May 5, 2002 -- SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
John 14:15-21
Color: White
Title: “Jesus gives us a way of transforming the negative experience of grief into a positive experience; Christ presence.”
Jesus continues his farewell discourse to his disciples; this section begins and ends with a statement about loving Jesus and keeping his commandments and occurs also in verse twenty-three. In each instance there is a promise that a divine presence will come to those who meet this standard. In verses fifteen to seventeen, it is the Spirit or Paraclete; in verses eighteen to twenty-one it is Jesus and in verses twenty-three and twenty-four, it is the Father along with Jesus. The three different terms all point to the same reality, namely, divine presence, looked at from different vantage points.
In verse fifteen, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
“To believe in” Jesus is much more common in John than “to love” Jesus., but they amount to the same thing. Here, loving Jesus and “keeping, ” that is, fulfilling his commandments amount to the same thing. “Love” identifies the attitude; “keep” identifies the actions which flow from it. “Love” Greek agapate, is plural and means “have a positive will towards,” an invisible reality which becomes visible, enfleshed, takes form, in actions. Those actions are called here “commandments,” since they are done out of obedience, as opposed to “good feeling,” love. In John Jesus has but one commandment: to love one another. When used in the plural it means all those actions that flow from and are consistent with that fundamental attitude. God and Jesus, is complete in himself and autonomous. He has no real “needs,” as such, but when a Christian acts in the best interests of others, he or she, in a sense, meets God’s needs. Thus, he or she can be said to “love God” or “love Jesus.” Of course, Christians also love God in an emotional sense, but that is not the point here. Keeping Jesus’ commandments is the way the invisible reality of love become visible. Thus, they become signs, sacramentals. The “commandments,” of Jesus involve a whole way of life in loving union with Jesus; they are not just moral precepts.
In verse sixteen, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.” The verb “to give” is often associated with the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, so much so that “gift” of the Holy Spirit, becomes a term for the Spirit himself. See Acts 2:38; 8: 20. Jesus is the way to the Father, and also the revelation of the Father. When he is withdrawn, through his death, from the disciples’ sight, how will he continue to reveal e.g., make the invisible God visible, God, being invisible himself now? The Holy Spirit is the answer. The divine presence will be felt spiritually, as really as physically. John does not stress the extraordinary manifestation of the Spirit’s presence, such as miracles, prophecy, tongues, etc. as does Paul in, say, 1Cor12. He does not exclude them, but he wants to say that the ordinary lives of Christians who put into practice the attitude of love is lived by and under the power of the divine presence now experienced as Spirit or Paraclete. The whole point is that the Spirit of Jesus performs the functions, does the work of, Jesus now, after he is no longer “in the flesh,” through his disciples. The Spirit is not a different divine reality, but a different experience of that same divine reality, God. The Father’s gift of his and Jesus’ Spirit overcomes the gap created by the absence of the physical Jesus. That Jesus-Spirit will now be located in the disciples instead of in an earthly body once inhabited by the Jesus-Spirit.
In verse seventeen, “This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.”
This explains the term “Advocate,” used in verse sixteen, In Greek the term is Parakletos, “Paraclete.” It has a lot of meanings: advocate, counselor, intercessor, helper, consoler. Basically, it is a forensic term for what we would call a lawyer, one who stands by your side at a trial for John does see Jesus and the “world,” on trial and defends you, pleads your cause, etc. John uses the term much more warmly than that and intends to include all of the above nuances in his meaning. For all of its importance the term appears only five times in John: here in 14: 16-17 and 26; 15: 26; 16: 7b-11, 13-15 (and once in 1Jn2: 1-2 for Jesus as intercessor). The term is another designation of and for the Holy Spirit who communicates truth and interprets for the present what Jesus said and taught in the past.
Which the world cannot accept: Humans can only be open to receiving the Spirit if they are in a right relationship with God, something the “world” is not. Thus, the “world” neither sees him by physical observation of his effects since he is physically invisible as such. These effects, signs of his presence, are the works; the loving keeping of Jesus’ commandments, Jesus’ disciples do in his name. Nor can they know the Spirit of Truth, of Jesus, by any inward apprehension as Christians do, because they are on the outs with God.
In verse eighteen, “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.”
Rabbinical students who followed their masters around all day and lived with them considered them “like a father.” Such was the case with Jesus’’ disciples. So they thought of his departure in death to akin to being orphaned, abandoned.
In verse nineteen, “In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.” Being no longer “in the flesh,” no one will be able to see Jesus as they used to, even the disciples. Yet, they “see,” with another eye, the eye of faith. They will come to see that he never really left them, only left the usual form, his body, in which they were used to, also, seeing him. But there is more to the presence of Jesus, being divine, than the physically tangible.
In verse twenty, “On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” This has three referents. The last day, the end of the world, when no one will be able to deny the divine presence, is the most comprehensive meaning here. Then, there is the day of Jesus’ resurrection, the same day, according to John, he bestows the Spirit. They will “see,” what he means then. Thirdly, there is the day of one’s personal resurrection, one’s death. Having no physical eyes to block or cloud real vision, the disciples will see into the eternal realm. All will be clear then. What will be seen will not be things or landscapes or terrain, but relationships. The mutual indwelling of Father and Son will be paralleled, “imaged,” to use a Genesis term, by the mutual indwelling of disciples and Son. How will we know? The same Spirit that bonds and binds Father and Son, binds and bonds Son and disciple, not only, then in the future, but even now. Only then it will all be much clearer, but no more or less real and true than now. Now this relationship is real or realized, then, even more so. The union between Father and Son is at the heart of Jesus’ teaching, indeed, the authoritative basis for it, stated often throughout John. But the believers similar union with Jesus is new.
In verse twenty-one, “ They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”
This repeats verse fifteen, but more generally and in reverse order. The mutual indwelling is not automatic. It is open to everyone, but not everyone receives it because not everyone loves as Jesus means the term. Mutual indwelling depends on love.
Sermon
From way back in the Old Testament the thing that amazed people as they experienced life was that “God was and is with us.” People then and now experience creation’s various levels and wonder what, if anything, goes on inside animals and even plants. These are living creatures, as are we. Do they experience God as we do? They surely must if they are to be alive, but they clearly do not have anything like the personal relationship, interaction, and simple “being-with” God that humans do or can. Humans seem to be the only ones of God’s creatures for whom there are indeed levels of reality, that life is more than existence, that what we see with our eyes, feel with our hands, and hear with our ears, is not all there is. Even without faith in God, humans love things and people, rightly or wrongly, with their hearts. At least, we use “heart” and many other words, in a more than physical sense, even though it is a sense organ.
Now Old Testament people expressed their more-than-physical experience of life by many wondrous statements. They used words like “Praise” or “Glory” or “Light” in an attempt, imperfect at best, to get at, describe, capture the moment, frame-freeze, experiences of wonder. One of those wonders, perhaps the deepest and most expansive, was the felt awareness that “God is with us.” They would, of course mean that in the sense of “for us,” “on our side,” “has our best interests at heart.’” But they would also mean it, at least some of them would, in the sense of God is somehow present to them, maybe not in the same physical way they were present to each other, but something loosely comparable. This was an experience, a felt phenomenon, long before it was expressed in words.
Now that sort of presence, not only local but friendly presence, would seem to be quite enough, more than we as humans should rightly expect, a grace in and of itself. It would be more conscious than what the animals and maybe plants, were aware of, but still not terribly different. God is friendly to us, not hostile. That is a lot to know and takes a lot of fear off the collective human mind or human race. Imagine if it were otherwise!
However, Jesus tells us that that is not enough for God. He wants to be even more present than that. He wants to be within us, and not just as a little temple or tabernacle. He wants to mix with us, converse with us, interchange love with us. He also wants us to reciprocate. This is the deepest and fullest presence, almost unimaginable, almost unspeakable, certainly indescribable in human linguistic terms, although Jesus seems to have done an excellent job of finding all the right words. God wants, to use human words however inadequately, what holds him together and what makes him happy to hold us together as well. On the human level the word “love” says it; on the divine level the word “Spirit” says it. Different words, same reality, same truth. So, what does God do, after becoming one of us, or, as we humans would say, giving us his Son? He gives us his Spirit, really himself with all his love and life and light and glory. It is as if God could not wait until this creation has run its course, a course he intended from all time and eternity, before giving us “more.” He gives us his Spirit now. He prepared us for this with Jesus and now continues to give us himself well past death, in time, yes, but well past time. It is too much for us to put into words and too much to grasp. In truth it is we who are grasped by him. All the prepositions of any human language when put together- by, in, into, within, through, among, etc.- do not begin to capture the essence of the mutual indwelling of God with, another inadequate preposition, us. Yet, no one has said it better than Jesus and the very contemplation of his words brings the reality home to us- that he makes his home in us and we in him! Jesus was not talking to mystics when he said these things; he was talking to you and me.
So, God is within us whether or not we recognize that fact. If God were not, we could not exist. Yet, God is within us in another sense, in an interpersonal way, if, and only if, we accept Jesus on his terms, if we totally surrender to him, give up our will or willfulness, and let him be our God, our Lord, our Savior. Unconditional surrender makes possible unconditional love. We can then love as God loves.
Loving Jesus and keeping his commandments of love amount to the same thing.
Loving others is the “incarnation” of our loving God.
Love, as Christ uses the term, is an attitude that expresses itself in action, not a feeling that expresses itself in emotions.
Christian love empowers us to see the invisible as God sees it.
The Holy Spirit is Jesus, who is God, invisible in form, but “seen” through behavior.
Jesus had to die and rise in order to give us himself in Spirit form.
Grieving: Grief is a process, better called “grieving,” a verb, an action, than “grief,” a noun, a state. It begins with the shock that sets in when someone or even something, is lost. At that point it is entirely emotional and, therefore, beyond our willing it or controlling it. As such, it is also entirely passive, something that happens to us. We are on the receiving end of the action, the action of death or loss. Certainly, the passage of time, the passivity of time, can diminish the emotion of grief. It can even eliminate it entirely, given enough time. That is because emotions are always temporary and fade when the stimulus that causes them fades away from consciousness. However, thanks to Christ, there is another perspective on grief and another way of dealing with grief. Jesus knew that his disciples would grieve his loss and in his farewell discourse he gave them and us a way of going beyond merely coping with or managing grief. He gave them and us a way of transforming the negative experience of grief into a positive experience of presence. He says, “Have faith in God and faith in me.” If we inject our will, our attitudes, into the unwilled emotion of grief, we can turn it into something more than merely suffering, a passive experience, loss. He gave them and us the eternal perspective on this temporary experience so that we would not have to wait until the emotions had run their course. We can let him, his Spirit, intervene and realize that what is truly temporary is the emotional pain, not the actual loss of a loved one. Jesus wants us to look upon all loss, all death, as he wanted his disciples to look upon his own death and their own loss. He says in effect: In one way I am going away, but in another way I am not. He says that he is only becoming physically invisible, but not really absent. This perspective on grief turns it into a learning experience. We learn through the physical absence of a loved one that that loved one remains present. We learn to sense the subtleties of presence and the dimensions of presence. That awareness takes the focus away from absence and the grief it causes and places it upon presence and the joy it brings. This does not happen instantaneously. It is a learning experience and, therefore, a process with stages. The disciples would receive Jesus’ Spirit on Easter, but it would take fifty days before they realized its full impact. That later realization was so powerful that they would forget the previous fifty days and even minimize the original experience of the gift and celebrate Pentecost with such joy that even Easter would be interpreted in its light. When we lose a loved one, we do well to go to the farewell discourse of Jesus found only in John and reflect upon it. It is all there. It is Jesus’ next-to-final compassionate act. Our death and the deaths of loved ones are also our next-to-final acts. The final one is in eternity where there is no end to it. In the meantime, if the Spirit of Jesus lives in us, so do the spirits of everyone we ever loved and who loved us. This is true even if they are still physically alive. For instance, whether our parents are dead or alive, our spouses or children dead or alive, where do their spirits live? In us, of course! They, like God himself, are always with us. Jesus teaches here that this is not just a pious thought or a consoling wish. It is a fact, a fact of life, a fact of eternal life. Now we know that we do not have to wait until we die before experiencing the joys of eternity and that those whom we love, like God, are always with us. Physical death changes our relationship with our loved ones, but does not sever it. Grief actually teaches us how God is invisibly present all the time. It sensitizes us to his always and everywhere presence that we are inclined to miss until and unless we experience loss. Amen.
