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John 14:5-14 · Jesus the Way to the Father
Embalmed Alive
John 14:5-14
Sermon
by Louis H. Valbracht
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The words are probably the most plain, the most authoritarian, the most all-inclusive of the great "I am" statements made by Jesus Christ. In Chapter 14 of the Gospel According to St. John, verse 6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life." In unmistakable, explicit words, our Lord is saying that the human being cannot have life without him. I suppose that our culture can be divided into two types of persons - those who say in whatever comfortable and luxurious situations they find themselves in: "This is the life!" And the other group who looks around them in frustration, bewilderment, and a plaguing sense of uselessness and asks: "What’s life all about, anyway?"

A periodical tells us a story about the last days of the late actor, John Barrymore. That incorrigible character was confined to his bed most of that time with a serious illness. His instructions from his physician were quite clear and simple. He could have very little to eat, very little to drink, very little exercise, and very little visitation from his friends. One evening his nurse had brought him his crumb-like meal, and as she gave it to him she asked him if there was anything else he would like. He said: "Yes, would you please bring me a postage stamp. I’d like to do a little reading."

I’m sure that many of us know lives all around us which are lived on just about that plane, lives that have never gotten beyond a little bit of this and a little dab of that, certainly lives that never reached the dimensions or the stature that God intended for them. Pinched and cramped and jammed into a little space, they are eked out in an almost kind of solitary confinement. There are those whose lives have never reached beyond the outward shell of their own skins, lives that are bound up completely with their own physical welfare and comfort and health. Certainly, we all know lives of this description, the person who goes around with one burning concern in life: "How do I feel? How do I feel? Is my motor running smoothly? Is my plumbing operating efficiently? That little pain that I felt, is it better or is it worse?"

Conversation at social gatherings, for many of us, continues to be an organ recital, the deliciously gory details of some recent surgery that someone had, something that the doctor told me about myself, that fascinating travelogue "Inside John Doe or Mary Jones," the magazine article that I just read - and you can’t pick up one without finding some medical title in the Table of Contents. But did you ever sit back and quietly observe such a conversation? Actually, not one person is the least bit interested in the insides of any other. Each waits with rather ill-concealed impatience until someone has barely finished the discussion of his symptoms so he can plunge in abruptly to tell about his own. His is the case that is really important, interesting, and significant in this game of organic one-upmanship. Even one of our presidents felt moved to publicly display and have photographed his gall bladder incision.

For many, if life goes at all beyond the inside of the body, it is only bounded by what directly concerns the body - its comfort, its pleasures, its satisfactions, its decoration. Our ridiculous preoccupation with cosmetics, clothes, or fashions, whether my pants are properly pressed or whether a lady’s skirt is short enough to show her bottom when she sits down becomes a matter of vital concern in life, doesn’t it? We don’t need any slim tailoring or tight girdles to make us look small. We are small, with little lives.

Some lives never get beyond the house or the job. Our homes may be our castles, but for many of us, they become prisons. We don’t live in our houses, we live for them. Or our jobs, whatever they may be, require our whole concern. We proudly inform one another that we are keeping our noses to the grindstone. Well, it’s fairly safe to assume that if you live life in that position, you won’t see anything except the grindstone. What a pitiful picture we are, laboring and sweating and striving for things which we think make up our living. We jam ourselves together into little buses, little cars, little airplanes, little elevators. We crawl through dark canyons filled with smoke and soot and exhaust fumes. We worm our way into that little place where we do our job. We work out our hours there, and then we go home to sit in the middle of a little piece of real estate. And this is our life! Do you have for one minute the insane notion that this is what Almighty God meant for your life to be, he who created you in his image?

In Chapter 6 of 2 Corinthians, Paul lists for us some of the prime paradoxes of the Christian life. You remember the list: Poor, yet rich; sorrowful, yet rejoicing; unknown, yet well-known; and so on. There is one in that list that is intriguing. He states the paradox: "Dying, yet behold, we live." But the thing that is fascinating about that paradox is that you can reverse it. You can also say it backwards, and it will be just as clearly true, as: "Living, and yet behold, we die," for this makes a tragedy out of the triumph, as we reverse it, and it is, for so many persons, tragically true, as living, and yet behold we die. What a condition!

If I should die, thus, while I am still living, think of the implications. God’s will is frustrated. His loving, creative activity in bringing me into being is all brought to nothing. He has brought forth a tree, and the tree has brought forth no fruit. He has made a creature with a potential of life, love, service, and fellowship; and the thing went dead before any of these possibilities, before any of these magnificent potentials were realized. It is the searching question that our very creation demands that we answer: "Have we fulfilled the purpose of our creation, or have we died without ever having lived?"

We cannot forget the stinging parable of Christ concerning the fig tree and the vineyard. The owner of the vineyard comes seeking fruit, and he finds none. And he says to the husbandman of the vineyard: "For three years now, I have come to this tree seeking fruit, and each time I seek the fruit, I find none. Therefore, cut it down and cast it out. Why should it take up space any more? Why should it any more be a burden to the soil?" It’s a question aimed at all of us. Our Lord asks: "What earthly good are you? What right do you have going on taking up space in the world, eating its food, breathing its air, using up its resources? Just the mere fact of being born and existing isn’t excuse. It doesn’t give us that right." What our Lord is saying, literally, is that each of us has the obligation of justifying the fact that he’s going on living. He holds up the very real possibility that we may be dead, even though we are going through the physical motions of life.

Perhaps we may illustrate what we mean by an incident in the life of a professor who was walking on the grounds of a great European university, and one of the students was walking with him. The student had been attracted there by the reputation of the university, by the sense of prestige that that famous place gave him. He was planning to study law. "And what," said the professor, "will you do when you have finished?" "I will take my doctor’s degree." "And then what?" "After several difficult cases call attention to myself by eloquence and learning, I’ll gain a great reputation." "And then what?" "Well, I suppose I shall die." And then the professor turned toward him and with his thundering voice said: "AND THEN WHAT?" The young man had no answer. The last question had struck home. He realized the futility of making a livelihood and losing a life.

There are some little lines of the poet:
Living to make a livelihood, solely that,
Then times are hard, very hard.
Living to make a life, wholly that,
Then times are good, very good.

And so, we may look at many an unhappy life and discover that it is unhappy because it’s perceived as no life at all. Thoreau once replied to a letter from one of his dull, conventional friends, who had written concerning his worry about his own health and the various diseases that he suspected he had contracted and what dire results they might have, and Thoreau wrote and said: "I would stop worrying about your health. I suspect you’re dead already," intending to shock him out of what he knew was a lifeless kind of existence. But such persons are legion. Such dead lives are common among all of us.

What is the advice of the world? How does the world tell us to live?

Adjust to society;
Conform to the pattern;
Live an average life;
Don’t stick your neck out or go off the deep end for anything;
Don’t be too fanatical about any conviction;
Fit yourself into a little groove and stay there and be safe;
Live a reasonably moral life, at least as good as the average person;
Get an average job, and work the average number of hours, at the average amount of effort, at least as hard as the average person;
Be decent to your neighbors;
Pay your taxes;
Be a good citizen;
Be a good parent, according to PTA standards;
Support the church, attend once in a while when it’s convenient;
See that your children go to Sunday school;
Keep the dandelions out of your lawn, so the seeds won’t blow on the lawn next door;
Carry enough insurance to pay the undertaker;
Brush your teeth twice a day, and see your psychiatrist twice a year;
And use Dial soap, so you’ll be socially acceptable.

I remember a young man with whom I worked in one of America’s large, industrial plants. We spent many weeks together on a labor gang. I remember him because he is so typical, a sample of a great host of the American people. From Monday morning to Friday evening, he would go through the motions of working. He would never more than was demanded of him. When the opportunity offered, if the foreman was out of sight, he would lie down on the job. He grumbled and groaned all day, cursing the fate that had made him a laborer and, with equal vehemence, cursing those who, as he said, through luck or pull or dishonesty had positions above him. On Friday evening, he would seize his pay envelope and dash from the plant. And the weekends that he told me about included drunken debauchery, lewd women, the amusement park, a gambling table, a dance hall, or some girl’s bedroom. And on Monday morning, he would show up again at the plant, tired, with bloodshot eyes, and borrow some money from me to buy his lunch. I asked him about those weekends: "Why? Why did he do it? What did he get out of it?" His answer was also typical: "What do you think I’m working for? A man who sweats out his guts all week in this sweatshop has a right to a little happiness on the weekends." Happiness! That was what he was laboring for, so he could be happy on the weekend. Poor, misguided soul; and yet, so typical, so common.

Or go to the other end of the economic scale. An article in Coronet magazine is titled "The High Price of Success." It states: "The corporation is taking the place of the Other Woman in the so-called eternal triangle, and the staggering impact on executive marriages suggests that big business is the most demanding mistress of all. According to psychologists, physicians, family counselors, and others, companies now absorb too much time, energy, and devotion of the rising young executive. Exhausted by their jobs, they are mere shells at home, unable to function efficiently as husbands or as fathers. The result is seldom divorce, which is bad for careers of young men on the go. Instead, marriages in name only are preserved between weary, indifferent men and women beset by all sorts of emotional ills, including chronic loneliness, sexual frustration, alcoholism, and excessive dependence on their children. In some New York suburbs, counselors will tell of families composed of emotionally disturbed or delinquent children, bitterly frustrated wives, and husbands so neglectful they do not even realize what is happening to their home lives. The president of one New York firm, for example, was home only every other weekend, and he usually spent that on the golf course or in the steam room at the country club. Only after one of his teenaged children attempted suicide did he discover that his wife had become an alcoholic and another child was addicted to narcotics." This is the large, full, successful life?

Is it any wonder that thousands of our people that we termed disparagingly "Hippies" said: "I’m sorry, we will not join your stupid rat race." We were insulted and hurt, and we chastised them verbally, because no one must question this. This is the good life! Everybody says it is!

Some others do the things a little differently. They slave away monotonously for fifty weeks for that two weeks they receive as vacation. This is their reward. For two weeks, they will live! Or they slave away for years so that they can be happy and secure when they retire in old age. Watch them. See how happy they are. Go through those retirement homes. Visit those retirement communities. See the joy, the security, the largeness of life!

Do you want to look at the feminine side? I read an interview of Zsa Zsa Gabor - and that’s about as feminine as you can get, I guess. She was asked why she married so often, what was she looking for? "I’m a very feminine woman," she said. "I’m looking for a man who’s going to spoil a wife, and look after her, and take all her headaches away. But, so far, none of my husbands have ever done that. The type that attracts me, and I always marry, are the ones who don’t want to look after a woman." She shook her head sadly. "It must be a very dull life to love only one person in a lifetime, but it also must be a very wonderful life, because you can build a life together, and you don’t have to start all over again each time." Is there any hope for her? "I hope so," she laughed. "I wouldn’t like to live without hope." And if she found herself in a right marriage, would she give up her career? "If I find the right man, if I can once relax, of course, I’ll happily give it up," she said. Clearly, for Zsa Zsa Gabor, as for millions of women the world over, a man she can care for and who will care for her and who will give her security is all she asks of life. Is that all, ladies? Is that what you want?

Most Americans talk about happiness, and what is it, this happiness that we seek? Where and how do we find it? The search is mad and wide and varied. In the quest for happiness, one man searches the Arctic regions, one grows roses, one writes poems, one paints pictures, one becomes a monk, many become sensualists. Our night clubs, our movie theaters, our race tracks, our sports amphitheaters are filled with millions in quest of happiness, this illusive something. One man buys a dozen houses, another goes into the wilderness. In the midst of all of the search, each man has the conviction that somehow, somewhere, under certain conditions, there are things, deeds, and a way of living that can make him happy.

A noted psychiatrist asks in a Pageant magazine article why so many married women are having affairs today. He concludes: "Modern-day wives have been around more before marriage; they’re often experienced sexually or they’ve read books and know what they should be getting out of their sex lives. Therefore, they’re less apt to sit in the house, rear children, and tolerate an unstimulating sex life. Today it is easier for women to support themselves and to avoid pregnancy. The result is that they can afford to be realistically independent. Their attitude is: I really know what I want, and I’m not getting it with my husband. So I’ll find it elsewhere." "My estimate," says the doctor, "is that one out of every five wives today sooner or later has an affair." Are they getting what they want? Not the ones that I meet day after day.

Most Americans think of happiness in terms of separate episodes and experiences - a movie, a meal, a car, a book, a trip - instead of thinking of happiness as the whole of life not dependent upon separate episodes or possessions. Therefore, we are unhappy people. All this because we are convinced that the later years of maturity stretch out as a kind of barren wasteland before us. This is tragically the natural and inevitable conclusion which must be reached when lives are lived according to our contemporary philosophy.

The French painter, Broulette, earlier in this century, depicted in a series of paintings the frustrations and defeats of contemporary life. In the first picture he shows a frantic man searching for some important piece of paper. The room is in a shambles, drawers are open, papers scattered about. Behind him is the figure of Satan holding the missing paper high above the head of the desperate searcher. This is the search for some new and enticing sensation in life. One philosopher has said that ours is the "Age of Sensation." How frantically we search for some new experience. The world beckons with them, everything from a new thrill ride on the midway of the State Fair to some new perversion of our sexual nature. Men are searching for something that will make life better as it goes along, and the search is fruitless.

Another painting depicts a haggard man in a large field, digging with a spade. Behind him are numerous holes that he has already dug, and beside each hole is a box with the cover open; and the boxes are all empty. Here the painter is depicting an empty life, spent striving for futile and empty goals. We have worshiped the god of material progress. It has become the sacred cow of the man on the street. Our scientific and industrial discoveries will - we wistfully hope - make our lives richer, bigger, fuller, as they go along. Life will be larger for us this year because we are planning to get a color television. If only we can find the cure for the common cold, invent a new mouse trap, or own an automatic dishwasher, life is sure to be finer in our declining years. All the commercials say so, and we have to believe them. This is what we’re working for! It’s got to be true, hasn’t it? This is what we work for! Empty boxes. We dig our holes. We open our boxes. And they’re empty!

The last painting is of a man bound and gagged and tied in a chair, while his terror-stricken eyes watch a thief rob his room of all his valuables. Here is our futile attempt to find security in possessions. Placing our faith in these things, we end up only with the nagging fear that there isn’t going to be enough. Look again at our aged people. Every day is the fear they won’t have enough to last them, the more they have, the greater the fear. And all of the events of life keep tapping us on the shoulder and saying: "Thou fool, this night thy soul." Thou fool!

But the Word of God presents to us the truth that life need not be that way. How is something else accomplished? A story in Newsweek magazine some time ago tells of a middle-aged couple who had been discussing the brevity of this life as compared to the eternity after death. So they decided to give away all that they had. He entered a Roman monastery; she went into a convent. They would probably not see each other for the rest of their lives. Poor, misled souls. This is not the answer! That is not living a life - that’s an escape from it, this retirement to a religious seclusion.

This is not what Christ meant when he said: "I came that ye might have life and have it more abundantly." Eternal life is not something that we prepare for in the dim distant future after death. We believe that when we accept Christ as Risen, Living Lord and Savior, we have entered into life HERE. We see life here upon earth as a part, but only a part, of that eternity. We see this brief pilgrimage in relation to the whole, In that light, life takes on new meaning, new richness. There are no declining years. Life is lived on the ascending scale. We are storing up spiritual riches. We perfect, as far as possible, the lovely art of worship. We learn to know the eternal joy of fellowship with our Eternal Father, and that association lightens and enriches our association with our fellow men. Love, joy, and deep abiding peace - these are the fruits of such a life. Oh, that we might understand that as our life grows.

Michelangelo once came into the studio of his student, Raphael. He looked at a painting that Raphael was doing as it stood there on its easel. And then, in anger, he picked up a large brush, dipped it into the paint on the palette, and across the canvas in large letters he wrote:

"Amplius!" Larger! You can’t deal with life, in little, cramped, weak, and indistinguishable figures, filled with fears and frustrations. Or, as the woman who visited the psychiatrist was told to go home and take the mirror down over her sink and cut a window in the wall so that she could see beyond her dirty dishes and her house and herself.

I don’t care who you are, or what your name is, or what you work at, or how much you have piled up, I will tell you the eternal truth that you will not find life here within yourselves. As one modern play has it: a poor, sick man is dying, and nobody understands his malady, dying in the rat race. Finally, they operate, and they make an incision as long as his body; and they are all surprised to find nothing except hollow blackness. You can’t make a life within you. You can’t make a life out of this. I don’t care how you dress it, or paint it, or care for it, or keep it in live and sparkling health, how you delight it, how you pleasure it, how you secure it, how you comfort it - your life can’t be in there, friend. You’ll never find it!

In the marvelous economy of our Creator when he says, through his Son, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind and thy neighbor as thyself," he isn’t giving us some arbitrary rule that we have to follow to be good, godlike children. He is giving us the essence of human life, that life has to be lived that way or it won’t be lived. We have to live in God and in our fellow man. Life, to become larger, must always go outward. There is no other way that it can grow.

"I am come that ye might have life and have it more abundantly."

CSS Publishing Co., Inc., Embalmed Alive!, by Louis H. Valbracht