When I was in high school, a classmate of mine had a lot of trouble paying attention. At the end of most classes, after the teacher had explained a concept at length, he would invariably ask a question that had already been thoroughly answered, often just before he asked it. Sometimes the exact same question had already been asked by another student. It got to the point where the rest of the class just knew that when this student raised his hand, something we had already covered would be brought up again…
The John 14 passage for this morning reminded me of this classmate of mine because the disciples – particularly Philip, seem to be in a very similar situation. The end of Jesus’ ministry is drawing near. He’s been teaching and preaching for several years. One would expect his disciples to be fairly familiar with the contents of his teachings by now, since it’s almost time for them to become the teachers and carriers of Jesus’ message. This seems to be what Jesus is leading up to in our passage for today: he speaks to them about the fact that soon, he will no longer be with them, and they become – well, seriously confused.
Here is where we find the familiar statement that Jesus is the way, and the truth and the life, as Jesus talks about how he himself is the way to know the Father; essentially, Jesus is saying that he is the presence of God among them. This seems like a pretty straightforward statement, doesn’t it? But the response Jesus gets is pretty odd. When Jesus says, “If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him,” Philip’s response is: “Lord, show us the Father and we will be satisfied.” What is going on here?! Jesus has just told the disciples that he himself is the way to know God. Not only that, but the events leading up to this passage have been explicitly about how Jesus reveals who God is – in chapter 12, Jesus says that the words he speaks come from God (v. 50), and that “Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in [God] who sent me. And whoever sees me sees [God] who sent me” (vv. 44-5). After these statements, Jesus washes the disciples’ feet, saying, “whoever receives me receives [God] who sent me” (13:20). How many other ways can Jesus say that he reveals the character of God? And yet the disciples don’t get it. Philip says, “show us the Father and we will be satisfied,” and Jesus can’t believe it!
Jesus responds, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” Jesus seems downright frustrated at this point! As a teacher, such a response must seem insulting! It’s as if they don’t trust his message, and don’t believe what he’s teaching them. But if there’s anything Jesus wants his disciples to take away from their time with him, it’s that he reveals the character and presence of God in his teachings and actions.
So what is it about this idea that makes it so difficult for the disciples to grasp? What leads Philip to blurt out, “Show us the Father”? It’s such an impatient comment, almost like saying, “Just tell us the answer already! Enough with the hints and metaphors and paradoxes – just show us the Father and we’ll be satisfied!” I think it has to do with what the name “Father” means to Philip. There must be something about Philip’s understanding of God that doesn’t fit with what Jesus has been saying. Maybe he thinks that Jesus is holding back on showing them the Father because Jesus’ ministry has been too ordinary, too unglamorous. Maybe, not unlike those who predicted that the world would end yesterday, Philip is expecting an altogether different God to come – one who is the image of a triumphant king, or a stern and punishing judge, or an all-powerful warrior, who will overthrow the Roman occupiers in a violent battle. If he was expecting these images of God to appear, it would make sense that he doesn’t see any evidence of them in the life of a wandering teacher, preaching among the outcasts, among peasants and those considered unclean sinners. Maybe Philip is thinking, enough with all this talk and sitting around eating and building relationships – where’s the action?! When is the battle going to begin, with God appearing as a heavenly warrior, ready to shed rivers of enemy blood?!
But this is not what lies ahead for the followers of Jesus – Jesus’ ministry is to proceed quite differently, and there have been signs of what is to come. Jesus’ parody of a royal procession into Jerusalem and Jesus’ washing of the disciples’ feet are two such signs, indicating quite a different meaning of the name “Father.” This is not the kind of father who abuses power, who manipulates and dominates his children, but the kind of Father who washes his children’s feet and walks with them in their suffering, to the point of undergoing death on a cross.
Yet, two millennia later, after that most overt of signs, the cross, who of us has really caught on to the radical transformation this creates in how we think of God? It was not only the Jewish tradition of that time, centred around the Temple, that thought of God this way – the Christian tradition wasn’t too far along before Christians started distancing God from the events of Jesus’ ministry, especially the cross. Many of the second- and third-century theologians involved in the church councils thought that because God is all-powerful, God must be altogether free from suffering and emotions, since these are caused by outside influences. An all-powerful God couldn’t be affected by anything outside of Godself, so God the Father must be free from all suffering. The cross, they concluded, was therefore something that only affected Jesus, the Son. Even more specifically, they argued that it only affected the human aspect of the Son, since the divine remains unaffected by suffering. I won’t go into all the details of this complex and convoluted theological argument, but you get the idea: a huge distance was created between God and the cross in order to protect a certain understanding of God (and, we might add, of fatherhood) from the events of Jesus’ ministry and death. Like Philip, they de
manded that Jesus “show them the Father,” as they understood the Father: as a controlling, all-powerful, completely autonomous ruler, who would never condescend to suffer on the cross. Not only that, theologies of atonement soon developed, arguing that God somehow required and caused the violence of the cross, making God a divine child abuser, an apathetic and sadistic tyrant. Unfortunately, this kind of logic is not limited to Christian history, but still pervades our tradition today.
And maybe we are not altogether beyond this type of theological logic, whether we realize it or not. Have we let the radical reversal of the cross sink in and change how we think about God, or do we still cling to some version of the all-powerful, dictator God? Do we allow ourselves to think of Jesus Christ on the cross as a human being, but not of God on the cross? Do we read the story of Jesus Christ as one of temporary hardship – a short time of God becoming incarnate and suffering, only to return unscathed to glory in a distant heaven, while many continue to suffer in this life? Theologian Sharon Betcher states it well when she writes, “for example, we sing, ‘Hosanna, blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord…. Power and might belong to our God,’ forgetting that this Passion Sunday refrain was a mocking parody – not an imperial imitation – of the power of Caesar. The power we celebrate, riding on the back of the donkey, was a nonviolent power of solidarity with history’s humiliated.” It’s an unsettling and counter-intuitive image: to think of God upon the cross, in such a weak, humiliated position, and to think that this might be how God does things: through peaceful, risky means that involve very little control and very few guarantees of success. But isn’t this precisely the kind of “Father” Jesus keeps referring to, and exemplifying – God as a penniless travelling preacher who spends all his time with those others ignore, washing the dust from their feet, only to be killed shamefully, as a criminal and a slave? Is this really the story of our God, which we somehow celebrate as a triumph, ending in resurrection? What does this story truly mean for how we understand power and righteousness?
The other passages from today bring this contrast into further focus, distinguishing between different understandings of God’s righteousness using imagery related to stones. In Acts 7:55-60, we witness the last few moments of Stephen’s life, before he becomes the first martyr for the Christian faith. At this point, he has just given a speech about how wrong the chief priests have got things – he has insulted the institution of the Temple and its sacrificial system, and proclaimed an alternative vision of righteousness. Enraged by his disrespect, those present take it upon themselves to defend the Temple hierarchy and their understanding of God through violence. Here stones are picked up and used as weapons; these are stones of hatred and death, resulting in the end of Stephen’s life; these are lifeless, life-ending stones. This is not altogether foreign to us, since even in our day, there are times when stones are used as weapons. I think of the news story from last summer about Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Iranian woman who was sentenced to be stoned to death for committing adultery. There are also teenagers in Israel/ Palestine, who throw stones at the Israeli soldiers, or, on the flip side, the huge dividing wall the Israelis are building to “protect” their settlements; walls too are weapons made of stone. This is when stones are stones of death, bringing lifelessness.
But what is especially interesting about Stephen’s last words is that he prays them to “Lord Jesus” – here Stephen essentially uses the name of Jesus as a divine name, thereby recognizing what Jesus tried to tell his disciples, and they just couldn’t grasp: that he is in God and God is in him. Though this is part of what Stephen’s persecutors consider blasphemy, he recognizes that the stones of death, the stones that divide and kill, forming walls of enmity, are not the key to God’s character. So what is?
The second type of stone imagery is that of stones as life-giving. This might seem like an odd image, but it actually appears at several points in the Bible: the call to worship for today spoke of God as our rock – God as our refuge, our shelter, a phrase that appears throughout the Psalms. The story of the Israelites drinking water from a rock in the desert also comes to mind. Rock is seen here as the material that shelters us and thereby is a kind of lifegiving rock; God is the rock that gives us life and preserves this life. What a contrast to the death-stones thrown at Stephen! But this strange imagery is taken even further in the passage from 1 Peter 2, which speaks of Christ and his followers as living stones.
What might this image suggest? What does it mean to be living stones? The commentators I consulted spoke of the contrast between the Temple and the new vision of the faithfulness established by Jesus Christ. In the Jewish tradition of that time, the actual structure or physical building of the Temple was the centre of the faith. People, including Jesus, made pilgrimages to Jerusalem for religious festivals, so they could worship in that massive, luxurious building; it was the place itself that was holy. Within this understanding, God’s presence resides within the walls of the Temple, and requires the faithful to come to God to worship and to make sacrifices of various kinds. In Stephen’s case, his persecuters thought that in order to preserve God’s honour, they had to go to the extreme of sacrificing a human life.
By contrast, 1 Peter speaks of Christ as the cornerstone of a new building, one that is just being built. It states, “See I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious; and whoever believes in him shall not be put to shame.” “‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner.’” Jesus is the foundational stone of the building; he is the stone that supports this building, giving it solidity. The stone that other builders thought unworthy and useless has become the most important stone in this building.
So what is the rest of the building made of? It’s made of the believers, the members of Christ’s church. Starting in verse four, we read an invitation to, “Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” The members of the church are invited to become part of the building God is putting together, to be built, with Christ the cornerstone, into God’s great construction project.
Evidently, this is no ordinary building, because the stones used to build it are living stones; this is in fact the New Temple. And these are not ordinary sacrifices, either, but spiritual sacrifices. A major reversal is happening here, a shift from v
iewing holiness as tied to the Temple, an actual building which houses God’s presence, to perceiving holiness in the very lives of God’s people. The new Temple, the Church, is not so much about an elaborate, cathedral-like building, but about a metaphorical building made of people, living stones that make up the house of God. In other words, God’s presence dwells among us. As one commentator stated, “The suggestion here is that brick and mortar has been replaced by an organic, living Temple.” I think this image is meaningful to us as Mennonites because this is in part why Mennonites have not historically spent a lot of time or funds on church buildings. They have favoured simple and plain worship settings, devoid of glitz and elaborate decoration. This was and is a way of maintaining the emphasis on the people as church rather than the building.
This reversal likewise changes the meaning of sacrifice. God no longer requires a substitutionary death (and I should note that there is a debate raging about whether that idea has always been a Christian misinterpretation of the Israelite sacrificial system). Instead, God requires life – believers are to share their lives with God and others, to be living, not lifeless, stones, whose lives reflect God’s presence. Unlike the stones which take away life or combine to build walls which divide people from one another, believers are to be life-giving, like the rock which gave water to the thirsty Israelites in the desert, and like God, who is our shelter and refuge. God’s New Temple, the church, crumbles what previously separated us, breathing new life into what was once lifeless, gathering up scattered stones to create a house that lives and promotes life. Here stones are no longer thrown at one another in a destructive way, but used for constructive purposes; to build up, to put together something that reflects God’s lifegiving, loving power.
And this ends up changing the way we look at power as well. No longer does power mean absolute autonomy and the inability to be affected by others. No longer is power displayed in an elaborate building. No longer does power mean the ability to take away life, as in Stephen’s case. Instead, power becomes associated with giving life, with building others up, with the utter vulnerability of a life of peace, which may lead to the cross – and will lead to the resurrection. It is this alternative vision of power that the disciples would come to recognize in Jesus’ claims that he was in the Father and the Father was in him. This travelling peasant-preacher had been showing them – and us – the Father all along, but they had not recognized their preconceived notions of God in what Jesus was showing them. In order to understand Jesus’ message, they had to let go of their assumptions about God’s power and might, maybe even about what it meant to be a good father in their patriarchal context; like the twelfth-century Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, they had to “Pray God / to rid [them] / of God,” to “let go of God for the sake of God.” That is, they had to put aside their previous understandings of God to allow Godself to define God’s character and presence in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
May we also have the courage to pray the God of life to rid us of the God of violence and death, so we may become living stones in the New Temple God is building among us, with Christ as our cornerstone. Amen.