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EASTER 2, April 23, 2006 |
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched, this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete. This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar, and his word has no place in our lives. My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speak to the Father in our defense—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world. (NIV) STRENGTH FOR EACH NEW DAY In some senses, the Easter season makes us happy that all the grim concerns of Lent and Holy Week-- the self-discipline, the fasting, and the frequent worship services-- are over and done with. The glorious choruses of Easter drown out the dirges remembering the confrontation and capture, the agony in the Garden, the humiliation and crucifixion. Now life begins anew and in the power of the resurrection, we stand before an open door. Our lives are filled with joy because we have been assured of an eternal future. It might seem that way to some, and some post-Easter sermons might tend to suggest such superficiality. However, even the authors of Epistles in the New Testament knew that it was more complicated than that. One could deal with the dark realities of life with the light of the resurrection, to be sure. However, one should never assume that life’s problems disappear and that the life of a post-resurrection Christian is free of challenge. In today’s Epistle lesson, the author, who may be one of a number of Johns known or unknown to us, is forced to address problems facing the growing Christian community. Unlike problems addressed by Paul at an earlier period, problems dealing with marriage, the Lord’s Supper, or gender issues in relation to leadership, John is confronting major post-resurrection era splits in the community on theological grounds. It might have seemed as if Christians were free to enter an exciting new and confident lifestyle, but there were questions about who Jesus really was and whether sin was still a reality for the baptized Christian. These challenges may seem archaic to us today, until we begin to realize-- we Easter Christians-- that none of these problems have left us. They continue to plague us in various ways. It continues to be true that the resurrection has not taken away our challenges. It has, however, given us the strength for the day to face them in creative and courageous ways. This is the message that John wants to share with us today, and that we need to be able to share with each other. Settling for nothing less than the real Jesus It’s difficult to know exactly what problems were being addressed in the Johannine communities, but a good deal can be surmised both from the Gospel according to John and the Johannine epistles, even if the Johns were different writers. It seems that some Christians were being influenced by those who had a very high view of the divinity of Jesus, a problem that arose at various times within the earliest church. If Jesus is fully God, then God cannot, of course, suffer and die, went the reasoning. A number of solutions were posed to this problem, including the notion that Jesus’ divine spirit left him before the suffering and crucifixion (a concept often called adoptionism), and the notion that Jesus was never fully human, but only appeared to be (a concept called docetism). The Christian community wrestled with such issues for centuries, often holding major conferences to resolve the issues, and sometimes excommunicating those who held opposing views from the majority. What was at stake, of course, was the question as to whether Jesus really took the punishment for our sins, or merely seemed to? Did he take our place at the cross, or had he “checked out” before the critical moment? In this Epistle lesson, John reassures his readers: This Jesus? We saw him! Our hands touched him! He was no phantom who just seemed to be real. We proclaim to you what we ourselves have seen and heard, John tells his audience—nothing less than a real Jesus! In later portions of this letter, he will say it was the Jesus who came by water (baptism) and blood (cross). “He,” John says, “is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” You can’t have a Jesus without the cross! “Well, and good,” you may respond, “but that’s ancient history. Is it really? Do these issues not continue to raise themselves today? For example, during Holy Week, the National Geographic Society aired its special on the Gospel of Judas , a 4 th century Coptic codex which it claims provided a new slant, not only on Judas’ relationship to Jesus, but on the whole story of salvation. The media picked this up, as hungry vultures looking for prey, and gloated that the document was “authentic,” (meaning only, of course, that it was not a modern fake, but a legitimate document from the ancient world). They repeated, in one broadcast after another, mocking-bird-like, “is it possible that the Gospels got the story wrong? That Jesus wasn’t “betrayed” at all? That Jesus arranged the crucifixion with Judas? That we’ve been misled all these years?” Of course, it’s always interesting to reflect on new discoveries and to see what they have to offer. However, there were many such manuscripts written in the early centuries, holding Gnostic, docetist, adoptionist and other heresies. And the church rejected them, not because a political majority was suppressing truth-filled minorities, but because the church wanted at all costs to protect its greatest treasure-- that “God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (Jn. 3:16) This truth was given many creative twists in the early centuries, and the Gospel of Judas was only one of them— known to us for centuries only as a title (from Iranaeus of Lyon), but now available to us for the first time as an actual text. This was the very kind of issue, which John was challenging. This is no spiritual Jesus, John claimed; we heard him talk; we held his hands; we saw him bleed and die. He was the real thing! The spiritualization of Jesus, which was characteristic of Gnostic writers such as the author of The Gospel of Judas , is however, not confined to a newly discovered codex. It is rampant in television preaching and in the daily lives of many Christians. Known as “success Christianity” or “feel good Christianity” in some circles, this modern heresy suggests, as a popular Detroit preacher put it some years ago, “God wants you to be rich!” He doesn’t want you sick or despondent or poor or jobless. The resurrected Christ who now lives in you will assure that nothing bad will happen to you. It is almost as if the real part of life, the material or physical part, will have no claim on you because you are now a person of spirit. This may make good Christian Science, which, by the way is another modern Gnostic heresy, but it is not sound Easter Christianity. As John puts it at the end of this same letter (5:4), one can overcome the world through faith, but the world does not disappear. We are not free from the burdens and challenges of life, but they will never overcome us. As Paul put it in one of his moving reflections, he was cast down, but not destroyed, despondent, but not despairing. There is another modern heresy that John could challenge. It is easy for us Easter Christians to remember the poor, the sick, and the marginalized of all kinds. Sermons can point us to their needs, and we can sympathetically cluck as we hear of the plight of the less fortunate. But perhaps we do and say nothing; we simply regard it as a concern in our hearts. John very quickly challenges this spiritualization of the faith in a later portion of this letter (3:17) when he says, “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue, but with actions and in truth.” So, you see, there are many ways in which people can avoid the dirt, the blood and sweat, the hurt, the sickness, the cross—all of which might seem to have nothing to do with a God who is spirit—or his people who are spiritual as well. However, John makes it clear (and the early church guarded this truth) that there is no salvation without incarnation; there is no Jesus without the water and the blood! And that means, that we people of faith cannot avoid getting our hands dirty and our dollars spent as we seek to have fellowship with our human brothers and sisters, and fellowship with God himself. Settling for nothing less than real living Apparently there was another kind of heresy that John felt it important to challenge. There were those who felt that sin was no longer real for them. Perhaps they were not so naive as to believe that they never did anything wrong, but they may not have believed that God would hold this misdeed against them because they had now been baptized—and thus fully and finally forgiven. This, John challenges, is not possible. Evil is evil, darkness is not light. God has nothing to do with darkness, and if you are darkness, you have no fellowship with God. If you sin, don’t pretend it’s not real, John might say; instead, simply ask for forgiveness, and the real blood of the real Jesus will purify you from your sin. In fact, John argues, if you claim you have not sinned, you make God a liar, because he would not have had to pursue the cross and resurrection to atone for our sins, were we actually blameless. The reality is that it is our continuing darkness that made the cross and resurrection necessary. If we fail to recognize this, then the evil, hostility, revenge and anger which drove people to crucify Jesus and drives us in our own way to crucify him again and again, must be projected on God, making it his evil, hostility, revenge and anger which punishes Jesus. But this is impossible, argues John, because in God, there is no darkness at all. God is only and ultimately light! This is important for us to understand if we are to grasp the meaning of the resurrection for us today. God is light, and we who are darkness have been given the opportunity to walk in the light. We, who live in the forgiveness of sins purchased for us through the cross and empty tomb and guaranteed to us by our baptisms, can face all the challenges that the world throws our way. We will never avoid them or be free of them, but we can overcome the world through our faith. Surrounded by darkness, we can walk in the light because we have fellowship with the Father, and with his Son, Jesus Christ. One of the people in our century who refused more than most to settle for nothing less then real living was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anniversary of whose death we remembered earlier this month (April 6). In prison, awaiting his ultimate sentence, he filled his days with writing poetry, the draft for a novel, sketches for his writings on ethics, not to mention a voluminous correspondence with this fiancée, his family and his friends. He could not escape the judgement of the state, the inhumane treatment of the Nazis, nor his ultimate execution. They were his lot in life at that time. Inwardly, however, he wrestled with who he was and what he was to become. Whether he was a cowardly woebegone weakling or a confident representative of the resistance others would have to judge. For him, knowing the full power of a resurrection faith, it was enough to confess that whoever he was or wasn’t, he was God’s! That was and is the basis for real living in fellowship with a real Jesus. Such a conviction is our emboldening faith as well. We cannot avoid life’s problems or challenges, but knowing whose we are, we have enough strength for the day to meet each challenge. And, as John himself might have said, we consider it a privilege to meet our challenges with a resurrection faith, for they make our joy complete (1:4). Prof. Dr. Dr. David Zersen, President Emeritus
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