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Friday, 12 May 2006
Easter 5 Year B
Acts 8: 26-40 NRSV text
Psalm 22: 25-31 NRSV text
Exodus 19: 1-6 NRSV text
1 John 4: 7-21 NRSV text
John 15: 1-8 NRSV text
Apologies for the late posting! I shall try and post Sunday/Monday next week to ensure I don't lose my writing window. Please bear with me and come back early next week!
Vines, branches, fruit and pruning – and “abiding”. This is one of those “purple passages” from John’s gospel that most of us know well. It’s a time to expound parables of grafting, pruning, getting rid of excess foliage so the grapes are plentiful and fat … and stuff about “abiding” that hovers constantly on the edge of twee and a bit precious. Any tendency towards twee and precious should cause us to pause. It’s Christian Aid Week this week and we dare not forget that this world is a brutal, death-dealing place. Most inhabitants of this planet live below the breadline. The scale of global poverty is staggering; the magnitude of starvation is terrifyingly obscene. What makes the statistics significant is not simply the scale. The scale is tragic. Yet if it was inevitable and unpreventable, that is all we could call it. It is the fact that it is preventable that is significant. The world has never been globally richer, not has it ever
produced more food. Global poverty is not an accident but a deliberate human creation. It is deliberate not in the sense that we set out to cause starvation, but in that we build a global economy that give those of us in the west a particular standard of living that necessarily means that two thirds of the planet live in abject poverty. And “we” – the people with the power and decision-making ability – reckon that is an acceptable cost. That is what makes the global statistics so obscene.
We’re talking about John’s gospel, and my point is this: even were John writing about other-wordly, beautiful soul-thoughts in which we could lose ourselves in mawkish sentimentality, the state of the world would demand that we leave the gospel alone in favour of other passages that speak more directly, compellingly and challengingly to the world we inhabit. There simply isn’t time to do anything else. People are dying, and in a world of disease, despair and death, sentimentality is a luxury. More than that, it is a deadly distraction. Stanley Hauerwas was asked
what he thought is the greatest danger facing the Church today, and replied, “Sentimentality!” He went on to explain that sentimentality allows Christians to substitute fluffy feeling and token action for the sort of sacrificial, transformative engagement with the world that the situation demands and that discipleship of the crucified Jesus requires.
Incarnation and mission
However, John’s gospel is not that sort of opiate. It has certainly been read in that way. And it is possible to read it through dualistic spectacles that see ultimate reality as “somewhere else” and non-corporeal. Reading this passage in Christian Aid Week requires that we consciously adopt a reading strategy that is deeply true to John’s own writings and intentions, and equally deeply engaged with the world. It seems to me that one of the mistakes that allows us to read John dualistically is that we ignore the fact that John is the theologian of the Incarnation. Incarnation is about heaven coming down to earth and taking concrete shape in human living. Truth is not “apprehended” or “thought”: it is born and lives. Eternal life – the gift of God – is to be seen and touched, heard and followed in Jesus Christ. The abundant life that is God’s intention for the world is for the here and now. To “believe” (as John tirelessly exhorts us to do) is not about escape from this world, but to echo the motto of Christian Aid: “We believe in life before death!”
The poetic language of John’s gospel is premised upon an incarnational view of truth. It is hard-edged and challenging. This is no more clearly articulated than in this passage about vines and branches. Look at what John has Jesus say: “I am not interested in braches that do not bear fruit. God is at work in the world, transforming it. That is God’s purpose. It is to save the world – this world! If you want to be part of me, you are necessarily part of that mission. And unless you get stuck in, you are of no use. You are sapping time and energy and resources. You are a distraction. You are a problem. You are of no use and you will be pruned ruthlessly and burned with all the other rubbish! (vv 1-6)” On the other hand, “If you are doing what you ought, and are overwhelmed by the scale of the task, all you have to do is ask for what you need and God will supply it! God will ensure that you are equipped. That will be evident – and people will be given a glimpse of God! (vv 8-9)”
Jesus goes on: “Make no mistake: the sort of love I am talking about issues in obedience. I have called you for a reason: to make love real! Your task is the same as mine: to bring heaven down to earth. When life for the world is abundant, you will sense my joy and share it. You will find greater joy in this than any you might have previously believed possible! (vv 10-11). Although these are not part of the lectionary passage, they nevertheless make clear what Jesus is driving at and steer us away from “soft” readings of the passage. This is Good News for the world as we have made it.
Vines, braches and the Image of God
Vines and braches is also about the deep connections between ourselves and Jesus – connections that run deeper than action and following. It’s about what it means to be human: to be connected to God as God’s children (an image John uses elsewhere). In other words, the image of vines and braches belongs to human beings as made in the image of God. Jesus the man is the “icon” of God. He shares that in common with us – or rather, we share it in common with him.
“Image” is multidimensional. Firstly, it tells us that we may not treat anyone else as less than a person in God’s image. If we treat anyone as less important than we and ours are, we do violence not only to them but to the God in
whose image they are made. That is why John urges us in the epistle to “love one another”. If there is an integral relationship between our relationship with other people and with God, we cannot claim to love God and hate our brother or sister (v21). Truth is what is seen on the ground. If we say, “God is ok – it’s people that I can’t abide! But God’s different!”, then John tells us we have misunderstood God. To see others is to see God. God is not “different” in the way we imagine God to be. Persecution, oppression, global poverty, indifference to the AIDS crisis or other human rights issue all depend on being able to see others as less than human – less in the image of God than we are.
Secondly, the image of God is about our own transformation. It’s about what people “see” in us – the picture we give to the world. Discipleship of Jesus – “loving” and “believing” in John’s terms – is about becoming more and more visibly like Jesus. That obviously isn’t about physical appearance, but it is no less physical. It’s about actions. If God is saving the world in Jesus (John 3: 16-17), then people will see God in our actions to make the world a place of Life and hope. And we will be changed in the process. That is part of what John means by “God abiding in us” (1 John 4: 13-16). It isn’t some theological theory: it is something we are supposed to be able to see and recognise as true because the changes in us ought to be observable!
It’s communal …
We live in a very individualistic age and culture. Spiritually, this often presents as though Christian faith was about “me and Jesus” – as though all that God has done and is doing in Jesus is just for “me”. That sort of individualism would be incomprehensible in the world of the Bible. It is not only alien, but hostile to the communal nature of faith and salvation. Jesus and John speak to the disciples as a group. The images of Church are communal. The disciples of Jesus are to be a new community. When Jesus speaks of love as the defining characteristic of that new community, he speaks communally.
Similarly, when Yahweh calls a new community into being at Sinaii (Exodus 19: 1-6), they are to be a “priestly kingdom and a holy nation”. Is there any theological significance to this communal understanding of faith beyond its cultural shaping? Yes! The point is that the new community is not just about changed individuals, but is a sign of a transformed world. And isn’t that precisely what we so desperately need salvation to be? It isn’t enough just to make a few individuals better – or rescue them from reality. If salvation is to be life for the world, as God intends and promises, then it has to be able to deal with the questions and dynamics that shape human history and existence in this world.
It has to be that because resurrection says that rescue from this world is not God’s intention nor is it an option. If it were, God would have wrapped human history up after the crucifixion and given up on the world as a bad job! But God raised Jesus from the dead. That means that God hasn’t finished with the world – in fact, there’s a sense in which, on Easter Sunday, God was just starting!
The hard edge
Vines, branches, pruning, love, abiding … these are hard-edged words. They are Good News at the onset of Christian Aid Week. They depend on Jesus, who is God become human. “Word here becomes flesh, sovereignty becomes compassion, weakness becomes strength, foolishness becomes wisdom, suffering becomes hope, vulnerability becomes energy, death becomes life”! (Walter Brueggemann).
Amen.
14:40 Posted by Posted in 1 John , Acts , Exodus , John , Psalms , Year B | Permalink