The Courageous Gospel. Robert Allan Hill
Only Jesus has seen God. Jesus came from God in the first place. (The order of this works against a later Gnostic tradition.) We have to recognize the unpredictability of Johannine symbols. The serpent images may be from the Old Testament or from Targums (Aramaic translations). Hebrew is to Aramaic as Spanish is to Italian.
The transcendence of God is very important for John. Memra: Word. The word of God is present. A bronze serpent was kept in the temple in Jerusalem. Such a symbol leaves itself open to folk lore. John uses that symbol for Jesus on the cross. There is the presence of God in both. The “lifting up of the Son of Man” is a central image for John. There are three forms of “lifting up” passages in John, and another in Mark 8 and 9. Is there not then some relation between these two?
Community and Spirit are both given at the foot of the cross. Jesus brings eternal life.
3:17 Realized eschatology. Three messiahs? As in Trinitarian discussion? Judgment in John is not a matter of sheep and goats. Rather Jesus’ very presence brings judgment. The coming of the Son of Man brings a crisis. People judge themselves.
7 / Two Biographies
John 4
“These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name” (John 20: 31).
In old Castile, northwest of Madrid, out on the arid, brown central Spanish highland, you may look toward the mountain range once toured by Robert Jordan and his muñequita, before his fictitious but nonetheless atoning, salvific, Christlike death, at the hands of Franco’s soldiers. The mountain range, high and in its own way majestic, looks very much like a woman asleep, so the Segovianos call her or it or the mountain “la mujer muerta.” As I and Robert Jordan and perhaps you also have found, it is a day’s long hard hike up into the Castillian mountains.
The Gospel of John is such a mountain range, high and lifted up. It challenges our endurance. It tests our orienteering. It measures our preparation and execution. There is an exacting and perfecting quality to this Gospel, similar to the exacting and perfecting character of fellowship at this church. With every cut-back trail, at every rest point, atop every lookout, with every majestic view, this spiritual gospel will address you in the midst of two crucial battles, those of dislocation and disappointment, with the good news of grace and freedom, with the ongoing need to choose, and—in choosing—to find the life of belonging and meaning, personal identity and global imagination.
I realize belatedly that the most lastingly formative aspect of my theological education, at Union Seminary in the City of New York, in the years of the Carter administration, was the preaching of William Sloane Coffin. In his recent collection of wisdom sayings, Coffin has a typically urbane, piercing word to say about hypocrisy. It is as close to the mind of Jesus in John 4 as I think you can come: “Generally we try to pass ourselves off as something that is special in our hearts and minds, something we yearn for, something beyond us. That’s rather touching.”
We all have at least two life stories, the one we publicize and the one we privatize. They both have meaning. Nor should one be eliminated or the other. In this chapter, following on the opening given in our lesson today, Jesus addresses the two biographies of a woman from Samaria. . . Go call your husband. . . I have no husband. . . You are right in saying you have no husband for you have had five husbands and he whom you now have is not your husband. . . As people and as a culture, we have more than one story to tell, more than one biography. Two biographies, like the woman at the well. Our best foot and then the other foot. The gospel this morning, a saving and healing truth for you, is that Jesus the Christ knows both biographies, all our stories, and loves us still.
“We put our best foot forward, but it is the other one that needs the attention.”
The Jesus of the Fourth Gospel is not easily blended with his counterparts in Matthew, Mark and Luke. Rather than projecting our own needs for uniformity out onto these ancient, holy, mysterious, puzzling and powerful writings, we first to listen to them. Listen. We need to let the Bible speak to us, as Robert McAffee Brown used to say. The Jesus of John 4 sees into others’ minds. He knows things without being told. He divines the secrets hidden in the heart. He stands alone and in public view with a woman, a Samaritan woman, a troubled Samaritan woman. This Jesus is guided along in a lengthy mystagogical conversation, full of riddles, double entendres, hidden meanings, mysterious silences. He offers living water. In none of this does one find a single correspondence with the earlier three quests for Jesus in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John’s is an entirely different Jesus. So, asked a bright teenager in September, which is true?
And here is my answer. They all are. They all truly represent the actual historical experience of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, which various little communities in his fledging church did have of him. All four are historically accurate. With accuracy they describe the Jesus known in the actual lives of the communities of Mark, forty years after Calvary; Matthew, fifty-five years after Calvary; Luke, sixty years after Calvary; and John ninety years after Calvary. They give us grace and freedom to sense Jesus, as they did, present among us, as He was among them. He is risen. He is not here. See the place where they laid him.
The account of the woman at the well provides one of two eyes needed to see. The other is the experience of Jesus, crucified and risen, which John knew and felt and preached. This Jesus, in 120 AD, knew his people. They felt his knowing presence. They felt his probing spirit. So do we. They faced his clairvoyant candor. So do we. They acknowledged his healing voice. So do we. A voice like no other—equanimous and serene. They sensed his love. They preached his love. They shared his love. Even across ranges of personal, intimate, generic confusion. And so do we. It is not the water of the well that slakes our thirst for salvation, but the water of eternal life. This water bathes both of our feet, both of our biographies, both the one we put forward and the one we hold back.
Grace During Dislocation
Young soldiers in their first year of service, at home or abroad, know about the dislocation that comes with growing up. So do their parents and aunts and uncles. Young women and men settling in at college for the first year know about the dislocation that comes with developing that second identity, that real self, yourself. At mid-life a man finds that he is ready to make up his mind to change his mind. Dislocation is mainly, but not only, the work of salvation for youth. Ask the eighty-year-old who sells her house. Or the ninety-year-old who keeps his. Salvation is not a matter of chronology, only, but of ontology and theology and psychology.
Our lasting health will rely in part on grace uncovered during dislocation. That John’s Gospel emerges out of the tide, the great sea change, of dislocation is itself a profound affirmation of grace. If this community, disoriented and discarded and dismembered amid Jews and Gnostics in 120 AD, could receive courage in change, then so can we. We need not fear change. You need not fear change. For down in the depths of dislocation, John discovered grace.
The most pervasive social change of the last thirty years, across our culture, lies in the rearrangements related to gender and to sexuality. The social distance between me and my grandfather is dwarfed by that between my grandmother and my daughter. My grandmother learned to drive using a buggy whip and sitting behind a team of horses. My daughter flies across the continent week by week. Elsie was born thirty years before she gained the right to vote. Emily rocks the vote. Gramma was one of a very small percentage of women to graduate from college. Emily runs the place. Elsie raised children, cooked meals, supported the church, and listened. My daughter works, leads, earns, and speaks. Women are still undergoing the tears and strains of pervasive social dislocation. Nor is feminism finished. Nor is equality achieved. Nor does freedom fully ring, not for women in America nor certainly for women around the globe.
Yet with this righteous dislocation, every bit as necessary as that which liberated John, has come an undertow of anxiety, much of it related to our understanding of sexuality. Sex, physical genital intimacy, is not what it used to be. And women are still largely paying the bill. In the great sea of sexual dislocation, certainly alive in the text of John 4, is there any grace to be found?
What are we teaching our children about sex? Do we happily and strongly affirm the covenant of marriage? Do