Sunday
March 17
Raymond Brown Writing
By Marsh Chapel
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Frontispiece
Some years ago, in the aisle of a darkened sanctuary, and following a dark re-enactment of the events of Holy Thursday and Good Friday (think three dozen parishioners dressed as Roman soldiers and carrying torches, roles for some of the disciples, one member each year selected to carry the cross and place and stand it on the front law, usually with a light or not so light snow falling), a ten-year old, guided by his mother, came forward along the shadowed side aisle of the nave and asked, of the Jesus so depicted, ‘What did he do that was so wrong?’ ‘What did he do that was so wrong?’ A child’s way to ask, ‘What was the linchpin for the move to the cross?’
Well, I said, or perhaps mumbled, something about blasphemy and something about treason. In the dark, the young man followed little of it, but the darkness he understood. I tried to say that the Jews found him blasphemous and dangerously so, the Romans found him treasonous and dangerously so. (Remember: the Romans crucified Jesus, for they alone held that power of capital punishment, not the Jews, not the Jews, but the Romans crucified him.) I don’t think the ten-year-old heard very much of what I clumsily said. But the darkness of that nave and of the acted out cross with 80 participants, that darkness he got. And the darkness of the Lenten mystery remained, and remains. It remains today. What indeed did he do that was so wrong? Here and herein abides the darkness of Lent, the darkness of Holy Week coming, the darkness of unfathomable mortality, the darkness of unwanted illness, the darkness of the quiet crying of the soul at 4am, the darkness of Dostoevsky and Raskolnikov, the darkness of the lasting inability to forgive, the darkness of impending sickness and death which will not be defeated, the darkness of having to live out life all alone, the darkness of doubt in any meaning or sense thereof, the darkness of the best of people being treated with the worst of life, to die a hero’s death, said Sherman, and have your named misspelled in the papers.
John 12: 20-33
Jesus’ fate as you know has now been sealed, just before our Gospel reading, in the preceding 11th chapter. Unfortunately, many times our lectionary lessons can be hard to follow, because they are cut away from what precedes or follows. Jesus has raised Lazarus from the dead, a few verses back. This seals his doom. In John, it is not the cleansing of the temple that puts Jesus on the cross. That has been done 11 chapters ago, an age in biblical time. No, what gets him in ultimate trouble is resurrection, his power, his love, his presence, and especially his voice that brings people from one location to another, in this case out of one religion and into another, out of the synagogue and into the church, out of tradition and into gospel, out of law and into grace, out of discipline and into love. For Lazarus, this is good. For Jesus, not so good. Voice can get you into trouble still. (Try preaching for a living…)
Then Mary wipes Jesus’ feet with her hair. Then Judas plots his downfall. Then Jesus rides the donkey. Then Jesus calls the crowd, who saw what happened with Lazarus. Then—notice—the Greeks come and ask for him (meaning, all the nations, meaning, all the unreligious, meaning the future of the planet). And his voice is still what the planet needs: in warming, in warfare, in collateral death, in historical political ignorance, in the abiding Covid shades of isolation and loneliness and anxiety and depression and our forgetfulness about communion, about common life, about conversation, about smiles and greetings and nods and a willingness to return to gathering and fellowship an a common life and a common good. Then Jesus prays for glorification, meaning crucifixion. The cross is the turning point between past and future, death and life, miscommunication and understanding. It is glory in John. Even the ever so human quaking prayer of Jesus in the garden, ‘LET THIS CUP PASS FROM ME’ is gone in John. What, shall I ask to be saved? No, I have come for just this purpose, this HOUR (again, like glory, in John, HOUR is a code word for cross).
The Greeks, THE GREEKS precede the religious, like the harlots preceding the Pharisees in the other earlier Gospels. “We would see Jesus” they say. What happens is different. They see, but more, they hear Him. They hear a compelling voice. They hear and heed a compelling voice, for which they have no other manner of description than to use words like heavenly and thunderous. This is a highly charged, very meaningful passage, if very short, as R. Bultmann might have reminded us. We are Greeks, ourselves, that is, not raised within Judaism, so our access to Jesus, and its depiction here, are crucial. At the last minute, we too are included.
They, the Greeks, and we, also Gentiles, come to Jesus by way of the apostles, Philip and Andrew (not Peter and Andrew, Philip and Andrew—John has Peter on a pretty short leash all along). That is, we come to life through a set of traditions, but the traditions themselves are not the life itself. We have to translate the traditions into insights for effective living, if they are to allow access to life. We have to translate the traditions into insights for effective living, if they are to allow access to life.
Then, the matter of what this closeness to Jesus means is considered. And what is it? It is not a heightened religious experience. It is not a mystical reverie. It is not an emotional cataclysm. It is service. One finds Him in service with and to Him. One knows Him walking alongside him. One gains access to him by loving Him and in Him loving others. In His service there is freedom, even perfect freedom. Service, step by step, and day by day, finally gives way to and leads to death, the rounding and finishing of life. Have we together found our path, our shared ways of service? Are we walking in the light?
With angel voices and thunder and a prophecy of being lifted up, the community of the beloved disciple sees, again, in retrospect, as we do each Holy Week and Easter, the paradox of victory in defeat, of life in death, of love conquering the ‘ruler of this world’. The ruler of this world is not a reference to God the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. The phrase is ARCHON TOU KOSMOU, the ruler of this world, the demigod who in gnostic thought mistakenly and haphazardly created the world. Jesus casts out the archon, the ruler of this world, and so can be offered to and understood by Greeks tinged with a hint or more than hint of Gnosticism. I guess you could interpret this passage without reference to Gnosticism, but just how would you do that? I guess you could interpret this passage without reference to Gnosticism, but just how would you do that? The service of love renders insipid and impotent the ruler of this world and all his minions. Service in love is eternal, eternal in the heavens.
(Puzzling, though, is the phrase, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again’. What is this? The second glory is the cross. But the first? Simply an assertion that the God of the future is also the God of the past? I do not, all these years later, I do not quite understand it.)
At all events, in the community of the beloved disciple, people have found a way, much truth and new life. A voice, heavenly and thunderous, has spoken to them, a voice given ‘for their sake’. As last week, the judgment once reserved for the end of time or for the eternal realms, or for both, has come, is now. The bottom line or cash value of resurrection is speech, the possibility of saying something that can be heard, of saying something saving that can ‘savingly’ be heard. While not limited to preaching in the narrow, and certainly not limited to an ecclesiastical voice, still judgment and salvation, in the here and now, by this Gospel, and this chapter of this Gospel are a dire matter, a crucial matter of hearing and speaking. It is the marrow of wisdom, speaking of which…
Wisdom
Most of us most of the time need more reminder than instruction. So say each of these twice every morning…
Faith is not a prize to achieve but a gift to receive.
The gospel is not about success and failure but about death and resurrection.
Cultural, racial and religious divisions are hard and real, today, and in first century Palestine. They must be faced and addressed.
Sometimes the divine voice is and has to be harsh, like when a Father warns his son not to touch a hot stove.
Food matters, really matters, and so, as in the sacrament is at the heart of our faith and faithfulness.
Love brings happiness as those four young men from Liverpool reminded us: all you need us love. Love is the way to happiness.
You can listen to 799 services on podcast, starting with August 2008. You can listen for 47 days and 7 hours straight. Ideal requirement for STH students.
Sometimes an anthem can and will interpret the Gospel for the day, alongside the sermon.
Love includes. Faith does not exclude. Hope includes. Love, faith and hope are like worship at Marsh Chapel. All are included.
Nostalgia can block out curiosity. Nostalgia can eclipse curiosity. (R Walton).
Brown Writing
My teacher of blessed memory, Raymond Brown, taught that we could trust the spirit. ‘Since we hold through faith that the Holy Spirit was at work in that growth (of the early church) and since there was real continuity from the first stage to the last, there is no real difficulty with the affirmation that Christ founded the church’. (Senior, 202)
My teacher of blessed memory, Raymond Brown, taught that we could trust the spirit, the Gospels were the result of evolutionary development in the early church with their roots in the life of Jesus and his mission but their content and tone influenced by the preaching of the early community and ultimately set in writing through the composition of the evangelists in the context of their communities (Senior, 204).
My teacher of blessed memory, Raymond Brown, taught that we could trust the spirit. So he was not too worried about Protestants like me would did not share his affirmations of the celibacy of the priesthood, the sacrifice of the mass, the infallibility of the pope, or the sub-ordination of women. He was willing to take and live one day at a time, one epoch at a time, one generation at a time.
My teacher of blessed memory, Raymond Brown, taught that we could trust the spirit. What is key is the recognition of the right of the Spirit-guided teaching authority of the church to develop and articulate anew Christian doctrine. Perhaps more than any other aspect of modern biblical scholarship and modern biblical theology, this understanding of the legitimate development of doctrine, moving in harmony with but also moving beyond the express formulations of the New Testament, guided Brown’s exegetical work and, at the same time, was a point of consternation for his critics (Senior, 229).
My teacher of blessed memory, Raymond Brown, taught that we could trust the spirit. There is something so lastingly true, good and beautiful, in and within the viva voce experience of teaching and learning, something so glad hearted and loving at its best. And it is happening right on our doorstep, right on the grounds near and far of Marsh Chapel. What a privilege to be a part of such a centuries deep form of living and, to name this in the Johannine sense, a centuries deep form of service.
Coda
To end, even in the darkness, there is the promise of light. As Dr King said, ‘when it gets dark enough—you can see the stars’. On Monday morning our Marsh Senior staff gathers for the weekly staff meeting, always beginning with devotions. Recently one of our number brought a reflection on hope, that carried, rightly, darker and lighter hues. The prayerful presentation ended with a suggestion that, even when hope seems a long way off, there remains what he, quoting another called, the power of ‘persistent possibility’. That kind of persistent possibility, and holding onto that possibility, may just be what we need, what you and I may need, to gather ourselves and receive the benediction, and take another week-long walk in faith. After all, as Martin Luther taught us, ‘faith is a walk in the dark’.
