Psalm 111 & John 4: 31-42
Second Sunday After Pentecost/ June
10, 2012
On
Wednesday evening the Session took some time to reflect upon John 4,
particularly verse 34. It’s the same
verse I want to focus on this morning. Therefore, let’s set it up and put it in
context.
John
4 contains the story of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well near the
city of Sychar in Samaria. He is passing
through the region on his way from Judea back to the Galilee in the north. Now,
remember the Jews and the Samaritans don’t get along. The Jews considered them unclean,
untouchable. As John says,
parenthetically, “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans” (John
4:9). So the fact that Jesus would ask a
Samaritan woman to give him something to drink, to touch the cup he would use
to drink with, is, in itself something quite remarkable. But that’s not my focus. What we need to know here is that Jesus is
alone with the woman at the well. Why? Because, John tells us, parenthetically, “His
disciples had gone to the city to buy food” (John 4:8). This is what we need to know for our
purposes, for when we get to verse 31 we have the disciples returning and
saying to him, “Rabbi [– teacher –] eat something.”
And
what does he say in reply? “I have
food to eat that you do not know about.” This is a puzzling response, rather vague. The disciples haven’t a clue what he’s
talking about. They murmur saying, “Surely no one has brought him something to
eat?” Sometimes we miss the humor and
the sarcasm contained in the gospels because we think we have to be so serious
around them. This is funny – the
disciples talk amongst themselves.
Food? What food? Who brought him food? We just went shopping for you and now you’re
not hungry?
Then
we have verse 34: “My food is to do the
will of him who sent me and to complete his work.” It’s obvious here that Jesus and the disciples
are talking past each other. They’re
both talking about food, but they’re not talking about the same kind of food. The disciples are operating with a
surface-level understanding of food and hunger.
Jesus meets them there and then takes them deeper, into a deeper meaning
of things – because that’s where Jesus lives, that’s where his mind and heart
are, and that’s where the depth of his being, his soul really is. To be a follower of Jesus means going into
the depths, leaving the surface meaning behind, and embracing a far more
profound understanding of life and reality. A life in the depths, as
opposed to the surface, a life of profound meaning and purpose, is what I mean
by soul. I don’t mean what’s left
after the body dies and decays. I don’t mean what goes to heaven. By soul I mean the core of who we are, what’s
deep in our guts, which our bodies also know to be so. Soul is that which ultimately matters, which
gives our lives purpose and vision and meaning.
All of this seems to be implied when Jesus says he has other food.
Last
week, I heard the psychiatrist Tom Kirsch reflect upon his career and the
direction of psychology today. Based
upon the people he works with in his practice in California, he said that
despite all of the great technical and scientific advances of our age (and they
truly are remarkable, unimagined even five to ten years ago), people are still
hungry for what he called “soul food.”[1] This is a hunger that all of our technical
and scientific advances cannot satisfy for us.
If it were the case, there wouldn’t be so many people struggling for
deeper meaning and purpose, especially in North America and Europe. Humanity is adrift and we know it.
That’s
how I felt this past week watching the transit of the planet Venus across the
sun. I followed the transit on the video-stream on the NASA website. I’m grateful for the amazing images that Jeff
Bolognese shared this week from the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory.[2] Stunning.
Amazing. Incredible. As I watched Venus move in front of the sun I
was struck by the massive size of the sun and the smallness of the planet
Venus. I was struck by the enormity of
our solar system and the smallness of my single, solitary existence on this
planet, which is close to the size of Venus.
Think of your existence within the vast, reaches of the universe, the approximately
14 billion light years from our sun.
That is humbling.
All
this technology, but where is soul? Who
are we? What does it mean to be human in
such an amazing universe? Why are we here?
One
of the great minds of the 17th century, the
philosopher-mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) had this to say when he
contemplated his life among the stars:
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the
eternity before and after, the little space which I fell, and even can see,
engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which
know me not, I am frightened, and I am astonished at being here rather than
there, why now rather than then. Who has
put me here? By whose order and
direction have this place and this time been allotted to me? The eternal silence of those infinite spaces
frightens me.[3]
He didn’t know just how immense and silent those
spaces really are.
In
those moments of existential awareness you can’t help but ask what your life
means, who are you, whose are you? Why
are you here? Why do you exist? What does it mean to be human, to be alive,
to be given this life? “What is a life
and what is it for?”[4] These are soulful questions. The
psalmist said it so well, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your
fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human
beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:
3-4). It’s the same question Pascal
raised. What does it mean to be human in
this universe? Who am I? The psalmist continues, “Yet you have made
[us] a little lower than God, and crowned [us] with glory and honor” (Psalm 8:5).
Many
centuries later, our Presbyterian forbears who wrote the Westminster Shorter Catechism
knew that every journey of faith begins by asking this question: “What is the
chief end [or purpose] of humanity?
Humanity’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy God forever.”[5]
That’s
the kind of food, I believe, Jesus was talking about. Living this question daily is the kind of
soul food Jesus feeds on, it’s what gives his life meaning and purpose, doing
soulful things, feeding on the things that feed the soul, which provides
meaning and depth. And for Jesus, his soul food is doing the will of the One
who sent him. That’s what gets him
going. That’s what gives him strength. That’s what gives him life.
What
is our “food”? What satisfies our hunger?
What do we hunger for, both individually and together as a church? What feeds our souls? We can easily come up with a list of all the
things that bring us to life, those things that excite us, things about which
we are passionate. But Jesus is talking
about something else here, something deeper.
He shows us something we might have forgotten about ourselves or maybe
shows us something about what it means to be human that we never knew before,
even if we’ve spent all of our lives in the church.
When
the early Church affirmed Jesus’ full humanity without sin it was a way of
saying that Jesus embodied what it means to be fully human. When we look at him we come to fathom what it
means to be authentically human, we see what a human life is for. And the extent to which we fail to reflect
his way of being, we fail, we sin, that is we miss the mark. Biblically,
theologically speaking we are not human yet; we are on the way to
becoming human, as Jesus was fully human.
And so what we discover, what we learn from Jesus – as the truly human
one – is that, like him, we are all born with a hunger, a soul-hunger, a deep
desire to “feed” on the will of God, and that our souls are never really
satisfied, are never really content until we rest in, live in, and hunger after
God’s will, God’s purpose for our lives and for creation, God’s desire for our
lives and for creation. The desire to
glorify God by doing the will of God is one of the deepest desires of the human
soul. The fact that this is not
immediately apparent in our age is evidence just how alienated we are from our
souls and how far adrift we are as human beings.
But
to the one who opens one’s soul to God, who prays heart-to-heart, soul-to-soul
with the Source of one’s being, you know, as St. Augustine (354-430),
discovered in the fourth century, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in
Thee, O Lord.”[6]
Writing about his return to God in his spiritual autobiography Confessions,
Augustine said to God, “You called, you cried, you shattered my deafness. You sparkled, you blazed, you drove away my
blindness. You shed your fragrance, I
drew in my breath, and I pant for you. I
tasted and now I hunger and thirst. You
touched me, and now I burn with longing for your peace.”[7]
So what is God’s will? That’s the
twenty billion dollar question. My sense
is that, for most, this question is more of a burden than an occasion for joy. Maybe we’re afraid of getting it wrong, of
getting judged for not getting it right.
Perhaps we carry around with us a judging image of God who is waiting to
pounce if we answer the question incorrectly.
Maybe we’re afraid of knowing the answer because we’ll have to do
something about it (or not). The will of
God is really very simple, but we’ve complicated it, because a fearful ego
loves to complicate things. So let’s
uncomplicate it.
What is God’s will? What does God want from us? Glorify God with your life. Enjoy God.
Live the good news of God’s grace.
Embrace faith, offer hope, extend love.
Liberate the oppressed. Forgive. Share. Open
your heart. Grow. Create.
Be merciful. Be
compassionate. Be generous. Do justice.
Be a peacemaker. Be a healer. Love your neighbor. Love yourself. Love God. Enlarge your heart. Embrace the stranger in yourself and in your
neighbor. Serve. Suffer with those who suffer. Rejoice with those who rejoice. Set your fear aside. Come alive.
All this is the will of God. This is what we were created for. And if we’re honest and courageous enough to
plumb the depths of our soul and listen to its desires, we will discover that
this is what every human being hungers for. This is the will God. All of this is what feeds our souls. It’s why we’re here. And our task, our job, our calling, our
challenge, our joyful burden is for you and me, on a daily basis, to try to figure
out what all of this looks like, to make it real, to enflesh it where we live
and work and play and worship. This
is what’s complicated; this is what is difficult. However, do not
despair in your struggle, because this, too, is also the will of God; we
are called to figure it out, and in this holy struggle, too, our souls are fed.
[1] From a lecture for the Jung Society
of Washington, given at the Swiss Embassy, 1st June 2012.
[3] From Pascal’s Pensées (“Thoughts”) from
1669. Cited in William Barrett, Death of
the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer
(New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1986),
8.
[4] The core theological question posed
by James E. Loder, The Logic of the
Spirit: Human Development in Theological
Perspective (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1998).
[5] Question 1 and Answer, Westminster
Shorter Catechism (1648), Book of
Confessions, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
[6] Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, I.1.
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