Readings – Nehemiah 2; John 8: 31 – 38, 48 – end Year C
“If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8: 31b – 32)
Famous words! Putting them into their context in John’s Gospel, these words come just after we’ve been told that many people have come to believe in Jesus because of His teaching. Jesus now says to some of the Jewish believers in Him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” . These words sound encouraging enough, but as the conversation continues Jesus seems to find the faith of these people to be defective. The important point is not that they are Jewish, but that they are people who have failed to fully grasp the truth about Jesus. A lively discussion ensues about how Jesus is related to God the Father and about how He alone can truly make them free. They claim their descent from Abraham and cannot accept Jesus’ claims to a unique relationship with God the Father. The final straw comes when Jesus asserts ‘before Abraham was, I am’ (John 8: 58). This is a claim to divinity, and hence blasphemous in the eyes of his listeners. They try to stone him. They have failed to recognise the Christ.
These same words can still speak to us directly in our different cultural context across the centuries. As far as faith is concerned we probably all fall somewhere on a spectrum between interest and discipleship. And that’s fine. We are all still in some sense those who have believed. So we can hear the words both as an encouragement and as a challenge. The word ‘continue’ suggests we have begun, but not yet arrived. Faith can be construed as a journey. Where do we see ourselves? Have we just set out, or are we journeying on with others in the way of discipleship? Do we expect to develop and grow in our faith?
Jesus says ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples’. For some continuing in the word involves reading and studying the Scriptures, the Word of God as a means of understanding Christ and His teaching. And this is good and right. However, Jesus is also himself ‘the word’. As John 1 puts it ‘the word became flesh and dwelt among us’. Jesus speaks the word of the Father (and John is very keen to emphasise that Jesus and the Father speak with one voice). He also embodies the word of the Father. In His life, teaching, death and resurrection He presents us with a living example of what God is like in human form. This is why our worship involves not only the written word of the Scriptures but the embodied word of the sacraments where we can encounter Christ directly.
Jesus promises that those who persevere in following Him will know the truth. How many philosophers, theologians and scientists down the ages have wanted to know the Truth (with a capital T). Tellingly, at His trial before Pilate when Jesus says “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice”, even Pilate asks “What is truth?” (John 18: 37 – 38). Many have wanted to systematise the truth that Jesus promises. To claim that they and they alone have the answers and that everyone else is wrong. This is the way of fundamentalism. Jesus does not say ‘you will know all the answers’ but ‘you will know the truth’.
There are different ways of knowing. There is the way we know facts, and the way we know a person. If we know someone over a long period of intimacy we know what they will think, how they will feel, even how they would react to certain things that may be beyond their immediate experience. In this way those we have loved who have died before us can still influence us. We can even find ourselves speaking their words. Jesus is Himself the embodiment of God’s truth, and I think that this more personal kind of knowing is what Jesus has in mind. I don’t mean to reduce this to the kind of over-simplified ‘What would Jesus do?’ mentality. We need to engage our brains as well as our hearts. But in the end it is Christ, the person alongside us, who will reveal truth to each new generation and place. It is by prayerful listening and by being prepared to change that we will find the truth. It is also something that we need to do together if we seek God’s will for our church.
Finally, Jesus promises that the truth will make us free. According to our reading, His first hearers denied that they were enslaved. They just couldn’t see it. We have a tendency to do the same. Perhaps from time to time we’re reminded of some besetting sin which trips us up again and again. That’s a kind of slavery that is easier to spot. But what about the slavery to thinking we are in control, competent, professional? The need to drive ourselves harder so that we can keep up with it all. The need to be busy. The fear of silences and empty space and doing nothing. That’s a kind of slavery too, and hard, I think to resist in our busy city and here in Hampstead.
I’m sorry that we don’t often hear the Venite these days. Psalm 95 which used to be part of Mattins.
“O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.
O that today you would listen to his voice! Do not harden your hearts” (Psalm 95: 6 – 8)
I’ve always loved that “Do not harden your hearts”. It’s an invitation to listen to Christ, to admit our weakness, our insufficiency, our tendency to want to be in control. All the things that prevent us from rejoicing in our freedom in Christ. We are his daft, stupid but beloved sheep. That is all that matters. That is all that we need to be.
“If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8: 31b – 32)
Amen