John 20:1-18

Jottings on John…Easter Day…Revised 2018. 

Easter Day falling on April 1st this year reminds us we are ‘fools for Christ’s sake’.

That God has the imagination to raise Jesus the Christ from what His people, &, notably, their leaders, have done to Him, invites us to use our imagination too in our preaching. Imagination may not be on Paul’s list of spiritual gifts, but who can deny it is one?!

Finding the raised Christ can be a very elusive business in any half-light in which we go looking for Him. Mary M is first to be baffled, then at her behest, Peter, & the ‘other disciple Jesus loved’. (Surely, He loves all of them?) The two respond to Mary’s angst, one reaching the tomb just ahead of the other as it happens. This ‘other disciple’ appears to take in the truth of what’s taken place sooner than Peter; even though the latter, typically impulsively, has gone into the tomb first. After these two have gone home, rather chastened, one suspects, Mary M, who’s returned to the tomb with them, remains. In turn she meets up with two angels, then unwittingly, with Jesus Himself. 

Our trio, &, later, other disciples, may imaginatively represent stages of belief some others have reached, or still suffer angst over on the way to reaching a discipleship raised with Jesus. Why not imagine & explore such possibilities:

Darkness, or even half-light is no substitute for the Light Christ is in Himself   & by His Spirit when we find Him raised & able to raise us with Him.

Someone telling us, or even speculating Jesus is raised, is no substitute for meeting Him personally. 

How thoroughly are we seeking? Fleetingly? Haphazardly (as I might look for a ‘lost’ sock!)? Persistently? Theologically? Or, most important, expectantly.? Always be on the look-out for angels, whatever their guise. They are always pointing us in the direction of the raised Christ.

Are we searching in company, within the Body? God is no solitary. Any more than a person raised with Christ can be one.

As the stories of the raised Christ develop over the days & weeks & more, some angst continues. But the more Jesus-raised-from-the-dead stories are shared, the more all the dots are joined, the more belief & joy break through in the reality of the communal experience. As joy, in the Person of & Presence of the Raised Christ Himself, takes over their company. As He needs to take over ours today. 

JN 18: 37-38  & 19: 16-30  

Jottings on John…From the Good Friday Gospel… 2018  

In asking Jesus, “Truth? What’s that?”, Pilate’s dismissive of both Jesus & Truth. Leaders who don’t admit the difference between ‘truth’ & ‘alternative truth’ are also dismissive. Now the leaders of the Australian Test Cricket Team appear not to know the difference between Truth & not truth - in their case, by cheating. Whenever we settle for alternative truths, or cheating, over Truth with a capital T, we’re aligning ourselves with Pilate & how he sees things, rather than with Jesus, God’s Truth.

Truth goes to the heart of Jesus' mission & kingship. At the beginning of His ministry, Jesus has had to wrestle out in the wilderness with the Truth of Who He is. What kind of Messiah He’s to be. He’s been tempted to hand Himself over to devilish ways of being Messiah, but discerns there’s no Truth in that direction. Instead, Jesus commits to being God’s Truth; living out God’s way of seeing things & doing things. How can we explore this?  

When Jesus appears before him, Pilate doesn’t ‘get’ Him! “You’re not really a king, are you?” he asks. (Try that with differing emphases!) When Jesus replies, “You’re the one saying I am”, Pilate’s response is,“You don’t look like a king to me!” Pilate’s unable to see the God possibilities in Jesus, God’s very own person standing in front of him; most certainly different from any king he’s seen or known, or likely to. Pilate is genuinely puzzled by Jesus, but unwilling to go beyond his own conundrum: When is a king not a king?’ Is it worth asking, too, ‘When is God not God?’

The way to help anyone, inside or outside the church, puzzling over Jesus’ kind of kingship is by our living out the Truth of His kingship. So they can see God’s Truth as Jesus lives God out in us, and ‘get’ it! Get Him! Get God!

Jesus tells Pilate, “Everyone who belongs to the Truth can hear my voice”, echoing what He’s earlier said to antagonistic fellow Jews [8:47]. Later, when Pilate refuses to change the wording over Jesus’ cross, has he simply had enough of the Jewish leaders & their complainings? Or, is this Truth-about-Jesus question still bothering him? Perhaps it should be bothering us more today?

Jesus, nailed to His cross, is the Essence of the non-negotiable Truth of God. He Himself puts the seal on that in His last words before He dies. Personally, I can never settle for the tame, ‘It’s finished’, or ‘It’s over’, kind of translation. I’ve no doubt Jesus is saying, & meaning, “I’ve done it!” “I’ve brought it off!” And that’s God’s Truth!

JOHN 12: 20-33

Jottings on John…Lent 5…Revised 2018 

The ‘Greeks’ who come to worship at the feast ‘want to see Jesus’. Are they among the ‘god-fearers’ attracted to the monotheism of Judaism? We don’t know for sure if they’d get past the Court of the Gentiles, but that’s OK if that’s where Jesus is teaching. What happens to those who come to our church hoping to meet God? Do they face barriers of any kind: structural, people, or attitudes, that may keep them from ‘seeing God’? Keep them from coming face to face with Jesus as these Greeks here want to do?

Why does Philip feel he needs to ‘get the nod’ from Andrew before approaching Jesus about the Greeks? Is there any hesitancy in the way we meet new people- opportunities? Dare we ask, “If someone were to come in here among us today saying they ‘wanted to see Jesus’ how would we approach them? Would we ‘pass the buck’ to someone else? A starting point might be to ask something like, ‘How well does our ‘front of house’ function. Long personal experience shows me how important the way we greet & receive people to worship, both regulars & strangers, is.

If we were to ‘mark’ our congregation on our performance as a people of God gathering to meet Jesus, how would we fare at this point? If the result is not too encouraging, can we learn anything from this passage to help us improve? 

  

We don’t know if these ‘Greeks’ of our story do actually get to meet Jesus. Neither Jesus nor John makes any further mention of them. Their arrival on the scene, though, seems to precipitate Jesus into recognising the climax of His mission on earth has arrived ¹. He speaks accordingly. Are we making as much as we might of ‘climaxes’ - in our liturgical observances, in on-going parish life, in our personal life? May it be time we discerned climactic possibilities God is creating under our noses, & grasp them?! Might the arrival of some new-comer onto our scene just be a God-sent game-changer for us?

In all this, do we need to learn to ‘let go & let God’ as Jesus does? Matthew Fox paraphrases Meister Eckhart on this passage as: ‘Jesus is so full of letting go He was able to let go of life. So free of letting go was the Divine Word that it could become human.’ ²  A thought to discern, deeply, & put into practice?

¹ Leon Morris, St. John, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1971, p. 590  ² Breakthrough, Doubleday, NY, 1980 p. 349 

JOHN 3: 14-21

Jottings on John…Lent 4…2018 

This old story of the bronze snake from hundreds of years before is seared deep into Jesus’ psyche. So much so that He takes the story & beats it into shape like the smiths beat that original snake into shape. Jesus beats it into representing Himself & what’s going to happen to Him. Beats it into representing Himself & how He’s going to be beaten. Beats it into how He’s going to be hung up on the pole of the cross. Beats it so all who will look up to Him will find their healing; in every sense of that word.

It’s not clear whether this passage is still part of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, but it makes sense to take it as being so. Look at how Nicodemus is later so moved at Jesus being beaten & hung up to die, that against the odds, he assists Joseph of Arimathea in giving Jesus a decent burial. Had the snake-on-the-pole story begun to sear itself into Nicodemus’ psyche, too, after this conversation with Jesus? 

It’s easy to focus so much on the popular appeal of v. 16 that we skip over 14 & 15 in our haste to get to it. To do this is to fall into the trap of selectively choosing texts rather than taking each as part of a whole. Jesus undergoes His own ‘being lifted up’ experience so we might find our healing through His loving us so much (our beloved v.16). He’s prepared to prophetically re-enact & fulfil His being the antidote for all that’s biting us as we journey towards our Promised land.

At the start of Lent we learned that wilderness may be hard going, inhospitable, & a challenge to body, mind, & spirit, but it’s never God-forsaken; though we may refer to it as such. Today we have Good News about finding our healing from the things that bite us as we journey onwards with God through life on earth, including our various wildernesses. How can we lovingly, patiently, & confidently encourage those being ‘bitten to death’ by the various scourges of today’s society to take this Gospel into themselves? Taking this story as deeply as Jesus takes the original story into Himself may produce healing at a deeper level than a lot of other ‘remedies’ on offer. Are we up for it?

Jesus Himself is healed through being raised to new life. Whatever happens to us, whatever bites us, He’s our guarantee of the deepest healing of all.