Fairly long post this week, and TWO readings! Apologies for that but felt that the first one would potentially provoke some debate.
Paul
New Testament reading
1 John 4:1-12
Beloved, do not believe every spirit,
but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; for many false
prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of
God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the
flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is
not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you
have heard that it is coming; and now it is already in the world.
Little children, you are from God, and have conquered them; for the
one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. They
are from the world; therefore what they say is from the world, and
the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens
to us, and whoever is not from God does not listen to us. From this
we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone
who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does
not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in
this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live
through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved
us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one
another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives
in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Gospel
Reading
John 4: 43-54
When the two days were over, Jesus went
from that place to Galilee (for Jesus himself had testified that a
prophet has no honour in the prophet’s own country). When he came
to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, since they had seen all that
he had done in Jerusalem at the festival; for they too had gone to
the festival.
Then he came again to Cana in Galilee
where he had changed the water into wine. Now there was a royal
official whose son lay ill in Capernaum. When he heard that Jesus had
come from Judea to Galilee, he went and begged him to come down and
heal his son, for he was at the point of death. Then Jesus said to
him, ‘Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.’ The
official said to him, ‘Sir, come down before my little boy dies.’
Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your son will live.’ The man believed the
word that Jesus spoke to him and started on his way. As he was going
down, his slaves met him and told him that his child was alive. So he
asked them the hour when he began to recover, and they said to him,
‘Yesterday at one in the afternoon the fever left him.’ The
father realized that this was the hour when Jesus had said to him,
‘Your son will live.’ So he himself believed, along with his
whole household. Now this was the second sign that Jesus did after
coming from Judea to Galilee.
So who should we listen to, and why?
Some
of us were watching with great interest the information coming out
from NASA about the New Horizons probe which has just flown past
Pluto. New Horizons was
the fastest probe we have ever launched from earth yet it still took
nine and a half years, and
some gravity
assistance from Jupiter to
speed it up, before it
finally arrived at Pluto, travelling at 9 miles per second. Now
that sounds quite quick until we remember that light travels at
186,000 miles per second. That's
why, despite still being well within the boundaries of our solar
system, information from New Horizons currently takes four and a half
hours to get to us. It
helps us to come to terms with just how big our solar system is
compared to the earth, or even just
to our villages and towns. And
when we expand that out to how large our universe is, well light from
our observable horizon has been travelling for 13.7 billion years and
we have absolutely no idea what lies on the other side of that
horizon, although
scientists tell us it's probably more of the same; galaxies filled
with stars and planets.
It
is a very big universe, way
beyond our comprehension, or so they tell us. Why do we believe 'them'? It's because
we believe the people who
are experienced in these things to tell us the truth to the best of
their ability, and who have proven themselves capable of good research. We
believe them despite the fact that most
of us have experienced only the tiniest fraction of the reality of
the size of the universe.
I
wonder what it would be like if we said we wouldn't believe it unless
we experienced it?
I
wonder how well NASA would do if its scientists said, 'We don't
really believe Pluto is there because no one has ever been there and
experienced it for themselves before coming back to tell us about
it'?
I
wonder how science would
progress if everyone said, 'I won't believe your experiment until I
have done it for myself'?
Thankfully, for the most part, sensible
people are happy to accept
the truth from the people that we trust to tell us the truth to
the best of their ability regarding what they have researched.
We rely on other people
who have proven their
expertise by their results.
However, it's interesting that when
it comes to religious matters it all changes. I often talk about the
experience of God and of how, for me, that sometimes
occurs in the reflective
times. I wonder,
then, how Christian belief would look if we refused to accept
anything unless we had proof by our
own experience?
In
order to believe in God, do we need proof? Do we need miracles? Do
we need something unexplainable to happen to
us?
Why
is religion subjective truth when science seems to be objective
truth? I'm not sure I can
give a complete answer to that, but
I hope I can at least show what I think is the yardstick by which we can make a
judgement as to whether we should listen or not. It
seems to me that it is
this
issue that John seeks to deal with in the above Gospel reading as we
continue our series on the parts of John's Gospel that don't appear
in the regular lectionary.
First
we need to explore the
passage in front of us a little. John
has a particular way of constructing
his narrative so that each section seems to build on the previous
one.
That means that today's
story is developed from the
encounters that Jesus has had over the last few chapters, and
its foundation is found in the
prologue of the Gospel's
first chapter where
John tells us that The Word of God came
to what was his own and his own people did not accept him.
John
illustrates this
in chapter 3 with
the encounter with Nicodemus, a Jewish leader who, although he knows
there is something special about Jesus, seems unable to accept him as
Messiah at this point (although intriguingly he seems to later.) The
second encounter John
shows us is with a
Samaritan woman who, after some debate, does accept him. To
understand the significance of that we need to remember
that Samaritans were thought of as being a mixed race by the Jews of that period.
So they were not quite Jewish, and it
is amongst them that John records
Jesus receiving
a slightly better welcome than he did from a Jewish leader. Our
passage picks up from Jesus having spent two days with them in a
Samaritan village before he moved on to Galilee.
So
to build his narrative
John portrays a Jewish
leader as
not very welcoming and
a Samaritan woman as
a little more welcoming once she understood more about him. What
happens when he moves even further away from Jerusalem and encounters
someone who was in all probability a Gentile, a non-Jew?
Now
I should add
that it's possible some
confusion may arise here because this phrase about a prophet having
no honour in their own country appears in the synoptic Gospels but
there it is used of Jesus in Nazareth, the village where he was
brought up. In John's Gospel the same phrase is used but is applied
to Jesus moving steadily further north, away from Jerusalem, and
has nothing to do with Nazareth. This
is because, from John's perspective, the Messiah's true home is
Jerusalem, but he receives no honour there, no
acceptance from those who lead,
and so he steadily
moves further away until
we meet the royal official.
One
of the reasons this passage doesn't make it into the lectionary is
because there are some strong similarities to the healing of the centurion's
slave found in the other
Gospels, so much so that many commentators think it's the same story only told differently.
What
John does here, though,
is to give it a place in an ongoing and developing narrative rather
than a place for a simple miracle.
On
the assumption, then, that this is the same story as the one found in
the synoptics but told in a different way,
what makes this so
interesting for us is
that, in this
progression from Jewish leader to Samaritan to a man who is a
Gentile, John appears to be taking great pains to suggest that the
further away he goes from
Jerusalem, the more of a
welcome Jesus
receives. Given
that John was himself a Jew, we should NOT read this as anti-Jewish rhetoric. He
may simply have spent some of his time wondering why Jesus, a Jew,
was rejected by the Jewish authorities. Bear
in mind that John's Gospel was an evangelistic text and there is a
body of opinion that it was written especially for Jews who no longer
lived in Judea. Personally I wonder whether John was someone who was deeply dissatisfied by the
way his country had been run and so a part of his reasons for writing
in this way was to express that.
But
the point John seems to be
making in all of this
is that the message of Jesus is not just for Jews and, whilst in the
synoptic Gospels evangelism is limited mainly to Jews, in
John right from the beginning the author is showing its acceptance
away from Jerusalem, the centre of Judaism.
That,
then, is the background to this reading. What
takes place is that the official's son is ill. The
official acts,
having heard about Jesus, by coming to beg him to heal his son.
Jesus responds initially
quite abruptly by saying 'Unless you see signs and wonders, you will
not believe.' That response is
quite important. Firstly it mirrors the kind of abruptness that
Jesus greets his mother's request to help at the wedding at Cana in
chapter 2 when they ran out of wine. Secondly, 'Signs and wonders', is a term that comes up a
lot in the Old Testament when describing the ways God has dealt with
the Israelites, and thirdly the word 'you' in that sentence is
plural, so we might translate it as Jesus saying, 'You people won't
respond unless you see signs and wonders.'
The
official's response is not one of desiring a sign or a miraculous
wonder. He just wants his son to be made well. He puts his faith in
Jesus by ignoring
the test and urging him to
come. Jesus responds by
telling him to go because
his son will live. What happens next is crucial for us because, quite simply, the official
takes Jesus at his word and responds by going home where he finds
that, indeed, his son has recovered, and began to do so at the time
Jesus had sent him on his way. In
other words the man acts on faith, not requiring a sign. He simply
believes what Jesus tells him to believe. He
doesn't have to experience anything to trust Jesus and the words he
speaks. He responds to
Jesus in much the same way that we respond to today's scientists, by
simply believing him.
And that seems
to me to be a perfect example of what faith actually looks like.
He
has never seen Jesus before. He has never met Jesus for himself.
But he has heard what others have been saying about him and so he
responds to their testimony by putting his faith in Jesus. This is a
man who has not been tarnished by cynicism.
I
wonder how that compares to us. What do we look for when we're trying
to decide whether we believe someone else when they tell us about
something spiritual? For
me, by and large, I want to see if it has had a positive impact on
who they are. Have they become someone I trust? Has their faith
meant that this is someone who I could tell anything to in the knowledge that it would go no further? Is
this a person whose spiritual experiences have transformed them so
that their whole outlook on life is gradually being transformed from
inward facing and their own needs, to outward facing and serving the
needs of others? Is true,
real, selflessly giving love something that seems to be growing in
the depths of their being? To
me, that seems to be the mark of someone who has touched the hand of
God.
But
I have to admit that, especially in my younger days, signs and
wonders were a big part of whether I would put my faith in what was
being said. If I witnessed someone apparently being healed, or felt
caught up in some warm feelings inside by stirring worship, then I
was apt to listen to what was being said. I liked being convinced by
signs and wonders, yet Jesus, despite being the most amazing miracle worker,
disparages them. Why?
I
suspect that the problem
with a faith that depends on signs and wonders is the ease with which
we
can be misled. Now I can
point to a number of key spiritual or mystical experiences in my life
which have been important, but they just kind of happened. In the times when
God has seemed distant they have been helpful to fall back on, but
they shouldn't be the foundation stones for what I believe.
However,
for some
people
the proof of whether something is real
is whether it is also
dynamic and lively. Do
things 'happen'? For
those who feel influenced by the
Christian charismatic movement, and
I count myself within that,
have we judged
whether a leader or a church is spiritual enough by whether there is
speaking in tongues or whether people are healed? I
know I used to.
Yet
here Jesus make it pretty crystal clear that we should not be reliant
on those things as being solid indicators of truth. In
fact I would go so far as to say we can be very easily misled if we
do. For example, a few
years back there was a very influential movement in charismatic
circles which came out of the Vineyard church at Toronto and which
became known as the Toronto Blessing. At
its height people were flying from all over the world to go there and
receive the blessing and then to bring it back to their own churches.
Initially it seemed like something very special but after a while I
became steadily more cynical because it became the next
'in-thing',
the next mark of being a true believer. Commentators
seem fairly sure that this did at least begin as a work of God, but,
that maybe, in a sense, we got in the way.
The intriguing thing for me, having spent some time researching some of the Pagan pathways, is that at
least some of the
hallmarks of the Toronto Blessing bore remarkably close resemblances to some of the known characteristics
of Shamanic practice together
with similarities to a few psychotherapeutic practices.
Now
we can make of that as we will. I'm not going to condemn Shamanism in this and
I have a couple of good friends who are practising Shamans,
but they have, on the whole,
a very different set of religious beliefs from
Christian ones. However,
if we decide to use signs and wonders as proof of whether an
experience is genuine then we can find ourselves in a strange place where Christians uncritically adopt a form of behaviour that they would criticize in a different religion.
Christians need to recognise that there
are numerous religions which have signs and wonders attached to them and so they are not a proof that something is Christian.
For example I know of people who are
Wiccan
who have engaged in a ritual called 'Drawing Down the Moon' in which
the priestess invites the Goddess to enter her, and of whom some have
testified that when it did happen the Priestess glowed with an inner
light.
I
have known of someone who
converted to a Pagan religion because of an encounter in which they
felt deeply loved by the
Goddess on a spiritual
level in a way they had never before experienced. Yet these
experiences are founded on different beliefs from our own.
Signs and wonders are not
the exclusive preserve of Christianity.
I
think this is why Jesus tried to make the point that we should not
demand signs and wonders as proof that makes us believe. What then should we look for?
I think we should we be looking
for changed lives. If
someone is genuinely being touched by God, by whatever name we or they may use, then there should be a
movement within their lives to being more loving, more giving of
themselves. This is also
what we find in the first letter of John, that love is the mark of
someone who is touched by God.
No
one is expected to be perfect, but if it is God who motivates us then
that kind of transformation should be evident to everyone and should
be the factor by which we should judge whether to listen and
take note of what is being said or written. Remember
that later on in John's Gospel, in chapter 15, Jesus says that
'Greater love has no one than to lay down their life for their
friends.'
So
with our modern scientists, we listen to the ones whose research has
a good track record of producing reliable results. Likewise with our
religious people we should listen and trust in those who seem to be
on the road to love.
Love
is the yardstick by which we decide whether to listen, and may the
Spirit of God so change us that love becomes the yardstick by which
others see the truth revealed in the ways in which we live our lives.
It's unlikely we'll reach
the heady heights of perfection, but let love be revealed as that
which is at the heart of the One who dwells within us.
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