Sunday
March 10
Raymond Brown Teaching
By Marsh Chapel
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For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
Scripture
Just before our gospel reading, Nicodemus, thrice mentioned in John, has departed. You remember his interview with Jesus. He asks about being born again. He asks about resurrection life. He asks about spirit. In the nighttime interview, Jesus answers him: You must be born anew. Your religion, your religious health, counts on this. Our gospel today takes the same theme further.
Saith the Scripture: God is love. (Or Love is God.) Eternal life is trust in God who is love. The doorway to eternal life is trust. We learn this in our experience. This trust is a gift, God’s gift. With open hands we receive the gift of God. We do not achieve or earn or create this trust. It is given to us. The gift comes wrapped, belief and trust and faith and knowledge come gift wrapped in meaning, belonging, empowerment—in the beloved community.
To make sure the hearer and reader of his gospel get the full measure of his point, the author of John uses a great old word, Judgment. KRISIS in Greek. You hear our own word, CRISIS, there. Until John, more or less, Judgment was reserved for the end of time, the eschaton, the apocalypse. John, as is resonantly clear here, says something different. Judgment is not at the end of time. Judgment is now. Judgment does not await the arrival of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven, or the millennial reign, or wars and rumors of wars, or signs of the times. No. The critical moment is now. John has replaced speculation with spirit. John has replaced eschaton with eternal life. John has replaced Armageddon with the artistry of every day. John has courageously left behind that to which most of the rest of the New Testament still clings. John has replaced then with now. Then with NOW. What courage! The upshot of this change, as recorded in our Scripture today, is the near apotheosis of our lived experience. It is what we have, all we have, to go on. And as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience, Who He is (Schweitzer).
In other words, the ancient near eastern apocalyptic, of heaven and end of time judgment, still present in various religious traditions (and in much of the rest of the New Testament) as we have tragic and sorrowful occasion to see in our own time and struggles with violence, is replaced. In your experience. This is the judgment. The light has come into the world.
As my grandmother used to ask, ‘Are you walking in the light?’ Walter Fluker, our friend and neighbor and colleague, said the same every day. Are you? ‘Are you walking in the light?’
Likewise, we notice that the letter to the Ephesians, written by a student of Paul, makes a complementary affirmation. By grace you are saved through faith (he writes this twice, or an editor has added a second rendering). The phrase, both in its repetition and in its cadence, seems clearly to be a prized inheritance for the Ephesians. God is loving you into love and freeing you into freedom. God first loved us. You are not made whole by your doing. You are God’s beloved, and so are made whole, made healthy, made well, ‘perfected’. Both in our successes and in our failures, we truly depend upon a daily, weekly hearing of this promise and warning. Hence the centrality, the enormous importance of Sunday worship. In our experience, we are given to trust God. Our response in actions will then forever be overshadowed by real love, by God’s love.
Then look at Numbers. You will remember that Moses stuttered. Moses had a speech impediment. But sometimes people so afflicted become the greatest of speakers, the greatest of rhetoricians, the greatest of eloquent preachers. We were reminded of this in the redolent, powerful State of the Union address last Thursday. There is a radical power in speech, an un-uprootable power in speech. There is, still, for our electronic gadgetry, an abiding outlasting power in the spoken word. And the truth will out, the truth comes out, over time, over time, over time. So, Moses prayed for the people.
Our Sunday hour of worship is meant to carry us backward, meant to carry us down deep, meant to remind us of what matters, counts, lasts and works. The single word for meaning, in faith, is grace. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
John
Which brings us to the Gospel, that today of St. John 3, which features Jesus in mortal combat over all of these. You are veteran listeners to and readers of the Gospel. You have paid attention and you have done your reading. So, you know how the Gospel of John flows. Jesus demarcates the limits of individualism during a wedding in Cana. Jesus pillories pride by night with Nicodemus. Jesus unwraps the touching self-presentations of hypocrisy in conversation at the Samaritan well. Jesus heals a broken spirit. Jesus feeds the throng with two fish and five barley loaves. Jesus gives sight and insight, bifocal and stere-optic, to a man born blind. Jesus comes upon dead Lazarus and brings resurrection and life.
He brings the introvert out of the closet of loneliness. He brings the literalist out of the closet of materialism. He brings the passionate out of the closet of guilt. He brings the dim-witted out of the closet of myopia. He brings the church out of the closet of hunger. He brings the ministry of the church out of the slough of despond. Speaking of the church, of ministry, of congregations, of communities, of denominations, of organized religion (although, to be playful, as a Methodist I am not interested in organized religion, but in WELL organized religion), yes, there are a lot of things wrong. But there are a lot of things right, too. The Jesus of the Gospel of John commands us to hear so. That is: in all, He brings the dead to life. Jesus brings the dead to life. The dead to life.
This Lent we honor Fr. Raymond Brown, the preeminent Roman Catholic Biblical Scholar of the 20th century. He was a pastor, a scholar and teacher, and he had his own personal ways of teaching.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
Brown Teaching
Although I had been raised in a Methodist parsonage, had attended weekly MYF gatherings, had worked for three years at a Methodist church camp running their waterfront (no drownings), and been graduated from a small Methodist college for small Methodists, nonetheless on arrival in Seminary, I had very little knowledge of or grasp of the Bible. That changed, rather suddenly and with intensity, under the tutelage of Fr. Raymond Brown, then a young middle-aged professor, and his colleagues (Martyn, Koenig, Shephard, and Landes). It really changed in full because of the fascination I immediately sensed and felt in the strange world of the Bible. I took every course I could.
Now Raymond Brown was my advisor. We met a couple of times a year, and looked at the courses I might take. My first semester he said, You know Cyril Richardson is teaching his course on Early Christian Writers (Patristics) this fall. It is usually a second-year course, but if you can get a seat you should take it this year. I just don’t know how long we will have him here teaching, and he is excellent. Richardson, indeed excellent, gave 11 of his twelve lectures, and died the day before the 12th. What a gift Brown gave me, by a slight thoughtful word of advice. Later on, he saw the pile up of Biblical courses I was choosing and, though a biblical scholar, said, Mr. Hill, you are going into pastoral ministry. Don’t you think you should have some courses in counseling and in psychology of religion? Well, again, he guided me with reason and care. For all his rightly celebrated scholarship, he had and took the time to offer some practical ministerial advice, to me, and I am sure to many.
He taught.
‘His main objective was to demonstrate the positive contribution of historical-critical biblical methods in support of traditional church teaching’. (102)
‘A hallmark of all of Brown’s publications was his desire not to overlook the pastoral impact of his books and articles, even the most academic ones’ (153).
He argued: ‘I contend that in a divided Christianity, instead of reading the Bible to assure ourselves that we are right, we would do better to read it to discover where we have not been listening.’ (REB), (180).
‘Brown was also convinced that the problems created by later interpretation of John should not be addressed by editing offensive words or passages out of the New Testament…but rather, by informed teaching and preaching about the Johannine text and by condemnation of Christian anti-Semitism’. (194).
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
Love
In all this, there is before us a Lenten caution, a Lenten warning. A nominal belief is not much better than no faith at all. Not a nominal belief in God, but an active awareness of God is born of the Spirit. The Spirit creates an active awareness, actually at work in our life, influencing your thinking and deciding. The Holy Spirit, God with us, is at work today, to refresh your heart and to quicken your life and to banish your fear.
Spirit is calling us today to move on from a nominal belief in God to the faith of a new birth, an active awareness, actually at work in our life, influencing our movements and our attitude. Such a rebirth, the wind of God inspires. ‘Let us not doubt that by the Spirit of God we are re-fashioned and made new (people), though the way he does this is hidden from us’ (Calvin).
The Gospel of John is calling to you. At every turn this strange, enigmatic Gospel is calling to you. I mean you. To take up a step up in faith. To move up a step up in faith. To receive a new birth in faith. Are you telling me you have gotten as far as you can in faith? Nicodemus thought that until he saw he was wrong. The woman at the well said so, until she, her own-most self, was revealed. Those feasting on fish and loaves learned something else. Those in harsh debate with Jesus did as well. The man born blind, given sight, thought maybe all he would have was his illness and the pool of Bethsaida: not so. And Lazarus, to top it all, was dead, down in the catacomb, four days. Then came a voice like no other: Lazarus! Come out! The Gospel of John is calling to you. At every turn this strange, enigmatic Gospel is calling to you. I mean you. To take up a step up in faith. To move up a step up in faith. To receive a new birth in faith. Are you telling me you have gotten as far as you can in faith? Take a step up.
The writer of our majestic, spiritual Fourth Gospel has turned to the earlier Testament, and alighted on a strange magical account of Moses making magic in the wilderness. He compares, he analogizes. Like the serpent on the pole in the wilderness, so Jesus on the cross on Golgotha. And then the majestic, spiritual word, the word of grace. A word about God, about love, about cosmos, about giving, about believing, about death and about life. It is the gospel, in nuce. God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. Hear the good news: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. And over time, over time? Truth and light merge. The doing of the truth and the seeing of the light merge.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
