John 14:1-14
Fifth Sunday in Easter/ 18th May 2014
There was a time when I thought that
all God wanted from me was my belief.
Belief is what mattered, I thought.
I went to Sunday School. My
mother taught Sunday School for almost forty years; she was my teacher twice
(not because I had to repeat a grade). I
went to Sunday School every week. I had perfect attendance every year, from
kindergarten through 9th grade when I was confirmed—and I have the attendance
awards to prove it. Believing in God was important; I came to sense that that’s
what God wants from us. When I was in
high school I read a lot of religious literature, which, looking back upon it now
was theologically very conservative. I’m
not sure how I came across such texts.
That was not the theological bent of my family or of my church. Yet, verses such as Acts 16:31 were seared
into my brain, "Believe in
the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household” (NIV). Or, there was this one from Romans 10:9, “If
you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that
God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (NIV). If you want to be saved, then you have to
believe, I assumed. I was worried about
being lost. Belief is the key to the door that leads to everlasting life, which
meant not believing or doubting would move me into very dangerous
territory. Or so I thought.
It was later, in college and in
seminary, that I realized two things: first, the value of doubt and, second,
the meaning of God’s grace. I came to know what grace felt like. It’s then that
I discovered that grace comes first—it always comes first—followed by
belief. Belief matters, theological ideas
matter, but belief unfettered by grace, belief apart from grace, is cheap and,
worse, dangerous. Belief matters, but
what matters more is our relationship with the object of our belief, the content of belief, that is, our
relationship with God through Christ in the power and presence of the Holy
Spirit. That relationship, itself, is grace.
Gradually, I came to see: God doesn’t want my belief. God wants me.
So, what causes
this confusion? Particular readings of
John’s gospel get us into this mess; they tend to confuse us. It’s not John’s
fault. It has to do with the way we read him. We just heard verses such as John
14:1, “Believe in God, believe also in me.”
Then there is the conversation between Philip and Jesus. “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be
satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I
been with you all this time,…and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How
can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father
and the Father is in me?” “Believe me
that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then
believe me because of the works themselves.” (John 4:8-11) Jesus is helping both Philip and Thomas understand
the unity between Jesus and his Father, with God. Jesus is saying in other words: If this seems odd or foreign to you, Philip
and Thomas, then look at what I’ve been able to do because the Father is at
work in me.
It might sound like Jesus is being
harsh here, even shaming them. There is
a gentle rebuke here, but we have to hear the rebuke within the context of
Jesus’ deep friendship with them,
within his commitment to them, within
the extraordinary trust and confidence he has in them. Jesus isn’t some revivalist preacher here
demanding Philip and Thomas to make a decision then and there: belief or
unbelief. Their conversation is situated
within the context of what they’ve already come to know about him.
Jesus here is a teacher, who wants
his students to deepen what they already know; he’s sharing this knowledge with
them, this wisdom about who he is because Jesus trusts them. In fact, he has
extraordinary confidence in them. What
Jesus wants them to realize is that through him they are being drawn deeper and
deeper into a relationship with the Lord of the Universe, the Source of all
goodness and grace, the Fount of love and life.
It’s a relationship that the Lord of the Universe, the Source of all
goodness and grace, the Fount of love and life seeks to have with you and
me. How do we know this? Because it’s the
same relationship that Jesus demonstrated to us in his relationship with his
Father. Jesus’ disciples—you and me—have
been and are being invited to live, to dwell in that same kind of relationship,
an intimacy with the God.
This is an extraordinary claim
here—radical, life-changing in its implications for us. It must have been staggering
for the disciples to hear. There’s
nothing like this in Judaism. “I am in
the Father,” Jesus said, “and the Father is in me” (John 14:10). This is a mutual indwelling, one
participating in the life of the other.
Life flowing from the Father to the Son; life flowing from the Son to
the Father. The Father dwelling in Jesus
works through him. Nothing Jesus says he says on his own. Nothing Jesus does he does on his own. It’s
all the result of God working through him.
Jesus certainly had more than belief in God. He trusted in God. He rested in the strength of the
relationship. He rested in God’s faithfulness and love for him. And in the strength of that relationship,
that mutual exchange—God trusting Jesus; Jesus trusting God—Jesus was empowered
to act, to serve, to save.
Therefore, when we hear the word
“believe” here (and throughout John’s Gospel), we should understand it to mean
something more like trust. When we trust
in what Jesus has shown us with his life we discover that, like him, we are
being drawn into a deep, intimate relationship with God.
God doesn’t want
your belief. God wants you. That is
what Jesus came to show. This is what
God desires for all people. It’s what
God desired for humanity since the dawn of time. The Christian life is about more than saying,
“I believe in God,” or “I believe Jesus was the Son of God.” The Christian life is about more than
belief. It’s an experience. As I came to
know—as I continue to fathom the unfathomable—God is in me and I am in God. That’s what Jesus is suggesting to Philip and
Thomas. God is in you and you are in God.
Why does this matter? Why is this so
important? Because, as Jesus says, “Very
truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me”—that is, the one who trusts in me, rests in me, welcomes me,
participates in me—“will also do the
works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am
going to the Father” (John 14:12). Now,
that’s a very bold claim.
How can anyone do greater works than
Jesus? Really? How can Jesus make such a claim?
Jesus could make such a claim
because he knew the potential power of human beings when their lives are bound
to God, rooted in that relationship with God, like Jesus, and when the Life of
God pours through them. What Jesus
knew, we can and do know. When we are
rooted in that relationship, when we trust that God is working through us, we
will witness the further unfolding of
God’s love incarnating itself in the world, in the church, in you and me. God
still desires the incarnation of divine love in the world.
Now, that’s not something that I
learned in Sunday School. I can remember thinking that God wanted me to believe
in something that took place in the past and that by believing that something
took place a long time ago somehow made God happy, which meant heaven for me—or
something like that. The orientation was
looking back. It took me a long time to
reorient myself from focusing on the past to the present, becoming attentive to
the ongoing work of God in the world,
and then looking forward, to the “new thing” God would reveal in the
future.
Right here in John 14 you can hear
the future orientation of this text.
Jesus isn’t calling disciples to look back to a golden age, but to look
forward to a new age, to the new thing God was doing in the world in Jesus, but
also beyond Jesus, through Jesus into the future. The vision Jesus offers his disciples is that
change is inevitable, change is good, and that God is still at work in us and
through us, that God is actually trying to take us somewhere, to move us, so we
better get used to change.[1] The story of God’s love is still being
told. It’s as if this is what Jesus
discovered—the story of God’s love is still unfolding—this is what he knew and
now he wants the rest of us to know this too, to know this experience first-hand.
And so Jesus says
in order for us to discover this for ourselves he has to leave us, he has to go
away—although not completely, he promised never to leave us orphaned (John
14:18)—like a good parent, Jesus has to step back, step away in order for us to
step up and grow up, to discover for ourselves what God is trying to accomplish
through us. As Jesus later says to his
disciples, in John 16, “…it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do
not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to
you” (John 16:7).
This week I was reading a review of a
book about to be released in two weeks, the first novel written by Jöel Dicker,
called The Truth About the Harry Quebert
Affair (Penguin). It’s being being hailed as the great American crime
novel—although it was written in French.
It’s about a crime case in a small New Hampshire town. It was released in France in 2012 and
immediately became a best seller, and then it was released in Spain and Italy
in 2013 (supplanting Dan Brown). Three
years ago, Jöel Dicker, a Geneva Law School graduate, was taking lunch orders
from Swiss parliament members and putting off the bar exam. The 28-year-old said, “I didn’t have the holy
fire for law.” So he quit his job and started to write. Speaking on the change of direction in his
life, he said, “I like it when the end
is the beginning of something else.” And I immediately thought of Jesus’ words
to Philip and Thomas. Something has to
come to an end for something else to emerge.
Something has to die in order for new life to follow. And then Dicker
offered these words, “A good story is never-ending.”
He’s right. That’s what makes it good.
When we finish reading a good story, we want to start reading it all over again.
The same is true for what we find in the Bible.
The story isn’t over—it’s still unfolding.
The story of God’s love for the
world is never-ending. And Jesus entrusts
you and me with the story: to not only tell the story, but also live the story,
embody it, live the story forward. Jesus trusts us and entrusts us with this
work.
We don’t do all this on our own,
relying upon our own strength, wisdom, or knowledge. It’s not about us, but about what God is
doing through us. And how do we know about these “greater works”? How do we do all of this? Jesus offers the way here too. Prayer. “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so
that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it” (John 14:13-14). This is not prayer as wish fulfillment. God is
not a genie who waits to grant us three wishes. Prayer is not a tool to get God
to do whatever we want. That’s childish and selfish. Instead, this is prayer in which we discover
and rediscover who God is, where we understand our true relationship to God, in God, and then ask God to help us to
do things, new things, new works, that will live the story forward and honor
God. We then desire after these things, even greater works, whatever will give
glory and honor to God. That’s how we
live the story forward. That’s our
calling.
What is that greater work in your
life?
What is that
greater work for the Church today?
What is the
greater work for this people of God?
Let’s together be still and listen and open ourselves
to the Spirit. Let us pray….
[Several minutes
of silent prayer followed here during worship.]
Through the
presence of the Holy Spirit, in the power of the Risen Christ, to the glory and
honor of God. Amen.
[1] Cf. the quote
from the bulletin cover: “Change is not
what we expect from religious people.
They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.” Richard
Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for
the Two Halves of Life (Jossey-Bass, 2011), 11.
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