Grace and Truth

We Lutherans, like a lot of similar denominations, follow a three-year cycle of scripture readings assigned for worship, with each year built primarily around one of the synoptic gospels of Matthew (currently), Mark, and Luke. John gets splattered in over the cycle, but doesn’t have a year to him/her/itself, which I’ve always found weird, but, hey, I’m a humble servant of the Lord’s church. And I can’t say as I particularly regret the cycle because John’s gospel is a real bitch to preach; it’s so, uh, ethereal, with Jesus forever mystifying with stuff like the disciples asking him ‘should we turn right or left at the corner?’ saying ‘I am the corner. Whoever stands on me will never turn again.’ Actually, that would be easier to preach than those four or five wretched weeks of the bread of life sayings. But I like the gospel and in fact grew up with the words of John’s prologue as part of my Christmas life: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God. . . .and the word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” And as well there are a stack of funny stories in there (Nicodemus, the crippled guy, the blind man, etc) that play out like Monty Python sketches of ‘Jesus and “the Jews”‘.

‘Course, that’s Keene’s read on things. Over the last several years I’ve become more caught by the question, what does it mean that the word took on flesh? “God became Jesus” is maybe something other than that Superman slipped on his Clark Kent suit. My old sem prof Olaf Hanson (rip) commented on one of my Christology papers ‘the incarnation didn’t happen just once; it only began to happen, and is continued through his spirit in his disciples.’ This means that the divine is doing something in the world through me (and also through you, natch), though danged if I know what it really is, which is why we call it ‘faith’, and so it gives my life an intrinsic value as an expression of God’s gifting presence in the world. I’m always haranguing ’em at the pastors’ bs sessions ‘it’s the incarnation! it’s an incarnational gospel!’ because we Lutherans are so much better at sin and forgiveness than we are at the empowerment by the spirit that it becomes oppressive. John is the gospel that gets to the how of this enfleshment most clearly (por moi), though obviously poetically ala, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches‘; and, like I said, ‘The word became flesh and lived among us.’ But these are just my own glimmerings of John’s gospel.

So I decided I ought to check out what the scholars are saying about it these days. As I put it to Oil Spill Tracy in one of our exchanges, in a fit of masochism perversely garbed as spiritual discipline I ordered the commentary NT Ray recommended, Andrew Lincoln’s book with the exciting title The Gospel According to Saint John. Gotta say I was rather dismayed when it came–536 big pages with little print and no pictures. I’m not sure if I want to commit that much time of whatever’s left of my life to reading it. But I’ve been plugging away nonetheless, finally clearing the 99-page introduction and remembering why I have never enjoyed reading commentaries: the guy is as dry, as the Aussies have it, as a dead dingo’s donger. But that’s academic scholarship for you–let’s not discuss the gospel of life with any, hmm, exuberance. Most of these guys could wilt a wet dream. That’s why reading the commentary is a discipline.

But he knows shit that I need to learn, though why I need to learn it escapes me since, like I said, the preaching cycle makes it easy for the preacher to ignore John altogether in favor of, say, the old testament lesson or the psalm. But it interests me in any event. The gospel was written by some anonymous John who can’t be identified at the end of the first century, some sixty years after Jesus was beamed up and, more importantly for understanding it, about 25 years years after the Romans destroyed the temple and the whole city of Jerusalem, which then lay in rubble for centuries. This brought an end to the Jewish sacrificial system, which had been a fundamental tenet of the faith of God’s people since its beginnings 2000 years earlier: that Yahweh ‘communed’ with his people through the sacrifice of the living flesh of animals, which could only take place at the temple. After the desolating sacrilege by the Romans, the Jews had to scramble intellectually and theologically and socially and politically to redefine their faith, which ultimately resulted in the rise of rabbinic Judaism (I think). So under the shadow of this horrific tragedy, you had all sorts of different groups and persons clamoring about things.

Not that there was anything new about the clamoring itself, since the Jews had been arguing among themselves for 2000 years about the covenant God created (yikes! just like us Christians), with the result that even at the time of Jesus there were about as many Jewish ‘denominations’ as our contemporary Christian imitations. ‘Course the destruction of their temple faith by the Roman god Mars changed the nature of the debate dramatically, with all four of the gospel writers joining a gazillion other arguing Jews, the three synoptics a couple of decades before John, in the 70’s and 80’s. NT Ray says (ahem: with his usual battery of caveats and footnotes) that the gospels are all part of this intra-Jewish debate, which is taking place in the synagogues and gathering spaces of communities and villages all over the region. The Jesus people were one option in the ancient equivalent of adult Sunday School class selections, and in fact in some places continued to be part of the synagogue community for a hundred years.

But in other places the social fabric could no longer contain the religious friction of competing notions of truth, and the Jesus people were thrown out of the synagogue, experiencing all the social shaming and shunning that implied, not to mention the loss of spiritual moorings: where do I pray and worship now, and with whom? In a village of a thousand people where you’ve lived for generations it ain’t like you can shop for a synagogue down the street. The gospel called John was written out of the misery of this situation, when the Jesus Jews were being expelled, or threatened with expulsion from the synagogue/community, and the rhetoric of this pain produces some real vicious attacks against ‘the Jews’ by the author(s). But even for John not all Jews were bad Jews: there were, of course, the good Jews who’d stayed with Jesus (and for whom much of the gospel is written, encouraging them to remain); and then there were the chicken Jews like Nicodemus who were sympathetic to the Jesus claim, but too afraid to be public about it; as well as the oppositional ones. So it’s pretty much totally wrong to hear the gospel as Jesus versus the Jews, as if all Jews were the same.

‘Course that hasn’t stopped historic Christianity from using the rhetoric of John’s pain to fuel its anti-Semitism and justify its violence against Jews; an incarnation of another sort. Apparently, grace and truth are not the only words to take on flesh; so do hatred and bigotry and violence (‘Kill the Jews who killed Jesus!’). Language creates reality: violent words beget violent flesh in both the privacy of our homes and the household of our whole society. It is a delusion to pretend that the recent assassinations in Tucson were simply the work of a madman; the act is also a symptom of the social word of violence becoming flesh. It is a word we all participate in speaking to one degree or another, though certainly some are more rabid than others, and our media glories in it. What to do about it, well, that’s a whole ‘nother discussion, though perhaps it could start with coming to awareness of the violent language we use personally. And maybe ‘political correctness’ isn’t such a bad thing, though to be honest, even though I invented the phrase back in the 70’s, I haven’t a clue as to what it means, though I think it’s a form of carping about the necessity of curbing your tongue in civil discourse.

I thought about attending a seminar at my old seminary Luther for the 45 seconds it took to realize it was in Minnesota in January. They were presenting ‘congregations as communities of moral deliberation’, an understanding of church life I’d grown up with, ’cause that’s what we did, say, in Luther League (in those days not only the ever present angst of sexuality–on which date is it right to cop your first feel?–but also the civil rights efforts, the war in Vietnam, the empty conformity of suburbia–even hosting forums for the adults, and of course deliberating through college Lutheran student ministry later. We gathered and studied (a bit) and discussed and debated these things and then we went and played together. When I began parish ministry, I presumed that this is how the Body of Christ lives–we come together to study, pray, discuss and debate and then join in communion.

I was naive. I never anticipated the hysteria of the lizard brains, who are not interested in moral deliberation, but in moral domination; who, already claiming the truth, are not interested in seeking it, but only in winning, defined by destroying the ‘opponent’ in any way possible. Their lizard brain heroes are the likes of Limbaugh and Beck and Dobson and Robertson: we got the truth, grace be damned because everybody who disagrees with us will be damned. Lizard brains care only about self-satisfaction, and see every encounter as a matter of survival.  They disrupt and destroy the community’s attempt at deliberation through intimidation, bullying, name-calling, deceit, and other terrorism.

We’re all lizard-brained to a degree–it’s a survival instinct, the old flight or fight thing built into all animals (probably plants, too, though I don’t know how), and it’s easy to slip into that even when the only threat is to my ego. Oil Spill Tracy and Pennsylvania Dave are two of my favorite pals from the other political perspective. Not only do they write well and (usually) reasonably (though obviously wrong when they disagree with me), but also with the same cynical abilities as me (the way to achieve unity in diversity is through cynicism). Over the years in our heated debates, each of us has slipped into the lizard brain of nastiness on occasion. But each case was redeemed by words of grace and truth: the truth–not of eternal verities–but of my life, ‘Here’s where I was coming from out of my own experience’, and the grace of ‘c’mon, let’s still be pals.’ And so we continue, a little more gently with each other, with a bit more respect for the realities of each other. The lizard brain is disciplined by the courage to be truthful and the humility to acknowledge that I, too, am merely a seeker of truth and not a possessor of it; but the lizard-brain itself can only be overcome by the experience of love (though tough love when it takes on Frankensteinian proportions–some people don’t change without a sufficient degree of pain).

The darling complained the other day when I expressed surprise at some upcoming event she informed me we were attending, ‘I told you,’ was the whine, ‘you never listen to me.’ That’s set off a lizard-brain moment of defensiveness for the past 37 years, because there’s no way to deny the accusation since ‘I forgot’ never works. But the spirit of truth was upon me so I said, ‘That’s because you’re not very interesting.’

We had a good laugh–I’d finally won one.

Grace and truth meet in a love that does not fear.

Larry