6 Easter C May 5, 2013
Acts 14:8-18
Ps. 67
Rev. 21:22-22:5
John 14:23-29
What is that both creates human lives as we
know them and then preserves then into
the future? It is our word ability. What keeps animals from becoming
extinct? Their ability to continue to
propagate their species into the future; for animals it is only a biological
preservation. With human being it
involves a preservation of all that humans have attained in what we call human
culture. And human beings use word or
language and language products to preserve what they can retain of human
culture from one age to the next.
What is a bee
keeper? Someone who tends to bees in
hives in order to harvest the honey.
What is a zoo keeper? A worker at
a zoo who takes care of animals. What is
a house keeper? A member of the
household who takes care of the interior maintenance of a house.
In our appointed
Gospel lesson for today, we have a reference to word keeping. “Those who love me will keep my word.” That’s a quote from a discourse of Jesus
unique to John’s Gospel. Word
Keeper? What does that mean? I’m as guilty as anyone in being sloppy
often about word use and I think perhaps we often miss the meaning of word
keeping in this Gospel lesson based upon what word keeping has come to mean in
our English usage, which probably came about because of a misuse of this Gospel
passage.
In English if it
is said that someone keeps their word, it means that they honor their verbal
contracts but we normally only use this phrase in reference to the words that
belong to the same person who is keeping them.
He keeps his word. I keep my
word. But I don’t usually say that I
keep someone else’s word. And it would
be a rare English expression for someone to ask me to “keep their words.”
We probably are
used to thinking that “keeping the word” of Jesus would mean to obey Jesus, but
there is another Greek word for obey and that is not the word used in this
Gospel lesson. In earlier verses it was
written that the disciples were asked by Jesus to keep his commandments. This is a direct identification of Jesus as
one who is greater than Moses when it comes to having commandments that should
be regarded.
But back to
keeping the word of Jesus. John’s Gospel
is all about Word. Word or the Greek
word logos can be used in various ways.
It can mean a single word; it can be used as a collective plural as “entire”
body of words; it can be used as a metaphor for what God is for us in trying to
understand God. The beginning phrase of
John is “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word
was God. And that Word also became flesh
and dwelled among us.
The dilemma of the
community for whom the Gospel of John was written concerned how the reality,
the life, the memory, the presence of Jesus would be retained or kept in this
world. Jesus was so special his
disciples were concerned that his memory could die out just as the memory of
the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived has died out.
The words that we
read today in John’s Gospel were written to a previous question. Judas
(not Iscariot) asked Jesus, “How are you going to make yourself known to
us and not to the rest of the world?”
This question is really a dialogue analysis of the “staying power” of
the remembrance of Jesus within the world.
You can appreciate the doubt of the question. Jesus, if you don’t make it on the big stage
of world history, like Julius Caesar did, how are you going to be remembered? And how can our small little band of
followers keep you alive in the world?
And the answer
is? Jesus said that he and the Father
and the Holy Spirit were all going to come and make a home in their followers. Jesus had just said that in his Father’s
house there were many dwelling places.
So Jesus was indicating that each body of his followers was to become an
address, a location for the residence of the life of God as Father, Son and
Holy Spirit.
What was going on
in the community of the Gospel of John?
They were taken up with the issue of the “staying power” of the memory
of Jesus in their life and world. They
were well aware of the success of the Jesus Movement but at the same time they
were not taking for granted the future presence of the memory of Jesus in the
world.
The punchline is
this: The quality of relationship and
the re-creation of Godly presence in the life of each person wer so pronounced
that it created such excitement as to be able to be transmitted through a
continuous succession of words of Jesus from one disciple of Jesus to the next
disciple of Jesus.
We are so assuming
about the doctrine of the Trinity that really did not become such a theological
abbreviation for God until after the fourth century, that we forget the
pregnant impact of the metaphor of the family of God becoming resident in one’s
life as a continuing location of God’s presence in this world.
If the Ford logo
fell off one of Henry Ford’s car would it still have been made by Henry Ford? Were the early members of John’s community
worried about the label of God and Christ being removed such that their maker and
originator would no longer be recognized?
“Don’t worry” says
the dialogical Jesus in John’s Gospel, “our the divine family brand is going to
be all over you and in you and through you and this basic DNA of the family is
going to be spirit-word within you and it will keep the Jesus-family brand
alive and well for a long, long time.
One of the major
themes, in my opinion, of the Gospel of John has do with the word and how it is
by the word that the identity of the community is going to remain connected
with the identity of Jesus.
In John, Jesus is
the Christ, who is the Word of God, the same word that was spoken when the world
of human beings came into being. Jesus
did not write books; Jesus spoke words.
Spoken words are harder to remember forever. How do spoken words remain? Oral tradition is passed on in spoken words
that are reduced to mnemonic devices such as metaphors and stories. Metaphors and stories are units of memory in
oral traditions. They help the listener
be able to retain the gist of the conversation.
Oral traditions are not always precise and exact; they get slightly
altered in transmission due to inexact human memory. John’s Gospel is about anchoring spoken word
of Jesus into a written word of teachings that Jesus would have said to help his
followers to retain the importance of the mission of his life. The punch line of John’s Gospel is about word
as written word or as a more precise technology of memory for retaining exact
words into the future. This is what the
Gospel of John has done; writing has retain exact words and these words limit
the possible number of interpretations for these words and the faith meanings
that they can come to have to people who read and hear them. You cannot say
that John’s Gospel is written about Julius Caesar.
The gist of the
appointed Gospel is that the quality of the life of Jesus is so special that it
could go from face to face contact; to personal witness existing in oral
transmission and then into written word and the life of Jesus could be
transmitted across history into the next generation. And this has happened; we ourselves still try
to account for the staying power of this transmission of the presence of Christ
to us and in the many and varied way in which we have come to confess that God
is Emmanuel, God is with us.
Let each us accept
that fact that we are individually a crowded house; God has taken up residence
in us, set up home and it started because we were made in God’s image and now
we just get to flat out confess it because God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Word,
Comforter, Wisdom or the Great One by any name resides in those whom the Divine
one has designed and created. Jesus made
this known is a special way and the memory of him has been retained in a
profound way. We may not understand the
staying power of Jesus even as atheist, agnostic and all have to admit that
Jesus has hung around for a long time.
Without
trivializing God’s presence in our lives let us accept it as the basic Mystery
of our lives that we revere and live towards each and every moment. Let us not be too proud about how we know
God; let us be more grateful that we have the privilege to be humble dwellings
for God in our world. Amen.
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