Aligned with God
Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for April 20, 2008
Read: John 14:1-14
In today’s Bible text, John’s gospel presents Jesus sharing his final meal with his followers. He looks forward to how his movement will carry on after his death and rising, when he is no longer physically with them. His hope is that the great work God has started through him will carry on through them. That is Jesus’ central concern here.
But this passage in John’s Gospel has become well-known for other reasons altogether. It is often read at funerals. Countless people over the centuries have been comforted by these words:
14:1 “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. 2 In my father’s house there are many dwelling places... 3... and I go to prepare a place for you.
Yet as marvellous as that assurance is, it can deflect attention away from Jesus’ main point here, which is the urgent need that the Jesus movement should carry on after his death and before ours, which is to say, in our lives.
Again, this passage is well-known because it contains a very difficult saying.
6 Jesus said to Thomas, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
No one can come to God except through Jesus? This passage has been takenout of its originating matrix and used to justify Christian exclusivism – the doctrine that outside of Christianity there is no salvation. It can help to put it back in its matrix, to remember that John’s gospel was written in a time when Christians were persecuted, where the other religions were associated with Roman imperial oppression. That may help us understand why this gospel so sharply elevates the Way of Jesus over all other ways to God. But that doesn’t really excuse the arrogance among Christians that has been promoted by those words, “No one comes to the Father except through me.”
And arrogance is the basic problem with Christian exclusivism. It violates the essential humility of Jesus himself. Indeed that humility shows up later in this very passage in John. And that is the part we should focus on today.
“12 Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these.”
We hardly ever notice that part of this passage, but it is astonishing isn’t it? Jesus promises that as wonderful as have been the things he’s accomplished in his ministry his followers will be empowered to do “even greater works”.
On the face of it this is an absurd idea. How could any of us even remotely expect to act with the power and wisdom of Jesus himself? But Jesus has such confidence in the power of God, and is so focussed upon God rather than upon himself, and he welcomes the thought that to the power of God’s spirit his followers will carry on his movement in magnificent ways and that it will spread beyond anything he has accomplished. He knows that God will open up wonderful possibilities, possibility that work within us, a source of power for us to draw on as we seek to carry on the Jesus movement, to carry on Jesus’ movement of restoring our human life to its proper connection to God.
Jesus is so humble that he becomes transparent to God.
8Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied." 9Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
This is a favorite motif or structure in John’s gospel – to line up God and Jesus and us.
God ➔ Jesus ➔ us
To see Jesus is to see God. To get to know Jesus and his Way is to encounter the reality of God in the maximum form it can take in any human being.
Here’s an image that can help us understand this. It’s wonderful to have a digital camera: so small and light, with the LCD on the back that allows you to see immediately afterwards the picture you have just taken. However the law of unintended consequences takes hold with this technology. It turns out that these little LCD screens polarize the light they emit. If you look at them through a polarized lens, such as the lens of your sunglasses, everything is fine as long as the polarization in your sunglasses aligns with the polarization of the LCD. But if you turn the camera sideways, rotate it 90 degrees, the light cannot get through. The upshot of this is that when I turn my camera sideways, if I’m wearing sunglasses (which I often do outdoors when I am taking pictures), the LCD screen goes black and I can’t see what I want to photograph!
A minor inconvenience. But it suggests this insight. God is pure love, pure goodness, pure”light”, as the Bible often puts it. Our spirits cannot “look” directly at God. The radiance of the divine reality would be overwhelming; the glare would blind us.
To look at Jesus, then, is like looking at God through sunglasses. Jesus is like a polarized lens. When we look at Jesus we can look through him to God, and see what God is like without being blinded. This is because Jesus as a person, his character, his attitudes, his life’s history, is aligned with the nature of God. The light passes through him without distortion and also without overwhelming us. And so John’s Jesus says, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
So often we are like a further lens in turn, but oriented the wrong way, like this:
But if we were to become fully aligned with Jesus the light could pass through us, too. When people looked at us, at what we do and what we are like, they would also be able to see what God is like, expressed at a human scale, operating through human actions. Like this:
And there is the possibility for us. We can become more and more aligned along the axis of Jesus, like a lens becoming more and more polarized in the right direction. We can become aligned by following the Way of Jesus. By the Way of Jesus I mean the stories he told and the symbolic actions he did and the orientation towards God which he demonstrated. These are like a giant magnet that passes over us again and again, gradually lining us up along the correct orientation so that we become as transparent to God as he was.
This is what Jesus promises will happen. It will happen in exemplary human beings who make it into the public eye as great people of spirit, people who are commonly recognized has been clearly connected to and oriented around God. It will happen also in unheralded and unreported lives being lived around the corner from us, lives which in their quiet way are also aligned through the Way of Jesus with God, lives that shine forth the self-giving love and compassion and the passion for justice which are in the heart of God.
This, then, is our calling. Let us seek to align ourselves with the fundamental directions of the Way of Jesus, so that, in ways great or small, the reality of God may shine through us and take effect in our world, doing things that might indeed, according to the purposes of God, be things greater even than those of Jesus himself.