would say. Inexpressible. Not easily described. Even his disciples were at a loss to understand what just happened on the mountain, and they were there.

But even so, Jesus’s transformation is not ghostly either. Jesus is not primarily a spiritual creature. But both physical and spiritual.

It is complicated, a complication embodied in Peter, who in the Gospels has at least three different roles. He is Jesus’ friend, a person like every earthly friend. Sometimes a goofy, good natured one. At the same time, he is the one who sees Jesus for what he really is: the Messiah. He sees Jesus with a clarity that the other disciples lack. At the same time, he is the first bishop of Rome, the rock on which the church is built. He is the administrative and missionary force of the body of Christ in the world after Jesus’ death. He is wise and foolish; trustworthy and flaky; an enthusiast (a word which means filled by the spirit) and a bureaucrat.

Jesus goes up to the mountain for a strange and other-worldly conversation with an ancient prophet and a law-giver. But three disciples—James, John, and Peter—are also there. They are there only because Jesus has invited them along. They are invited not because they are needed as witnesses, but because Jesus has friends and colleagues in both worlds. He goes up to the mountain, and then he comes down to earth again.

One way for us to know Jesus is to think our way there. To learn, read, talk, and argue about Jesus. To take his words seriously. To evaluate them against the needs of the world. To invent theologies that, for example, proclaim him to be 100% human and 100% divine at the same time. To philosophize about what is going on in the sacraments. To ask what Jesus would have us do.

But for many, either frequently or rarely, we discover Jesus in ways that are inexplicable, surprising, and often astonishing. Amazement is the prevailing color of our lives and faith. Who is this Jesus who moves us so, to whom we seem so oddly and suddenly attached? Where did that attachment come from? How can it be?

The same Heschel writes about radical amazement. Amazement itself becomes the reward and the gift. It is a pleasure itself, like the pleasure of gratitude or the pleasure of beauty. All gifts to us given by God for no earthly reason. Just because evidently God wants to.

This openness to ineffable amazement is necessary for our faith, for otherwise, really, why bother? Why pay attention to Jesus? It is this, more than our thoughtful consent, that gives us the courage for our mission. That lets us read the Sermon on the Mount without ridiculing it, that lets us claim that renewal and restoration are always possible, that lets us serve others at the risk of our own loss.

The question is not, therefore, whether the transfiguration story is credible. The question is whether it somehow draws us to a God who is strange, good, and here.

Thanks be to God.