I
lay down my life
Texts: 1 John 3.16-24; John 10.11-18
In the passage we read just now from John’s gospel, Jesus is addressing
his Jewish opponents. ‘I am the good shepherd’ he says, ‘because I lay
down my life for the sheep that I know and love by name. You, on
the other hand, behave like the hired hand who runs away when the wolf
comes by, because he does not love the sheep and cares not for their
fate. The life I lay down, I lay down by my own choice. But
I will take it up again. This power I have received from my
father.’ This morning I should like to dwell for moment on this
sense of volition we get in John’s gospel around the death of Jesus,
that Jesus somehow chooses to lay down his life, and that he does this
out of love for his disciples.
It is difficult for we moderns to really understand why the crucifixion
happened. On one level, of course, we know exactly why it
happened. Jesus got himself into trouble by being incredibly
naïve, by seeking to upset the carefully negotiated détente
that existed between the Roman state and the Jewish authorities.
Jesus died because he was a starry-eyed idealist who could neither
comprehend nor accept the real-politik of his time. From that
perspective, the perspective of historical and political ‘realism’, the
more theological explanations for his death seem rather odd. That
Jesus died for our sins. That he chose to die out of love for
sinners. That his life was given to exhaust and destroy the power
of sin and death over our human future. Journalists are
completely lost with it all, as a review of the film version of The
Narnia Chronicles revealed a few months ago. ‘What I have never
understood,’ says the journalist, ‘is why Aslan, or Jesus, had to
die. If God loves us, why would he need some kind of
blood-sacrifice? Why doesn’t he just forgive us and be done with
it?’ Even bishops and theologians have trouble understanding it
all, as regular readers of our esteemed denominational newspaper will
have discovered.
There are, of course, good reasons why we find the death of Jesus
difficult to understand. One of them I have mentioned before in
this church. Affluent westerners now live at a great distance
from the rather sobering fact that life comes from death. Indeed,
we have become afraid of death because we have forgotten about its
connection to life. When we lived nomadic or agricultural lives,
we were much more aware of the connection. We saw that the beasts
that provide our meat had to be slaughtered. We saw that the
plants that produced the grains for our bread had to die in order for
us to harvest their fruits. We saw that the land became fruitful
again by ploughing in the dead remains of the harvest. When you
buy your food from the supermarket, when medicine has all but removed
that daily certainty that death is around the corner, it is difficult
to see that life itself comes at a cost, the cost of other life.
At one level, then, the theology of the death of Christ reflects upon a
simple biological fact: that life itself is very costly, that the
aliveness of one is made possible only by the death of another.
Theologically, there is a sense in which this is true even with the
doctrine of creation. Here the creation only becomes possible, is
only able to come into existence as something other than God because
God is willing to undergo a kind of death, the death of God’s right to
exercise sovereignty over the creation. If God retained that
right, you see, then the creation would be no more than an extension of
God’s own mind and will. It would always do what God willed it to
do. It would not be God’s other. What God apparently chose
to do, though, was to expend his power to create a power other than his
own, a power that is able to choose a way other than that which God
would have chosen.
But note the way that theology has already complicated, here, the
simple sense that the nomad or the farmer has that death is somehow
necessary to life. For what God does , in giving us life, somehow
transcends the simple categories of necessity, of cause and
effect. What God does is introduce the wildcards of love and
volition, which means that life and death are no longer a matter of
necessity alone, unfolding according to a pre-programmed genetic
imperative, but of choice, and especially the choice to love. The
death Jesus dies is not, therefore, to be understood only as some kind
of necessary death, a death like that of the beast which is slaughtered
(against its will) to feed the tribe. His death certainly does
feed the tribe, let us make no mistake about that. What are we
doing at communion, if not to participate in the food and drink that is
able to give us the life of the kingdom of God? Yet, let us be
clear, this life is given us not because we take it from Jesus, against
his will, but because he has chosen to give it. Out of love.
There is sense, then, in which the crucifixion simply manifests in
human history what God has always been about: love. And what is
love? According to the Johannine corpus, love is what God is as
trinity, a community of service and care. It is hospitality, the
willingness to make a home within one’s own life for someone who is
other than oneself. It is solidarity, living the sufferings of
another as though they were one’s own. It is sacrifice, the
laying down of ones own powers, one’s own capacities for life, that
they may be taken up by another. It is to centre oneself on
helping another to come alive, in the faith that life shared is the
best life of all.
Perhaps our difficulties with the death of Christ come down to this,
then. That we moderns have become strangers to love, and
especially to its costs. Over and over we are told that love is
something other than what Christ would teach us. Over and over we
are told that love is a contract or convenience that is fine while it
serves our own interests, but can be legitimately done away with when
it begins to cost us somehow. Over and over we are told that love
is about feelings of euphoria, a drug to help us cope with the pains of
life. As such, when love itself becomes painful, we are better to
ditch it. Over and over we are told that laying down one’s life
for another, and especially for the stranger, is irrational. Life
is about securing yourself against the misfortunes of others.
Life is about comfort, no matter that our comfort deprives
others! Today elections are won or lost on this platform.
Is it any wonder that we struggle with the death of Jesus, then, a life
laid down for another!
The good news of Easter is that life shared, life laid down for others,
creates a new kind of life altogether, a life hitherto unimagined in
the history of the world. In the mystery of divine love for the
world, the self-centred egotism that has destroyed human life for
millennia is itself destroyed and done away with, absorbed, as it were,
into the death of Christ so that the usual cycles of human relating—our
cruelty, indifference, violence and greed—is not only interrupted, but
done away with altogether. You might not believe that this is so,
if you look at the world we live in. But what God gave us, in the
time he spent amongst us in the flesh, was a glimpse into the reality
of God, a reality yet more real than that reality we usually
experience, a reality that is close enough to change our world if only
we will believe and live our lives accordingly. Faith, you see,
is the place in which God’s reality (which is sometimes called grace)
arrives in the world. It is the place where love finds soil
enough to flourish.
I pray for the faith of the people of God, that we shall be able to
resist the rationalism and cynicism of our world, and let love
in. I pray that we might summon faith enough to love each other
as Christ has loved us.
In the name of God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so
now and forever, world without end. Amen.
Garry
J. Deverell
Easter 4, 2006
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