The Rev. Natasha Brubaker
May 6, 2007
John 13:31-35
Of the many memories of my childhood that make me smile is that of watching Star Trek—the original one with Captain Kirk and Scottie and Spock. Occasionally my Dad would get home from work in time for us to eat dinner and watch it together on TV. Even though I would giggle at the microscopic skirts of the women that couldn’t possibly do much good in any sort of action moment and roll my eyes at Shattner’s tremendous ability to overact, it was always fun. It was a time to let imagination run wild and see new worlds. In particular I remember that line during the opening sequence that says to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Now you may ask what in the world does the opening line of Star Trek have to do with the Gospel today. Honestly, not much. But it came to mind while reading the words of John when Jesus says to his disciples, “Where I am going, you can not come.” In a way, Jesus is saying he is about to go where no one has gone before. And that is indeed what happens on the cross and in the resurrection.
This short passage we read acts as a link between two parts of the story about Jesus the night before he dies. He has just finished with washing the feet of his disciples. He sends Judas out to do what the devil has planted in his heart to do. After the words we hear today Jesus gives a long teaching to his disciples on the meaning of the way to love one another.
But these words of exclusion stand out. Why can’t we come with him? Why can’t the disciples go where he is going? This is not typical of John’s Gospel. The refrain throughout so much of it is come and see. In the open chapter when the disciples are gathering around him Jesus tells people to come and see and they in turn tell others such as Nathanael to come and see. The Samaritan woman at the well gets her townspeople to go to meet Jesus with the words come and see. And the teaching on the good shepherd is full of language where the sheep come in and go out and find pasture. It’s a constant breath in the story: in, out, come, go. Given this theme of the meeting and union of the divine and the earthly that is captured in the words of motion, it stands out to hear Jesus say no, you can not come with me here.
While Jesus was not the first man to be crucified nor far from the last, his death was unique in the world. For those of us who believe the revelation of the resurrection, his death was not only that of a human but also of God incarnated in that human. The significance and meaning of that death was to reveal the resurrection—the truth that while life is inscribed by death, death is circumscribed and subordinated to life. Life, life poured out and given away in love, overpowers death and sin always and in all ways. This was an act only to be accomplished in Jesus so that we could then come and follow and do likewise. In thinking about this I remembered a dialogue in the movie The Fellowship of the Ring between the elf queen Galadriel and Frodo the ring bearer. He is doubting his ability to finish what he has taken on to do. Galadriel replies: this task has been appointed to you. If you do not find a way no one will. This task was appointed to Jesus, this sacrifice. He opened the door, the way. For surely he commands us to follow him even into death for the sake of the Gospel. But he had to make the way for us, make us understand and see that way. This is why I suggest he tells his disciples that they can not come with him now. eHe HH
The other side to this task, the other side to the revelation of the risen Lord, is how the very nature of sacrifice is transformed by Jesus and his death. We use the term sacrifice all over the place to describe the cross and death of Jesus. We don’t understand it well, living as we do in a culture that does not have sacrifice as part of its cultic expression. It can easily lead to theologies where Jesus must die to appease an angry God. It is much more than that, though, in the Gospels and most eloquently spoken to in John. It is about love as grace and death as grace.
Scholar Gail O’Day writes:
The example to which the love commandment points is the love of Jesus for his disciples, a love that will receive its fullest and final expression in his death. Jesus’ followers, therefore, are exhorted to love one another as fully as he loves them, a love that may indeed find its expression in the laying down of one’s life. To model one’s love on a love whose ultimate expression is the gift of one’s life is to model one’s love on a love that has no limits, that knows no boundaries and restrictions. To interpret Jesus’ death as the ultimate act of love enables the believer to see that the love to which Jesus summons the community is not the giving up of one’s life, but the giving away of one’s life. The distinction between these prepositions is important, because the love that Jesus embodies is grace, not sacrifice.
I would offer that Jesus redefines sacrifice for those of us who follow him. It is letting go of the notion of sacrifice, the sharing of one’s self, as giving up and giving from what we have gathered for ourselves. That in itself is a huge shift in the way we live in the world. It shifts the focus from ourselves to God and to others. It means not becoming better than, or having more of so we can give up to help others. It means we don’t seek our wealth or status or power in order that we can then give away to help others, too often meaning asking them to become like we want them to be. Rather, it means living our lives to their fullest with the fundamental understanding that all we have should constantly be being given away. This is possible because Jesus makes it possible in how he gave himself away. It is possible when we look first at the world as an expression of God’s love and every living person in it as a bearer of the divine. We are no longer over and above others, but one body under God who are separated from each other by the divisions of the world. As followers of Jesus we reject those distinctions and we don’t seek the glories of the world to then parcel them out in ways that makes sense to the world. It is possible because in Christ we are already dead to the world and alive in Jesus and his love, his giving away. In his life and in his death he did not stand like this (arms over chest) or like this (one hand out giving away things). He lived always open and giving away freely, constantly. And it is shown most fully in his death. For what posture did his death take on? This: (arms outstretched).
To live in this way is something I pray for each day. How Lord Jesus can I live today giving away my life in love for others. What must I let go? What must I learn anew? What pain and joy must I encounter to be truly free in your life? What must I understand to live as I have claimed I live: baptized into your death and resurrection? And I look not only to the Gospels and the whole of scripture but to those others who in their lives lived in a stance of giving away, free from the world and truly alive in Jesus Christ. They are all around us in ways large and small, and I need their witness and example to teach me more and more how to love my Lord.
One example comes from a Ugandan who stood against the reign of terror imposed by Idi Amin. “Kefa Sempangi tells how, after long evading Amin’s forces, he eventually met five of the dictator’s thugs, who were intending to kill him. Sempangi told them, ‘I do not need to plead my own cause...I am a dead man already. My life is dead and hidden with Christ. It is your lives that are in danger, you are dead in your sins. I will pray to God that after you kill me, He will spare you from eternal destruction.’ To his astonishment, the assassins not only spared his life, but asked him to pray for them.” One closer to home is those who, often at great risk to themselves, place water in the deserts of California and Arizona for those crossing the border so that they don’t die of thirst. Regardless of status, language and which side of an invisible line we are born on, they see first a fellow brother and sister in Christ, and that all of us are caught up in circumstances much larger than us and mostly out of our control. Lord, when did we see you hunger or thirsty or naked? When you did it to the least of these you did it to me. Such witness is made possible by knowing that Jesus went where we could not come 2000 years ago on Calvary and opened the way for us now to come and follow.
One last vignette to share. It is a story of giving away life to stand witness to a deeper truth, to the limitless love of God, of laying down one’s life for others. And while the common identity claimed in the story is not Christian as you will hear, it also very much is even if the word is not spoken. This story comes from the amazing and heart-wrenching book We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, a book that looks at the roots and aftermath of the Rwandan genocide which happened in 1994 which is even more haunting given what is happening in Darfur. While world leaders from the US and Europe dithered and tied themselves in meaningless linguistic knots about how many acts of genocide constituted a genocide and if genocide might be happening there, within the span of about three months nearly one million Tutsis died along with the Hutus who helped them. Those doing the killing proudly called them selves génocidaires, genociders in English, for they knew exactly what they were doing.
The author writes:
On April 30, 1997—almost a year ago as I write—Rwandan television showed footage of a man who confessed to having been among a party of génocidaires who had killed seventeen schoolgirls and a sixty-two-year-old Belgian nun at a boarding school in Gisenyi two nights earlier. It was the second attack on a school in a month; the first time, sixteen students were killed and twenty injured in Kibuye. The prisoner on television explained that the massacre was part of a Hutu Power ‘liberation’ campaign. During their attack on the school in Gisenyi, as in the earlier attack on the school in Kibuye, the students, teenage girls who had been roused from their sleep, were ordered to separate themselves—Hutus from Tutsis. But the students had refused. At both schools, the girls said they were simply Rwandans, so they were beaten and shot indiscriminately.
Rwandans have no need for more martyrs. None of us does. But mightn’t we all take some courage from the example of those brave Hutu girls who could have chosen to live, but chose instead to call themselves Rwandans?
Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples. |
