Poured Out

2 Samuel 11:26-12:10, 13-15

Galatians 2:15-21

Luke 7:36-8:3

            All three of today’s scripture lessons present us with a rather complex knot in which are wound together the dynamics of forgiveness, gratitude, and morality.  In both the story from II Samuel in which the Prophet Nathan confronts David and the gospel story in which the woman anoints the feet of Jesus the themes of sex and love are at least a prominent part of the background.  The paragraph from Galatians that we heard in between these stories is the sharp attempt of Paul to place the center of our relationship with God in Christ, not in the morality of law-keeping. 

            Get ready for some surprises here.  These three things taken together are likely to shatter what you imagine the purpose of Christian religion is—indeed perhaps the purpose of any religion—and quite possibly your self-understanding as well.

            Let’s begin with the compelling masterpiece that is today’s Good News from Luke.  To start off, it is a distinctly different story from a couple you might have heard not long ago in Lent and Holy Week.  There are at least three different stories and four separate accounts of a woman anointing Jesus.  Those in Matthew, Mark, and John take place not in Galilee, as today’s story does, but in Bethany, a little village not far from Jerusalem.  Matthew and Mark place the anointing by an anonymous woman in the house of Simon who is not a Pharisee but a leper.  In both their versions the woman anoints Jesus’ head, not his feet.  In both stories, the onlookers—disciples in one case—fuss at the woman because she has wasted expensive ointment, which could more appropriately have been converted into cash for the poor.  In both stories, Jesus takes the side of the woman saying that she has anointed his body beforehand for burial.  John identifies the woman as Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus.  Mary anoints the feet of Jesus and wipes them with her hair.  All of this takes place the week before the Passover during which time Jesus was crucified.  The voice that objects to the profligate love of Mary is that of Judas Iscariot who was to betray Jesus.  And Jesus’ response is an order to let Mary alone, to let her “keep it [the perfume] for the day of my burial.”

            Luke’s story, as you can see, is very different from any of the others.  Simon, a Pharisee, has invited Rabbi Jesus to his house for dinner.  It is a particularly festive meal, because contrary to everyday custom, dinner guests are reclining at table on couches.  In what seems to us a bizarre occurrence but which in those days was apparently common, a woman, probably one of many people hanging around the outside of the house peering in at the guests, comes into the house and starts what is clearly an extravagant show of affection for Jesus.  The woman is a harlot.  Everybody apparently knows this.  Simon, somewhat surprisingly, does not upbraid the woman but is in fact scandalized that Jesus, reputed to be a prophet, apparently does not know who and what the woman is.  He also reasons silently that if Jesus did know, he would certainly put a stop to it.  Thus, Simon figures, this man is no prophet.  Jesus in fact knows Simon’s thoughts.  Perhaps they are not that hard to discern.  At any rate, in the fashion of the day he poses a little riddle about the two debtors with greatly different debts, both forgiven.  Who will love the more?  When Simon says he supposes the one who was forgiven more, Jesus says that he has answered rightly. 

            Ah!  The trap is laid.  “Do you see this woman?”  That is the real question.  Simon not only does not see her as anything beyond a street harlot, nor does he see himself.  And because he does not see his need for forgiveness, he has no earthly idea why one would carry on so in gratitude for forgiveness.  How could he?  Jesus contrasts the woman’s profligate outpouring of love with Simon’s rather reserved—to say the least—display of hospitality.  Underneath is the issue of the way Jesus himself is treated.  And that in turn reflects the way he is or is not understood to have anything to do with forgiveness.  Luke does not tell us directly but suggests that something has transpired before between Jesus and the woman.  Now the interesting thing, frequently ignored by readers and commentators, is that the woman is still a harlot.  Nothing in the story or the text suggests otherwise.  Surprise Number One.  Most people would argue, along with Simon the Pharisee, that Jesus would in no way knowingly put up with an active prostitute cavorting with him in public in a scene that has obvious sexual overtones (think:  feet and the letting down of one’s hair, an obvious sign of intimacy). 

            The question is whether Jesus has already forgiven the sins of the woman (which the story implies), or whether he forgives her sins after this display of love.  It might seem of little importance, but the way we answer this question perhaps tells us something valuable about what forgiveness is.  From the point of view of morality, the woman is clearly a sinner and thus an outsider.  Yet Jesus has reached out to her, apparently not for the purpose of bringing her to the rank and status of insider, but simply to affirm her.  His pronouncement at the end of the story that her faith has saved her most likely means that her faith has not been nullified by her work as a prostitute.  And “saved” means to be made whole, to be made right, to be justified, not “saved from damnation” the way it later became distorted to mean. 

            Now the faith that justifies intersects with Paul’s point to the Galatians.  Like Simon, Paul had been a Pharisee. And Pharisees were deeply committed to keeping the Torah, the Law, as meticulously as possible.  But Paul’s transformation into a follower of Christ had brought him to understand that it is not keeping the Law that makes us right with God, saves us, makes us whole.  Rather, it is faith in Christ—putting our whole trust in Christ’s grace and love—that justifies us, makes us “just” or “right” with God.  He even goes so far as to say that he has been crucified with Christ.  He is obviously talking about a mystical experience, but it has very practical outcomes.  It is no longer “Paul” who lives, but Christ who lives in him. 

            What if the woman that came into Simon’s house were to have said that?  What would it have meant for her?  It might have meant that she had almost literally been melted by the love of Jesus to the point that her whole life took on a different meaning.  Did she cease working as a prostitute, if that is what she was?  Maybe.  But it possibly would have meant that what mattered to her was not what she did or who she was but rather that her whole life might now be overflowing with the kind of love that Christ showed her, the sort of acceptance that she experienced from him.  Might it have been that in all of her relationships she now was as extravagantly loving to everyone, pimp and client and competitor and alienated family member, as she was towards the Christ who loved her and would give himself for her?  Do you suppose that the fundamental change in her was that rather than selling love she now broke herself open as if she were a very alabaster jar, pouring herself out without reservation to accept others as she herself had been accepted and affirmed?

            Be honest.  What bothers us about all this is that, as good as it sounds, it veers perilously towards what Paul himself saw, namely the likelihood that Christ is an agent of sin!  On some level we fear that if God and his Christ are not moral police officers either pulling us from immorality or punishing us for willfully staying in it, somehow the whole system is going to capsize and we will find ourselves awash in corruption and savagery.  Well, that is something to ponder all right.  Where does morality fit in with all this?  Is there any such thing as a moral imperative? 

            Listen to Nathan the prophet, whose story about a little pet lamb nailed David much as Jesus’ riddle grabbed Simon the Pharisee.  “You are the man!” says Nathan.  David’s sexual desire for Bathsheba had led him not only to commit adultery with her, in effect stealing her from her husband Uriah.  And when Uriah foiled the plan, David had him killed.  Yes you are the man, David.  And there are consequences.  Sickness, death, sorrow, and ultimately the division of your own family will result from what you have done.  “I have sinned,” David admits.  Before David’s story ends, we see unfolding layer by layer the very human, flawed character that was indeed Israel’s hero and model king.  Through it all, however, he was a man “after God’s own heart.”  He was not the darling of God because he was morally upright, or because he was talented, or because he was successful, or any of those things.  He simply was David.  We don’t need to justify David.  He needs no justification.   And this is the wonderful and mysterious thing that Paul finally sees:  it is not by keeping the Law even perfectly that makes us right with God.  We are forgiven and free simply because God loves us lavishly. 

            The theologian Paul Tillich wrote in The Shaking of the Foundations, “…Sometimes a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying:  ‘You are accepted.  You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know.  Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later.  Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much.  Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything.  Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”*  That is Good News to beat the band.  Sure, there is accountability, suffering, even despair at various points along the way.  And there is plenty of room and reason for confession.  But the overwhelming Word of God is not a word of condemnation, but a word of consolation.  And it is, “You are accepted.  I love you.”  Can you imagine a response to that Good News that does not begin with profound gratitude?  Can you think of anything you want to do other than kick up your heels and dance as you have never danced before, belt out a song or a cheer, hug someone, or maybe even take a prized bottle of something precious and break it open and pour it out like all the tears of joy your soul could squeeze out of you, and hug and kiss the one who loves you so? 

            The community of Jesus has no better model than the harlot in Simon’s house as to how to respond to God’s grace.  Because she does exactly what Jesus himself does:  she pours herself out without counting the cost.  It is, in the end, a far better way to live than the pinched and narrow morality of Simon the Pharisee.  And only those who have been forgiven much will ever understand why.

* Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York:  Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948), 163.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013

Down and Up

John 14:8-17  “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

            For as long as the world lasts, we’ll probably continue thinking on some level that up is good and down is bad; that God lives somewhere in the sky; that heaven is where God lives and thus must be somewhere up, up, and away; and that if anything like Jesus or the Holy Spirit comes from heaven to earth it must involve a coming down.  In other words, it is virtually impossible for us completely to free ourselves from thinking spatially about these things. 

            What to do?

            I have long been on a program to call all that into question, enough so that people can begin thinking differently about it, a program which I continue to think is worth the effort.  But I have to admit that there is, after all, some value in the up-and-down kind of thinking, as limiting as it is.  One might even say that there is built into the human experience a predisposition to thinking that up is better than down because in all human cultures that seems to be the way we imagine spatial values, with few exceptions.  So when we come to Ascension Day, which we celebrated ten days ago, we imagine that Jesus after his resurrection went “up” although we know perfectly well that heaven, being everywhere precisely because God is everywhere, is no more up than down.  And when we come to today, Pentecost, our prayers and hymns say things like, “the Holy Spirit came down on this day from heaven, lighting upon the disciples,” and “Come down, O love divine.”  We know the limits of that language if we have been hanging around the world longer than about five years, though we still use it. 

            So, without exactly throwing in the towel, I invite you to move in the direction of seeing that there is some usefulness in thinking about life and death, God and humanity, heaven and earth, time and eternity in up-and-down terms.  Before it is over with, I think you’ll be able to see that we wind up in an amazing place where the adverbs “up” and “down” blend together and disappear.

            Let’s start with the motion of baptism, since that is the centerpiece of our Pentecost celebration.  You have heard me tell you before my mantra about baptism:  when you forget everything else about baptism remember that it is “down under and back up again.”  If you remember that, you will not likely forget that baptism is a way of ritually acting out and applying Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Down under the water is like “down into the grave.”  It is a symbolic burial.  And “back up again” is the movement of the resurrection.  Remember that the best kept secret in Christianity is that the resurrection does not happen after you die.  It happens in your baptism.  When we come out of the water and back up again, we are indeed united with the Risen Lord, and we thereafter are living in the resurrection.  It has no end, to be sure.  But its effective beginning, certainly symbolically, is in baptism.

            When you think about it, all of life is a matter of going down under and coming back up again.  Peter Senge and some colleagues describe that process in a very interesting book called Presence, one of the most deeply theological books I know, although it says nothing formulaic about God.  [Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers,  Presence:  An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society (New York:  Random House/Doubleday/Currency, 2005).]  They speak of the “U,” which captures the motion of traveling downward and coming back up again. The three parts of the U are sensing (observing, becoming one with the world), presencing (retreating, reflecting, allowing inner knowing to emerge), and realizing (acting swiftly with a natural flow).  Traveling the U, going down and coming back up, involves letting go of our pre-established ways of thinking, going down into deep reflection, and coming up having let go of our own will, ready not to impose that will on a situation.  We could put this in a dozen, perhaps a hundred, different ways and it would amount to the same thing:  letting go and being open.  I suggest that that is exactly what our mythical language of “dying and rising” is getting at.  Each day, each moment, we have the opportunity to hear the call to let go, to rest in silence for a time, and to rise again, living in openness from a place quite different from our ego with its habit of controlling and imposing its will on situations. 

            Pentecost has everything to do with going down and coming up.  But it is not perhaps what you think.  It surely is not what the traditional language implies.  Pentecost is not a matter of the Holy Spirit “coming down” except in the sense that coming down can mean the great joining the small, as when an adult bends or kneels down to look a child in the eye or to hear what the child is saying or to share a moment of supreme importance with the little one.  Pentecost is an infusion.  It is a filling.  It is a breathing of life and energy into an otherwise dispirited, innervated, confused and paralyzed community.  Like all the other events in the story of salvation, Pentecost is not a one-time event, but a reality that makes itself felt time and time again.  When we feel—justifiably—that we are little more than a sack of dry bones, here comes Pentecostal wind, breathing new life into us.  When you appear to be a fallow field, just waiting to become fruitful and productive but somehow unable to do that on your own, the fire of Pentecost can rush through you like sparks through stubble, consuming all that holds you back and igniting your energy to do what you have believed was impossible.  So if you want to locate Pentecost on the U, somewhere on the journey between going down under and coming back up again, it is right there at the bottom, exploding, giving you the kick that lifts you into new life.

            But Pentecost is really even more than that.  I mentioned that last week we were celebrating the ascension of Christ.  The ascension is not a commemoration of Jesus’ flying up into the sky and out of sight, but rather that the entirety of human nature, which he himself embodied, he took with him into the very life of God.  Do you get that?  Your human nature and mine becomes a part of the godhead, the life of the Trinity, the essence of God.  No longer can we talk about God and humanity as being distinctly separate.  We get a taste of that in the gospel for today.  “Show us the Father and we shall be satisfied,” says Philip.  Jesus replies that when we have seen him we have seen the Father, because he and the Father are one.  That is powerful language!  It means that if we are united with Jesus, then we are united with God.  There is no getting around it.  Your life, your decisions, your struggles, your heartaches, your aspirations, your energies, your laughter, your work, your prayer is the ground on which you meet God.  God is in your body, God is in your mind, God is in your imagination, your dreams.  You will discover the Most High God in the most lowly depths of your own experience.  There is no place you can go where God is not.  And that is the miracle and meaning of Pentecost.  It really is quite simple.  It is about God’s Spirit being in you and your spirit, your nature, being inextricably bound to the reality of God.

            That is why Baptism is down under and back up again.  It is about traveling the U down into the grave and all the dark places and finding there the power which raises you up.  It is about journeying with Christ through the sicknesses in which you find strength, through the failures in which you learn to cope, through the times when you doubt your own worth and yet come to the indescribable peace of accepting yourself as simply human.  Baptism keeps going on and on because there is literally no end at the end of the U.  The more we travel the U, the more we see that we haven’t finished one trip before another begins.  The deaths and resurrections begin flowing together.  “Up” and “down” glide together and become indistinguishable, because the worst things can be blessings and the best things can turn out to push us to our knees.  Past, present, future all mix together in a timelessness which we mostly know through the moments that send shivers of excitement through us, or the sights and sounds that move us to tears, or from the occasional minutes when we find ourselves still in the presence of God while praying or meditating.  All of it is Pentecost.  All of it is resurrection.  All of it is taking to heart that nothing about us is or ever can be separated from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

            Thomas Diaz and his little brother Felix are going to be baptized now.  Thomas I think is most excited by the knowledge that he is going to get a candle when he has been baptized in water and sealed by the Spirit.  The candle will burn and go out, but the fire of the Spirit never will.  It is the energy that will raise him up from every fall and the light that will shine through him and before him in every dark place he will ever go.  And that is your gift too.  Down and up, up and down:  God is in motion, and the motion of God is always God attempting, so to say, to nestle in your heart.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013

At Last

Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5

            Some Christians positively love the book of Revelation.  Some hate it.  Most of the people who are attracted to topics like the end of the world, Armageddon, the disappearance of earth as we know it, obscure symbols and predictions of the future tend to embrace Revelation because it is full of that kind of thing.  Others are like a wonderful Swiss woman I had in a Bible study group some years ago.  “Why is this book even in the Bible?” she asked.  “This is crazy talk.  It should not even be allowed in the Bible.”  Although she might have been a bit blunt, she actually hit upon the chief reason why Revelation is the last book in the Bible.  It is actually not last because it deals with the last things and the last events, although that probably has something to do with its placement; but it is last because it almost did not make the cut.  There was that much disagreement about its nature and its contents.   Indeed the arguments about Revelation did not stop, nor have they ever.  Martin Luther, for example, writing in the 1522 edition of the German Bible, gave his reasons for assigning the book to at best a subordinate place within the New Testament:

            About this book of the Revelation of John, I leave everyone free to hold his own ideas, and would bind no man to my opinion and judgment:  I say what I feel.  I miss more than one thing in this book, and this makes me hold it to be neither apostolic nor prophetic.  First and foremost, the Apostles do not deal with visions, but prophecy in clear, plain words, as do Peter and Paul and Christ in the gospel. …I can in nothing detect that it was provided by the Holy Spirit.  [quoted by Christopher C. Rowland, “Revelation—Introduction,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. XII (Nashville:  Abingdon, 1998), 536-7]

He goes on to say that the author of Revelation toots his own horn a bit too loudly when he threatens anyone who takes away anything from his book, yet says that they are blessed who keep what is written in it.”  Luther says, “…yet no one knows what that is, to say nothing of keeping it.  It is just the same as if we had it not, and there are many far better books for us to keep.”  Luther says in the end that he can’t get his spirit to fit into the book principally because Christ is not taught or known in it, and yet to teach Christ is the thing which an apostle above all else is bound to do.  He says that he’ll stick to the books that give him “Christ clearly and purely.” [ibid.]

            Well, that ought to be enough ammunition to mount a pretty successful attack on a sermon preached from the book of Revelation.  But I want to do just that today.  While I agree with Luther and my Swiss friend, I must say that there are a few things about Revelation that redeem it for me.  One is that some of the imagery—not all of it to be sure—is incredibly rich and beautiful.  Another is that it blasts all to smithereens the nice little rational categories in which we sometimes think we can trap God.  Instead it paints a picture of an untamable, free God, opening up a future that makes the strongest, most formidable human empires look like the silly little efforts they are in comparison to God’s future.   Luther himself later softened his review of Revelation and pointed out that “we see that, through and above all plagues and beasts and bad angels, Christ is with his saints, and wins the victory at last.”

            Yet the main redeeming value in the Book of Revelation is that, obscure as it is—ironic, isn’t it, that a book called “Revelation” can veil more than it reveals—it at least ends by proclaiming the ultimate fulfillment of the dynamic that gets the Bible going in the first place:  and that is the desire of God to be God, for all of us humans to be God’s people, and for God to dwell with and be one with us.  Did you ever get far enough in the Bible to discover that place where in the Creation story Adam and Eve have eaten of the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?  Their eyes are suddenly opened, they realize that they are naked, and suddenly they are ashamed.  They make little aprons of fig leaves to cover themselves.  Then, rather pathetically, they hide when they hear the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the evening.  It is a charming story in a way:  a God scarcely bigger than a human, walking around making a bit of noise, carrying on a conversation with two earthlings who only did what any of us would do any day of the week.  From that point on, the story winds its way through flood, slavery and liberation, through exile and return, through wars and oppression and failed rebellion until it comes to Jesus.  Then all the twists and turns flatten out in daylight so bright that people can see in Jesus the God Most High who has made a dwelling in a human being walking among other human beings.  No longer do frightened humans try to hide from God; through Jesus they are attracted, drawn to God. 

           

            This is where the plot thickens.  Imagine a tree with several prominent branches, each of which has its own smaller branches.  The experience of Jesus, living, crucified, and risen, is the trunk of the tree.  Two major branches sprout from that experience.  Call one “personal” and one “communal.”  Then two other branches develop, higher up.  One is “this world” and one is “life hereafter.”  Up nearer the top are two more branches.  One is “prophecy” and the other is “apocalypse.”  Both of these branches have to do with the relationship of the present and the future.  Prophecy generally sees that human beings have something to do with the future and can actually influence it, though God is definitely in charge of it.  “Apocalypse” tends to see that the future is way out of the hands of human beings, entirely shaped by God with people involved in it only in relation to how they do or do not play by God’s book in the present.  Each of these branches sprouts other branches, twigs, and leaves.  From a distance, they all blend in, so much so that an onlooker might think that any branch is pretty much like every other.  Yet when we get up close, we can see that every branch is distinct, so much so that it almost seems that they belong on very different trees.  Which branch is good?  Which branch is right?  Which branch does more justice to the trunk?

            At the risk of being like many another preacher or reader of Revelation, picking and choosing which branch I like, either squeezing the book into a shape that will agree with my pet ideas or discarding it because it simply does not suit me, I want to suggest that ultimately the vision before us is one of community more than individuals, one of this world more than some other world, one about our present life more than life hereafter—a vision that sees the future of a world transformed by the pervasive presence of God and of God’s Christ.  Instead of leaving us quaking in our boots, like the books of Hal Lindsey, whose The Late Great Planet Earth, inspired by Revelation, sold over 40 million copies between 1970 and 2000, Revelation itself leaves us imagining that God is with us, not against us.  Instead of stoking fears, like the Left Behind novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, consumed by over 63 million people, many of whom are influencing policy in and for the United States and its institutions, Revelation actually inspires precisely the justice that the political structures of this world normally oppose.  Indeed by envisioning a city of God, Revelation challenges us as Christians to align ourselves with the God who works to renew creation and transform human community.

            Some have said that the end of Revelation is so different from the rest of it that it must have been written by another author and affixed to the original by that author or some editor.  Whatever.  The interesting thing is that after all the smoke and ruin and destruction and portents and signs and beasts and other scary stuff, in the end we meet familiar friends:  God and the Lamb, who, of course, is the Risen and Exalted Jesus.  Instead of a totally collapsed earth blasted out of existence by some nuclear Christ, we see the New Jerusalem, a city, an urban community, coming out of heaven.  And although you did not hear it in today’s snippet from Revelation, the author’s description of the New Jerusalem is stunningly beautiful, its streets paved with gold, its gates pearls, its walls adorned with dazzling jewels.  In other, more prosaic words, the urban community representing the ultimate triumph of God in human experience is indescribably wonderful, beyond anything that a mortal could dream of building, far superior to anything that Roman Emperors or Napoleons or Hitlers or Stalins or Vaticans or Washingtons or corporate America could possibly construct at their most ambitious. 

            But the most amazing thing in this whole chapter, the last but one in the whole Bible, is that there is no Temple in the New Jerusalem.  There is no need of one, for the presence of God and the Lamb—the glorified Jesus—pervades everything and everyone.  There is still a throne, which symbolizes that there is a limit to which God and humanity can be equated.  The Light of the City is not the Temple but the Lamb, Christ:  and by that light a redeemed, ordered, peaceable community of nations walks, having no need of sun by day or moon by night. 

            If you want to believe, as many have and do, that the Christian hope, expressed in such images, is about life sometime besides now and somewhere besides here, you can certainly go ahead and believe it.  But I think this last book of scripture jolts us into seeing that God’s kingdom and God’s justice cannot wait.  Liberation cannot be left to another world when the glory of God is liberating the poor and the oppressed in this world:  that is the Revelation’s meaning for the Latin American liberation theologians, mostly slapped down by the last two popes.  Imagining the beautiful and powerful is not confined to illustrating the text of the Apocalypse itself; but, as the poet and artist William Blake saw, it cuts us loose to saturate our consciousness with the apocalyptic outlook, [ibid, pp. 551ff] spurring us to challenge the domesticated God of rationalists and to take on the Church when it starts sucking up to the empires of this world and their cronies. 

            This is where our impetus for Christian social ministry comes from.  This is the ground of our passion for justice.  This is heart of our confession:  the dwelling of God shall be with humanity.  God is the Alpha and the Omega, the A and the Z, the beginning and the end.  We are not doomed to keep remaking God in our image, imagining that God shares our prejudices and limitations.  No, as the Seer of Revelation promises, we will see God’s face, and God’s name will be on our foreheads, right where we were signed with the cross of Christ Jesus in our baptism.  For cross and resurrection and the struggle for liberation and the victory are all tied together, folks.  And just to make sure you know that in this struggle you don’t have to worry about yourself, hear once more the promise made directly to you:  the Lord God Almighty will be your light, and you shall reign for ever and ever.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013

                       

Left Out?

John 20:19-31

            Thirty or so years ago, I still pretty much cared what people thought about me in that post-adolescent sort of way.  I secretly pondered in my heart the awful question if I really had many friends.  I could go for months without thinking about these matters until I was in a group of friends.  At the time I belonged to a rather large diocese with hundreds of clergy.  When we would be together, vested, waiting for a diocesan convention to begin or an ordination or some other grand affair, I would find myself talking with a gaggle of clergy.  The signal would be given for us to get in line.  Suddenly, everyone in the group would have a partner to walk with but me.  I got a little self-conscious about that.  I started surreptitiously staying quite near to someone—anyone—thinking that I would have a natural partner to walk with when time came.  Never once did it help.  Later I would simply come through the front door and ask, “Would you walk with me in procession?”  a question that raised eyebrows and furrowed foreheads. 

            At some point the issue vanished from my awareness, but not quite.  It came to embody for me what I suspect all the energy around the symbol of “heaven” is about.  It was my deep craving to be included, not to be left out.  It was no big thing, indeed nothing anyone else would have paid any attention to.  I just needed to be included.  Simply included.

            So I have great sympathy for Thomas the disciple who happened not to be with the others when Jesus made his first appearance to the Eleven.  I suspect that he was out of the room tending to personal needs as people are wont to do, or on an errand for this bunch locked behind closed doors, such as fetching some pita bread or olives for the evening meal.  Whatever the case, Thomas, I fancy, felt a little on the left-out side when he returned.  Most folks are preoccupied with his hesitation to believe what the others report, which is, of course, John’s point in telling the story.  When we want to be included but find that we are not or were not, the most natural reaction is to replay our favorite response to stress or threat.  “You guys are putting me on, right?  He never came.  You’re just trying to fool me.”  Or, “C’mon.  I know Jesus better than that.  He and I were tight.  He’d never show up just when I was out.”  Or, “Well, he may have shown up, but what’s it to me?  I had other things to do.  Next subject.”  Thomas had his own defenses, which are on full display in Chapter 19 of John’s gospel.  And I have mine and you have yours.

            The interesting thing about this story is that it reverberates far beyond the Easter evening scene itself, far even beyond the issue of Jesus’ appearance and the consequent challenge of believing in him without having seen him.  It touches on something that we only rarely seem to look at, and that is how human beings are always looking for a community to be a part of.  On no level is that search more apparent than when we feel suddenly like outsiders looking in on those who already belong to what we feel detached from.  They know the scoop, the news, the story.  We don’t.  And that poses a crisis for us.

            I saw just this week a photograph of young Filipino boys carrying weapons in the service of the Taliban.  I wondered what the appeal of the Taliban was to them.  I suspect that few of them could discuss many of the political or religious notions of the Taliban beyond parroting what they might have been told or taught.  But I can promise one thing:  a deep need to belong to something important is answered for them by that group.  One can say the same thing about many movements, groups, and configurations in human societies the world over.  We need to belong.  We are communal animals. 

            Now the interesting thing is that there are far more options for belonging to a group with an old story than there are options for inventing or discovering new stories.  Did you never wonder how it is that the same animosities, the same rivalries, the same partisan politics, the same religious divisions maintain their power and their hold on people decade after decade, century after century, age after age?  Look at how many folks identify with a story, let’s say Protestant Christianity, for example, or Roman Catholicism, for that matter, simply because that is the story of their tribe.  Many of these folk could tell you nothing much about the religious battles of the sixteenth century, but they are fiercely attached to a tradition that keeps old arguments alive.  Not long ago I heard from a neighborhood boy I grew up with in Conway, South Carolina.  His family, like mine, were just average middle-middle class people, with no pretension whatsoever to money or prestige.  But he has become a dedicated Confederate participant in Civil War battle re-enactments, and appears on Facebook with a bearded face in a Confederate cap, the Stars and Bars waving behind him.  I wonder how he imagines that the powers that started the Civil War ever had anything much to offer him.  But I’ll bet he could tell you plenty of reasons why that particular story has become the one that he most passionately identifies with.  And so it goes. 

            By the end of the first century when, in all probability, the Gospel of John appeared, this crisis had penetrated the Christian community.  On the one hand, there were folks who had come to be Christian because their parents were or because it was the thing to do.  Christian instruction being what it was in those days, it is unlikely that people would have been ignorant about the general story of Jesus, his death and resurrection; but knowing the story line, even identifying with it, was a good deal different from being deeply invested in it.  Bear in mind that the external pressure upon the young Church was enormous.  Persecutions came in waves.  And persecution always presents the inevitable result that a great many people would rather renounce their faith than die for it.  But there were other issues as well.  The first and perhaps even the second generation of witnesses had died out.  There were lots more Thomases around, people who had not been there when it all happened.  Other communities with stories more credible, more dazzling perhaps, less risky maybe, were available to those Thomases.  With more power, pull, and punch, those stories, even some that were corruptions of the Jesus story, proved fierce competitors with the apostolic tradition.

            Now you can begin to see how it is that the Church was caught in a double bind.  Not only was its story under attack from without and in danger of irrelevancy within, it had not only to convince the Thomases that they could in fact believe without having actually seen, but that the story of the Christianity was indeed true, and that those Thomases could not only believe it but give their lives to it and for it.  That is what we see going on in Chapter 19 of John.  “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”   And believing, such a central issue for this gospel, is not giving intellectual assent alone, but giving one’s heart, falling in love with, giving one’s allegiance to the crucified and risen Lord.

            Yet it is not simply believing that is a problem for the Thomases.  It is belonging as well.  So this story about the resurrected Jesus is a story about the founding and charging of the beloved community.  Jesus appears to the disciples and breathes on them.  This is John’s account of what, following Luke-Acts, we call “Pentecost.”  Jesus gives the spirit to his community, empowering them with the life that he lives as the risen Christ.  They, in effect, share his own priestly vocation, forgiving sins (or not).  But what does all this do for Thomas and his misfortune of missing the first appearance?  The story shows that Thomas stands in contrast to “the Beloved Disciple,” the model disciple in John’s account, who, when looking into the empty tomb earlier that morning, had “seen and believed.”  Thomas’ insistence sets him apart not only from the Beloved Disciple but sets him apart from the community as well.

           

            Since our own age has more than its share of problems with believing without physical evidence, we would very much like for Thomas to be excused.  I would.  Were I writing the story, I would definitely cut Thomas some slack.  John will have none of that.  Jesus very clearly criticizes Thomas:  “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”  And yet, even before he says that, he invites Thomas to examine his wounds.  Thomas apparently does not need to go quite that far, as he exclaims (first among the disciples to do so!) “My Lord and my God!”  There is no doubt that there is a place for Thomas in this community.  And there is not the slightest suggestion that there needs to be a remedial breathing of the Holy Spirit for Thomas because he missed the first go-round.  He belongs fully. 

            It is not too much of a stretch to see that, of all stories in the gospel, this one has your name on it.  John says as much.  “These things are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”  You get to decide, as always, exactly what you will do with that.  Two things are nearly always at stake for us humans.  One is that we are so constructed to be creators and tellers of stories that we will always be seeking one that gives our lives meaning.  It may be political or philosophical or just a simple collection of family folk tales.  It may even be a story that justifies our addictive or self-destructive behavior or rationalizes our guilt or self-absorption.  But the story of the Risen Lord breathing his New Life into a community that dares to live as he lived, serve as he served, a liberating, healing, forgiving life stands as a beacon to all who would find their way by losing their lives and who save their lives by giving them away.  You have that option.  The other thing that you need on some level is what I was jittery about as I awaited the great processions wondering who would walk beside me.  And that is a way of belonging to a community in which you are unquestionably valued.  You are welcome in this community of Christ not in spite of who you are but precisely because of who you are.  There are no outcasts, not even those who miss the point or the Spirit or the resurrection appearance when it happens.  Just stay connected.  Be a part of the fellowship.  Live in community.  For in this same gospel, the Jesus who was raised from the dead promises to you and to all his disciples that you need have no fear of abandonment, for “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the ages.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013