Monday, June 12, 2017
VI Easter
VI Easter
May 21, 2017
Holy Trinity & St.
Anskar
If you love me, you will keep my
commandments
+In the Name of God,
the Holy and Undivided Trinity
Now, commandments are given only by God. Jesus does not call his precepts “my Fathers
commandments.” Jesus does not claim the
role of a prophet, God’s mouthpiece: Jesus claims the authority of God in His
own right. Not “Thus saith the Lord,” but "Whoever has seen Me has seen
the Father.” Just after the part of the Discourse we heard today, Jesus says
Anyone who loves Me will
keep my commandments. My Father will love them, and We will come to them and
make Our home with them.
I often repeat that to you. It is an amazing saying.
Among all the stunning upsets of conventional reality found in the Gospel, this
is right up there at the top: the Father comes to us. The Unmoved Mover, the
Creator of all, the Ancient of Days outside and above all that is, visible and
invisible, dwelling in light inaccessible, before time and forever, gets up, as
it were, and moves to take up residence with US! The Father’s House Is the
world made fit for Him to dwell in, not so that we may leave the world and
escape to that House, but so that the Father’s House may come into the world —
that the cosmos may become the House of Many Mansions.
How are we to reconcile the
inclusivity of the Many Mansions with the exclusive-sounding declaration that
no one comes to the Father except through Jesus? That’s not too hard, really.
It all depends on what coming to the
Father means. I once had a friend who was a parish secretary. He had a
little sign made for his desktop that said
Joseph Spires, Parish Secretary
No Man Cometh Unto the Father but by Me
Okay. That’s funny because of the pun on Father. The word has more than one
meaning. Likewise to come to the Father
may not mean what is obvious to us: to come to God. In the very same passage, which we heard last week, Jesus
refers to God: “You believe in God, believe also in Me.” But then He refers to My Father. We understand that God and
Father are synonyms. Jesus could
have said “No one comes to God except
through Me.” But He didn’t: He said “No
one comes to the Father except
through Me.” That may simply mean that
no one could come to acknowledge God as Jesus’ Father, except by acknowledging
Jesus as His Son — which is kind of obvious. In order for God to be Jesus’s Father, there must be a Son.
Jews and Muslims don’t call God Father.
Nobody ever did until Jesus taught us to. That doesn’t mean that Jews like
Abraham Joshua Heschel or Hindus like Mahatma Gandhi, or Muslims like Rumi, or
all those sages and prophets outside Israel, who taught humanity to hope and
who are acknowledged as messengers of God by our own Catechism, have no
relationship to God, that they are deceived. Far from it! Who can say that they
are not among those who keep the Son’s commandments, even though they don’t
think of it that way?
In the next passage, Jesus
summarizes His commandments:
‘This
is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to
lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
Those who love one another, who devote their lives to the
poor and oppressed, will be loved by the Father of Jesus. Whether or not they
know God as His Father, Jesus promises that the Father and the Son will come to
them, and make Their home with them. The
only difference between them and the disciples to
whom He is talking is that the disciples know what is going on.
I do not
call you servants any longer,
because the servant does not know
what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made
known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.
The implication is that the Father has plenty of
servants, who do not know what He is doing, but nevertheless obey his
commandments – obeying what the Son has commanded, even though they be unaware
of their own obedience.
These servants, who obey God
even though they do not call God Father,
are not outside salvation. In another place, Jesus tells us that they will be
surprised, when they come to their judgment and learn that they have been
serving Jesus all along. “When did we do that?" they ask, and the King
responds that they did it when they had mercy on “the least of my brothers and
sisters,” that is upon any other human being. They do not have to know anything
about Jesus or His commandments in order to hear the glorious words: “well done
my good and faithful servants, enter into the joy of your Lord!”
Those who do know — whom
Jesus calls “friends" — are no longer “servants,” and they enter the
fullness of eternal life now. They know Jesus as the Son of the Father: they
keep His commandments, and they know they are doing so. That is eternal life:
as last week’s Collect puts it, Jesus is the One “whom truly to know is eternal
life.” The fullness of eternal life includes the experience of Jesus as the Son
of the Father. That doesn’t mean that those who lack this knowledge are
excluded, just that they haven’t yet been let in on the secret. That is why the
King calls them “faithful servants”
at the Last Judgment, just before He invites them into eternal life sharing the
joy of the friends of the Lord.
Salvation understood as a healthy relationship to God includes all the servants
of God, who do not know Him, as well as all the friends who do.
The fullness of eternal life
includes knowledge. Knowledge is one of those good things that
pass our understanding, of which the Collect speaks, which the Father has
prepared for those who love Him. In this life, human beings are given various
levels of knowledge; but those who keep His commandments, as He tells us, are
those who love Him. And in loving Him by keeping His commandments, they come to
know Him, because the Father and the Son will love them and come to them and
make Their home with them.
Alleluia!
Christ is risen from the
dead,
trampling down death by
death,
And giving life to all in
the tombs.
Alleluia!
