We are only on the way

Sixth Sunday of Easter

Acts 8.5-8, 14-17; 1 Pet. 3.15-18; Jn. 14.15-21

I'd like to summarize and expand on those passages given to the risen Jesus, in the readings since Easter. They are "don't be afraid", and "peace be with you." There are a number of ways of doing this. One very simple way is to point to a book. It's simple but it may not be the most useful way, but the title of the book at least is helpful. The book was written by one of the premier New Testament scholars in the world, James Dunn, and he entitled it: Unity and Diversity in the New Testament. What Dunn does in 400-500 pages is to point out the wide variety of understandings we find present in the New Testament, understandings of who Jesus was, for instance. There is an extraordinary number of ways in which the New Testament writers understood, interpreted Jesus. Almost every gospel and letter in the New Testament proposes its own peculiar view of Jesus. The Letter to the Hebrews calls Jesus the "pioneer of our faith". The Book of Revelation talks about Jesus as the great Amen - the great yes to God. Mark's Gospel says that the only real Jesus is the Jesus who suffers. Paul talks about Jesus as the New Adam. The titles and understandings multiply all over the New Testament, and these titles are not reducible to each other, which is really important. But it's not just the understandings of Jesus which are so numerous and so varied. There are all kinds of other diversities in the New Testament as well. What does the Christian community look like? How is it organized? Clear, in the Book of Acts, it is presbyterian. It's made up of a group of elders, "presbyteroi" in Greek. Or in John, the organization is congregational. Or in Matthew, Peter has a prominent place.

And even more important than their understandings of the structures of these little communities, is the meaning of Jesus' impact on us - what the theologians call "soteriology". What does it mean to be saved by Jesus? Numerous answers are given. Paul alone uses a dozen terms or models for this.

So, at the end of his book, Dunn asks whether there is anything that holds all this diversity together. Dunn says that , at bottom, it is the figure of Jesus. But, please note, we can appropriate that figure only through these multiple understandings, and even more than these, as subsequent theology shows. So to put it in summary fashion, one of the effects of the Resurrection is that we human beings are supposed to be able to live in a pluralized world, that was not present before the Resurrection. It sounds fairly pedestrian to put it that baldly - pluralism as the upshot of the Resurrection. But that is exactly what is at stake here: religious pluralism, theological pluralism, a plurality of spiritualities. The history of the Church is constituted by the continuous emergence of different spiritual disciplines, theologies, ecclesial forms and practises.

What is going on in all this? It is the fecundity of the Resurrection producing this great, wild diversity. So why is this not central to our understanding of the fruit of the Resurrection? Perhaps a better question: why are we human beings so uncomfortable with the notion, even more, the reality of pluralism, diversity? We surely are. All you have to do is look at the history of the Church. Over and over the lines are drawn between heresy and orthodoxy, between those who are in and those who are out. But look again. Some years ago, the theological project of Martin Luther was validated by a French Catholic theologian, Louis Bouyer. And this is anything but a unique instance.

We have, in fact, always had this wild diversity in the church. Yet we have also had this counter-move, insisting that everyone walk in the same pattern: tidiness has been the order of the day. But plurality, of its essence, is untidy. So let me again ask the question: Why are we so unnerved by this disorderliness of pluralism? Or to put it in the language of Derrida, and some of the deconstructionlist philosophers: Why is the other a source of intimidation for us?

I don't think the answer is very far to seek. The other, in their very otherness, is felt as a threat. Their very difference discomfits us. The underlying problem lies in the basis of my sense of who I am. And that sense is more often than not, founded on the base of self-differentiation. But that self-differentiation is almost never neutral, but becomes the occasion for a qualitative discrimination between myself and the other: being thus, I am better than those not as I am - or I may even be worse than the other. But the other, as other, is threat.

So we look at the figure of Jesus for whom the category of the alien, threatening other, the absolutely excludable other, seems not to have existed. All you have to do is get behind these wildly diverse depictions of Jesus in the New Testament, whether Jesus as the New Adam, or the suffering servant, or saviour and benefactor - imperial titles which Luke uses, there were no alien others for Jesus. This raises the question: how could that be? How is it possible? I think the answer is there in the New Testament, where we find the ultimate source of Jesus self-understanding, his identity. I understand myself by being able to point to my enemies. So the other is menace to me. Whereas Jesus grew up to believe that God is the great Other, with whom Jesus was to discover who he was and God embraced everyone. But this God makes his rain to fall and sun to shine on the just and the unjust. And so if I am who I am in relationship to God, then I cannot be intimidated by those others whom God embraces. Therefore, I don't have to be afraid and can have peace – as well as a good deal of confusion, perhaps. But who said peace and confusion were incompatible? In fact to say that they are incompatible is to be a non-starter in life. We can't take step one if we want absolute security at every moment of our existence. There's no place to go. I'm dead in the water. There's nothing I can do. And, of course, this "mix" is pointed to in a number of aphoristic statements in the New Testament. "Love your enemies; do good to those who hurt you, pray for those who persecute you." The enemy as the other, construed as absolute and unalterable opposition, menace, threat. But Jesus, as a good Jew, is saying I can love any enemy, because God loves us all. So does the enemy stop being an enemy? No! That's the whole point. The enemy can be embraced precisely in her enmity by my love.

This is enormously important not just for the spiritual life but for the life of the Church today, as well, because we are becoming more and more a Church of exclusions, I'm afraid. We are re-ghettoizing ourselves. We are restoring something which John XXIII had, we thought, demolished: this Catholic notion that "error has no rights". So John XXIII said, there is no such thing as error. There are only people and yet the Church I grew up in failed to make that fundamental distinction between people and abstraction positions.

So it is extraordinarily important to respond to the call of the risen Christ - this Jew whom God validated by raising Him from the dead. This Jew who was absolutely non-exclusionary in His relationships- only this response will secure my existence. And God will do this despite my fears, despite my confusion, my uncertainties. I can even love my enemies. So we are called even in this further sense to a radical pluralism. And this is true not just in terms of my personal relationships, but this is also true in the most technical sense in the life of the Church. For instance, can we articulate the figure of Jesus on the basis of Chinese philosophy, or Hindu thought or Buddhist thought? As a number of theologians are attempting to do right now, some of whom are being condemned for their efforts.

What is ultimately at stake here, I think, is the belief in the future, the future, which is God's. And therefore final full truth is, as Jesus said, retrospective. "By their fruits you will know them." In other words this means we essentially live in a condition of obscurity and incompleteness. But how often have we thought we have trapped the truth? Prematurely announcing our final and full possession of it and silencing other voices, perspectives, expressions. We must recall our history, with its de facto pluralism; our history of failing to recognize the partiality of our vision; our history of fearing and excluding the other. Ffinally, we must recall the amplitude of Jesus’ embrace, confirmed by the Resurrection, all of this calls us to a sought-after, and lived pluralism. I believe that the edge could be taken from most of the neuralgic points in the Church’s life today, if we would see in the Resurrection a call to pluralism.

It is to know that God is drawing us to the future, that God will do what the Gospel of John says over and over "I will send you the Spirit who will lead you in to all the Truth." We are only on the way. Therefore, we ought to be considerably more modest, patient, less assertive, ready to tolerate uncertainty, ready to question our own boundaries, borders, than we typically are. For to be able to do this is itself the effect of the grace of God: enabling us to live that way now.

Finally, to conclude with the words of one of my favourite New Testament scholars, who has a great gift for creating the apt and memorable phrase. He is here commenting on the passage in John read in the Gospel last week - about there being many rooms in God's house. Stanley Marrow has this comment: "In the Father's house room is always available, because room is a function of love not of space."

To other sermons