SERMON FOR ST JOHN | 27 December 2015
In the lectionary – the cycle of readings and prayers that binds all Christians together, wherever we may be – the Sunday after Christmas has become the Feast of the Holy Family. We focus on the relationship between Mary and Joseph – and of course on their new son – and we talk about them as the model for our own families.
But when the first Sunday after Christmas is on the 26th, 27th or 28th, there are three other great themes to grapple with and we are allowed to go off message if we wish. The three days are St Stephen and his martyrdom on the 26th, the massacre of the Holy Innocents by Herod on the 28th – and the teaching of St John on the 27th.
Now it could be said that keeping St John today is a bit ‘heavy’, a bit hard. But there is a reason why St John was given such a prestigious day as his annual commemoration. Of all the Gospels his is believed to be the one that draws us most closely into the mind of God – which is why lots of Churches have their reading desks looking like eagles. The eagle became the symbol of St John because it is able to fly the highest of any bird and therefore must be closer to God than any other.
But to start: if you want a quick and easy summary, St John’s Gospel is the one that teaches us most about who Jesus is – and rather less about what he did.
And I suspect we know far more of St John’s Gospel than we might think. Watching Catriona pass the time on the Tube to her Grandma’s yesterday, I suggested that the puzzle book was a bit easy: yes she said she liked to do easier puzzles, they make you feel more intelligent!
Well, we can do the same with St John’s Gospel too but first let me just put it into its historical time frame. You will remember, of course, that the military situation in Jesus’ day was dominated by the Roman occupation. In our Christmas Day quiz we talked about Caesar Augustus and Pontius Pilate and their puppet, King Herod.
By 70ad the equivalent of the IRA were giving the Romans a very hard time and so in that year the Romans destroyed Jerusalem (and massacred a militant remnant in a place called Masada) before dispersing the remaining Jews all around the Mediterranean.
The tiny Christian community of that time got caught up in all this of course and each little congregation discovered that although they described themselves as disciples of Jesus, they came from very different backgrounds. Those with a Jewish background still struggled to see Jesus as anything more than a wonderful man while the Greek speakers held on to their cultural image of ‘the Divine Man’ who walked on earth but who was really a god who looked like a man.
So by 85ad when John began to put his Gospel together, there was a real job to be done to fuse these two traditions together to show how Jesus was both God and man in every sense. And once that had been done, John wanted to ‘up the anti’ and say: this wasn’t just a matter for the brain but should show itself in a new way of loving (and being united with) those who thought and behaved differently. In the words of the Taize chant: Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est: Where there is charity and love, God himself is there.
So throughout the Gospel we get stories and bits of teaching which try to show what happens when God’s divine truth is able to break through to give people ‘new life’ (John’s most common phrase).
Every story is an example of the penny dropping for people: you can almost hear them say, Well, I had never thought of it like that before! The women at the well, or Nicodemus at night, they all have five minutes with Jesus and suddenly all their confused ideas come together like a jigsaw puzzle. But instead of a puzzle St John uses the image of ‘light’.
Which is why at least two of our hymns today reinforce this image: the job of Jesus, John tells us, is to shine in the darkness. That is the familiar line from the Gospel at Midnight Mass: John the Baptist came as a witness to the light, the true light that gives light to everyone, who was coming into the world.
And Charles Wesley’s most famous carol, ‘Hark the Herald’, says the same thing in verse 3: Hail the heaven born prince of peace, hail the sun of righteousness, Light and life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings…
So what is Jesus here to do? To shine in the world to show us, first-hand, the life and light of his Father; that is, to show how it is possible for you and me to be filled with a new and vibrant power - that is also not ours but is the power of God at work in us. John’s Fourth Gospel, then, is filled to the brim with examples of what happens when signs of God’s transforming power are revealed – not least the turning of water into wine at the wedding in Cana. If God can become human, if water can be turned into wine, if people can be healed and restored to new life, what they are seeing is nothing less than the releasing of God’s Spirit into the world. And all because it is God’s will that we should enjoy, in the here and now, Abundant Life.
There is one very big difference between the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, (usually called together, the synoptic Gospels) and that of John’s Fourth Gospel. And it’s this: for the Synoptics, sin is all about our wrongdoing, both as individuals and as a community. We have broken the covenant relationship with God: we have messed up and only Jesus sacrificial death on the Cross can redeem us and make us whole once more. That’s all very familiar.
St John’s understanding of sin is that it is a form of spiritual blindness. We are in the dark – literally. And that is cured and restored - less by penance and beating ourselves up - than by a new commitment to live like Jesus. The Cross isn’t so much the place of agony for John as the place of Jesus’ glorification. So he gets Jesus to say: When I am lifted up I will draw all people to myself. The Cross isn’t a sign of defeat but a way of taking away the mask in front of our eyes, as if we can then say: look, see, this is what love looks like.
And so all those familiar images in the Fourth Gospel are about life: I am the vine, you are the branches. None of us can see, none of us can live, unless we are part of this source of true power, this conduit of eternal life.
And from that flows those other familiar words, I give you a new commandment, love one another. If you don’t love each other, how can you love God?
Which takes us to my final reflection for 2015. In what sense is the Christian Church like that of 85ad, the Church that St John knew? For him the Jews and the Greeks had two insights which this Gospel seeks to draw together: Jesus was man/Jesus was divine becomes: Jesus is the Son of God.
And how is that manifested? A new commandment I give you: that you love one another. Love one another as I have loved you. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples…
In three week’s time, on the 18th January, the Church will again celebrate Christian Unity Week. And there will be a few joint services, a few study groups and lots of prayers offered.
And on the 25th, when the week is over, will we have got any closer – by we, I mean in our context, Anglicans and Roman Catholics? And I ask this question, what is it that really stops us from being united?
Is it really theology – or is it a great deal of mutual suspicion that we might be found to be wearing no clothes as in the children’s folk tale: that our differences really don’t amount to very much at all and are certainly not as great as the divide between Jews and Greeks that St John’s Gospel was written to address, way back in 1st century Palestine.
But how would we cope if we had no one to say we were different from? How could we maintain our identity – or honour those in the past who died for their particular badge of faith/their branch of Christ’s body?
We honour St John with the symbol of the eagle: flying high and into the nearer presence of God. We revere his Gospel because it forces us to look beyond ourselves to the possibilities that would be emerge if only we could lay aside secondary issues and return to the heart of the Gospel: seeing Jesus. If we feel more comfortable where we are, then we have some work to do before we say we have responded in any real sense, to Jesus’ command to us to love one another as I have loved you...