THE FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
Year A
May 18, 2014
John 14:1-14
Pastor David Tryggestad
Concordia Evangelical
Lutheran Church
Duluth, Minnesota
Last
Sunday, on Good Shepherd Sunday, we heard Jesus declare: “I am the gate of the
sheep. . . . Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out
and find pasture” (John 10:7b, 9b). Today Jesus says, “I am the way, and the
truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
Last
Sunday, I quoted from a little book, Thoughts
While Tending Sheep, by W.G. Ilefeldt, who writes about his experiences after
retirement of raising sheep on a California
farm. As a boy, the author experienced the death of his father at age 37 while
the family was living in Texas.
His mother moved back to her parents’ home in Boston. Our author struggled in school, not
able to read because of a severe case of dyslexia. Finally he was sent to
Hillside, a private boarding school for boys outside Boston. On Sundays, most of the boys went to
a church of a particularly severe Protestant brand:
The Protestant church most of the kids at Hillside
attended followed closely the traditions of our Pilgrim forefathers. Their
services tended to be severe, without emotion, except when the preacher was
preaching about sin, which was just about all I remember him preaching about. .
. .
One Sunday the first year I as at Hillside,
the minister was preaching about hell and damnation. What else? He was getting
himself all worked up and, at the most dramatic moment, at the top of his
voice, in which he condemned all who did not follow the narrow path of moral
rectitude, predicting all would go straight to hell if we did not, his
bridgework fell out of his mouth.[1]
I thought
about a conversation in the sauna at the YMCA just this past week. One of the
guys said he had been raised in the church, but that he had left it many years
ago. I wondered if he got tired of hearing about “hell and damnation” and
“moral rectitude.”
Our author
comments on his former church: “. . . its tendency toward narrowness lost me.”[2] I
wonder if the same could be said of the experience of the man at the Y
regarding the church of his youth: “. . . its tendency toward narrowness lost
me.”
Last
Sunday, on Good Shepherd Sunday, we heard Jesus say declare: “I am the gate.”
Today Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”
How do you
hear those two statements of Jesus? Do you hear them as saying the same thing?
Or do you hear them as contradictory to each other? When you hear, “I am the
gate,” do you hear the gate as wide
or narrow? When you hear, “I am the
way, and the truth, and the life,” do you hear it is wide or narrow? As inclusive or exclusive?
Does the
second half of that second verse make a difference for the way you hear it?: “I
am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except
through me.” Do you hear it as wide
or narrow? Inclusive or exclusive?
I would
posit that this verse, and others like it, is the rub for many people and their understanding of Christianity. I
expect this verse is a major stumbling
block for many. I wonder if this was the case for the man at the Y.
Fortunately
for our author—and for us—his experience of church did not end with that
particularly severe brand of Protestantism. He tells about finding his way to another church with another kind of message:
Shortly thereafter, my belief in a redeeming instead of an
angry and vindictive God began. . . .
I got to hear a different kind of sermon. I remember one in
particular. . . .
The preacher [was preaching about Jesus’ healing and the
connection between healing and forgiveness. The preacher] further explained
that what Jesus was saying was that everyone of us has it within his power to
heal, to forgive sins. Forgiving is not God’s prerogative alone. We too can
heal by loving, by caring, by forgiving those who have wronged us. By healing
them we ourselves are healed. This was the Good News I kept hearing so much
about in church, but which I now had heard
for the first time. Even though I had been baptized twice, once as an infant
and again at the kitchen sink by my Uncle Tom [his uncle was drunk at the
time], it was somewhere around then I guess you could say I really became a
Christian.[3]
Let’s
contrast our author’s experience of the two churches he describes. He says
about the first one, “its tendency toward narrowness lost me.” His experience
of the first church was that it was narrow.
Jesus, as the gate, was a narrow
gate. Jesus, as “the way, and the truth, and the life,” was a narrow way, a narrow truth, a narrow
life. In contrast, the author’s experience of the second church was
life-giving: “This was the Good News I kept hearing so much about in church,
but which I now had heard for the
first time. . . . it was somewhere around then I guess you could say I really
became a Christian.”
To be sure,
there is in Christianity an understanding that the way is narrow; even the gate
is narrow. Listen to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew: “‘Enter through the narrow
gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and
there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that
leads to life, and there are few who find it’” (Matthew 7:13).
But the
narrowness of the gate and the narrowness of the way are not about “moral
rectitude,” though there are moral implications; rather, the narrowness has to
do with unyielding devotion to Jesus
and to loving all those whom Jesus loves.
And we are all invited through that gate and along that way and that truth and
that life: the way and the truth and the life of love.
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian who was hanged by the Nazis during
the last month of World War II, was a theologian of the “narrow way” of
Christianity, and he wrote in his monumental book, The Cost of Discipleship:
To be called to a life of extraordinary quality, to live up
to it, and yet to be unconscious of it is indeed a narrow way. To confess and
testify to the truth as it is in Jesus, and at the same time to love the
enemies of that truth, his enemies and ours, and to love them with the infinite
love of Jesus Christ, is indeed a narrow way.[4]
Bonhoeffer
went to his death embracing Jesus’ narrow way of love, even of love of enemies.
I think one
of the most astonishing verses in all of Scripture is in our Gospel for today:
“Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that
I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the
Father” (John 14:12).
I wonder if
these “greater works” that Jesus is talking about have to do with love—loving
as Jesus loved. I suspect this is what Bonhoeffer understood as he lived his
life of love. I suspect this is also what the author of the little book, Thoughts While Tending Sheep, discovered
at that second church. I suspect this is what the preacher at that second
church was talking about:
The preacher further explained that what Jesus was saying
was that everyone of us has it within his power to heal, to forgive sins.
Forgiving is not God’s prerogative alone. We too can heal by loving, by caring,
by forgiving those who have wronged us. By healing them we ourselves are
healed. This was the Good News I kept hearing so much about in church, but
which I now had heard for the first
time.
Jesus is
the way, and the truth, and the life. That way, and that truth, and that life
are love.
Thanks be
to God!
[2]Ibid.,
120.
[4]Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, cited at http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2723088-nachfolge
(accessed May 17, 2014).
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