Texts: John 14:15-21
Our Gospel reading continues that of last Sunday, with the disciples gathered with Jesus at the Table, listening to his farewell words. The relationship between disciples and Teacher—then and now—is not to degenerate into sentimentality or a wistful nostalgia once he has gone, about “how wonderful things were when Jesus was with us.” Love expresses itself in loyalty to the teachings of Jesus, and in loyalty comes our efforts to obey—not out of some legalistic requirement that if we don’t obey we will be cursed, but out of the reality that having been once in the company of this revelation of God, having once let Jesus move our stony hearts as I have been saying throughout this Easter season, our lives are forever different. We, too, are drawn into a unity with God that defies even our attempts to ignore it or act as if it isn’t there.
Giacomo Puccini composed some of the world’s greatest operas, including La Scala, Tosca, and Madame Butterfly. In 1922 as he began what many critics consider his finest work, Turandot, Puccini was diagnosed with cancer. He struggled to finish the opera before he died, but as his disease sapped his energy, he told his students that, if he did not complete the work, they should finish it for him. After his death in 1924, Puccini’s students assembled all his notes, studied them carefully, and proceeded to complete the work.
In 1926 the world premiere of Turandot was performed in Milan’s famous Opera House. Puccini’s prize pupil, Arturo Toscanini, conducted the opera. It proceeded beautifully until Toscanini came to the end of the parts composed by Puccini. He stopped the music, put down his baton, and turned to the audience. ‘Thus far the master wrote, until he died.’ There was a long pause. Then Toscanini announced, ‘But his disciples finished the work.’ The conductor, with tears in his eyes, picked up the baton again, and the opera concluded to thunderous applause and a permanent place in the world of great operas. (William J Bausch, World of Stories, Mystic, 23rd Publications 1998, p300)
In the Gospel reading from last week we heard Jesus, in this same Farewell Discourse, saying: “…the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these…”? I asked you to put down on the 3×5 card things you have done, and are doing, and actions that you are planning to do. On the green sheet, you see just part of what the witness of this congregation is and has been.
As we move towards the end of the liturgical season of Easter, we are reminded of the ways in which the church at various times in its life huddles down behind closed doors, trying to live on nostalgia about the way things used to be, when in fact the only way to live is to go on about finishing the maestro’s work that was begun, and that planted its song in our hearts and needs to be let out for the world to hear.
The Farewell Discourse in chapters 13-17 of John’s Gospel were written long after Jesus was gone. We need always to remember that this gospel especially was written backwards, in the midst of a community for whom Jesus was only a memory. No one in the community had even met Jesus, and most, if not all, of the original disciples were dead. The Romans had destroyed the Temple, which for many had been the predictor that the end of time would come, but it hadn’t come. Terrible conflict between those who still held to Judaism, and those who were Gentiles unwilling to submit to all the rules of Judaism, had resulted in people leaving family and home, feeling orphaned indeed, and unsure if they had made the right choices. So many people claiming that only they had the absolute truth. And then there were the persecutions, both from the Jewish community, and from Rome: the author of John puts these words in Jesus’ mouth later in the 16th chapter: They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God. [John 16:2]
Whenever people believe that some orthodox position must be asserted in the face of what they call “moral relativism”, but is actually a different experience and different point of view—a sign of pluralism, whenever people believe that such orthodoxy must be affirmed in law, the result is usually political disaster, oppression, and eventually fascism. So, too in John’s time, the effort to snuff out Jesus and his followers led to waves of repression and persecution. It has happened in wave after wave of history.
These words to us from these Scripture readings today are therefore very important for our time, and for our life together as Christians. First, they remind us that we are not alone. Because we have allowed Christ into our lives and hearts, however incidentally, however casually, we are now part of something greater than ourselves. The holy has come to make a home in us. I will abide in you, Jesus says. Just as Puccini’s music had touched the minds and hearts of his disciples so that they could complete his great opera, so however tangentially, there is in each of us a Jesus who lives and reigns in us.
Barbara Lundblad, a Lutheran pastor who teaches now at Union Seminary in New York City, says that the Farewell Discourses are “a bit like The Last Lecture Series in some colleges, where [beloved] professors are asked what they would say if they knew it was their last chance to speak. Here at the table, Jesus says some things over and over: “….Love one another”, and “The Spirit of truth will abide with you when I am gone.”
I take all these words to mean: Look, Jesus loved all those disciples despite their flaws, their inability to understand, their betrayals, so we need to love one another, too as family. We are diminished by the loss of anyone. And, simultaneously, out of the mix of people and experience and ideas in community, remember that you all still have more to learn. It means that in every generation Christians and the church are faced with new questions, new perplexities. Does the sun revolve around the earth or is it the other way around? Should nuclear weapons ever be used against an enemy? Should we pre-emptively wage war? Should we assassinate an unarmed terrorist? How should we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless? Should women who feel called by God be ordained to preach? What about homosexuality? What are we to do about those neighbors?
The author of the fourth Gospel insists that Jesus knew that there would be questions that the sacred writings didn’t address, that there would be things he had never talked about that would come up to challenge us. We could either hide behind closed doors, or we could trust that hope—hope in the goodness and grace of God, hope that a better world is possible— is in us to lead us to find the answers to our questions. Barbara Lundblad used another illustration in talking about this passage: she said that a number of years back she read that the reason mountain climbers tie themselves together is to keep the sane ones from going home. She acknowledged that whoever said that was probably playing with the audience, because we all know that mountain climbers tie themselves together to keep from falling into a crevice, or sliding off a steep slope or getting lost in the fog. But there is another piece of truth: When fear sets in, many a climber is tempted to say: “This is crazy! I’m going home”.
Living the way of Jesus can be like that: if you really get into it, you can say…”Whoops, this is a bit more than I anticipated.” You mean I’ve got to really worry about how to feed the poor, and what loving God and my neighbor might mean in my own house—in how I treat my spouse, my children, not to mention down at the office? You mean I’ve got to look at the budget of my country and ask if it reflects my values? If you’re sane, you might want to bail out.
The promise is, however, that we will have an Advocate—one who calls out for our sakes in the trials of life. We will have a Comforter—one who makes us strong together. We will have a Spirit of truth to lead us. And we only discover it when we pick up the tools of the way of Jesus and start digging in to finish the work. “I will not leave you orphaned. … I am coming to you.” Someone this week spoke of hearing a great sermon by an African-American pastor, on the passage: Go and make disciples of all nations, and lo, I will be with you always.” That’s the same promise that we have heard here in John’s Gospel. But the black preacher had the wisdom to say: “If you ain’t got the Go, you ain’t gonna know about the “lo.”
Well, as we go on our part of the way of Jesus, that seems a good place to pause for a while. May God’s word dwell in you richly this week. Amen.
