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Who is Jesus? It is a question unique to Christianity, the question that makes Christianity different from other religions of the world. We all know the creedal answer, of course. Jesus is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified about thirty years later, and then raised from the dead. Believe in him and you will be saved, some say. But that’s not all there is to it. The question I’m asking this morning, the question Jesus’ disciples were asking on that night before he died, which is the context of our Gospel reading this morning, is “What does it mean to believe in Jesus?” The disciples knew that night that the end was closing in fast, that Jesus would soon be killed. And because of that, “their hearts were troubled.” They were experiencing angst – not just mild perplexity, but deep anxiety – because he would soon be leaving them. They had placed so much hope in him up till now, but what does it mean to believe in someone who is dead? So Jesus says to them, “Don’t be anxious. Go on trusting in God. You know the way. I am the way, and I have shown you. To have seen me,” he adds, “is to have seen the Father, and now I am leaving you to prepare a place with the Father for you. It is, in fact, the Father, abiding in me, who is doing all this. So go on trusting in him even after I am gone.” Jesus is the one who shows us the Father. But what is a father, anyway? And who is our father? And in showing us the Father, just who or what is Jesus showing us? In the Bible, when one speaks of a father, he speaks of some particular things. A father, in the Bible, is one who is the source of another; a father begets someone. A father, in the Bible, is one who has a relationship with the one he creates. A father, in the Bible, imparts himself, and what he holds dear and important, to his children. A father, in the Bible, blesses his children. He speaks the way God the Father spoke to his children in Israel through his prophet Moses: “In days to come, when your children ask you what is important in life, when they ask you to show the the meaning of life and the way to live, you shall teach them. You shall tell them: ‘Once we were slaves in Egypt, but God our Father brought us out of slavery by his mighty hand and gave us new life, life with renewed purpose, which is to love the Lord our Father with all our heart and mind and soul and strength, and to love each other as we love ourselves, for it is in this way that we find our own true lives.’” To be a father, in the Bible, is to be a teacher. Not as one who merely gives out information, but a true teacher who himself shows the way by giving of himself to his children in love. Like the teacher of John Cairns. Cairns, a British school principal, wrote to his former teacher, Sir William Hamilton. “I do not know what life, or lives, may lie before me,” he wrote, “but I know this – that at the end of the last of them, I shall bear your mark upon me.” Fathers, in the Bible, are like that. So are mothers, we should note. Sir William Hamilton, Moses, the Lord God of Israel – all of them fathers, all of them persons who would not give birth to a child and then abandon him with indifference. All of them real fathers, persons who give of themselves to their children to show them what is valuable and dear in life. That is what, and who, Jesus came to show us. A father is what Jesus himself came to be for us by living the life of his Father among us, not only by telling us who the Father is, but by showing us how to be a father ourselves. So it’s no wonder, then, that our hearts are troubled as we fear to lose him in a world that seems determined to abandon its spiritual roots. It’s no wonder our hearts are troubled when we haven’t yet gained the courage to assume the responsibility of fatherhood ourselves. It’s no wonder that our hearts are troubled as we consider the world we have generated and orphaned, a world we’ve created but for which we lack the commitment to be a father and mother to. It’s no wonder that our hearts are anxious as Jesus prepares for his death, leaving us to anticipate life in a world so indifferent to its children. For what does it mean to a child, what does it teach him, when parents say, as many do, “Oh, we don’t think we should influence Jennifer about religion. We think she should be free to decide for herself what she believes about God when she grows up”? What does it mean to a child when we fail to share with her what we believe about what is good, when we fail to share what we believe about justice and mercy and faithfulness, about life? For not to teach, is to teach. What does it mean, for example, what does it teach our children, when we are indifferent about war, or about the future of a twelve-week-old fetus, or about our neighbor who lives under a bridge? What does it mean for our children when a juvenile court judge tells us that in a recent typical month in his courtroom he saw eighty-five young people who were charged with serious offenses, and that these eighty-five young people came from eighty-three different families, and that of the eighty-five, only two had two parents? What does it mean for us as a people that a man convicted of murder says his teacher was television – that he learned to want to commit murder from watching murder on television? Do we not believe that television teaches, even if fathers and mothers don’t? It’s no wonder that our hearts are troubled at the thought that Jesus, the one we had put so much hope in, might now abandon us to a world where Cable TV and no one in particular are to be the ones who will leave their marks on us to the end of our days? Does that sound like an exaggeration? If so, consider this survey reported by The Christian Science Monitor not too long ago: A sample population of six-year-olds was asked which they would miss more if they were to lose them, their fathers or their TV. The fathers won – by a slim four percentage points. And more than one person in my short tenure as a priest has reported difficulty teaching children the Lord’s Prayer, because it is hard sometimes to get past “Our Father,” “father” being a word that brings pain, memories of fathers who had deserted them or were indifferent to them, memories of fathers who had abandoned them, if not the house. It’s no wonder that our hearts are troubled when we consider some of the things we are teaching our children, because right in the midst of it all, right in the midst of ubiquitous and mindless TV and questionable web sites and dubious chat rooms, right in the midst of the poverty of our guidance of our children’s spiritual health, we can still hear the claims made upon us by our true Father. Hearing Our Fathers’ Word, and seeing his Word in Jesus, we are reminded once again that we have abandoned the life of God for the life of slavery to our own ends. And our hearts are troubled by our faithlessness and the anxiety it creates in us. So much of our lives, it seems, is taken up with the business of seeking what we call a “better life” for ourselves and our children. But as George Will once observed, “providing children with better lives complicates the task of making them better people.” Which is our true purpose, our true vocation – to have better lives or to be better people? The purposes we pursue in life make much difference, you know. As someone once said, “There is very little difference between one person and another, but what difference there is is enormous.” It’s no wonder, then, that our hearts are troubled as we spin around the carousel of our lives hoping to grab the brass ring or waiting for tomorrow’s lottery results or counting on Aunt Mabel’s inheritance, when we remember, in Jesus, that our true purpose is God. It’s no wonder that our hearts are troubled as we seek a better life, when we can see, in Jesus, that our true life is to be a better people, a different people, God’s people, God’s royal priesthood, whose vocation it is to live the life of God himself in the world. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” Jesus tells us as he himself walks the way, all the way to the Cross, and calls us to follow him. “I am the road, the hodos.” That’s the word Jesus uses in Greek when he tells us that he is the way. It is the word from which we get the word “exodus,” the road Jesus himself spoke of and walked, which is the way out of fear and slavery into the Promised Land of freedom and life. Locked up in the slavery of fear that night just before Jesus’ trial and judgment, the disciples contemplated the road Jesus was taking, the road he was calling them to follow. Like us this morning. And Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” “Don’t let this situation throw you,” is the way Eugene Peterson translates it. “You trust God, don’t you? Trust me. There is plenty of room in my Father’s home. If that were not so, would I have told you that I’m on my way to get a room ready for you? And if I’m on my way to get your room ready, I’ll come back and get you so you can live where I live. [But] Thomas said, ‘Master, we have no idea where you’re going. How do you expect us to know the road?’ And Jesus says, ‘I am the road, also the truth, also the life.’” The reason I like Peterson’s fresh translation here is that it suggests a different tone of voice – not a confrontational “I, Jesus, am the only gate into heaven and everyone else is damned,” but an invitation to any who care to go with him. “The road I am taking is the road out of slavery into freedom and life. Come take it with me,” he says. “Anyone who has faith in me will do what I am doing, because I can tell you for sure that God is a Father who does not abandon any of his children. Trust me when I say that you and I can trust God in the situation in which we find ourselves in today, just as we did when God led us on the road out of Egypt into Canaan.” So here on this Fifth Sunday of Easter, we find ourselves once again having a last meal with Jesus on the night before his trial and judgment. He is taking the road that leads through the death to self into life. And once again he calls us to accompany him, confident that it is the road of freedom, confident that it is the road that leads to genuine life, because he has confidence in God, because he believes that God himself is out in front of him and of all who trust in God. Here in the middle of Easter we find ourselves once again back in Holy Week, back in the midst of real life, realizing that Easter and resurrection are not about pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by, but about an option and opportunity for life on our journey in the real world God gives us to live in. And we find that we are very much like Jesus’ disciples that night long ago. We need a father; we need someone in whom to put our trust, so that we don’t get lost on the road from slavery to freedom, on the road from death to life. Throughout Easter we have witnessed the resurrection life of the one who walked the road all the way to the Cross and the tomb, and beyond. And now he is about to leave us again to ascend to his Father and ours, but not, he promises, without leaving us the hope and strength of his Holy Spirit. We find that we are very much like the disciples themselves, all of us like children, all of us like the child who is traveling along the road with his father in their wagon, when they come to the edge of a great forest, a wilderness. There are some bushes there, thick with berries, delicious delights of the world that catch the child’s attention. “Father,” the child asks,” may we stop for a while so I can pick some berries?” The child’s father is concerned that they complete their journey, that they move on toward home, but he doesn’t have the heart to refuse the child’s request to explore and enjoy the world along the road. So he stops the wagon, and the child jumps down to pick the berries. After a while, the father says, “Son, it’s time to continue our journey.” But his child is so engrossed with the berries that he can’t bring himself to leave them. So what can the father do? He doesn’t love his son any less because he is a child, because he is enjoying the forest and its fruit. And he will not think of leaving him behind. But he really does want to move them on their way toward home. So finally Jesus says, “Son, you may pick your berries for a little longer, but be sure you are still able to find me. I’ll start moving slowly along the road, and as you work call out, “Father! Father!” every few minutes, and I shall answer you. As long as you can hear my voice, you’ll know that I’m still nearby. But as soon as you can no longer hear my answer, know that you are lost, and run along the road with all your strength to find me.” Jesus must leave, and our hearts are troubled. He must continue his way home, his way on the road to the Cross, and beyond. And as he walks that way, we cry out to the Father in him. “Father! Father!” we cry. Can you still hear his answering call: “Come, follow me”? If you can, then you still know the way. If you can’t, then run with all your strength to find him. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |