We have two different scenes in today’s passage from John’s gospel, and they take place one week apart. The first takes place on that first day: the day the Christian church marks as the day of resurrection. It is evening now, and Jesus’ closest and dearest have heard the reports from Peter and the disciple Jesus loved about the empty tomb. They have heard Mary Magdalene’s breathless announcement, “I have seen the Lord.” It is still the first Easter!

But here they are: holed up in the upper room, behind locked doors. The passage says they are afraid of “the Jews,” but that doesn’t make sense, because everyone in that room is a Jew. Maybe they are still afraid of the Romans who, after all, executed Jesus just a few days earlier. Maybe they are afraid of those religious leaders who seemed to encourage the Romans. Maybe they have heard the resurrection story, but just can’t quite believe it. Resurrection or no, they are afraid.

Image: "The Incredulity of Saint Thomas," by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), 1602. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

It’s a strange story we are hearing this morning. In fact, it’s a little different than the story you may have been expecting. You may have been hoping for that version that has Mary Magdalene weeping, and an encounter with a mysterious gardener who turned out to be the risen Jesus, and joy! A face-to-face encounter. A joyful reunion. You may have been expecting more joy this morning.

But that doesn’t seem to be what we have. This is the resurrection story we have today.

Image: An Open Tomb: He is not here. Grave in Israel, by photographer Peter van der Sluijs, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

On Thursday of Holy Week, we Christians enter into the most sacred time of our year. On this night we gather to share a meal, remembering another meal, and another gathering at night of Jesus and everyone who was closest to him. And having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end...

Stained Glass from the Church of Saint Michael the Archangel, Findlay, OH, courtesy of Wikimeedia Commons.

Back when the Temple still stood in Jerusalem, before the year 70 CE, when Rome put down an uprising by turning it into a pile of rubble, it was the Jews’ sacred duty to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem every year at the time of the Passover. Imagine a main road into the city, into which paths from all the villages between Galilee and Jerusalem fed, so that, at first, it is a trickle of people… you might see the same numbers any day people went from one place to another to go to market. But the nearer to Jerusalem the road winded, the thicker the crowds became, as villagers met with other villagers on their pilgrim way. As they neared the city, the mood became festive—this was, after all, their great festival week! It was then the pilgrims began to sing psalms of celebration, and one of the psalms they sang together was Psalm 118: “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

“Hosanna!” the people cry, a Hebrew word meaning, “God save us! Save us, Lord!”

Image: Zirl / Holy Cross Parish Church, Tyrol, Austria. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

This week I tried to think of my own personal experience of caves. I didn’t come up with much, but there was that one trip to Howe Caverns when my children were small. I remember how cold it got as we descended in the elevator, and how oddly thrilling it was to climb into a boat so far, it seemed, underground. I also remember how utter and complete the darkness was when the tour guide actually turned out the lights—the kind of darkness that makes you say, “I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.” But the truth was, at no time during that visit did I feel even a tiny bit unsafe, at no time was I frightened. It was all completely controlled, and there was no opportunity to get into even a little mischief.

It didn’t take too long to realize that the most vivid experience I’ve had of caves has been in reading about them. Specifically, that time I was in the seventh grade, and our English textbook consisted of excerpts from novels, and one of those was the chapter called “Riddles in the Dark,” from The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Jesus goes to the Temple early in the morning. He sits down—the classic position for a Rabbi teaching—and begins to share his wisdom with the people. But his teaching is abruptly interrupted by the appearance of religious leaders, who are dragging with them a woman whose name we never learn. She has been caught in the act of adultery. We don’t know anything about the woman except this: if she is being charged with adultery, it means she was having sexual relations with a man other than her husband. If she is being charged with adultery, she must have a husband, because, at this point in history, adultery is fundamentally a crime against a husband’s rights. His property rights. The woman was considered one man’s property, and she and another man have violated his rights.

Image: Pietr Breughel II, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, (1565); courtey of Wikimedia Commons.

And that’s it! A man who had lost his sight has had it restored—after one false start, perfect sight.

And that should be it: a miracle, a sign of God’s power working in and through Jesus, pure and simple. A man who had been walking in the darkness can once again walk in the light. No one has to lead him anywhere, ever again.

And that would be it, if the story weren’t located where it is in Mark’s gospel: immediately after two stories about people who can’t see who Jesus really is, and immediately before a story about Jesus’ disciples refusing to see what his mission is, that he is on the road to the cross.

Image: Christ and the pauper, Artist A.N. Mironov, oil on canvas, 2009. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Let’s talk about this passage from John’s gospel, a section that contains what is easily the most memorized verse in the New Testament, John 3:16.

Let’s talk about this conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, a conversation that gets very complicated very quickly, and, frankly, some days, leaves my head spinning.

But first, let’s talk about Pharisees.

Image: Henry Ossawa Tanner, "Study for Jesus and Nicodemus" (1899), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I was seventeen years old, a freshman at Boston College, a school I loved, in a great city. I’d been accepted into the University Chorale, and was rehearsing solos for the Vivaldi “Gloria.” My biology major didn’t yet feel like a huge mistake. I had great roommates, people I love and good friends still.

And yet, one fall night as I was walking from lower campus to upper, past beautiful grey stone buildings, crunching through crisp fall leaves, I abruptly felt a little like you do after the roller coaster passes over the crest of the mountain and starts to fall. Something inside of me dropped. Dropped away… some mental, emotional, spiritual thing I had been standing on, and which I’d thought was a big solid rock, turned out to be just a trap door, like the ones the condemned man is standing on with the hangman’s noose around his neck. And in that moment, everything I’d been sure of simply… fell away.

God is also speaking to the people, directly, intimately. God doesn’t say, “I am God, the all-powerful!” like that man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. Instead, God says, “I am the Lord, your God.”

Your God.

The law of the Lord is perfect,
    reviving the soul;
the decrees of the Lord are sure,
    making wise the simple…

Barbara Brown Taylor, who wrote Learning to Walk in the Dark, notes that this understanding seems coded into our faith, too. She says, “From earliest times, Christians have used ‘darkness’ as a synonym for sin, ignorance, spiritual blindness, and death."  Taylor observes that the dominant expectation for most Christians is that we are part of something she calls “full solar spirituality,” and we are strongly encouraged to stay “in the light of God around the clock, both absorbing and reflecting the sunny side of faith.” That means: lots of certainty, lots of optimism, and not much space for complexity, nuance, or the grey tones we find between the black letters on the white pages of our bibles.

But things are a little more complicated than that. And if we read a little further into the stories and the songs that make up our sacred texts, we find something that may surprise us: God is there in the darkness, too...

On this very odd Ash Wednesday, which also happens to be Valentine’s Day, let us start with Love.

Someone once told me that the Bible is God’s love letter to us. And there are times when I can absolutely get behind that idea and there are times when, well, it’s complicated.

Tonight’s passage from the prophet Isaiah traverses all this territory. Love letter and complication. It begins, like a proper Lenten passage should, with talk of fasting...

For my friend, the mountaintop was worshiping God almighty with a great throng of people, her singular smallness joining with the many to create a thunderous song of praise. For me, it is the moments of wonder when nature reminds me of its Maker. For you it may be something different—leaf? Birdsong? Volcano? What makes you gasp in wonder? What makes you say “Wow”?

One thing is for certain: you can go looking for mountaintop experiences, but there are no guarantees you’ll find them where or when you expect them...

We don’t know exactly what is going on with this woman, though we can guess that a fever at minimum, was a sign of infection. You or I would be headed off to the walk-in for antibiotics. In first century Palestine, that’s not an option. An infection… whether caused by a wound or an airborne illness such as bronchitis or influenza…it would be a serious matter, most of all for the very young and the very old.

She is probably seriously ill.

And of course, they tell Jesus. Possibly because Jesus is a compassionate listener. But more likely because, Jesus has already earned their trust.

Preaching. Teaching. Healing. Praying. Jesus is doing all these things. And his still-small band of close followers already trusts completely that Jesus will be able to do something about Peter’s mother-in-law.

Image courtesy of FreeBibleImages, for teaching purposes only.

Preaching. Teaching. Feeding. Healing. Praying. 

Needless to say, that is a short list, filled with big tasks. And at the outset of his ministry, Jesus calls four men who didn’t go to high school or college or seminary, and invites them along to do exactly these things.

Why is Jesus so sure they can do this? What does Jesus see in these four men who fish for a living, that they are the ones he chooses to do his work with them?

Here follows:

Ten Reasons Why Fisher Folk are a Good Choice for Companions in Ministry...

I can go shopping alone, confident that I will not be followed or harassed because of the color of my skin. Not everyone can say that.

While I’m shopping, or if I’m applying for a mortgage, I don’t have to worry about my skin color working against the appearance of financial reliability on my part. Not everyone can say that.

I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group. Not everyone can say that.

When my children were young, I could arrange to protect them most of the time from people who might not like them.[i] Sadly, tragically, not all mothers can say that.

One of the most important experiences of awakening in my life was understanding the fact that being white gave me certain privileges, some tangible, some intangible. I had always taken my life experience for granted. I had always assumed that all reasonably decent people could expect the same kinds of life experiences. I was wrong. I learned that there are ways in which our lives are chosen for us, even before we are born.

... the God’s honest truth is: we have no idea what Jesus has been up to. He’s is about 30 years old, which makes it, for most of us, about 29 years and 11 months since we last saw him. Where has he been? What has he been doing? Is he looking for a fresh start? We don’t know.

Here’s what we do know: the baptism wasn’t, how do I put this…. typical.

Image:

St Michael and All Angels, Lansdowne Drive, London Fields, London E8 - Mural, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.