community of love?

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 7^th) 2024 

READINGS

1 John 1: 1 – 2:2

Psalm 133

John 20: 19-31

                                                                          (photo used with parental permission)

To understand John’s letters in the New Testament I believe we need a little bit of background. It probably dates me as a theological student, but I would make no secret of the fact that I am most persuaded by the writings of Roman Catholic scholar Raymond Brown. He argues that the four writings we know as John share a common source. That is the eyewitness accounts of the disciple described cautiously in the fourth gospel as “the one whom Jesus loved.”

It is a beautiful endearing title, and while I'm not one of those that find strands of homosexual longing at any point in the biblical record – that is not an argument for or against recognition of homosexual love today – I find it clear nevertheless that the source of these writings had a remarkably deep relationship with the one we and he call Lord. In the fourth gospel the author, or perhaps more likely oral source of the material written down, could clearly claim a deep knowledge of the interior working of the mind of Jesus. Personally I do not see that as any sort of mystical, in a loose sense, far less sexual, bond. I do see it as closely akin to the relationship between the minds of those who have worked in deeply entwined encounter, such as those in an international sporting team, or those who have served together in military units. Of that I probably need say no more here.

The source of this material that we know as John and one John 2 John 3 John, knew clearly, as Paul does in his writings, that love was the absolute embodiment of all the teachings and actions of Jesus. That love of course was no romantic, though it might include that, no sexual, no limited form of love at all. It was the love that came to be known as agape. I think it is fair to say it is the love that in the Māori language, is aroha, or even arohanui, inexpressibly great love incorporating justice and discipline and work as well as warm feelings of an enriched heart.

For John, as we see in Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, love is the very essence of God, of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and as such should be embodied in the life and witness of the followers of Jesus Christ. This is the love – and its corollary “peace,”  – that the risen Lord imparts in the lives of the gathered disciples, post-Easter. Jesus bestows on them the gift of the one foreshadowed throughout the gospel account as Comforter, called alongside, docked deep in the lives of those who are following Jesus. Docked as deeply in the lives of followers of Jesus as they permit. Again: Paul and John alike are a wakeup to the extent to which we can blot out the gentle voice of divine love amidst the white noise of our busy and often self-centred lives.

Raymond Brown argues that the beloved disciple went on after the resurrection, never denying or marginalising the centrality of the resurrection, to found a community of believers somewhere in the Mediterranean realms that we know as the Middle East, but which in his time was just one more outpost of the often corrupt Roman Empire.

In an attempt to make this Jesus community a counterculture to empire corruption, John emphasised Jesus’ rule and embodiment of love. To what extent did this community emulate and practice the love revealed in the story, and behind the story the life and teachings and actions of Jesus, the one he provocatively calls “Word made flesh”?

Sadly, like most of us, the members of John’s community were human. Jesus breathed peace and love and justice into the nostrils of his followers in the locked room that he entered. To be recipients of this love, this perfect love, is to dwell in the light and to be persons and a people in whom there is no darkness at all. Perhaps as an old man the Beloved Disciple had become separated from his community, but somehow he learns that all is going wrong, and in the little epistles 1, 2, and 3 John we find him, like Paul, for example in his letters to the Corinthians, becoming increasingly strident as he realises that they are not, as perhaps we sometimes are not, the people of peace and love and justice they were called to be.

By the end of John’s writing career (as it were) he is running out of words. Like Paul again, he longs to be with his people to attempt to correct them as they fall short of the standards that he expects of them. “Beloved, do not imitate what is evil but imitate what is good,” he writes. “Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God.”

What then for us? Despite the recipients of the letters of Paul and John alike clearly falling short of the writers’ expectations, the letters survive. We would say that as part of the workings, miraculous workings, of God’s, Spirit, that same Comforter who moved on the face of the deep at creation and was shall we say re-breathed into the nostrils of the disciples in the locked room. That we have the writings we call scripture is a gift of God. In the case of Paul and John alike the author probably gave up the task of writing feeling that his communities had fallen apart – much I might add as we might think the church we have loved is falling apart in the 21st century. 

Yet we have those writings.

In the mystery of God, and probably without the knowledge of the human authors of our scriptures, those writings came to be handed down to guide us, in itself a sign that ultimately they guided their first recipients. Someone, perhaps several someones, treasured the writings, handed them on, and we have them, as Christians have had them for 2000 years. Like the first recipients we have sometimes ignored, abused or belittle them, yet still they speak.

We too are a horribly imperfect people. Were the Beloved Disciple composing a letter to us today it might be strident too. Nevertheless our task over and again is to allow the piercing light of Christ, the risen Christ, to penetrate our own darkness – which because we’re probably not terribly important compared to a Trump or Putin, is more a fuzzy greyness than true darkness. Nevertheless we are called to allow Christlight to penetrate our darkness individually and collectively so that we too can be bearers of justice, and peace, and hope, and light – and more – in the communities into and through which the Spirit guides us.