The journey from one bush station homestead to the next took longer than I anticipated – and in any case I was not expected till the morning. So, there was no alternative but to sleep by the side of the road. I found a clear patch away from the possibility of scattered dust or stones from a passing semi-trailer and settled for the night.
I had slept rough before but never quite like this. This would be my first evening in total darkness – no street lights, no car headlamps, no voices in the street, no light from a distant house signaling habitation. I was alone in the darkness. The stars were brighter than I had ever seen them before or since. Slowly the sounds of the bush magnified. I sensed a living world around me: I felt its presence and heard the rustle of creatures in the undergrowth. The darkness was at once beautiful and terrifying.
That image came to mind as I read today’s text from John. As John wrote, he drew on the power of the image of darkness to contrast Judas and Jesus. In the sense that John used the word, darkness enveloped both men; both were alert to events now beyond their control. Judas was trapped by the darkness of his decision to betray Jesus to the authorities: Jesus was trapped by his decision to accept death as the consequence of his teaching and his challenge to the authorities. Both men ‘had set their face’ to a conclusion from which there was no turning back. ‘It was night’ (13:30).
Each person here will know the starkness of feeling driven to a decision from which there seemed no return. More rational reflection might have meant other choices, but right then our ‘black dog’ moment drove us to our own precipice. Much of my pastoral conversation takes place over such issues. People live with regrets at what they did at some point in life and the fateful decisions that had dogged them since. The conversation begins with ‘If only…’ and then every memory is tinged with guilt.
Faith for each of us may have begun in brighter times of discovery. Faith then was a song that resonated in our inner being: the senses sharpened and we experienced ourselves and the world around us in fresh ways. Positive words for this flood our memories, conversion, regeneration – then hope, generosity, acceptance, discovery and creativity. The music, the art and the poetry of life wove their patterns in us: faith was alive and our spirits danced in delight. And then tragedy hit.
Suddenly we lacked the parallel words for desperation. Events in the world around us twist our vision and distort our language about good and evil; the God of good times suddenly seems remote from struggle, doubt and despair. In these times, we can give way to a dualism where God and the devil, good and evil are balancing powers in a world ruled by fate and blind chance. ‘Why did this happen to me?’
That was a pattern in ancient religion, where sacrifice and scape-goating, ritual murder and retribution shaped the commandments that ruled life. God the arbiter of ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’ offered the only commandment for tribal survival. And then Jesus interrupted this flow of hostility with his new commandment, ‘Love one another, as I have loved you’.
He constantly repeated those words over the days before his crucifixion. They were the mark of his life and would be the shape of their discipleship. He spoke them in the darkness where doubt and betrayal had overtaken each of them. If I have understood John’s underlying intentions correctly his primary focus here was on Peter’s inability to sustain faith in crisis – Peter with his own betrayal of Jesus before the Jewish authorities: ‘I do not know the man’ and said with curses and tears of regret.
More immediately the now-recounted story of Judas followed that same pattern, right to the point of suicide. His darkness was terrifying. Jesus also stood in the same darkness, deep in his own spirit: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’. This was the cry that finally issued from his lips.
Here is a hard place to stand with a sermon text. We have all known great times of discovery, with God almost jogging at our elbow as George Bernard Shaw once quaintly put it. It is too easy to shift these hard moments into the devil’s territory. But your experiences of life and mine cannot allow cliches and easy answers to soften what the hard experiences have actually taught us. So, hear the depth of what Jesus said that night in the Upper Room: the darkness would be for him and for them an awakening to ‘glory’. Clearly Jesus meant something profound by this word ‘glory’ since he repeated it five times in a sentence of twenty-five (Greek) words.
‘Glory’ was a short-hand term for ‘the presence of God’; everyone would have known this from their reading of the prophet Ezekiel who drove that word into their religious vocabulary. The God ‘who dwells in light unapproachable’ (1 Timothy 6:16) enters the human experience, seen by shepherds at the manger cradle, manifested in the signs of Jesus (John 2:11) and now in the darkness revealed in Jesus’ person.
Darkness is our key to understanding. Darkness, the place of our radical decision-making, is where we find and take our life direction. The same event that drove Judas to despair and Jesus to death was the moment of discovery and awakening.
This is one steady theme through the Bible and it shatters our superficial urgencies for easy answers. The darkness tests our faculties: we need to listen to the rustle in the undergrowth and sense our belonging with what we cannot see. I was talking recently, with a student of the writings of John of the Cross, about a person responsible for false accusation. I was locked with my anger and isolation; he suggested that I draw the presence of that person into the darkness with me and there let him tell me what fault he found in me. I must listen with every faculty alert – though I could not see his face for the darkness.
This was not to be first about forgiveness: it was about learning to love myself and the other in a new way. My adversary was in his own dark prison of hatred and distancing. I was not his victim nor was he my victim: the darkness was the tragedy from which he needed to rescue himself. I may well need to change my ways and face my failings, but right now I simply needed to see him there, trapped by his own decision to accuse. I must learn to live by Jesus’ ‘new commandment’. The old commands about rejection and hatred, betrayal and retribution only lead to despair and lock us into patterns of loss. The new commandment to love one another is the heart of life transformation.
As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.
In the longest continuous passage of all the Gospels (chapters 13-17), Jesus constantly repeated this theme to his disciples.
Draw this teaching the centre of faith. The New Testament writers, and here John in particular, speak of the Cross as the expression of the love of God. They draw our attention to God as victim and scapegoat and seen supremely in the neighbour or other person. The death of Jesus is symbolically described as the murder of God. Don’t avoid the images, however horrifying they sound. The intention of this symbolic language is to turn your attention away from your self as victim and from the other person as your scapegoat.
Jesus’ teaching challenged populist views of God and humanity that sees God as placated by our pleading and our neighbour victimised by our prejudice. The new commandment is a sole value that should shape our living with each other, our evangelism and our pastoral care. Loving this way does not depend on charity or support programs. Of course methods play their part, but without the unencumbered love that Jesus spoke of they risk being only gimmicks.
Love like this takes the darkness seriously. We share the desperation of those around us. We have no easy answers to crisis or tragedy. The darkness of despair overtakes all of us and there triggers the responses of our faculties. Love is about reaching for hope and sharing compassion not finding quick answers. Love is the steady offering of the Christian community to the world around us. Love does not need to judge or separate but instead bridges across difference. The glory of God is people seeking each other’s welfare and living the new commandment of grace and harmony not the old commandments of rule and division.
The journey from one bush station homestead to the next set my first evening in total darkness – no street lights, no car headlamps, no voices in the street, no light from a distant house signaling habitation. I was alone in the darkness. The stars were brighter than I had ever seen them before or since. Slowly the sounds of the bush magnified. I sensed a living world around me: I felt its presence and heard the rustle of creatures in the undergrowth. The darkness was at once beautiful and terrifying.
– a Meditation Homily based on the Gospel reading for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, John’s Gospel chapter 13 verses 31-35.
Bill Lawton
28 April 2013
This was a wonderful sermon to listen to as well as to read again. I am glad to be attending a church that sees Jesus’ death as the consequence of his actions, and not as some pre-ordained, planned punishment by God.
Sue, I have been remiss is not replying. Thanks for your supportive comment. I love speaking to an audience that responds with their whole being. The address time at Sunday church often seems a moment when people’s imagination catches the possibility of life touched with surprise and hope.