FINDINGS II
Easter
V - C - May 2, 2010
Acts 11: 1-18; Revelation 21: 1-6; John 13:
31-35
By Harry T. Cook 4/26/10
RUBRIC
"Remember that Thanksgiving when we were all around the
table together. It was the last time before N. died. Remember what got said?"
So go human memories of "last times" and of their impact. That is the sense of
the placement of the gospel lection for Easter V-C. Four weeks have passed
since Easter and the church is on its way to what is called "Ordinary Time"
when the drift of the gospel lections will return to the stories - many of
Luke's confection -- about what Jesus said and did in the weeks and months
before the denouement narrated in Passion Week and Easter Week. The RCL takes
us back to that "last time." Already the idea of doing "this for the remembrance
of me" is appealing. "Remember that last night . . . ?" Sounds like a community
built on love, right? We'll see.
WORKSHOP
So the reading begins: "At the last supper when Judas had
gone out, Jesus said . . ." And he said it at length. The discourse begins at
13:31 and goes on from there with few interruptions and stage directions
through to 17:26 just prior to John's depiction of the handing over (or turning
in) of Jesus by Judas Iscariot. This is what might be called the end of the
beginning, if not the beginning of the end. The memorable "love" enunciated at
13: 34-35 certainly resonates with the later, post-resurrection "forgiveness"
theme of 20: 21-23, thus connecting, if a connection is desired, 13: 31-35 with
those later narratives. John may not have been the obvious dramatist that Luke was,
but the sentence immediately preceding 13:31 is drama enough: "After receiving
the piece of bread, Judas immediately went out. And it was night." John was not
telling us what time it was. Darkness in this drama is descending and will not
be lifted until Mary is depicted as recognizing the risen Jesus at the tomb
(20:16ff). Speaking of drama, John accomplished the betrayer's exit (13:31a)
only to make way for a triumphal speech from the soon-to-be-betrayed to the
effect that the mischief Judas had
gone on his way to make would "glorify" both the Son of Man and the Father who
is in him. John's Christology is sufficiently formed that he can put on
Jesus' lips the words, "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's
life for his friends" (15:13). That statement can be taken in a
political-historical context, meaning that Jesus took the bullet for a whole
community of dissidents Rome no doubt wanted out of its hair, or in a
metaphysical context meaning that Jesus' death would be atonement for human
sin. Taken together with 3:16, 15:13 could mean the latter. But considered with
the word "friends" in mind, it could yet mean the former. In any event, John
was saying that sacrificial love is the divine nature disclosed by and in the
Son That established, John's Jesus got down to the application
of that principle: "Little children," he said (John representing it in the
Greek "teknia," which is almost akin to "kids" or even "kiddies"), "Yet a
little while I am with you." This is notice that a) Jesus wasn't long for this
world because they were coming to get him and silence him, or b) that his life
as an incarnated terrestrial was coming to an end. As he told "the Jews" (see
7:33, 8:21 and 13:33), "Where I am coming you cannot come -- meaning a) that
his would be a singular martyrdom or b) that his ultimate destination was
re-absorption into the Godhead whence he had been incarnated. A good many
Johannine passages are double entendres. Either way, Jesus was leaving behind a
community that he created, and it is obvious that the community will have a
continuing vocation beyond its relationship to him. And this is its singular
vocation: "A new commandment" to love one another as he has loved it/them.
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
It is the "newness" factor that is the low-hanging homiletic
fruit of this passage. This "new commandment" -- what is "new" about it? The
way the "love" commandment is otherwise stated is: To love the other as self --
a riff on Hillel. But what is "new" here is that love is to be expressed as
Jesus is depicted as having expressed it, viz., in a full, self-giving,
sacrificial way. Here are echoes of the Qumran brotherly love concept of the
sons (and presumably the daughters) "of light" loving one another. It is not,
though, a necessarily universal, undiscriminating love that is enjoined here,
but a ratcheting up of fraternal love (φιλ�ω) to all-out, no-holds-barred love (αγάπη). Already one supposes that anyone who had shared Jesus' itinerancy
as the disciples are depicted as having done would have had and expressed some
measure of fraternal love for one another. Now comes the higher vocation: to
love one another as Jesus is said to have loved them. And there is purpose
behind the thing itself: "By this (love) everyone will be able to see you as my
disciples, that is, by the love you express to and for one another" (my
rendering of v. 35). So "agape" has both intrinsic and extrinsic values. It is
how a community lives that is its primary teaching -- which may explain why
much of the world regards institutional Christianity as a joke. The
contemporary Anglican Communion, for example, is anything but what the only
proper noun in this sentence supposedly conveys. It is a cat fight on a global
scale. It is that, too, in its United States province, the Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church has clawed and scratched its way along,
fighting such intramural battles as slavery: the church in the American South
pretty much stuck with the Confederacy. The church came close to schism in its
General Convention's decision to divert church funds to the inner cities of
America which had been ravaged by revolts in the mid-sixties. Then came the
unseemly conflict over altering liturgical language, followed closely on by its
schism-baiting debate over whether or not women could be priests and bishops.
Now the abyss widens over whether gay and lesbian persons are human enough to
be anything other than barely tolerated sinners.
Add to that the abyss into which the Roman Catholic Church has fallen with its hierarchy's attempt to fend off criticism of its failure over who knows how long to discipline its pedophile priests. Treating the Vatican as if it were an impregnable fortress that no one dare storm and of whose colonels and generals no journalist dare ask pointed questions, the pope and his acolytes wrap themselves in the vestments of faux piety and sneer back at the justifiably offended world they claim their Lord was sent to save. "They will know we are Christians by our love, by our love.
They will know that we are Christians by our love."* So go the words to a '60s-'70s song made popular during the post-Vatican II adjustments in
American Catholicism. I think the world knows no such thing. * by Peter Scholtes and Carolyn Arends, � 1966 by F.E.L. Publications, Ltd./ASCAP (1925 Pontius
Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90025)
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