Two-Minute Homily: Doing As He Said    

FINDINGS II

Easter VI - A - May 29, 2011

John 14: 15-21      

John 14: 15-21   

Jesus said to his disciples: "If you love me, you will do as I say. I have asked the father to provide you with an advocate to take my place. That advocate is the authentic force who will be with you always. The world is ill-equipped to accept that force because it cannot perceive it, much less recognize its legitimacy. However, you recognize it because it lives within you and will stay there. I won't leave you and make you orphans; I'll come to you. Shortly now, the world will no longer see me, but you'll see me because I will be alive in the same way that you'll be alive. Then you will come to see that I am in my father and that you are in me as I am in you. Those who do as I say . . . they're the ones who love me. And those who love me will, in turn, be loved by my father. Further, I will love them and continue to disclose myself to them."

(Translated, condensed and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook)

RUBRIC

This text is an "if A, then B" proposition. John's Jesus is depicted as being in conversation with his closer friends in what has been termed as a "farewell discourse" -- perhaps words John imagined or wished Jesus might have spoken to his followers. The farewell discourse, however, is unique to the fourth gospel, so the assumption is that it is largely a creation of the Johannine imagination. This passage in particular assumes that John's Jesus and the father (or Yahweh/Logos) are co-terminus, which has been John's point all along.

HOMILETIC WORKSHOP

The "if A, then B" concerns the necessity to "love" the son. And here the root word predictably is άγάπη -- "love" in the sense of an uncalculated and incalculable outpouring of the whole self to others. That "love" is the subject of the "new commandment" of John 13:34: "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you . . ." How had Jesus loved his friends? The clear indication of this gospel which, like all other such documents was composed well after and in light of Jesus' death, is that Jesus laid down his life for them. That was Jesus Judaism in its early developmental stage attempting to invest an execution with a meaning it probably didn't have when it occurred -- if it occurred.

The outpouring of the disciples' love and the proof of it are to be in the keeping of that great commandment. That said, it must be remembered that the fourth gospel does not include any of the better known wisdom sayings generally credited to the Jesuses of the synoptics. Those sayings, including the riff on Hillel the Great which produced the so-called Golden Rule, may be the "commandments" or the "do-as-I-say" things of which John's Jesus spoke in the passage at hand.

The keeping of such commandments would surely not be easy. Jesus' enunciation of them -- as in "turn the other cheek" and "walk the second mile" (clearly strategies of passive resistance) -- may be part of what got him into trouble. The ethic framed by them is counter-cultural, as in "love your enemy." So part of the bargain of the "if A, then B" is that if the disciples are to love Jesus by doing as he said (and did), then he will both send and be that "other advocate" -- παράκλητος, one called to the aid of an accused before the bar, pleader, intercessor. In our palsy-walsy Americanese, this would be "one who is always there for us."

Late first century C.E. Jesus Jews were certainly in need of such an advocate. The Gospel of John suggests that such communities were under the gun and marginalized by synagogue Judaism. And that may well have been the reason for the passage in the first place, that is to assure Jesus Jews that, despite the pressures they felt from both Roman authorities and the synagogues, they did have an advocate, though an unseen one. That advocate, however, like the rule of God would be and, in fact already was, within them. "I am in my father and . . . you are in me as I am in you."

Augustine, Luther and Barth to the contrary notwithstanding, it all hinges on "doing as he said," on keeping the commandments, fulfilling the terms of Jesus' ethical wisdom teaching. That's the love that enables recognition of the advocate among the faithful. "If A, then B." The logic is similar to Paul's "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised." (I Corinthians 15:13).

Putting it more bluntly, as a friend of mine has said and, in so saying, gave me half the title of a forthcoming book: "Long live salvation by works."

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Two-Minute Homily

Doing As He Said       

By Harry T. Cook

What did Jesus say? And does it make any difference? Is it who said it or what was said that counts?

I quote from my 2001 book Seven Sayings of Jesus*:

There are monumental difficulties in determining with any certainty anything the one called Jesus might have said. With the Jesus Seminar we might better look for some consistency among the so-called 'red letter' sayings around which over time textual editors have place quotation marks, so attributing them to Jesus.

We have suggested that he was an exponent of a peculiar humanistic ethic, that such was his possible distinction among many of his itinerant street-speaker types. Working from that hypothesis, it is possible to find that consistency in seven sayings that may be actual utterances of or derivative of stories attribute by tradition to Jesus.

Those sayings are:

'Turn the other cheek,' 'Walk the second mile,' 'Give up your shirt as well as your coat,' 'Forgive 70 times seven,' Love your neighbor,' Love your enemy,' 'Do to others as you would have done to yourself.'

. . . The central thesis of this book is that these seven sayings say as much about . . . Jesus as he was remembered by his earliest followers as anything we possess in the scriptural tradition. Who Jesus was -- and therefore what he would do -- can reasonably be distilled from an understanding and appreciation of those sayings.

According to the text at hand, Jesus told his followers this: If you love me, you will do as I say. The evangelist is unclear as to what his version of Jesus may have said. While John's gospel shows little evidence that the writer knew or cared what Jesus may have said, he could not have been entirely unaware of the sayings attributed to Jesus, which appear in the gospels of Thomas, Mark, Matthew and Luke.

But the question is this: Does it matter who said what? Does it matter if it was a human being believed by some to be a unique revelation of the divine or, what seems more credible, a Gandhi-like person guided by a vision of peace and justice?

If, as the proverb attributed to this Jesus -- by their fruits they will be known -- applies to this discussion, perhaps the ethic that encompasses and informs those seven sayings matters only if people who know and embrace them act upon them as a rule of life. The consequence is all.

If the Jesus whom Christians imagine as actually having lived had never given such counsel as turn the other cheek or love your enemy, would he matter as much as he seems to matter? And if his followers have not consistently followed the counsel inherent in those words attributed by some sources to him, does their so-called "faith" matter very much?

* Cook, New York, 2001, Vantage Press, 25-26.