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A Sermon by Donel McClellan
A Sermon by Donel McClellan
Meeting
Jesus Again for the First Time . . .
John 12:1-8
- Lent 5 - March 28, 2004 It is of more than passing
interest that we change gospels for our scripture lesson today. The four
preceding weeks of Lent, Cindy and I have preached from the Gospel of Luke.
Today our lesson is from John. That fact is significant because John, more than
any of the other gospels, has a distinctive understanding about Jesus’
relationship to God. This Lent we have been looking at the familiar figure of
Jesus through the eyes of contemporary biblical scholarship, especially as it is
presented by Marcus Borg in his book, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. So far we have talked about
Jesus as a person of prophetic compassion, steadfastly holding to the course he
felt God was setting. And we have considered Jesus as a teacher of uncommon or
subversive wisdom. In both of these roles Jesus confronted the powerful
religious, social and political traditions of his time. Clearly he was nearing
some kind of showdown. I have contrasted conventional
wisdom, the common sense of a culture, with Jesus’ unconventional wisdom. This
morning we are going to look at the conventional wisdom of the church regarding
Jesus and contrast it with an unconventional wisdom which underlies the story in
today’s gospel reading. Much of what follows is taken from Marcus Borg’s book.
[1] If you were to ask a handful
of people, in or out of the church, to describe Jesus, the most common answer
would probably be “Jesus is the Son of God.” That understanding is an ancient
one, going back to the first church council at Nicea 300 years after Jesus’
death. At that time, the leaders of the growing church sought to codify what
they understood of the teachings of the early church. They came up with
language which has been used over the years in countless liturgies: We believe in one Lord,
Jesus Christ, If we go back to the records
of the first Christian Community, the New Testament, we do find references which
give support to this understanding. Jesus certainly referred to God as Abba
which means Father or Daddy in Hebrew. But the books of the New Testament
contain several different images of Jesus and none of them has a consensus
position in the earliest Christian community. This morning we are going to
look at an alternative understanding of Jesus as the Wisdom of God. I
want to place this image alongside the more commonly used, Son of the Father.
Keep in mind that language about God is never literal, it is always
metaphorical. Theological language says God is like a shepherd. God is
like a judge. God is like a father. In the Hebrew tradition, one
of the strongest metaphors for God is wisdom. In Hebrew literature wisdom
is often personified in the form of a female person, the Wisdom Woman. In both
Hebrew and Greek the word for wisdom is feminine. The Greek word, sophia
is used by today’s scholars to refer to this feminine personification of wisdom.
Borg uses Sophia in his book and I will use it today to clarify that we are not
talking about some intellectual idea, but a personal image that refers to God. In Proverbs, Sophia cries out
in the street:
How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will
scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? . . . I will pour
out my thoughts to you, I will make my words known to you.”
[2] It soon becomes clear that
Sophia’s role is prophetic and that she is a personification of God. Later in
Proverbs Sophia speaks of her role in creation.
Yahewh created me [Sophia} at the beginning of God’s work, the first of
God’s acts of long ago. . . . When God marked out the foundations of the earth,
I was beside God as a master worker.[3] Finally, Sophia talks about
her intimate relationship with God and invites people to her banquet:
Sophia has set her table. She has sent out her servant girls, she calls
from the highest places in the town, “You that are simple, turn in here!” To
those without sense she says, “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I
have mixed.”
[4] I don’t know if any of these
images strike you as familiar, but you have encountered them again and again in
the New Testament. The earliest written records
in our Christian Bible are the letters of the Apostle Paul. Paul is the first
glimpse we have of the emerging Christian community, even before the gospels
were written. Paul’s big theme is
justification which is a legal term. Justification is the court verdict you want
to hear if you are in a trial. It signifies that one has been found to be in the
right. One’s position in the case is justified. Paul applies justification to
our relationship with God. For Paul, we are made right with God, justified, by
grace. More specifically we are justified by grace through faith. The
opposite of justification by faith, as any good Lutheran knows, is justification
by works. In Paul’s terms, trying to
please God by being good or doing good works, means that we live under the heavy
expectation and burden of the law. This is not any particular law, but the idea
that we can meet certain rules and thereby establish our relationship with God.
Paul calls this misunderstanding the wisdom of the world. It is what I have
called conventional wisdom in these sermons. Contrasted to the wisdom of the
world is the wisdom of God. Paul also calls it the foolishness of
God because it is the opposite of the wisdom of the world. The dramatic link here is that
Paul speaks of Christ as the wisdom of God:
We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to
Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews or Gentiles, Christ the power
of God and the wisdom of God.[5] Now we are ready for John’s
Gospel. Do you remember how it begins?
In the beginning was the word [I am going to use the Greek term for word,
logos], and the logos was with God, and the logos
was God.
[6] Some folks assume that the
logos or word refers to Jesus, perhaps because it is a masculine term
in Greek and the English Bible uses the male pronoun he to refer to the
logos. In fact, most scholars believe
that logos is another term for Sophia, the Wisdom of God.
Here is a reading of the John passage from that perspective:
In the beginning was Sophia, and Sophia was with God,
and Sophia was God. She was in the beginning with God. All things
came into being through her. In her was life and the life was the light of all
people . . . she was in the world and the world came into being through her, yet
the world did not know her. And then John’s great
conclusion is reached:
And Sophia [the Wisdom of God] became flesh and dwelt among us. For early Christianity, Jesus
was seen as both the Son of the Father and the child of Sophia. Jesus was both a
teacher of wisdom and the Wisdom of God. Now we come to this touching
episode in John’s Gospel where Mary takes a pound of nard, an expensive perfume
that cost a year’s salary, and pours it all on Jesus’ feet. In a world of
conventional wisdom everything about this story is wrong. Women don’t touch men in
public. Women keep their hair bound and covered. Only kings and priests anoint
people. It is the act of a superior performed on an inferior as a bestowal of
honor, except . . .except that women do anoint a dead body before burial. Don’t pay any attention to
Lazarus’ complaint. It is the cry of one seeking justification by works. Mary
understands grace and bestows it in extravagant measure upon Jesus. Is it
possible that she understands something that the other’s don’t? Is she one of
the first to sense that this beloved man is himself the vessel of Sophia, the
Wisdom of God? When we encounter the wisdom
of God in our midst our only possible response is extravagant love. This is
realized blessing. The only response to realized blessing is the extravagant
expression of love. W. H. Auden understood
realized blessing. First he identifies the source of the blessing and our
reluctance to respond. "O look, look in the mirror And then he provides an avenue
to realize and respond to the blessing: "O stand, stand at the window Marcus Borg likes to tell a
story on his good friend and noted New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan
who was once interviewed by a reporter. The reporter, frustrated by Crossan’s
subtle arguments that the Jesus of the Bible must be recovered, finally asked
bluntly. "Answer with a simple yes or no. Do you believe that Jesus was the Son
of God." Crossan said, "Yes. I believe
Jesus was the Son of god, the Word of God, and the Lamb of God." The reporter responded, "You
theologians are all alike" By that he meant that Crossan understands
descriptions to the person of Jesus to be metaphors. Perhaps the New Testament
testimonies about Jesus would become richer and more fruitful for us if we
understood that they are metaphors and not literal descriptions. For some who
knew him, Jesus was the incarnation of God’s son, for others the incarnation of
God’s Wisdom. Both traditions are rich in meaning, and both will nurture our
understanding as we approach Holy Week. |