These Are Written (Second Sunday in Easter; John 20:19-31; April 8, 2018)

These Are Written

Second Sunday in Easter
John 20:19-31
April 8, 2018

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

I realized something this week, something that gives me a little relief and a little sadness, too: This is probably my last sermon here on John's gospel. My hope in beginning this series was, if you remember, that by reading John with new eyes and hearing him with new ears I might come to the place where I have a better understanding and appreciation of what it was he was trying to do. I hoped to better respect him even if I couldn't say that he and I were besties.

You might say that I set the bar a little low, but there is a place for baby steps and I think this was one of those places. John, if I understand him rightly, set for himself a difficult mission. To a great extent, he was successful. There were even a few places where I said quietly, "Well, done!"

You might also remember--in fact I hope you never forget--that I set out on this experiment with a theory to test. My theory is that John's gospel was written for a community of Jesus-followers who had been part of a Jewish community in a Greco-Roman city. There were Jewish communities in many ancient cities. While they varied in their practices and beliefs, these communities felt a kinship with each other. They had a lot in common. They shared the experience of following a religious way of life that presumed life in Judea and a special relationship with Jerusalem while at the same time they were actually living outside of Judea and far from Jerusalem and its Temple.

The Jews had won a very important privilege in the Roman Empire: they were recognized as a licit, that is, lawful, religion without having to worship the Roman gods or even having to offer a sacrifice of incense to the spirit of the Emperor. In exchange for that, a daily sacrifice and prayers were offered in the Temple on the emperor's behalf. In this way, Jews were able to live in Greco-Roman cities in relative peace most of the time and could at very least appeal for imperial protection if local magistrates decided to use them as scapegoats.

From the point of view of the leaders of the Jewish communities, these new Jesus-followers were dangerous. They were Jews, at least at first, but their insistence on recognizing Jesus as the Anointed One (Messiah in Hebrew, Christ in Greek) threw the synagogues into turmoil. We don't know who started the quarrels and we don't know whether the Jesus-followers decided to leave the synagogues first or whether the synagogue leaders decided to show the Jesus-followers the door first. We only know that what began as a larger group, became two, mutually hostile groups.

The split left the Jewish communities weaker and more vulnerable, but they may have seen no other choice. The one thing that the Romans would not tolerate under any circumstances was civil unrest. This they would put down with brutal efficiency.

The Jesus-followers--however much they might have provoked it--found themselves outside of the Jewish community. Suddenly they were no longer a part of a licit religion and could legally be persecuted. But the pain and danger of the Jesus community went well beyond that. They had been Jews a long way from Judea and Jerusalem, but connected to the broader Jewish community through the synagogue. Now they were isolated from their roots and their connection to Jerusalem.

This Jesus community was suddenly from nowhere at all. "Once you were no people, but now you are my people," God once said to them. Now they heard their fellow Jews tell them, "Once you were God's people, but now you are nobody at all." They were nobodies from nowhere.

I can't say for certain just how the lines were drawn between Jewish synagogue and Christian church, but I imagine that--if modern church splits offer any clues--sometimes the line cut through families. Children may well have been cut off from parents, siblings from each other. Certainly many friendships were destroyed by this schism. So now the Jesus-followers were nobodies from nowhere and they were alone.

We may think that we modern folks are all about individuals, but we still know in our bones that human beings are not built for being alone. Crying babies make us anxious to care of them even when they are not ours. Solitary confinement is a devastating sanity-threatening form of punishment. We will hold stubbornly to ideas that we would instantly recognize as foolish and false if it were not for the risk that, if we disagree with our community, we will lose our place in it.

All of this is to say that John's little band of Jesus-followers was in a state of painful disorientation. They were suffering a kind of vertigo of the soul. They were survivors of deep trauma and sometimes it seemed that the surviving part was still in doubt.

No wonder, then, that John's story eventually turns to the little band of Jesus-followers hiding out in their safe-house. The disciples' story becomes a way for the members of John's community, living some sixty or seventy years later, to work out some of their own stuff.

The original band of Jesus' followers was hiding out because they were afraid of the leaders of the Jewish community. What can they possibly do, if the Jewish authorities have it in for them? How can they dare to show their faces? Even if it is the first day of the week, or what later followers would come to call the Lord's Day?

They were behind closed doors on the Lord's Day and who should appear but Jesus himself. He showed himself to them, as a wounded Messiah. He breathed on them and gave them the authority of the Spirit to forgive sins. (They are not nobodies now, are they?) Thomas Didymus wasn't with them, so Jesus did an encore a week later just for him. You may notice that, while Thomas had claimed that he needed to put his fingers in the wounds in Jesus' hands and his hand in Jesus' side, and Jesus told him to do that, the text doesn't say that Thomas actually did that. Instead, Thomas declares his own confidence in Jesus based on seeing him only.

"Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe," says Jesus. John, of course, is addressing Jesus' words to his own community, none of whom (more than likely) had even seen Jesus either during his lifetime or in a resurrection appearance.

Then we have a kind of conclusion. And then another chapter. And then another conclusion. The suspicious me is suspecting that chapter twenty-one is actually a sort of afterward to the gospel. If we didn't have it, we would never have missed it and the gospel would conclude with the observation that Jesus did a lot of wonderful things that the first generation of Jesus-followers saw that were never written down. But the ones that were written down were written for the sake of John's community, that they might "believe" that Jesus is the Anointed One and, through that "belief" have "life."

John's hope is that his community will stop being victims of their trauma--as shown by their cowering fear of the synagogue officials who tossed them out--and move beyond being mere survivors of trauma to being a community of people who thrive, a community that has real life.

At first glance it would seem that this recovery and rebirth take place through the the community's beliefs, but I think we need a second glance and maybe a third. Some funny things have happened to the notion of belief in the last few decades. The meaning of belief seems to have shifted. I hear people talking about belief now and I have this urge to quote Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride: "This word you keep using. I do not think it means what you think it means."

A belief seems to be an opinion that doesn't have to be backed up with fact and sound reasoning. Beliefs are a private matter, it is assumed, and therefore no one has the right to question them. So a belief doesn't have to be defended. Belief has come to refer to our non-disputable, privately-held opinion. That's not what John means by it, however.

It's another case of the problems we have when we try to translate a text. In most cases words that can be used to translate each other are not really equivalent. Take for example the Spanish word, pila. In El Salvador a pila is the two hundred gallon concrete tank and washing surface that is a center of many households. In Argentina a pila is a battery. I see a connection between the two meanings: both uses have something to do with a reservoir. But there is no English word that covers the same territory.

The same problem confronts us in the Greek word family that we usually translated as "faith" or "belief" or "believe." The word in Greek, though, also covers the area covered by the English words "trust" and "trustworthy." "Faithful" and "faithfulness" come closer to being equivalents. Faithfulness isn't a matter of belief. Faithfulness is a moral commitment to fulfill one's promises. Faith is the confidence we have that someone who has made a promise will keep it. Sometimes in the New Testament it's even hard to tell who is the one who is being faithful. The phrase that is usually translated as "faith in Christ" can--and more directly--be translated as "the faithfulness of Christ" or simply as "Christ's faithfulness."

To understand John rightly I think we need to push the translation more toward something like this:

Then Jesus did many other signs in his disciples' presence, signs that aren't recorded in this book. But these things are written so that you may confidence that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through that confidence and in his name you may really live.

John's hope for his community is that--out of all the things that could have been written about Jesus--they will read these things and gain the confidence not simply to survive their trauma but to thrive in spite of it. This is John's version of God's dream: Real life as it truly should be lived even in the midst of a world that sometimes delivers pain, sorrow, and real damage.

And perhaps John's hopes extended beyond his own wounded, struggling, and cowering community. Perhaps he imagined that others would find that their experiences were not so far from the things that his community had been through. Perhaps he hoped that other communities and even individuals would take these words to their own comfort and healing, move through their pain, and emerge into the light of life in the presence of the God who was made known in Jesus, who had loved them all along, and who would never cease to love them to the end of history and beyond. Amen.

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