A number of years ago there was a television drama titled See How She Runs, which told the story of Betty, a 40-year-old schoolteacher who decided to run in the Boston Marathon. Betty’s daughter Kathy was surprised, shocked, and not a little fearful. The play contained the following dialogue between Betty and her daughter Kathy on the subject of fear:
Betty: “There are worse things than being scared.”
Kathy: “Like what?”
Betty: “It’s worse never to be scared.”
Kathy: “Is it?”
Betty: “If you’re never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances. That’s like dying and waiting a lifetime to be buried.”
Contrary to what many people think, the Jesus we meet in the Fourth Gospel is a very human Jesus. He is not a Jesus who was never scared, or embarrassed, or hurt. In the 12th chapter of John it is as though we are allowed to overhear a soliloquy in which Jesus agonizes over the meaning of His life in the light of the impending cross. “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say, Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” (John 12:27)
In this chapter we find our Lord fighting His own personal battle with His all-too-human desire to avoid the cross. No one wishes to die. No one wishes to die at age 33. (Give or take a few years. We are unsure of Jesus’ actual age.) No one wishes to die upon a cruel Roman cross. John’s Gospel does not give us the story of Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, where the Synoptics tell us that He sweat great drops of blood in fearful anticipation of the cross, but John does have Jesus, in the very last week of His life, shrinking back from the frightening realization that the path he was treading would inevitably lead to a cross. As Betty told her daughter Kathy, real courage does not mean never being afraid. Real courage means being terribly afraid, and yet doing the thing that has to be done in spite of the fear.
Of course, the end of the Gospel story is not terror and tears, but rather triumph and victory. In fact, John seems to squeeze together two events in the life of Jesus which occur separately in the Synoptics: Jesus’ agony in the Garden and His transfiguration on the mountain-top, where the word of divine affirmation from His heavenly Father claims Him as His own: “Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’ “ (Mark 9:7) We will leave it to the Biblical scholars to sort out just how these two stories relate to one another, and how they came to be conflated in the Fourth gospel, but in John Jesus’ agony is changed into confidence and faith. What happened? What happened is that in between the agony and the victory came the Voice of God; and everything was changed. Jesus found the courage to keep on keeping on. As the old hymn puts it, “We marvel at the purpose that held thee to the course/while ever on the hilltop before thee loomed the cross.” (No. 444 in the United Methodist Hymnal)
What about this “Voice of God”? In the early pages of the Bible there is contained the ancient tradition that God at one time spoke directly with people. He spoke directly to Adam and Eve in the Garden; He spoke directly to the child Samuel, according to the story contained in I Samuel 3:1-14; He spoke directly to the prophet Elijah after he had run away from the wrath of the wicked queen Jezebel, according to I Kings 19:1-8. Then, in the eighth century before Christ, and again in the sixth century B.C., God spoke to His people through the medium of prophets, who were not “foretellers” so much as they were “forth-tellers,” proclaiming what God was doing on the stage of human history. That, indeed, is what the much abused word “prophet” means: Not one who predicts the future by gazing into his private crystal ball, but rather one who speaks for God.
However, by the time of Jesus, people believed that the “good old days” when God spoke to people face-to-face were past. They had come to believe that God was too remote, too far away, to speak to the world directly anymore. The voice of God, which had spoken so forcefully through the prophets of yore, was now silent. In Jesus’ day the rabbis spoke of what was called in Hebrew the “bath qol,” literally, “the daughter of a voice.” It was not really the voice of God per se, but was rather what you might call the faint echo of a voice, sort of like the famous smile of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat. By Jesus’ time people had come to believe that the days of the prophets were over, that God no longer spoke directly to His world, but rather must communicate through intermediaries such as angels, or faint whispers deep in the human soul, rather than in the mighty organ tones of the past.
One can easily understand why people came to such a belief, for who could stand a direct revelation of God, anyway? Sometimes we hear people ask, “Why doesn’t God show Himself?” without realizing what they are asking for. If God should show Himself, how could we ever stand it? There is a certain mercy in the mystery, for God should be hidden from our eyes so that we might be protected from too much light. T.S. Eliot once said that we humans cannot bear too much reality, and I have a hunch that is true. The ancients had an expression: “If you can’t face the candle, how can you look at the sun?” One wonders about the people who, in recent years, have vociferously complained about God’s seeming absence from the world. One wonders just how they might go about handling His presence. Just what do they expect God to do, leap into our midst like Superman with overwhelming power to solve all of our problems for us? Step out of the heavens some summer night and write His name in flaming letters across the sky for us? In one of his books, Frederick Buechner suggests that if God should ever do such a dramatic thing, we would be amazed at the sight for awhile, but after a while we would become bored with the whole thing, asking, “Ho-hum, so what else is new?” In a book titled Still the Trumpet Sounds, the late Dr. J. Wallace Hamilton commented on that verse in Isaiah 64:1, “O That Thou would rend the heavens and come down!” He wrote, “Suppose He did. You have to ask yourself how much of that kind of revelation we could stand. If He should reveal Himself in the fullness of His power, we would shrivel up. We’ve had a little smidgen of it, a mushroom light against the sky. Men have opened a small crack in the universe and found a hidden power there, a small hint of other powers that would utterly destroy us if we were not guarded from their light. The veil between the seen and the unseen, between the world that we can stand and live in and the world we cannot bear is every thing, but it is there and there’s mercy as well as majesty in the mystery of (God’s) kindness.”
The Biblical God is a hidden God. And there is mercy as well as majesty in that hiddenness, for how could we stand to look directly at God? But we do catch glimpses of God once in awhile. St. Francis believed that the red-breasted cardinal flashing into his view was not an accident but was rather God’s deft brush-stroke perfectly timed to take his breath away. And who can say that he was wrong? British Methodist Colin Morris, in a book titled Mankind My Church, tells of a West African creation myth which puts the point beautifully. In the beginning, God existed, and so did men. But God was pure, naked God, and men were afraid to go near Him. So God covered Himself with the mantle of creation—rivers in which men could fish, forests in which they could hunt, soil which they could cultivate. Thus men lost their fear of approaching God—and God, so the story quaintly ends, was as happy as a dog with fleas! Yes, the Biblical God is a hidden God. But Christians want to say more. Christians believe that they catch the clearest glimpse of God not in nature, not in God’s creation, which can sometimes be, as the poet Tennyson put it, “red in tooth and claw,” but we catch the clearest glimpse of God in a Person: Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians call the Christ. Still, in Christ we see a God who is both hidden as well as revealed. Some looked at Him and looked through Him and saw the Divine at work in Him; but others saw nothing to wonder at and could only repeat the contemporary clich, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46)
And so a decision had to be made concerning this man from Nazareth—and still has to be made. Some of Jesus’ contemporaries asked, “Is this not merely the carpenter’s son?” (Matt. 13:55 ) as though anything or anyone can be explained by its antecedents. “Is this not only Mary’s son, one whose name is known to us and whose nose we used to wipe? This man has attended no theological school, studied under no prominent rabbi. He is only a local yokel from the hick town of Nazareth . . .the Podunk of Galilee!” Some looked at Jesus and saw in Him the Son of God. Others saw only the Carpenter’s son, the son of Mary. And what you see when you look at Jesus makes all of the difference. In the twelfth chapter of John, the author tells us that Jesus was buoyed up by the voice of God speaking to Him. But not everybody in the audience heard what He heard. Some thought that it was only thunder. Still others thought that an angel had spoken to Him.
I have always been fascinated by those folks who thought that it had only thundered. I think that during my years in the parish ministry I have met some of them. Sometimes I think that I have been one of them! I am talking about folks whose minds and hearts are so tuned to the prosaic and ordinary that they fail to see the Divine breaking into the commonplace. There are a lot of people in our day who try to live solely within the scientific dimensions of the mundane and the ordinary. They do not seem to have any part of their minds open to the possibility of the supernatural or extraordinary. They are much like that colorful old socialite and gourmet society reporter Lucius Beebe. Beebe reveled in the good life with its lavish meals and name-dropping. His particular fetish was to insist that table wines be served at precisely room temperature. The high life finally got to Beebe, however, and his stomach rebelled. One of his lady friends was told that Beebe was soon to go into the hospital for abdominal surgery. “Well,” she replied, “I do hope that the doctors have the good grace to open Lucius at precisely room temperature.”
Well, there are a lot of folks who seem to live life only at “room temperature.” They seem blissfully unaware that other temperatures may exist. They live what might be called a “one-dimensional existence.” Such persons might choose as their patron saint the pussycat of the old children’s nursery rhyme. You may recall the profound words:
Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?
“I’ve been to London, to visit the Queen.”
Pussycat, pussycat, what did you there?
“I frightened a mousie right under her chair!”
Now, here was a real cat of the world; a gourmet, a world traveler. She had been to London, no less. And there are a lot of wondrous things to be seen in London: Westminster Abbey, the Tower of Big Ben (as a popular song of some years back put it)...to say nothing of the Queen and the ever-fascinating Royal Family. But what did she see? She saw a mouse! And why did she see only a mouse? Because that was what she was looking for! (I am indebted to that great teacher of preachers Halford Luccock of Yale for this idea.) Most people see what they are looking for. Soviet cosmonauts orbited the earth some years back and returned to tell us that they have swept the heavens and found no evidence of God. On the other hand, American astronauts orbited the earth and read the opening chapter of Genesis while doing so, proclaiming that the heavens do, indeed, declare the glory of God. Now, both sets of adventurers went to the same place. But each came back with a different report. Which suggests that what we take with us when we go to see something is at least as important as what we see when we get there.
Jesus spoke of people who, having ears, do not hear; and having eyes, do not see. The fact of the matter is that the meaning of life does not lie on the surface. It is only available for those who take the time and effort to look beneath the surface. A poet by the name of William Herbert Carruth has written:
A fire mist and a planet—
A crystal and a cell,
A jelly-fish and a saurian,
And caves where cave-men dwell;
Then a sense of law and beauty
And a face turned from the clod,--
Some call it Evolution,
And others call it God.
We see what we are looking to see. And the real meaning of life rarely lies upon the surface. It is for those who look at it until they look through it to see what lies behind it. Halford Luccock once wrote about what he called “the aristocracy of the attentive.” He said (in his book “Marching Off the Map,”) that “The great revolutions of science never come to casual strollers through life whose only language is a passing surprise, Well, what do you know about that?’ They have come to an aristocracy -those who have observed nature devoutly. Epoch-making insights follow a period of costly attention and incubation. G.K. Chesterton put the whole history of science in two sentences when he said, You can look at a thing 999 times and be perfectly safe. But if you look at it the thousandth time you are in danger of seeing it!’” As that eminent philosopher Yogi Berra is reported to have said, “It is amazin’ how much you can see by just looking.” It is. Therefore, how silly it is for anyone to dismiss out of hand the spiritual dimension of life when he or she hasn’t spent ten minutes in ten years thinking seriously about the question. An Englishman once said that most novels about Oxford were written by elderly ladies on the basis of a two-day visit, thirty years ago, to Cambridge!” I have known some supposedly enlightened people whose rejection of religion rests on just such a flimsy foundation. They are still living as adults on the basis of a rejection of a kindergarten version of the Christian Faith which they probably misunderstood in the first place!
Let’s face it: we are not very good at listening. Probably because we are so busy talking. And to be open to what the Bible calls the “Still, small voice of God” is a demanding discipline. It is not for spiritual dilettantes who skim briefly over the surface of life. If there is one clear call that comes to us through the pages of the Bible it is to “Be still, and know that I am God!” (PS. 46) We are called to pay attention, but most of us aren’t very good at it.
A few years back I heard of a minister who inserted in the middle of the Scripture lesson one morning the words, “Our family planted strawberries this year, but only weeds came up.” And then he went on to read the rest of the lesson. What is remarkable about this is that nobody noticed. They were simply not paying attention. It seems that during worship we often put our minds in neutral. We park our brains in the narthex, thinking that we will have little use for them for the next hour or so.
Only once in my forty-year ministry did I ever conduct a double marriage ceremony. It is a complicated affair, for you have to administer two sets of vows and promises to two sets of brides and grooms. I remember asking one of the grooms if he took the bride to be his husband. He allowed as how he did, and nobody noticed my gaffe, so I went right on with the service. I assume that they are legally married and have lived happily ever after. But the whole experience did raise some questions in my mind about people’s attentiveness during the things we do in church.
...And not only in church. I came across the following fascinating story about President Franklin Roosevelt. It seems that one day he got tired of smiling that big, winsome smile of his and saying the usual platitudes at a certain White House reception, so one evening he decided to see if anyone out there was paying any attention to what he was saying. As each person came up to him with extended hand, he flashed that big toothy grin and said, “I murdered my grandmother this morning.” People would respond automatically with comments such as, “How lovely!” or, “Just continue on with your great work.” Nobody listened to what he actually said, except one foreign diplomat. When the president said, “I murdered my grandmother this morning,” the diplomat responded ever so softly, “I am sure she had it coming to her!”
We are not very good at listening and paying attention. That is why the Christian Church Year has special seasons of remembrance such as Thanksgiving when we are called to remember our blessings; or Lent when we are called to remember our mortality and God’s promise of resurrection, and Advent when we are called to remember the coming of Christ, the basis of our faith. The Letter to the Hebrews begins with these words: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.” (Heb. 1:1,2) When Jesus began His ministry there came a voice from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son...listen to Him!” But the world did not listen to Him. And the world’s blindness and deafness made a Calvary. But you and I claim to be among that part of the world which did listen to Him, and continues to listen to Him. Maybe if we listen to His words 999 times (as Chesterton says) along about the thousandth time we will actually hear them, and hear them in such a way that our lives will be transformed!
John Masefield’s poem “The Everlasting Mercy” tells the story of a drunken poacher named Saul Kane who meets a Quaker girl named Miss Bourne in a pub, and through her radiant witness to her faith suddenly finds Christ becoming real to him. He goes out into the world that is identical with the world he knew before, just as the world we will walk into after the worship service will be the same world we left when we came to church, but somehow, for Saul Kane everything is now different. Everything is transformed. Oh, there has been no earthquake, no thunder, no cataclysm, but he has come to see and hear and trust in the victory of a risen Christ, and realized that through Him, he could rise to a new life. He cries out,
O glory of the lighted mind.
How dead I’ve been, how dumb, how blind.
The station brook, to my new eyes
Was babbling out of paradise;
The waters rush from the rain
Were singing Christ is risen again.
I thought all earthly creatures knelt
From rapture of the joy I felt.
“Some said it thundered.” But some others came to see and hear in Jesus the Words of God made flesh. We can be among them, if we will. Amen.