The loneliness of Jesus

The loneliness of Jesus

Fifth Sunday of Easter

Acts 6.1-7; 1 Pet. 2.4-9; Jn. 14. 1-12

The texts today are wonderfully dense ones. Just a small note about the first and third readings which I'd like to talk more directly about next week. (The Hellenists , were Greek speaking people and were either non-Jews who had joined the Jesus movement or Jews who had grown up outside of Israel). What we see is an initial tension in the beginning of this Jesus movement, between those Jews in Israel who had accepted Jesus and the Hellenists. The tension is already there, as to who gets served what. Community is threatened by this. So they appointed 7 Greek speaking people to get the community put back together by attending to the Hellenists. In other words, what is at stake here is the same thing that's at stake in the gospel reading, namely, the plurality of forms of belief, of which I want to talk more next week.

But today, I'd like to take the second of the two things I mentioned last Sunday, namely those 2 bywords of the risen Jesus that we run across over and over. Last week we talked about this injunction not to be afraid. " Don't be afraid" and how impossible that is. Today I want to take the other one which is in all the resurrection stories too. "Peace be with you." Or, as we have it here, "Do not let your hearts be troubled." I want to look at this notion of peace in the light of the resurrection.

The first thing that needs to be said is that peace is not some kind of inner contentment. It is not peace of mind. It is absolutely not peace of mind. This is really important today, because as a bunch of quite perceptive sociologists of religion have pointed out over and over, our modern emphasis on spirituality is basically understood by our culture, in North America, as precisely this kind of inner contentment. I'm at peace with myself. Okay. That's fine. But that's not the peace that Jesus is talking about. It is not and we need to be very, very clear about that both because that form of peace is so alluring and so needed. But it is not what the resurrected Jesus is talking about when, over and over again, he says "Peace be with you."

Secondly it's not the kind of peace that we are trying to work out in Kosovo, which can stand as a really good model for what we normally understand as peace between people. It's a peace that's enforced by intimidation. Everybody will get along well as long as all the mechanisms of fear are in place. We'll all be alright. We'll all form this nice, harmonious whole as long as everybody knows who to be afraid of and operates under that fear. And it is true. This is the normal understanding of peace. We didn't need NATO and 600 bombing sorties yesterday, and pictures of Albanian refugees. All we had to do is look at the way families are built most of the time. As one psychologist put it, most human relationships are simply power games. Who's in charge here? Who's in charge here? What leverage can I use to manage things? And it works. It really does work. If you can organize fear patterns well enough then there's not going to be any trouble. One of the most peaceful places in the world were the Nazi concentration camps, to put it at it's most grievous, or plantations in the American south in the era of slavery. There was lots of peace there. It was peace that was simply the result of everybody knowing who could do what damage to whom, and therefore, it required tailoring one's behaviour along those lines. And it's really important that we keep that in mind because so much glib talk about peace is nothing more than that, strategies for fear management if you will. We talk about anger management so much these days, and that's useful but we don't talk so readily about fear management.

Well, if these are not what Jesus is talking about, then what in God's name is He talking about? Well since, Jesus was a Jew we have to take the Jewish notion of Peace, "Shalom", as we get it out of the Jewish scripture. Paul VI put it fairly succinctly when he said, "If you want peace, work for Justice." In other words, peace is essentially, in the Jewish view, a social phenomenon. It is not some kind of private, interior condition that somehow is immune to all the wear and tear of our interactions with other human beings. The only thing that can go by the name of peace, and that is faithful to the risen Jesus, is the peace that comes from being able to live with each other fear free...fearlessly. Fearlessly. that is what is peace means when Jesus says "My peace I give to you." We people, so diverse, so weird, so self-engrossed, as we all are, are called by Jesus to that kind of peace.

Let me try to get to this from a markedly different angle. There was a great German theologian earlier this century, who used to write regularly about the loneliness of Jesus. Why should Jesus be lonely? Why is anybody lonely? Loneliness is an absolutely foundational, fundamental human experience. Why is that? Because we send out these little tendrils of ourselves and hope they grab onto something and grow and nothing happens. They reach only into air and so they wither. So the sense that I am never going to be really connected, at my deepest and most true point with anybody else is why there's loneliness and this is just a generic statement of loneliness. There is more.

How many people, do you think in Jesus' own life really understood him, what he was all about? Even his mother, we have in the gospel of Luke, was walking around scratching her head. "She did not understand what he said but she treasured all these things in her heart." Who understood Jesus' way of looking at the world, really? To read the gospels with all their theological overlay, and even there we've got Philip saying: we're clueless, we're clueless and Jesus’ response, "Have I been with you all this time Philip and you still do not know me?" How many people was Jesus able to share his vision of life with? Nobody. Was Jesus lonely? I suspect an enormous part of his life was lived in a felt sense of isolation.

What sustained him then so much of his life? His belief in God. This is not some kind of nice, cosy continuous presence of some warm embracing figure. Faith does not work that way. Faith, as the gospel of John says, is a struggle. For how are we to believe in a God who says we are called to each other, in a world in which we are ruled by the law of competition. Whether we are talking about sibling rivalry between our kids, grades to get LSAT tests to get into law school or dance, or climbing the corporate ladder or making sure your promotion and tenure application, is well in place. That's where we are. And you can go much further than that. How many of us really share what is most real to us even with those people with whom presumably we are the most intimate.

And I'm not saying this as kind of some sarcastic, jaundiced criticism of life. For who of us is big enough to receive the reality, the full reality of another human being? Who of us is even able to gather ourselves up into our own hands and donate ourselves to another human being? Who can do that? And these are the most fundamental realities of human existence. So, was Jesus lonely? There was no question of it. His solitude was somewhat differently constructed than ours, I think, because it was solitude that was always open ended. It was open to this mysterious other that he called Abba, Father, God, upon whom he was content to wait, and whose manifestation and presence, whatever form it took, he did not try to manufacture, the way we do.

Peace. Peace. Peace. What is peace? How could Jesus be peaceful therefore? Or is this all more religious blather, of which we've all had too much? The only thing that gave Jesus peace is his belief in God who really did construct all of us, timorous, distrusting human beings, for each other. And the God was a God who was going to bring us all together, all the counter evidence.

So, how does this work with regard to the resurrection? The Jesus that these writers believe had been raised by God from the dead, is precisely the Jesus who was absolutely open to everybody and before whom everybody could be open. This got him into trouble. It got him killed. Because that manner of life is dangerous. That kind of vulnerability is fatal. But then they proclaimed: It's this Jesus, it's this Jew who lived this kind of way that God validated by raising him from the dead. And that's why you get the risen Jesus saying to all these people....peace....peace. Are they incredulous, therefore, because there was a body walking around? Or are they incredulous because the likelihood of us human beings ever being able to stand as Jesus did with each other is so remote. This is really important, because we need to locate, very carefully, places where peace belongs. So, we human beings, on the micro scale - within the family - or on the macro scale, among nations, know and engage in wars raging violently right now. That's the context for our lives. That's the air we breathe. That's our description of reality. And here we have this man saying "Peace be with you."

So it is very important that we understand, first of all, what this peace is all about and know that it always is going to be tenuous and threatened because it is a peace based on faith. There is Jesus’ peace not because "I have it all together", or "I love myself adequately", or "I"m self-affirmed by my boss". No. We ought to have learned, from so many distortions and miniaturizations and falsifications and disguises of the Christian message to be very wary when people say "Oh there's peace." So, I hope that we are brought to our knees, to seek this God. To seek this God who alone is the source of what we can legitimately call peace. At least peace the way that Jesus talked about it.

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