MOST RECENT SERMON

Text of a Sermon for Wednesday after the Fifth Sunday in Lent. Year C. John 8.31-42

Today’s Gospel is extremely problematic. This is not, unlike many other Gospel passages, because of any “unrealistic call” from God, or the requirement of transformation that seems to us impossible. It is challenging for other, for social reasons.

Our text has often been referred to as one of several ‘texts of terror’, those passages in our bible that cause harm, and even incite real world violence against a group of people. In this case people made in the image of God, here labelled as “the Jews”.

One of the foremost Australian Catholic theologians and biblical experts, Fr Brendan Byrne, says this text has, “much danger when read, without nuance or explanation.” This is particularly the case when we remember that just after our sacred words today, Jesus declares that the Father of the Jews is ‘the devil’.

This text, and similar texts, mostly from the Gospel according to John, have for centuries been at the heart of Christian antisemitism and the Christian persecution of the Jewish people. This is a violence against people and God that has become naturalized in some parts of the secular world.

So, before we enter into and draw from the depths of the living Word in our Gospel for ourselves and our community today, we do need to acknowledge the social harm it has caused and still causes. Our faith is not an individualist faith, each looking out for themselves, but is, and has always been a faith of action in love, a faith where the personal is both spiritual and political-social.

A great way of addressing the problems inherent in the words of our Saviour, or words placed in his mouth, is to remember this: at the time of Christ there were no Christians or Jews.

Christianity was not yet formed, and though the ancestor of modern the culture-religion of Judaism was present, we cannot easily describe it as “the Jews”. For this reason, when translating the Greek word, Ioudaioi many scholars and translations now use the word ‘Judean’ rather than Jew. This is far more accurate as it identifies the people with reference to place, rather than the millions of other “Jewish” people in other parts of the world at the time of Christ.

What we are witness to in today’s Gospel is an intra-Judean dispute and conflict over authority between those Judeans, the first disciples, who have accepted the authority of Jesus as a divine agent, those who have sort-off accepted it, and those who have rejected it.

Despite depicting a very human focused power struggle, our Gospel today is still alive and can still speak to us – because at the centre of that struggle is Christ, the one who is fully human and fully divine, the one who is present now in his name and through his remembrance.

We hear of Judeans, Jews, who “had believed in” Jesus. Believed in Christ.

From many modern Christian perspectives, this would make these Judeans, now Christians. Belief in Christ, for so many Churches these days IS the defining moment, the essential part of “being a Christian”.

As always though, we need to be careful not to retroject modern or later ideas and meanings into our sacred texts. The Greek word for ‘belief’ here, and throughout the New Testament, is pistis. And while yes, mostly translated as belief, at the time of Christ, it also had the sense of trust and reliability. Most importantly it did not carry with it the whole complex of our later developed faith or faith statements, like what we pray in our statements of faith. Roman legionaries swore pistis, trust, allegiance, faith to the emperor.

So, we have some Judeans who have some measure of trust in Jesus; they’ve come to know him somewhat, most likely because of his healing and his miracles – five of the seven great signs or miracles of Christ in John have already occurred before our passage today.

But for Jesus, this trust is not enough, and perhaps even today, easy faith, easy trust, is not enough.

“If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples.

Continue in my Word.

The Greek word used for ‘continue’ also has a range of meanings, hard to translate into one word. It is the same word we hear in that moving and deep passage at the start of the 15th chapter of John:

‘Abide in me as I abide in you’. 

Continue in me as I continue in you.

If you abide, remain, dwell, live in my Word, then, only then, are you truly my disciples.

Our trust and faith is to be completed by staying within the living Word, living with the Word, remaining with him, day in day out, as we wander, as we grow, as we suffer and live – remaining and dwelling with him.

And it is through this abiding, this dwelling in the Word, that we come to the truth of the Word. And for the first hearers of John, and for us today, able to read this incredible Gospel whenever we wish, we are confronted with this truth in the very first lines of the Gospel.

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’. 

 ‘And the Word became flesh’.

God is now and forever one of us – to quote Joan Osborne in her incredible song from 1995:

What if God was one of us,
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin' to make His way home.

This is the incredible truth that the Judeans cannot fully accept. By their focus on their ancestry – descendants of Abraham – their focus on the traditions that have formed them, their focus on the identity they hold as Judeans among the oppression of Rome, by all these they limit their understanding of the incarnate God before them.

For the Judeans, Abraham, their father, the one who met and was intimate with God is the original and source of human-divine interaction. For them, the traditions they hold and maintain, hold with precious love, make available this divine connection. For them, as people chosen from God, their identity as Judeans among the plethora of nationalities and cultures now surrounding them, is so, so important. All of this is holy and right and from God.

And also, the truth, the truth in and as Christ, is that God is now accessible in body and flesh, accessible apart from the established traditions, and accessible to all peoples, Jew and Gentile alike. 

And the same truth, the same radical life and world changing truth is here today – because like these Judeans who struggled to fully see God incarnate among them, Christ is here today – in and as us, his Body, in and as the bread and wine we will commune today.

This truth, this free gift of incarnational truth, also sets us free today: if we do not simply have faith, but abide, live and dwell in the Word. Then we, like the Judeans can be free. Free from resting on our identities as good Christians, good people; free from resting on church tradition, the way things need to be done, should be done, have always been done; free from any idea, any practice, anything at all that places a barrier between the flesh – our flesh – and the divine who became and becomes flesh.

In his Name, Amen.