Sermon for Sunday Service in Goleszów, Lutheran Diocese of Cieszyn, Silesia, Poland
Readings: Deut 6:4-9, I Jn 4:16b-21, Jn 5:39-47
It is a great pleasure to be with you this morning. This is not my first visit to Poland, nor to Silesia, but it is my first visit to Goleszów. I was born after the Second World War, even though my bald head may suggest otherwise! I grew up in a village near an airfield where many of your fellow-countrymen flew against the Nazi forces, and the memory of their presence with us lived on through my childhood. We can indeed be thankful and praise God that we now – all of us – live in more peaceful times, and in freedom.
One of the most effective ways of finding out something is to ask questions. It is a technique that is used every day on television and radio; in England we had our fill of it during the weeks before our recent General Election. It is also a technique used in the catechisms that are part of both the Lutheran and Anglican traditions. And it is a technique embedded in the gospels, whether the questions come from people who want to find out more about what Jesus really stands for and who he really is, or from Jesus himself to people whose motives he is placing under the microscope.
Something of this atmosphere pervades a good part of John’s Gospel – and this is certainly true of this morning’s passage, from the end of chapter five. (Jn 5:39-47) It is as if the questions have all been asked. They have been about the healing on the Sabbath of the lame man at the Pool of Bethzatha, with which the chapter began. (Jn 5:1-9) But the details have been picked over by legalistically minded religious people: it shouldn’t have happened on the Sabbath, and Jesus has no right to say to the lame man that he can take up his bed and walk. (Jn 5:10-18) And just to make things even more complex, the man who was lame was resigned to his condition, so that Jesus even had to ask him if he wanted to be healed in the first place. (Jn 5:6) By the end of the chapter, we almost get the impression that the healing had never taken place at all, as the interview is about Jesus’ authority. Why should he do this kind of thing? Who does he think he is?
These questions continue to be asked about Christianity two thousand years later. Why do we gather this morning like this? Who do we think we are? Such questions do not just concern why, for example, there are different Christian Churches. They are about the very heart of the Christian faith. Those who were giving Jesus a hard time had everything well under control, including the Scriptures – for Jews, the Old Testament Scriptures. They keep looking at them, but they cannot see what they are really about, because their search is fundamentally flawed, it is in vain. The key is that word ‘glory’ (cf. Jn 1:14), which in John’s Gospel is about Jesus’ life and ministry (Jn 2:11; 11:4,40), all of which culminates in the cross, the supreme glorification of the Son of God. (Jn 7:39; 12:16, 23; 13:31f.). For those confronting Jesus, on the other hand, ‘glory’ is something they want for themselves, and receive from each other – as Jesus actually suggests. (Jn 5:41, 44) This is why they do not understand what love really is, the love of God and neighbour. They ought to be able to understand him, given the fact that every devout Jew knew by heart, and recited at least once a day, the ‘Shema’ (this morning’s first reading), ‘Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone’; and we must love him with all our heart, soul and strength, and our neighbours as ourselves (Deut 6:4-9). It is so fundamental to Jesus’ own teaching that it also appears in the Gospels (cf. Mt 22:37-39, Mk 12:29-31, Lk 10:27). For Jesus is not in the business of creating some new-fangled faith that has no substance. What he ends up by doing is extending, renewing, and fulfilling all that he has inherited, Moses, the Law, everything, and giving it an entirely new meaning – which is what we call the Christian faith.
We have travelled a long way from the (on the surface) simple action of healing the lame man at the pool. We are into big issues about the ‘why’ and the ‘who’ of the Christian faith. At the end of the day, these two merge into one question – who is Jesus? And if he is about a good way of life, that is moral, generous, respectable, and mildly harmless, then we might as well give up and go home. But if – IF – it is about a glory that is centred on the cross, and a love that flows from that cross, then we are into something far more radical. The fault of Jesus’ Jewish interlocutors is the temptation of every religious person: to wrap everything up so neatly and tightly that the real meaning inside is lost from sight. They had even forgotten what love of God and love of neighbour really means. And this is the heart of the gospel to which we keep being recalled. That is why we are here this morning: not to process some paperwork at a public meeting, and (as we say in English) ‘take them as read’, but to attend to the good news ourselves.
We ourselves need to hear the gospel, because it is so rich, so wonderful, so demanding, so beautiful, that even a lifetime on this earth is not long enough to digest and work out its full implications. Jesus said to his questioners that it is Moses himself who is challenging them, through him. (Jn 5:46) In the same way, those who may aggressively ask us, as the Church, what we are doing and why we are doing it, should look to themselves, and see here this morning something in one sense familiar, but in another sense different: a group of people gathered round a book, to attend to its message, and who then share in a common meal. The difference is that the book has a message not just for today but for tomorrow, and the next day, and the rest of our lives; and the meal is not a ‘one-off’, but one to which we find the need to keep returning again and again.
How can we summarise this? The epistle reading does it succinctly when it speaks of God as love, and that there is no fear in love. (I Jn 4:16b-21) St Augustine, a writer and preacher of the early Church who influenced both the Lutheran and Anglican traditions, put it in a nutshell in one of his letters: ‘we approach God not by walking but by loving. The purer our love for Him toward whom we are striving, the more present to us will He be.’ (Ep 155.13) That is the kind of truth that is searching because it is so deep, a truth that asks us questions, not just about how we may take Christ for granted, but also the questions others may want to put to us. Look what happened to Jesus when he healed the lame man on the Sabbath. Look what might happen to us if we let him heal us, so that we may do more than walk the life of faith, but do it with love, the love of God, and the love of neighbour – in His Name, now and for ever. Amen.
+ Kenneth Stevenson
