Two-Minute Homily: Getting Through to Mr. Big   

FINDINGS II

Easter V - A - May 22, 2011

John 14: 1-14     

John 14: 1-14   

Jesus said: "Don't succumb to your anxiety. You believe in God, of course. Well, believe in me, too. There is plenty of room in my father's house. Why would I tell you that if it weren't true? I am going to that place soon enough to reserve a space for you in it. And if I go and do that, I'll return and gather you in my arms, so that where I'll be, you'll be, too. You know, of course, where I am going, and you also know the way." Thomas said to him, "Great One, we don't know where you're going, and how could we know the way?" "I am the way, and I am truth and I am life," replied Jesus. "No one gets through to the Father except by me. If you recognize who I am, you will recognize my father as well. In fact, from now on you know him; you have seen him." Philip said, "Well, then, let us see the father, and we'll be satisfied." Jesus replied with some asperity, "I've been here with you for all this time, and you say you don't know me, Philip? Anybody who sees me sees the father, so how can you say 'Let us see the father?' You can't believe that I am in the father and that the father is in me?  I am not saying this on my own authority. Listen, the father is with me all the time. And I am doing his work. You should believe that I am in the father in that the father is in me, or at the very least you ought to believe the works for what they are. And by the way, as God is my witness, I tell you that anyone who believes in me will be able to and will perform such works and even great ones, because I am on the way to the father. What's more, I will do for you whatever you ask as long as you ask in my name. This is so the father can be honored by what the son does. Putting it this way: Anything you ask by mentioning my name, it will be done."

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

RUBRIC

The first thing to notice about this passage is its placement near the beginning of what turns out to be in John's schema the so-called final discourse of Jesus. Judas has "gone out" into the night eight verses earlier. John's Jesus knows to what he has gone out, and that the end is probably near -- as would John's readers well before he began to tell his version of the story. Some one in those shaky late first century communities would have wanted to know what Jesus' last words were. Knowing of such questions and perhaps seizing the opportunity to put words of his own on Jesus' lips, John sets forth an intriguing theology which begins with the means of explaining the non-corporeal life of the physically dead Jesus.

HOMILETIC WORKSHOP

You must first explain his whereabouts if you are to insist that he is in some way alive. The place to which Jesus is going is first alluded to at ch. 13:33. Now his disciples are told that he must go there for a season to prepare for their going there, but not yet. In due course, John's Jesus says, he will return from "that place" and gather up those who have heard this message (the disciples in whatever number) and accompany them to it "so where I am there you may be also."

What place? Where? The disciples are assumed to know, and not only the place but the road on which to reach it. Thomas (who else?) is made to say plaintively, "We have no idea. How could we know such a thing?" That is the set-up for one of the major "I am" sayings unique to the fourth gospel but reminiscent of the Yahweh pronouncement at Exodus 3:14. For Thomas' benefit, the "way" is Jesus; the place is the "father" or where the father is; the "truth" (αλήθεια) is the disclosure or unveiling of the whole plan and purpose.

If the contemporary consumer of FINDINGS II find John's language puzzling, so the late first century Jesus Jews must have been similarly baffled. "Don't succumb to your anxiety," John's Jesus told the disciples. "Don't be confused." Anxiety and confusion is what those slouching away from Judaism into they knew not what must have felt toward the end of the first century C.E. Perhaps they looked for a sustaining hope in a source other than their own time (conflicted) and their own space (a land hardly theirs). And where else might that be but the source/origin of their being as John had sung of it in 1:1-18?

The claim is that only through Jesus can one get to that place or attain to that state wherein no heart need be troubled. This surely is Jesus Judaism reacting in the extreme to the pressures upon it to reject the innovative path of its own emerging and revolutionary Judaism. It is the claim of a paranoid community with its back to the wall - defiant and insistent on its position. The idea that no one can achieve ultimate acceptance except through belief that Jesus was God in the flesh only makes sense if understood as a principle internal to the community. It does not make sense to say that to or of persons of other religious persuasions. Acts 4:12 (often footnoted in commentary on this Johannine passage) does not have the universal sweep often attributed to it: "There is no other name given among mortals by which we must be saved." The "we" seen in context refers to Jewish rulers, elders and scribes plus "Annas, Caiaphas, John and Alexander, and all who were of the high priestly family." All those were Jews and are the collective antecedent to the first person plural pronoun "we" in Acts 4:12. Bad ecclesiology and bad manners, even so.

The latter section of 14: 1-14 further develops the christology of the discourse to the point at which John's Jesus attributes both his words and his works directly to the "father," with emphasis: "Believe it!" The son does the father's works and, after Jesus has gone to "that place" believing disciples will do those works. Access to the father is no longer through the keeping of the 613 commandments of Torah but through embodying the New Commandment of 13:34: love (άγάπη). No more is access to the father to be through the priest-craft of the long-past Temple and its Holy of holies. The only intermediary is the son through whose name (nature or intention) can anything be asked. This would have been hard medicine for those of continuing rabbinical, synagogue Judaism to swallow.

Imagine the strength and courage that besieged Jesus Jews must have drawn from John's passionate and graphic vision of divine partisanship. It is all the more remarkable to witness, given that at the end of the first century C.E. the future of Jesus Judaism was tenuous at best. The words of John 14:1ff sound so triumphant in light of nearly two millennia of Christian hegemony in the West. The trick is to try to hear those words as in a bunker ca. 90 C.E. on what might be thus far the worst day of one's life.

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Two-Minute Homily

Getting Through to Mr. Big      

By Harry T. Cook

It was telephone switchboards and their low-paid operators counting out the ringy-dingys who started to build the Great Wall of Inaccessibility. Butlers in their days surely contributed to its construction, too. When they were handed the cards of would-be callers, they never knew for certain that their masters were at home but far more often knew that they were not.

Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge was a big-time financier, but all anyone had to do to see him was to open the door from the lane and walk up to his desk, having handed the lowly clerk Bob Cratchit their hats on the way in.

Not today. To speak to the top person of any firm, corporation, political jurisdiction or practice, one must thread a complicated way through the pressing of 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5, leaving messages as one would shoot an arrow into the air, or, alternately, face a series of factotums to whom one must vouchsafe in detail -- often in quintuplicate -- the reason he needs to see Mr. Big.

Possibly the most aggravating question one can hear is that of a receptionist, secretary or aide asking in acid tones, "May I tell him what it concerns?" It sounds like a question, but its intent is a threat: "Tell me everything, or the line will go dead."

That's the stuffy sense of the line given Jesus by the evangelist John: No one gets through to the Father except by me. Assuming by "father" John meant the one deity of the universe, it is no wonder the evangelist makes such a deal of the post-mortem Jesus who keeps showing up here and there. See John chapters 20 and 21. John doesn't complicate his case by staging an ascension into the heavens for Jesus that would have the effect of making the very one through whom a person must go through in order to access the father the more inaccessible. John further makes certain we know that the father "will send another Advocate" in Jesus' place once he's gone. See John 14:16.

Quite by accident while on my way across the cable spectrum to a PBS channel, I caught part of a feverish sermon by a well-known TV preacher. He was issuing a stern warning that no prayer lifted unto the deity of his religion could possibly be heard, much less answered, if not offered "in the name of Jesus." Because the deity of his religion was, incidentally, the only deity, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and all manner of other religionists have but one recourse, viz. to convert. Of course, he quoted that line from John mentioned above to support his proposition.

Next day I decided to see how much rigmarole I would have to endure to get him -- the TV evangelist that is, not God -- on the phone. I had to dial an 800 number, so rather than using up precious minutes on my cell phone, I used the landline in our house. It was a good thing, too, because the interminable litany of key-punching, on-hold Jesus songs and multiple recordings all saying, in a word, that I could forget about ever speaking directly to The Man ended up costing me nothing but an irreplaceable 10 minutes of my life.

It is no wonder that people who have thought it through no longer believe, if they ever did, that prayer cast upon the vagaries of the universe addressed to remote and unseen deities is a worthwhile effort. You can almost hear that offensive voice asking, "May I tell Him what it concerns?"

"No, you may not." Click.