All institutions over-claim for themselves and end up believing more in their own existence than in the vision that propelled them into existence in the first place. This is particularly true of religious institutions. Religions may begin as vehicles of longing for mysteries beyond description, but they end up claiming exclusive descriptive rights to them. They segue from the ardour and uncertainty of seeking to the confidence and complacence of possession. They shift from poetry to packaging. Which is what people want. They don't want to spend years wandering in the wilderness of doubt. They want the promised land of certainty, and religious realists are quick to provide it for them. The erection of infallible systems is a well-understood device to still humanity's fear of being lost in the dark wood without a compass. 'Supreme conviction is a self-cure for infestation of doubts.'

Holloway, Richard.  Leaving Alexandria: a Memoir of Faith and Doubt (p. 152). Canongate Books 2012

 Fourth Sunday of Easter B

April 29,2012

Reading 1: Acts 4:1-18

Reading 2 John 3:1-2

 

 Reading 2: Beloved, 

See what love the Father has bestowed on us
that we may be called the children of God.
Yet so we are.
The reason the world does not know us
is that it did not know him.
Beloved, we are God's children now;
what we shall be has not yet been revealed.
We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him,
for we shall see him as he is.

Gospel: Jesus said
"I am the good shepherd.
A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
A hired man, who is not a shepherd
and whose sheep are not his own,
sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away,

This is why the Father loves me,
because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own.
I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again.
This command I have received from my Father."

 

 A shepherd worthy of the name

lays down his life for his sheep
while the hired man 
who is in it for what he can get
out of it
runs away.

Something doesn’t gel in this:
a shepherd has to risk his life to save the sheep, for sure,
but he must avoid getting killed
or the sheep will have no defence –
so Jesus can’t be talking about getting himself killed
for his sheep.

Strange we would have thought that’s what he meant –
to appease an angry father and pay what we owed in penalty for disobeying  -
when at the very start of the story Abraham
is forbidden to offer his son in sacrifice.
We got that one badly wrong.

Then what does it mean to lay down one’s life? 

Read the whole chapter, and the one before it. In fact
skim the whole gospel of John and see
that Jesus is warring with the pharisees
about truth and lying deception.

All through he makes it clear that it is his choice
to lay down his life. Here he says:
“No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own. 
I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again. 
This command I have received from my Father.”
It is not about getting himself killed. The only ‘compulsion’
is the Father’s command: a matter of conscience.

John struggles page by page to put into words
what lies at the heart of the matter.
The other writers told the human story and one might suspect
that already by John’s time it was becoming ritualised,
theologised, formulised, religionated,
weaving in the very darkness it should be overcoming.
So he shared his meditations and wove the tale again
in full myth and symbol.

We need to go to the end of the affair, when the warfare
against the darkness the deception and the lies
went beyond words
and they used their weapon of choice the final force.

"Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth.
As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world.
And I consecrate myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in truth." (Jn 17:17-19)

I think the way Jesus laid down his life was in this:
that after spelling out the truth to friend and enemy alike
finally he laid himself open to judicial scrutiny
before the highest tribunals in the land.

The trial from start to end 
is a battle of truth against false assumptions–
false pretensions – false accusations –
lying claims to power and lying threats by which
bullies got their way.

May I ask, kind reader, that you go through John’s account
to see how he shows it as the truth versus the lies, 
with Jesus stripped of defence and dignity
made transparent
for the blinding truth to in the end prevail.

This, I think, is the battle we should all be engaged in
always
all ways
being 
the candle burning to light the dark
not sacrificed – made holy by destruction
but consecrated – made thoroughly holy by dedication
to being true come what may.