“The Many Sides of Jesus: Long Time Coming”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Text: John 8:48-58
It was a phone call that I made with some fear and trepidation. My heart was racing a bit as I dialled the number, for the place that I was calling was the South African high commission, and I was asking if at all possible to be able to have a meeting with the High Commissioner himself. I knew the High Commissioner had only been in position for a few weeks but I really wanted to do this. I knew I had gall, I knew that you don't just call a High Commissioner's office and say, “I would like to meet with the High Commissioner,” anymore than you call an embassy to meet the Ambassador, but I had one card up my sleeve: I knew the High Commissioner's nephew, he was a good friend of mine and I thought that maybe if I dropped his name I would have easier access. So I phoned and a bureaucrat answered. I asked, “Would it be possible for me to meet with the High Commissioner?”
There was a pause on the line and then he said, “We'll get back to you.”
You know what that means in bureaucratese don't you? It means you'll never hear from them again. I thought it was worth a try, nothing ventured, nothing gained. A few days later there was a call and on the line was the High Commissioner himself. “Reverend Stirling,” he said, “This is Billy Modise. I understand you would like to see me.”
Well, I'm almost speechless. I know it's hard to believe that, but I was. I said, “Mr. Modise, I would love to see you.”
He said, “Are you free next Thursday?”
I said, “I don't care if I am free or not, I will be there next Thursday.”
“Afternoon tea it is, from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m., come to the High Commission.”
I went. I walked in the front door and was met by bureaucrats and security guards and there was a spirit of anticipation in the air. Not just from me but from everyone who was there because this was the first time in the history of South Africa that they had a black High Commissioner. It was 1995, President Mandela had just come to power, and Billy Modise was the first representative of his government in Canada. I took the elevator to the second floor, walked out and there, standing with his arms out to greet me was the High Commissioner himself. I looked at him and smiled. I said, “So, you're Uncle Billy then, are you?”
He said, “Yes, and you're Reverend Stirling, aren't you?”
I said, “Indeed I am.”
He said, “Come in, I'm delighted you're here.”
We spent an hour and a half together. It was one of the most emotional days of my life. I couldn't imagine that I was in a South African High Commission having tea with the High Commissioner. And we had this wonderful conversation. I went home and I wanted to look up a bit more about this Billy Modise. It was before you could just Google someone so I went to the Who's Who and the library. I was astonished to realize that this man that I had called Uncle Billy was none other than one of the greatest diplomats of the latter part of the 20th century. He had fled South Africa after the Sharpeville riots and gone to a Swedish university on a scholarship. He graduated from the University of Uppsala, he represented the ANC in exile before the United Nations, he became the head of protocol for that organization. He met with governors and princes and kings and queens. He was one of the leaders in the world to bring change internationally to South Africa. He was one of the most peaceful and respected men on the planet from South Africa. He was considered by Mandela to be one of his right hand men. And I, stupid Stirling, had called him Uncle Billy!
I had sleepless nights thinking about how casual I was. But you know something? We really don't know people when we meet them for the first time, and I'm not just talking about ambassadors or people of great repute or knowledge or power. It doesn't matter who we meet for the first time, we really don't know much about them. It is only when we engage them, only when we encounter them that we have any real knowledge of them. We don't often have a biography in hand we do not have a curriculum vitae before our eyes, when we meet people we take them as we find them. That's why I've always had a degree of empathy for the Jewish leaders from today's passage from John. This is another one of those encounters in John's gospel just like the one last week with the Samaritan woman. But in this case Jesus gets a hostile reception. The Jewish religious leaders question him and think he's blasphemous. They wonder whether he's a threat to the status quo and to power and look with suspicion upon him. So much so that in their suspicion they reject him and in rejecting him they condemn him.
Where my sympathy with them ends is with the swift judgement they make about Jesus, the way that they reject him outright and become hostile and angry in their language. Just like us when we meet someone and feel threatened by them and are not sure about them. It's all very well to have questions and concerns it's another to react in a hostile way. But these people responded to Jesus in that way. Look at the context. It was probably understandable. In his conversations with the religious leaders he actually said to them, “You do not know me and you do not know my father.” This so angered them that they thought he was a Samaritan and called him one. Another word that is also in there and it's a word that is actually used in the Qur'an to describe Jews is that they were “princes of devils” and that in other words, Jesus was a Samaritan and a prince of the devil. Very inflammatory language! After all, Jesus was saying that he loved God, the father and had a unique relationship with him. He said this during the feast of Tabernacles and he had just been party to the feed of five thousand, he had just had a conversation with a Samaritan woman, although how far and wide that would have been known is still questionable. The fact is what Jesus was saying and doing was aggravating the religious leaders to such a point that they were calling him a prince of the devil.
Jesus' response was both strong yet humble. He said, “I do not do this to glorify myself, but rather there is one who will judge who is greater.” It is not about me, he's saying, it's about my father. Then they said to him, “Are you greater than Abraham? Are you greater than the Prophets?”
Jesus said, “Before Abraham was,” and this is one of the great lines of the New Testament “I am.”
“How can that be?” They said. “You are not even 50 years old?”
“Before Abraham was, I am.” He replied.
Why did Jesus enter into this acrimonious relationship with the religious leaders? Why didn't he just keep quiet and go away? Because he wanted to reveal the length of the love of God, he wanted to show the power of time and God's work in time. He wanted them to know that in his ministry, the unique breaking forth of God into time, was taking place. He was even willing to risk being rejected for the sake of it. What he was doing was radically altering their perception of time. Think about it for a moment: When you want to know about somebody not only do you go to Google and Wikipedia if but you try to read a biography or go and find out something about them in order that you may know and understand them. But what is fascinating about Jesus, particularly in John's gospel, is that in his encounter with the religious leaders he doesn't give a biography in the classic way. He doesn't talk about his Galilean heritage, he doesn't talk about being a Nazarene and he doesn't even recount any of the things that he had said or done. He simply said to them in the midst of this very chaotic conversation, “Before Abraham was, I am.”
To anyone who know the Old Testament that phrase, “I am” denotes the name given to God. It denotes a moment when God appeared to Moses in the burning bush and declared in the book of Exodus, “I am who I am.” That “I am” carries with it all the weight of the presence of God. Jesus is asking those who are listening to him to have a completely different sense of time, to break beyond the constraints that they live with, to understand that in him, God, the divine is doing something personal and unique and life shattering.
In the New Testament there are different words for time, one of them is the word, “chronos,” the root of chronology and implies a linear sense of time, time moves from one step to the other like the tick of a watch or clock. We all think of time in that linear sense, we think of it as a succession of one thing following another. Chronology… time… the way we look at it. But there is another phrase that is used to describe time and that is “kairos,” and kairos time is God's time, the time of promise and fulfilment and decision. God's time breaks into chronos, linear time, that God engages time. It's not that God as the timeless one, as the one who is above time, if impervious to time. No, on the contrary, this is a God who break in to time. God, in his great, cataclysmic way enters into time, transforms time, saves time. Jesus, in his ministry, and certainly those who wrote about him after his ministry looking back on it realized and understood that there was something unique about the “I am” breaking into time, transforming it.
I love what Leonard Sweet put in his book, Jesus Manifesto that I quoted last week:
This Christ is the first born of the entire cosmos. The first person to appear in creation and he is pre-eminent in all of it. All things visible and invisible were created by him, through him, to him, and for him. He is the originator as well as the goal, he creator as well as the consummator, but that is not all. This Christ existed before time as the eternal son. He is above time and outside time. He is the beginning, in fact, he was before the beginning. He lives in a realm where there is no ticking watches and clocks. Space and time are but his servants and he is unfettered by them.
Amen. What a phrase. And you know, for all the sense of cynicism that we have about such a concept, it is fascinating that in both metaphysics and physics today there is the realization that the relationship between space and time is much, much more complex than we think. Moving from Newton to Kant to quantum physics and relativity, we've now reached a point where we understand the enigmatic nature of time. In fact there's a book that came out not very long ago by Robin Le Poidevin titled, Travels in Four Dimensions: The Enigmas of Space and Time. This brilliant professor of physics concludes that the complex relationship between time and space leads us to understand it in the end as a paradox, a paradox that we cannot fully fathom, the multiple dimensions of time. I am not here to suggest that modern metaphysics and physics are trying to somehow back up the New Testament claims of Christ, all I'm saying is that there is a need for us to keep an open mind about God's time, that there is a need for us to take at face value what we hear in Jesus and what we understand as the New Testament witness, that time as we understand it is enigmatic and paradoxical and there is an element to it that we simply do not understand.
And so with that in mind I have three suggestions for you: Three suggestions about how that “I am” can break in to transform your life. The first is by suggesting that we need to honour and we need to praise that moment in time, the moment of the incarnation, the moment of the life and the ministry of Jesus. Paul in Galatians says, “This is the fullness of time.” In the right time, in Gods' time, God's son came to dwell among us. That means that we then look at the life of Jesus, not just as the life of a holy man, not just the life of a man who claimed deity for himself, but look at his whole life and ministry as God's breaking forth into time as we understand it. That the healing of the blind beggar, that the forgiveness of the woman caught in adultery, that the conversation with the Samaritan woman, that the identification with the leper, that the desire for a kingdom of justice and righteousness, that the dying on the cross for the forgiveness of sins, that the resurrection from the dead and the empty tomb are moments when the “I am” said, “I am here in my son and in my son you will reveal my grace and my glory.” To respond to that, to acknowledge that, to bow before that is to celebrate that moment, that time. Where else can we see God's eternity? We cannot look from above. We cannot see from the perspective of eternity. We see from what we have been given in time and in time came Christ and in time came “I am.”
There is also a sense that there is a great celebration right here and right now. I think back to my conversation with Billy Modise. You know, for all the flippancy and the flamboyance of that gathering, the clotted cream and tea and wonderful crumpets, the laughter and honest exchange of ideas he and I had and my guilt about being almost blasé about it, I realize that no matter how much I might have known his biography leading up to the moment, it was the encounter with the person that encouraged and changed me and gave me such a great sense of joy. I actually was so concerned about having been as casual as I was that I phoned his nephew, Temba. I said, “I have an awful feeling that I have been a little disrespectful to your uncle. When I first met him I called him Uncle Billy.”
He said, “I know, he's already called me and told me. He found you refreshing.” He said, “Quite different. But I had already warned him about you. He wasn't surprised, you're the one who's surprised.”
I said, “Well, I really enjoyed it and I really like him.”
Temba said, “It was a fun time you guys had.”
I realized that it was in sharing that I knew him. Not everything about him, not all the fullness and completeness of his life. At that time I didn't know that he would go on to be the head of protocol for the entire South African government under President Mbeki, that he would receive honours and degrees galore from universities all over the world. It doesn't matter, it was the encounter, it was the engagement that mattered.
The Apostle Paul in writing to the Ephesians in a text that transcends all of this on the many dimensions of Christ says, “I pray that you may know the fullness of his love and that you may come to allow Christ to dwell in your heart through faith.” Paul knew that the “I am” though dead and risen and ascended is still there to be a presence in our lives.
In the Toronto Star on September 1st there was an article about the miners trapped in Chile. They are still underground and I can't imagine, can you, the hell of being underground like that. But it said in this article, and there have been subsequent articles in papers all over the world, that what they have done down there is to create their own church. They've elected a leader to be their spiritual guide to remind them of prayers, to be in liaison with psychologists aboveground, someone who can represent God to them and that this place, underground, in the depths, becomes a church. Why? Are they out of their minds? Far from it, for even there they know that Christ is with them. They know by faith that he hears their prayers, that the “I am” is not limited by time or by space or by the length of days or by the depth you are underground, but the “I am” can come to you and as they acknowledge, give them strength every day.
That's the difference that faith makes. When I see people living aimless lives, going from one thing to another and back again, uncertain about how their lives will unfold, complaining about the most minute details, all I can say is that this great love, this great grace, this great presence is being missed. The “I am” wants to be with you through the son. What a tremendous transformation of the present and what an incredible affirmation of hope for the future. The kingdoms will rise and fall and empires will fade away, trends and philosophies will have their moments, that secularism might have a foothold here and atheism a foothold there, religious conflict have a bastion somewhere else. There might be times of uncertainty and collapse or there might be concerns about the environment but throughout it all there is the “I am.” Throughout it all there is the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, the before time he was and after our conception of time he will be. So Jesus, in meeting these religious leaders, went out on a limb. They picked up stones and threw them at him. Why? Because he wants us to know and future generations to know and all of history and all of time to know that he is there. Amen.