FINDINGS IV By Harry T. Cook

Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook 

4/22/13

"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.

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 lift 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 went to the gibbet 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 text at hand τεκνοις, 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 going 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 partake in the double entendre. 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 them as parts of the community.

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 αγάπη 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 that 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. Perhaps with Pope Francis in charge things will be different in that and many respects.