John 14:1-14
I never said you
slept through my sermon.
That is an
interesting sentence, in part because it raises the astonishing notion that
someone might sleep through a sermon — at some other church, of course! But
what makes it even more interesting is that it is actually seven different
sentences, depending on where you put the emphasis. I never said you slept
through my sermon. I never said you slept through my
sermon. I never said you slept through my sermon. I never said you slept
through my sermon. I never said you slept through my sermon. I never
said you slept through my sermon. I never said you slept through my sermon.
I never said you slept through my sermon. If someone were not actually
speaking these words and you were just reading them on a page, they would
become a kind of Rorschach test that reveals as much about the one receiving
the message as it does about the one sending it. Left to your own devices, how
would you hear these words? Where would you put the emphasis?
That is
significant when it comes to interpreting Scripture. The Bible contains many
difficult passages: Old Testament verses describing the Lord’s wrath, for
example, or God telling the Israelites to slaughter everyone in Jericho. And
the New Testament presents plenty of challenges as well: people tend to squirm
when we hear what Jesus has to say about divorce or when we read that section of Luke where Jesus tells
his followers that unless they hate their parents and their children, they
can’t be his disciples. So there are plenty of passages to take issue with, but
interestingly, the one I have received the most comments on over the years of
my priesthood is the one we heard today. It comes up frequently because this
text is often used at funerals. So both in planning for funerals and in talking
with people at receptions after funerals, I have been asked about this numerous
times. What troubles people is not the many dwelling places part: that sounds
great. What gets to people is the next part: I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father
except through me. And at issue here is where people put the emphasis,
because so many people hear this as, No one comes to the Father except through me or No one comes to the Father except through me. In other words, lots of people both inside and outside the
church hear these words as exclusive, as a way for Jesus to keep people out of
the Kingdom. And that’s not how I hear these words at all.
The focus on many
dwelling places, of course, undercuts any exclusive reading of this text. But
more compelling for me is the emphasis on the Father. Jesus is always
emphasizing his Father. In this very Gospel today, he goes on to say that if
you have seen him, you have seen the Father. That if you know him, you know the
Father. That the Father is in him and he is in the Father. That he does the
works of his Father. So when I read verse 6, I hear it as, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. And as
Jesus makes perfectly clear, his Father is love. Any approach to God that
doesn’t reflect the love which Jesus embodies and teaches will fail because
there is no other God but the God who is love.
In light of that,
where do we put our emphasis? If it’s not on God’s love, it is misplaced. Think
about interpreting the Bible, for example. If we read passages and conclude
that they call us to exclude or hurt anyone, then we are certainly not hearing
them or understanding them correctly. We are putting the emphasis in the wrong
place. In his book, On Christian
Doctrine, St. Augustine, one of the greatest minds in the history of the
Western Church, writes: “Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy
Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as
does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and neighbor, does not yet
understand them as he ought.” Jesus, God’s love made flesh, is the truth: only
that which leads us to love comes from God.
And when we pray,
where do we put our emphasis? On eloquence? On stringing together lots of words
and then adding the name Jesus at the end as a kind of postage stamp to make
sure it gets into God’s mailbox? In the Bible, one’s name reflects one’s
essence, and the essence, the core, of Jesus is his Father’s love. To pray in
the name of Jesus means to pray with that love. What makes prayer powerful is
not using the name of Jesus as a magical incantation: it is praying like Jesus,
praying with the Spirit of Jesus — because prayer is just the love of Christ
flowing through us. The more we emphasize that love, the more we let that love
flow, the more powerful our prayer becomes. Try it: it makes a huge difference.
But most
importantly, in our daily lives, where do we put our emphasis? When you leave
here today, when you wake up tomorrow morning, where will you be focused? If
our faith is just a form of life insurance, if our emphasis is just on the
future, on a heavenly state after we die, then we are missing out. We can
experience God’s love, which is to say, we can experience the beginning of
eternal life, in every moment of every day. If our emphasis is on the love of
God which Jesus reveals, we can know it while we sit with a dying relative or
while we do the most ordinary tasks. That love pervades everything and can make
everything a form of communion. St. Catherine of Siena once wrote, “All the way
to heaven is heaven because Jesus is the way.” Imagine everyone in this church
focusing on that love on a daily basis: imagine how that would enrich our
lives, as individuals and as a parish, and bless the community around us.
Imagine a billion Christians around the world emphasizing not their differences
or their institutions or their buildings or their rules, or judging outsiders,
but emphasizing the love of Christ. Jesus was right: we could do far greater
things than even he could do because his love, embodied in us and in all his
followers, would reach into every corner of the world and make everyone’s life
better. It’s all a question of emphasis. Put it in the right place, and it
changes everything. God grant that it change us.
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