St. Phillip and St. James
Gary Hall
Seabury-Western
May 1, 2007
As much as I like the Fourth Gospel, preaching on John six weeks in a row is like spending eternity in a French restaurant where they serve only sweetbreads, escargot, and duck. It is a tasty diet but a rich one. My own predilections run toward the leaner, more sinewy texts of the synoptics. Drawing Johannine texts so many Tuesdays in a row makes me feel a bit like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the opening scene of Tom Stoppard’s eponymous play. I keep flipping a coin and it keeps coming up heads. I don’t know what I did to deserve this.
When I find
myself trapped deep within John’s lexical maze, I usually throw myself
a lifeline by latching on to one particular word or phrase. My problem
both reading and preaching about the Fourth Gospel is that it enacts the kind
of misunderstanding it describes. I half expect some day to hear John’s
Jesus, in the middle of the bread of life discourse, to tell us that he is the
walrus, too. Goo goo goo joob. Mark’s Jesus may be mysterious,
but he is never this opaque. John’s Jesus talks in ways so dense
and confusing that I, like the disciples, never really quite get what he is up
to.
So that is
why I am clinging like a spent swimmer this morning to this relatively clear
line from today’s Gospel: “Have I been with you all this time,
Philip, and you still do not know me?” What elicits that line, of course,
is Philip’s question. Today is, after all, St. Philip’s day
(shared, of course, with St. James the Less), and I confess to a kind of empathy
with these guys. How would you like to be remembered principally as the
disciple who, in a classroom where there are no dumb questions, asked a dumb
question? “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Or,
if you were St. James, how would you like your epithet to be, “the Less”? Sure,
they get a day in the calendar, but it’s like spending eternity being remembered
for the goofy things you wrote in somebody’s high school yearbook.
Please do not e-mail this sermon to the AMIA.
Nevertheless,
both the plainness of the question (“Lord, show us the Father, and we will
be satisfied.”) and the pained sharpness of the retort (“Have I been
with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?”) say something
profoundly elemental about our human desire both to know and be known. What
makes us like Jesus in this moment is a sudden unguarded expression of vulnerable
humanness: don’t you even know me? Living as we do in a world increasingly
prone to see people as representative members of racial, gender, ethnic, or sexual
orientation groups, there is that part of us which wants to be seen and known
beyond those categories. I know that I need to own my own identity as a
straight white male, but that, at least for me, is not quite enough. I
think that’s why I prefer narrative to discourse: we read stories because
we want to know the people in them. People embody the truths that ideas
can only hint at.
A new book
by Edward Mendelson, a professor of English at Columbia, has reminded me
of this
The most intellectually and morally coherent way of thinking about human beings is to think of them as autonomous persons . . . instead of as members of any category, class, or group.
–Edward Mendelson, The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life
I suppose we could describe Jesus as a peasant Palestinian Jewish male, but having described him that way, do we really know him? In the lingo of the Fourth Gospel, Jesus embodies the One he calls his Father. If you spend any time with Jesus you’re spending time with that One. An inability to see that One reflected in Jesus is an almost willful insensitivity to who Jesus really is.
And if that
desire to be known is something human, it is also, I believe, something divine. It’s
not just that the human Jesus wants to be known. It’s also that
the divine Jesus craves recognition, too. In his novel The Sea,
the Irish writer John Banville portrays a man called Max who is alienated
from his past, himself, his life. At one point in the novel, Max starts musing
on God and the world. This is what he says: “Given the world that he
created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.”[John
Banville, The Sea, p. 185] That’s an arch and witty thing to
say about the world and about God, but in the context of the story being told
it demonstrates that Max knows even less about the world than he knows about
God. He looks at the world in all its plenitude and glory, and all he
can feel is cheated and aggrieved, as if reality itself is not quite enough. Philip’s
question disappoints Jesus because it shows that Philip, like Max, can’t
see the beauty and grace and glory that are in front of and around him. It’s
like going to a beautiful mountain resort and being disappointed that they
only have black and white television.
We’re
gathered this morning to give thanks for the life and witness of Sts. Philip
and James, Apostles. All of us, of whatever human category, want to be known
as more than just a representative of that group. We want to be seen in all
our particularity and valued as who we are. Philip’s question to
Jesus elicited a deeply true and revealing response from Jesus: not only do
you and I want to be known and valued and loved as we are; so do Jesus and
the One he calls his Father. In his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus
took on our life and all our incompleteness and longings and brought them up
into God’s own life. It is o.k. to want to be known and to matter. If
Jesus himself feels that way, it’s o.k. for you to feel that way too. God
doesn’t love you in principle or theory. God loves you in fact. That’s
a truth that transcends all our categories–human, intellectual, or otherwise. And
that’s why, in the Eucharist, we give thanks. Amen.