Anyone who has studied French literature has run across Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie — Jealousy or Window Blind, depending on how you want to translate the noun. It is a bizarre book with a story-line that loops back around to tell the same snippet of a piece of life over and over again. It’s sort of like listening to certain pieces of music by minimalist composers like John Adams or John Cage that consist of a never-ending loop.
I sometimes feel as though the lectionary does the same thing for us. It presents the same story over and over but seen through slightly different lenses. In this case, we are hearing a loop that encompasses many themes and many fragments of the larger story.
Today’s gospel reading throws us back into Holy Week and John’s description of the last supper. By the time John’s Jesus reaches the last supper, he has done all the signs he was meant to do. Consequently, Jesus seems to orchestrate his last hours. Part of this preparation comes in words in what is known as the ‘Last Supper Discourse,’ which follows Jesus washing the disciples’ feet.
So much of the Last Supper Discourse focuses on the great commandment: ‘If I, your Lord and teacher have washed your feet, you must wash one another’s feet. I give you a new commandment: Love one another as I have loved you. Everyone will know you are my disciples if you have love for one another.’
Central to the theology of the Fourth Gospel and its companion, the First Letter of John, is the theme of God abiding in us and we in God. Loving one another as God loves us becomes our way of manifesting God in the world. The First Letter of John reiterates this idea in its words, ‘God is love, and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God in them.’ Abiding in and remaining in God’s love becomes the central mark of discipleship in John’s thought. Serving one another as disciples, washing one another’s feet, defines us as people of the Way, of Christ.
How can it be, then, that in Jesus’ glorious statement of love, two sharp and dissonant notes strike?
First, Jesus knows — even before instructing the disciples to love one another — that one of them will betray him. Even in the midst of this intimate, intense moment of communion, someone is out of place. Judas’ betrayal is so discordant that the writer of John has to add that Satan enters into Judas at the time of his receiving the morsel of bread as if to say, the action is so heinous, that it cannot come from a human’s soul but from the devil.
The other discordant note sounds in Jesus’ statement, ‘Little children, I am with you only a little while longer. You will look for me… and where I am going, you cannot come.’ Jesus softens this announcement with the term of endearment, ‘Little children,’ but it cannot soften the underlying sense of total abandonment.
This statement then leads us into the following chapter, 14, which begins with Thomas’ poignant question, But, Lord, where are you going? And can we come too? We know well this story because it is one often chosen for the gospel at the burial office. Jesus answers in words that tell Thomas that where he is going, they cannot yet come but that in his father’s house are many rooms and Jesus is going ahead to prepare one for them.
In fact, then, this morning gospel sums up for us with its backward and forward looking what this season of Easter is about. We are more than halfway through it; we only have two more Sundays of Easter before moving to Pentecost.
And, lurking in the back of our mind, should also be the gospel we heard on Easter morning where Mary Magdalene finally recognizes the risen Jesus, drops to his feet, grabs onto them, only to be told by Jesus to let go of him because he has not yet ascended to his father.
In ten days we will observe the feast of the Ascension, hinted at by the suggestion of chapter 14 of the gospel according to John and then by the recollection of the gospel from Easter, John 20.
We hear all these themes and overarching them are this morning’s words that go round and round in a circle:
Now the Son of Man has been glorified and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and at once will glorify him.
They are a mouthful!
What John is getting at is simply this (in the words of Jean Vanier):
Jesus is the glory of God; the glory of God is the manifestation of who God is: it is God’s almightiness and love, it is God’s littleness and humility, it is God’s love and deep respect for each one of us. The glory of God is Jesus walking serenely towards the total gift of himself in love.1
Or, as Iranaeus wrote in the second century: The glory of God is the human person fully alive. I have that quotation on a bookshelf in my bedroom so I can see it on a daily basis as a reminder of how to respond to others in my midst. I fail every day all the time to see God in everyone, of course, and I have to pick myself up and keep trying, but in my heart I know that Divine Glory dwells in everyone.
Desmond Tutu writes in God Has A Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time:
The divine shines through material that was thoroughly unpromising, unlikely, improbable. So we were brought to see that no one is untransfigurable, no one is a totally hopeless case. God does not give up on any one of us. It is truly tremendous.
When you go to heaven, you will say to me, should I be there, too, “Gee whiz, man, I didn’t know you were so beautiful.” You will see the divine light that shines through me, and not just this guy with a large nose. All the people you thought were just mere flesh-and-blood humans, with all their physical flaws, will be revealed to you as filled with divine light. We are meant to be godlike; that is why we were created in the image of God. But we really don’t know what God is like except when we get glimpses. When someone is wonderfully generous or compassionate, we do sometimes stand in awe of that person, and that gives us a glimpse of the glory that is God. And if we had the eyes to see, we would look at one another and see the beauty of God, and we would treat each other with appropriate reverence and awe.
Many people ask me what I have learned from all the experiences in my life, and I say unhesitatingly: People are wonderful. It is true. People really are wonderful. This does not mean that people cannot be awful and do real evil. They can. Yet as you begin to see with the eyes of God, you start to realize that people’s anger and hatred and cruelty come from their own pain and suffering. As we begin to see their words and behavior as simply the acting out of their suffering, we can have compassion for them. We no longer feel attacked by them, and we can begin to see the light of God shining in them. And when we begin to look for the light of God in people, an incredible thing happens. We find it more and more in people — all people.2
If Desmond Tutu can find that glory of God in all people, despite the misery which he lived in apartheid South Africa, then surely we can too.
The glory of God is the human person fully alive. When we find the glory of God in another person, then we also see God’s love incarnate and abiding in another person, for God is love, and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God in them.
Then go out and tell everyone — the people who today will sit on our lawn and buy our chicken barbeque, the people with whom you work, your children, your parents, your friedns — that they are God fully alive in them. Tell them. Tell them.
END NOTES
1 Jean Vanier, Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus (Mahway, NJ: Paulist Press, 2004), 250.
2 Desmond Tutu: God Has A Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2004), 96-97.
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