“The Beast with Two Minds”
John 7:10-13, 37-43
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
3/19/17
In best-case
scenarios, the most influential people in our lives embody Love and forgiveness.
They speak challenging yet transforming truths to us. They evoke both laughter
and tears. And if they are truly influential, we can’t help sharing what they teach
us. I’m more grateful than words can express that both of my parents are such
people for me. While I’ve shared with you some things my dad has said, my mom has
spoken some memorable words, too.
I am the
second of four children, and when any of us complained about something we had
just received or experienced, something we had expected to be wonderful, Mom,
as she continued cleaning up after us, cooking for us, or perusing the paper to
escape us, would say, “Remember, things are always better while you’re
anticipating them than when you actually get them.”
I didn’t want
to hear that! I was a kid. I didn’t have a driver’s license yet. I hadn’t earned
a paycheck yet. I hadn’t kissed a girl yet. I hadn’t left home yet. I was
looking forward to those things – with great
anticipation! So, I dismissed Mom’s advice as a symptom of the foolishness
of her advanced age. She was in her thirties, for crying out loud. Her late thirties!
To my chagrin, Mom proved more
right than wrong. Because anticipation is often fueled by a desire for personal
benefit, it tends to breed unrealistic expectations. When hit by enough disappointment,
we try to protect ourselves through suspicion or even full-on cynicism. The
same is true, and even more so, when fear drives our anticipation. Fear
devolves into impatience with and judgement of those whose own desires and
expectations differ from ours. It seems to me that the suspicion and cynicism
of fear creates the festering rancor in which we now live.
In John’s gospel, one of the main
characters is The Crowd who follows
Jesus everywhere he goes. The crowd represents any of us and all of us. The
crowd believes and disbelieves. They hope and despair. They receive in grateful
wonder, and they scoff in ill-tempered disdain.
In John 7, Jesus is in Jerusalem
for the Festival of Booths. This festival amounts to a kind of Thanksgiving meets
Mardi Gras meets Holy Week. It’s a week-long, harvest celebration with parades,
feasting, and solemn worship. Word is out that Jesus of Nazareth is in town.
The Jews are looking for him, and The
Crowd is in an absolute lather.
“Jesus is here? Fantastic! He’s really
something special!”
“The heck he is! He’s a wannabe! A
fraud!”
The crowd has heard stories about
the Messiah, but coming in from north and south, east and west to gather at the
table, they’ve listened to different storytellers. So, there are at least two
camps of messianic expectations. Some see messianic hope in Jesus’ compassion for
the poor, in his authoritative teaching, and in stories about things like the transformation
of water into wine and a mystifying abundance in five loaves and two fish.
Others expect religious and political redemption to go hand-in-hand. So, until
Jesus leads the Jewish people in successful rebellion against Rome, he’s just
one more quack hawking snake oil.
The crowd may be one literary
character, but being of two minds, it is at its own throat. Throughout John’s
gospel, the crowd encounters Jesus but struggles to recognize him. The tension
we see and feel at the Festival of Booths exposes more than a momentary dilemma.
It illustrates the way of life for people of faith.
The synoptic gospels acknowledge
that tension, as well. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the
earth,” says Jesus. “For I have come to...” then he names all the divisions he will
cause. (Matthew
10:34a-35ff)
We are hardly strangers to that
tension, are we? Never in my lifetime have I felt such division in my immediate
surroundings. Never have I felt as obliged to define and act on an opinion as I
do now. And never have I felt that differing opinions held such potential for damaging
relationships that mean so much to me. Religiously, politically, socially, and economically
we are the crowd. We are a beast with two minds.
Watching the crowd wrestling with
their expectations, and with each other, Jesus says, “Let anyone who is thirsty
come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has
said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”
Who among us doesn’t crave living water right now?
By referring to scripture, Jesus
calls us to our sacred memory and to sacred community. Know who you are, says Jesus,
by remembering your shared story.
Within that sacred memory are words
from Isaiah, the prophet who declares redemption to exiles who have been
defeated and dispersed. Through Isaiah, God says: “For I will pour
water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my spirit
upon your descendants…” (Isaiah 44:3)
The trouble is that
in both the first and the twenty-first centuries, some in the Judeo-Christian
tradition hear in those ancient words a promise of a return to wholeness, to
oneness in community with God, neighbor, and earth. And others hear God’s
promise to return a particular community
to religious freedom and political eminence. And I suppose some try to hear
both. And there’s the rub! The Crowd, that one character, hears both. What will
a divergent entity expect? How will it respond when reality doesn’t live up to
all the anticipatory hype?
We are in the season
of Lent because The Crowd eventually decides to reject Jesus. We are on our way
to Friday and Saturday because before Jesus reveals the fullness of his
promise, we seethe with disappointment. We expected so much more.
When Jesus says, Come to me and drink, he offers us the
living water of the Holy Spirit. And he challenges us to remember and to anticipate ourselves as a community becoming one in God’s Spirit.
Long before John
wrote his version of the Gospel, Paul wrote to the Corinthians. There is rich
harmony in their voices: “For just as the body is one and has many
members,” writes Paul, “and all the members of the body, though many, are one
body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one
body…and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. (1Corinthians 12:12-13)
We are members of one,
painfully divided body. So Friday is coming – again. In one way or another, we
are going to kill the one who loves us unconditionally, because we are going to
feel disappointed by him.
Sunday’s coming, too.
And once again, Jesus will call us, he will dare us to see ourselves as part of
an outpouring, part of a flow that reveals the seminal, continual, and eternally
renewing utterance of God into the chaos, into the brokenness.
On Sunday will be
reminded – again – that God is still creating us, still redeeming us by Love,
for Love.
Charge/Benediction
In this life, oneness
in the Spirit does not and will not mean uniformity of religion, politics,
race, sexual orientation, lifestyle, or anything else. I’m learning this, but
I’m learning it slowly because I anticipated something quite different. Indeed,
something within me must die and be renewed before I fully accept it. I’m a
work in progress.
Life can be tense,
even dangerous, when all the beasts gather at the watering hole. But none of us
can live without water. God is the water where we gather to drink. Oneness in
the Spirit means, I think, entering the tension and embracing it as the only
possible place to find the presence and peace of God.
Go, and may you, and
we together, live as signs of God’s oneness, wholeness, and promise. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment