ETERNAL LIFE:  FOR WHOM?

A Sermon by Rev. James D. Brown

Second Sunday in Lent—February 17, 2008

 

Genesis 12:1-5 and John 3:1-17

 

Context is important.  Life is situational.  Truth in incarnate in life as we live it.  The details of the moment matter.  I couldn’t help but think about this as I read something forwarded by a friend who is a professor of library science.  She began by saying, “This may boggle your mind; I know it did mine.”

 

What followed was a listing of statistics for the United States (there were 45 of them) for the year 1907.  I’ll run down just a few of them to set your minds awhirl:

 

Life expectancy was 45 years.  The three leading causes of death were

pneumonia and influenza (as one category), tuberculosis and diarrhea.

Only 14 % of the homes in the US had a bathtub.  Most women washed

their hair once a month, with borax and egg yolks the most common

shampoos.   Eggs were 14¢ a dozen and coffee 15¢ a pound.  Only

6% of all Americans had graduated from high school.  And finally,

think long and  hard about this one—there were 230 reported murders

in all 45 states. 

 

My friend finished with this exclamation:  “Now just try to imagine what it may be like in another 100 years. It staggers the mind!” It sure does.

 

Too often we read the Bible as if it did not bubble up out of real life lived by real people making their way through the details of a very specific context.  Today’s lesson from John begs to be placed in its real world context.

 

This is not the time for a detailed exposition of when the Gospel According to John was written and by whom.  I’ll just give a quick summary of generally accepted scholarship in this area.  The written Gospel was the last to appear in the early church.  Mark was first, and then Luke and Matthew followed.  Some time toward the end of the first century John’s Gospel came to light—a full sixty years after Jesus’ life and ministry.

 

No one knows for sure who wrote it.  Almost no one thinks Jesus’ disciple, John the son of Zebedee could have written it.  Most likely it was composed in sections over a period of decades by representatives within a group of Jewish Christians associated with the tradition of the beloved disciple referred to in the Gospel itself—a disciple who is never named.

 

What is striking about the Gospel is the antipathy toward the Jews that runs through it.  In verse 44 in chapter 8 Jesus tells a group of Jews that they are children of the devil, and subsequently they pick up stones and throw them at Jesus. 

The other gospels depict moments of grave conflict between Jesus and Jewish scribes and Pharisees, but John’s Gospel seems down right overloaded with harsh rhetoric cascading from the lips of Jesus toward his fellow Jews. 

 

Here we need to look closely at the context in which John’s Gospel was written.[1]  In the early years of the church in Palestine, most Christians were Jews, and they continued to worship in synagogues on a regular basis.  Over time a great conflict began to erupt over what is called Christology—the nature of Christ. 

 

Some converts to Christianity had come to believe heart and soul that Jesus was on a par with God, that he was of the same being and substance of God.  Others in the synagogues found this to be blasphemous.  “God alone,” they argued, “is the great I AM WHO I AM who spoke to Moses.”  In fact, they accused those who equated Jesus with God of being bi-theists—believers in two gods and not one.

 

Around the year 80 in the first century, things went from bad to worse.  Jewish leaders—in this case Pharisees—published what were called the Eighteen Benedictions.  The 12^th Benediction sheds light on the expulsion of Christians from synagogues that was taking place at that time.  The 12^th Benediction includes a curse on the so-called minîm who had deviated from belief in the one true God.  What had been brewing as a theological disagreement among friends now erupted into a religious war that included shedding blood, fueling animosity between Jews and Christians that would come to haunt the human family.

 

The context, then, for John’s Gospel is one ripe with name calling of the type we know all too well—“You’re either for me or against me.  That’s all there is to say.”  Jewish Christians and their Jewish compatriots found themselves on opposite sides of a towering theological wall.

 

Now we are ready to meet Nicodemus.  A Pharisee, a leader of the Jews, he comes calling in the night to see if he can figure out who Jesus really is.  Remember that the writer of the Gospel is peering back into the remembered life of Jesus during a time when Nicodemus’s questions are not just idle chatter, but part of a raging conflict. “Who, in God’s name, are you?” 

 

There is a painting of this moving scene that hangs in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, “Nicodemus Visiting Jesus,” painted in 1899 by the African-American artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner.   Tanner had to gone to Palestine and while there encountered a community of Jews from Yemin.  He felt a kinship with their dark skin and used one of them as his model for Nicodemus.

 

Tanner places Nicodemus and Jesus on a rooftop bathed in mysterious twilight.  Jesus sits on the parapet facing Nicodemus, who is perched on a chair or bench.  Nicodemus is dressed in long flowing robes with a skullcap prominently on his head.  He is leaning toward Jesus, both hands on his knees, with a look of inquisitiveness tempered with puzzlement.

 

Jesus has long hair and is dressed much like Nicodemus, though his head is uncovered.  He is staring intently at Nicodemus, with his left hand raised as if he is saying pointedly,  “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

 

As I viewed Tanner’s painting and read about it online, I began to understand why Nicodemus has held such an important place in African-American worship and theology.  When slaves were brought to this country they were forbidden to worship on Sunday mornings as their masters did.  Henry Louis Gates tells it like it was:  the slaves metaphorically owned the night while the master owned the day.  Like Nicodemus of old, our African-American brothers and sisters gathered stealthily in the night, hungering after a word of hope, a scrap of good news.

 

In John’s Gospel Nicodemus is cast as a character who can’t see in the dark.  He stumbles over an idea that in Greek is captured by the word, anōthen.  In the New Revised Standard Version it is translated “from above.”  In the New International Version of the Bible it is translated “again.”  Which is it—born from above or born again?

 

Well, it’s both.  The word has a double meaning.  Jesus tells Nicodemus that if he wants to be in tune with God the way Jesus is, then Nicodemus will have to open his heart to God and be born from above into a new beginning.  To be born from above, born again into eternal life does not mean living an endless sequence of 24-hour days, but rather living in the unending presence of God—from this moment on. 

 

This is a mystery, to be sure, and Nicodemus doesn’t get it.  Jesus is frustrated with him because he is telling him the old, old story of the very same God who called Abraham out of Mesopotamia centuries before and loved the Jewish people into being.  There is a palpable sense of frustration conveyed in a passage like this.  If you close your eyes you can picture the conflict between Jewish Christians and their compatriots who are embarking on separate paths late in the first century. 

 

Given our human freedom to make choices in life, this is no surprise.  But the depth of the conflict that results is a surprise to us when we think of Jesus and his central message of God loving the world, the kosmos, so much that God takes on our human lot so that we will not miss out on the good news of redemptive love in this life, in our present circumstances.  How does such good news turn so sour, so often?

 

One of the ticklish questions we deal with in our context is what to make of the light and darkness dualism that marks this passage written down late in the first century.  Listen to the verses that follow those I read earlier from John’s Gospel:

Those who believe in [God’s only Son] are not condemned;

but those who do not believe are condemned already, because

they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the

world, and people loved darkness rather than light because

their deeds were evil.                                  [John 3:18-20]

 

I’m sure some of you have picked up on the recent controversy that relates to passages of Scripture such as this—right up to the present moment.  It has to do with the Latin Mass for Good Friday that Pope Benedict XVI has recently revised after protests from Jewish leaders. 

 

Until the recent revision, the Latin prayer used on Good Friday by a traditionalist minority of Catholics around the world referred to Jewish “blindness” over Christ and asked God to “remove the veil from their hearts.”  The revised version omits this language, but still calls on Jews to recognize Jesus Christ as the savior of all men and asks that “all Israel may be saved.”

 

Cardinal Walter Kasper, the top Vatican official in charge of relations with Jews, recently weighed in on this subject by denying that the reformulated prayer was offensive and said that “Catholics had the right to pray as they wished.”  He added, “I must say that I don’t understand why Jews cannot accept that we can make use of our freedom to formulate our prayers.”

 

All of us do have to right to pray as we wish, but I find myself thinking that we are also called to allow the Spirit of Christ to fill our hearts and give us utterance that is truly of God in our time.  I’m more and more of the mind that if religion is maintain its rightful place in a shrinking and ever more conflicted world, then as we pray we need to picture before our very eyes the Jewish friends who are our companions along life’s way.  This will temper our words to be sure.  Isn’t this what the world needs now from  those of us who claim the name Christian?

 

I don’t want anyone for a second to think that I don’t embrace the passage I read from John as good news.  John 3:16 is one of the first verses I memorized in Sunday School, and I loved it then and I love it now.  But I have to confess I’m a lot more humble than I used to be, a lot less certain that I or any human being on the planet ought to answer once and for all a question best left to God—eternal life:  for whom?

 

I’m more and more of the mind that what we are being called to articulate with all the grace we can muster is what eternal life is like for us right now.  What is salvation like for you, for me?  I can’t tell you the answer to the whole sweep of human history and how God sorts out the sheep from the goats in the human family—to use an image from Jesus.  But we do know something about eternal life, experienced now.

 

A number of years ago the phone in my office rang.  A mother sobbed and then cried out, “Hurry, hurry, my little baby is dying and you have to baptize her.”  I had never talked with the woman before, never heard her name.  She was calling from the Barnert Hospital in Paterson, NJ—a few blocks from the church I was serving.

 

I hustled off to the hospital, thinking as I drove along that there was nothing in my own tradition that suggested that this child would die outside the pale of God’s love if she weren’t baptized.  Our own Westminster Confession of Faith was amended a hundred years ago to state unequivocally that nothing therein “is to be regarded as teaching that any who die in infancy are lost.” 

 

Driving along I remembered the basic thrust of this statement that affirms “that all dying in infancy are included in the election of grace, and are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit, which works when and where and how he pleases.”[2]  I also found myself thinking that this whole subject takes us way beyond what we any human can really know in the realm of reason.  Matters like baptism for a dying infant require one great big leap of faith that God’s love is truly the final word.

 

I arrived at the hospital and was taken into a room where an African-American infant just a few days old was breathing her last. I took her in my arms and baptized her with her mother clinging to both of us.  This little girl never believed in Christ, never called his name.  But her mother did, and as she cried out Christ’s name she and her dying daughter and I were swept up into eternal life. 

 

I think that’s what the world wants to hear.  I think that’s enough, don’t you?

 

Let me say just one more thing.  After Jesus was crucified, do you know who showed up carrying a mixture of myrrh and aloes weighing about 100 pounds with which to prepare his body for burial?   Nicodemus.  Look it up in John 19:39.  The Spirit does blow where it pleases.  It really does.

 

MARKET SQUARE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Eternal Life:  For Whom?