Laying God’s Cards on the Table
Lord, take my lips and speak through them. Take our minds and think with them. Take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you. Amen.
A bishop colleague of mine, Greg Rickel, in the earliest days of his ministry, told a story about being in a diner and overhearing a family of three, a dad, a very pregnant mom, and a little girl having a conversation about the baby that was about to come into their family. The little girl was all excitement and joy until her father posed the question, “If you had a choice between a brother and a sister, which would you choose?” Without hesitation, she said, “A brother”. Her father followed up by saying, “Think of all the little boys in your class at school. Which one would you most like your brother to be like?” And then after a protracted silence from the usually very talkative little girl, she looks at her father and says, “I think I want a sister”.
Throughout Advent, we’ve been waiting for a baby. And in this season of Christmas, we celebrate Jesus’ birth. So what’s the difference between the baby you expected and hoped for and imagined, and the grown up one you got? You know, the Jesus who said, everyone, not just people like us, everyone is a child of God and worthy of respect and dignity. The one who said, ‘turn the other cheek’, and ‘you cannot serve both God and money’ and ‘take up your cross and follow me’. Our pre-Christmas vision of Jesus is of a sweet, adorable, uncomplicated, baby, demanding little but sleep and milk. But the Jesus we got is tough, demanding and preaches very high standards for our behavior. Makes us prickly sometimes, and sometimes asks us to do things we believe we cannot possibly do. Which Jesus do you believe in, the Hallmark Christmas greeting version of Jesus, or the one we actually got? Today’s gospel is the early Church’s moment to ask those questions. This gospel of John is written almost a century after Jesus’ earthly birth, but in our liturgical calendar, it comes so fast after the hubbub of Christmas, we can easily miss the serious questions that are being asked.
And those questions are important to ask because they are ultimately about Jesus’ authority, Jesus’ authority, to teach about the nature of God. Unless Jesus comes from God, indeed is God, then his teachings about the nature of God have no real authority. They’re just good advice or maybe the ravings of a crazy, itinerant, over the top, optimistic preacher. The opening to John’s gospel that we just heard may sound like a lot of theological gobbledygook, but it behooves us to stop long enough to understand it. So buckle up. We’re going to do some quick Bible study this morning. Let’s review. Mark is the earliest gospel and the most brief, written probably in the seventies. No, not the 1970s, the real seventies. Matthew was written for Jews by a Jew and is often critical of Jews. And always critical of John the Baptist, whose followers were in a competition with the early Church to see which was going to survive. Matthew wrote his gospel probably in the eighties and had a copy of Mark’s earlier gospel beside him. Luke, also in the eighties, also with a copy of Mark to guide him, was written for Gentiles and all outsiders, and the meek and lowly and vulnerable, by a gentile and an outsider.
For instance, the stories of the Good Samaritan and Prodigal Son. Stories we really could not do without as Christians are only to be found in Luke’s gospel. But today’s gospel, John, is the last and latest of the gospels, written roughly a hundred years after Jesus’ birth. And it’s unlike the first three, not one of the so-called synoptic gospels, offering synopsis of Jesus’ life. Rather than a telling of the story of Jesus’ life, John’s gospel is a reflection, a meditation on what Jesus’ life meant, both in the moment for those who had known Jesus, as well as in the long run. In the grand scheme of things. It doesn’t set out to tell us what happened, but rather tries to answer the questions, ‘Who was Jesus really?’ And ‘What was God trying to do in Jesus?’ And ‘what did it all mean?’
By this time, the early Church had pretty much bought into the theory that Jesus knew exactly who he was, if not from the get go, then early on. I mean, after all, if he was God, then surely he knew who he was and what was going to happen to him. And John’s gospel is certainly written from this vantage point. But let me just say I think you can make the argument from scripture, and I personally do, that if God really did actually become a human being as we claim he did, truly became one of us, then like us, he didn’t know any more about what was going to happen to him than we do.
Jesus, of course, had grown very close to God and he was not stupid. He knew that the Roman Empire and the official Jewish Temple leadership who were collaborating with the Romans, felt threatened by his popularity with the people. And he had to have known that if he kept preaching his prophetic message against power and the powerful, and for love and the lowly and outcast, they were going to try to silence him, maybe even kill him. But he just kept singing that song about God. He could know all that without knowing either precisely what was going to happen or that indeed he was God. All of this is preamble to hearing this morning’s famous and glorious and highly theological proclamation. ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’. No birth story in this gospel. In this dense opening to John’s gospel, John lays out the basis for all that he will tell us in the gospel that follows. It’s a little like reading the end of a murder mystery first. John begins by telling us who done it. He tells us who he thinks Jesus was. Answer? The Messiah.
And how Jesus fits into our understanding of God. Answer? Jesus the Christ was there with God at the dawn of creation. And in this brief beginning to his gospel, you will hear John planting the seeds for the theology that will come to fruition in the full-blown notion of the Holy Trinity and the historic Nicene Creed in the fourth century. John is doing some serious speculating here. But remember, it’s based on the recollections of the people who walked and talked with Jesus, and those who found new life as a follower of the risen Lord. Who believed he was so very much the perfect revelation of who God was, that he must have been God. The one who would in time become known as the second person of the Trinity. And if he too was God, then he must have been present from before the beginning of time. He not only was with God, says John, he was God. And Christ had always been a part of the Godhead, became the human Jesus, and then returned to sit at God’s right hand where he had been from the very beginning.
John proclaims Jesus, the Risen Lord to be The Word. Now, the Jewish understanding of the word ‘Word’ is much more than just one piece of a sentence. There was the sense that God created the entire universe by speaking it into being. The very breath of God and the ‘Word’ being spoken by God brought the creation into being. And John equates this ‘’Word’ to the Incarnation of God. they knew as Jesus. Who had resumed his place at God’s side after his Resurrection, a part of God from the beginning of time. It was this same ‘Word’ who became to the people who knew him, a light in the darkness. Not just for them but for all of humankind, full of grace and truth. You can see how this led to the full-blown theory of the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit
Now, at this point in our reading, John can’t resist throwing some shade on those Jews who were followers of John the Baptist, who were still giving the followers of Jesus a run for their money. It was unclear yet which faith community would survive. So John, the gospel writer, flat out claims that John the Baptist was not the light, but rather simply testified to the light which was Jesus. But the most important part of this section is at the end, in almost a throwaway line, that our becoming children of Almighty God was not because of flesh and blood, nor by humankind’s efforts, but was solely done by God, God’s own self. This is the clearest statement so far that the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth was God’s doing, and at God’s initiative. It’s as if John is saying this all happened because God since the beginning of time wanted it to happen and by no one else’s efforts. Indeed it is reflective of St. Paul’s earlier notion that we did nothing to deserve becoming children of God. Rather, this was God’s doing, a free gift, an expression of grace by the God of all that is. Let’s be clear, in the ancient world, no God in his rightful mind wanted to be human. So John is positing a wild and unique notion here that God’s reason for becoming incarnate in Jesus was God’s full disclosure of God’s own self.
An act of vulnerability unheard of by any God in the ancient world. After all, by definition, gods weren’t vulnerable to their subjects. God’s Incarnation in Jesus was a full and complete vulnerability on God’s part. An honest opening up of God’s nature. No more wondering. For the first time ever, if you wanted to know what God was like, what God wants from us, what God’s attitude towards us is like, look at this guy, this Jesus. And look at what he said and taught, the perfect revelation of God. For me, the best example of this is the father in the so-called story of the Prodigal Son, which of course isn’t really about the prodigal son, but about his father. Jesus was not just talking about a particular father and son in a story, Jesus was talking about God. And what God’s attitude toward us would be if we, like the prodigal, were selfish and made wrong choices and messed up our lives pretty badly. Not just failing to live up to our potential but offending God in the process. And what does the story reveal about the true nature of God?
The Father in the story frankly isn’t interested in the son’s apology for his misdeeds. They were their own punishment. But the Father is focusing on throwing a party to celebrate his son’s homecoming, and that, says Jesus, is God’s attitude towards us. God is laying all of God’s cards on the table, telling us who God is and how God will treat us. By the world standards, it’s crazy for God to be this generous and forgiving and loving. Because as mere human beings, we wouldn’t be and we wouldn’t expect God to be. After all, we would probably want to take advantage of someone this kind. How foolish of God to tip God’s hand and let us know ahead of time how radically God loves us and how forgiving God will be.
That, my friends, is why fire and brimstone preaching and sermons warning about sinners in the hands of an angry God are not Christian. They may be dramatic and they may scare people into joining a church, but they’re not the gospel. The gospel said says God is otherwise, and God came God’s self to set the record straight, to be clear, to vulnerably and personally tell us how much God loves us and how unshakeable God’s love for us is. In 21st century America that just seems too good to be true. In my experience, you can preach an angry, vengeful, disciplinarian God, and no one will bat an eye. But you preach a God who is too kind and too forgiving and too loving, and you will be denounced for it. Believe me, I know.
Your task and mine during these 12 days of Christmas and for all the days of our lives is to ask, do we believe God is that loving anyway? It is too good to be true, except that it is true. And if we live our lives as if it’s true, there are almost no limits to the good we can do and no end to the joy we can experience. And when we die, despite all of our failings and sin, God throws a party to welcome us home. I don’t know how or why. I just know it’s true. And that is the light that shines in the darkness, the light that the darkness will never ever overcome. Amen.