Scripture: John 14:1–14
Sometimes you can’t make this stuff up.
This week, while I was writing the first sermon in our series on healing, I got a fax in the church office. Yes, a fax. It beeped and everything. And this fax might just have had all the answers for healing that we seek, and I quote:
“THE CURE IS HERE! FROM THE HAND OF GOD! VIRUS/COVID PROTECTION!! HERBAL, ALL NATURAL PROTECTION FROM VIRUSES, COLDS, PNEUMONIA, COVID, ETC. SHAMAN SPENT 50+ YEARS STUDYING IN THE AMAZON AND AFRICA, SEEKING CURES FOR DISEASES. TESTED AS A FAMILY SECRET, FOR OVER 50 YEARS. IT IS NOT FOR SALE!!! JUST PAY SHIPPING AND HANDLING OF $65 PER BOTTLE.”
(and if that isn’t enough healing for you, the fax continues…)
“VINTAGE WATCHES 70% OFF. ROLEX WATCHES. IMPERIAL JADE, LAPIS LAZULI, RUBYS, EMERALDS UP TO 610 CARAT, SAPPHIRE ALL PRICE UP TO 90% OFF!! FOR GREAT DEALS ON GEMS AND PHONES, LET YOUR HEART BE YOUR GUIDE!”
Sometimes you can’t make this stuff up.
Of course, you might agree that the theme of healing is…a bit more complicated than the fax suggests. In fact, the topic of healing in general is pretty complicated. When our worship team talked several months ago about what themes or topics would be meaningful to hear, they brought up the topic of healing. Specifically, the healings of Jesus, and what they have to do with our world today. So over the next four weeks this summer, we are going to explore that theme in depth. What is Jesus doing when healings take place in the Gospels, and what is God up to in our world when it comes to healing? Again, it can be a bit complicated.
Case in point is today’s passage. Did anyone else pause a moment when you heard that last part? The part about Jesus giving the disciples whatever they ask for. Did anyone else wince a little? I know I did. My first thought was: “Uh…not true. Fake news.” You see, I have a list. A pretty long list, in fact, of things that I have asked for in Jesus’ name, that I absolutely did not receive. I asked for answers and wisdom, and received silence. I asked for healing for friends and family, who received nothing that I asked for. I prayed that our leaders would make wise decisions, and they acted out of power-hungry greed. Heck, when I was younger I am pretty sure I prayed in Jesus’ name for divine help in more than one Cubs game, which alas, did not end the way that I prayed.
So there is something missing here. Maybe Jesus is just wrong; he messed up on that one. Maybe he was literally talking ONLY to his twelve disciples—eleven at that point because Judas had already left the room; perhaps there is some kind of power that Jesus was giving only to those people in that time and place, and I don’t have the same power or authority or gift. Maybe there is something about the way that I ask that I am doing wrong; perhaps I am praying for the wrong things or using the wrong words or living my life in a less-than-ideal way that means that my mistakes mess up the power that Jesus is talking about. He doesn’t make that stipulation here, though: “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”
Does anyone else get the feeling that something is missing?
Maybe it would help if we took a little bit more of a longer runway to figure out how Jesus might get to this point. For example, it might be helpful to remember that this passage is John 14, which means it immediately follows John 13, which is this Gospel-writer’s version of the Last Supper. Jesus has just washed their feet, given them a mandate to go and do the same, and has explained to them that he will be betrayed and denied by them. He has told them that he will be with them only a little longer, and announced to them that everything that gives them stability and hope will be upended very soon. They have absolutely every reason for their hearts to be 100% troubled, and Jesus tells them “do not let your hearts be troubled.”
The disciples, too, have to wonder if something is missing. At first, the disciples are indeed incredulous. Thomas says that they don’t know the way. Philip says that they don’t know the Father. But Jesus gently chides them, explaining that everything that they have seen him do, in word and deed, is exactly what God is all about. He is the way. He and the Father are one.
Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh describe what is happening here in social science terms. They use the term “antisociety” to describe the way that Jesus is at work in John’s Gospel. Within the larger society, there is this group of believers that works against the aims of that larger society. This antisociety is a conscious alternative to the society around it, and develops its own language, practice, and community expectations. What Jesus is doing here is setting up this antisociety as a group committed to healing and hope and power, in a way that runs counter to the world around it. Whereas the larger society acts in ways that create violence, destruction, and hopelessness, the antisociety creates a space where healing and hope can take place. When Jesus tells Thomas and Philip that they already know all they need to know, he is giving them confidence through what will be one of their final lessons in this alternative community, at work within the world even as it acts in ways counter to the world.
That’s how Jesus can tell them that they will be able to do even more than he can! What seems hard to believe for us, must have felt impossible for them. And yet, this is exactly what he promises them. He draws them closer to this alternative community, so that they can begin to have an impact on the larger society around them. Working from the inside out. They, too, will demonstrate power. They, too, will demonstrate greater works. They, too, will bring healing and hope to the world. Jesus is proclaiming a work that is more systemic and complex than a simple action or moment in time. Together, through their actions and their teaching of others, they will grow this alternative community in ways that he could not possibly do as one person alone.
In that context, when Jesus was referring to the “heart,” his disciples would have understood him to be talking about the part of us that involves both the heart and the emotion. It would have included connotations of the will, the intellect, our judgment, our personality, and our feelings, all rolled up together. Jesus would have been telling them that even when he left them, they would receive a peace of mind and heart that meant they would not be controlled by fear or helplessness. Their hearts would not be troubled, even though everything in the world around them would suggest that they should be. That is the message that they must receive from Jesus, and the message that they must take to the world.
Fast-forward now with me 2,000 years into the future. When we join the antisociety of Jesus, we participate in the work of healing that is often unpredictable, sometimes complicated, and very regularly slow. Belden Lane writes about this in his work The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. He writes about the experience of desert spirituality: those who left the society at large in order to create an antisociety that learned new ways of hospitality, of care, of love, and of healing. In the desolate spaces of the desert wilderness, these spiritual scholars came to understand new ways of healing. New understandings of countercultural hope. Lane suggests that we, too, can learn from these wise women and men, even if we never step foot into a literal desert:
“All of us know desert Christians who have never been to Egypt, never wandered the dry arroyos of southern Utah. But they have been no strangers to that most terrifying of desert landscapes. They have known intimately the parched and cracked land of an AIDS hospice, the steep cliffs beyond the waiting room of radiation oncology. Through their struggle with cancer and AIDS, they have acquired much of the attentiveness, explored many of the deep caves of indifference mapped out by desert Christians centuries before them.”
Lane continues with a proclamation that these desert mothers and fathers—both centuries ago and in our context today—learn more about what God’s healing is by standing in the place of desperation, of dryness, alongside of those who are struggling:
“The desert has taught them well. They are what the church has been summoned to be, a community of broken people, painfully honest, undomesticated, rid of the pretense and suffocating niceness to which ‘religion’ is so often prone. They love, inexplicably and unflinchingly, because of having been so loved themselves.”
Many years ago, early in my ministry, on my first day of Clinical Pastoral Education at Baptist East Hospital in Louisville, KY, my supervisor quoted this [following] text to me and the other wide-eyed students wondering what in the world they were supposed to do as hospital chaplains. “The one who believes in me will be able to do greater things than me,” he read. And then he explained his theology of healing. He believed that every day in that hospital, that verse was coming to fruition. After all, Jesus was only one person, who could only be in one place at a time. But the hospital in which I sat was filled with doctors and nurses. Counselors and social workers. And yes, chaplains like us, who could participate in a shared work of healing that was greater than even Jesus was able to do in his limited time and space. Instead of an individual and mechanical interpretation of the verse—where one person just had to say the word and BOOM! Someone gets healed!—instead what Jesus was talking about was something more collective. More communal. A shared experience of healing. Just like the antisociety that Jesus worked to create in that time and place, the hospital where we sat was a place that worked against the brokenness and violence of the world to bring healing and hope to those bruised and beat up by the world.
In the same way, when Jesus told them that he would do anything that they asked for, he was setting up a shared experience of an antisociety that worked against the brokenness of sin and destruction that surrounded them. This antisociety, which we would come to call the Church, worked to heal troubled hearts, minds and bodies bruised by the world. At times in the last 2,000 years, that healing looked almost magical: a word spoken…a limb restored…a dramatic change even more impressive than a $65 bottle of cure-all. But for the most part, throughout those 2,000 years, healing has come in much more communal ways. Like at Baptist Hospital East. And Lawrence Memorial Hospital. At Family Psychological Services. And, yes, even at First Baptist Church of Lawrence, KS.
When we feed others in the food pantry, we are participating in the systemic healing of hearts and bodies.
When we conduct yoga classes, or organize bike rides or trail runs, we are participating in the systemic healing of hearts and bodies.
When we partner with organizations like AMOS in Nicaragua, sharing health and hope, or Heartland Community Health clinic here in Lawrence, we are participating in the systemic healing of hearts and bodies.
When we build community and participate in the alternative anti-society, standing against violence and greed, we are participating in the work to which God has called us. Together we heal. Together, we are church.
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